Plenty of Nothing

Prank

Fosterfarm

Rancid

Japanese Word of the Day: Doujinshi

Back in the mid-Nineties when I was writing the Star Trek fanfic Door Repair Guy I was reading Henry Jenkins on the competition between producer and consumer in the field of popular culture.  Fans sometimes assert a right of eminent domain over a favorite narrative and will create stories of their own if they think their tastes or expectations have been ignored by the executive producers.  Oftentimes these stories are of a sexual nature and include scenarios you know you'll just never see on TV (e.g., "Kirk/Spock").  Part of the fun of reading the manga Genshiken is the realization that the author Kio Shimoku knows all about fan culture and is drawing toward it.  Much of the story revolves around the creation and collecting of doujinshi, fan-produced manga.  These comics are invariably described as porn by the anti-otaku Saki Kasukabe, and when the characters' own doujinshi is finally shown almost all of it is blacked out for the sake of propriety.  A number of the characters pair off into couples over the course of the story, and there's considerable innuendo about what goes on in the clubroom and the washrooms, but very little is shown.  I suspect this is a strategy to encourage fan-art by the readers, and sure enough, you can buy Genshiken doujinshi on eBay, where I stole this image.  Douglas

Go South, Young Man

Languagehat points out this National Trust surname finder.  Enter your family name and see where in Britain they were concentrated in 1881 and 1998.  It's fun to watch my mother's family name spread north from Galloway while my father's moves east and south from the Outer Hebrides until they meet ... where they met.  Douglas

Lilacs Are Holding Up the Shed

Then How Come This Space Ain't Rented?

Stump

Making Libraries Safe For Books

 
A couple of comics have made it onto the shelf here at our digital journal Plenty of Nothing that presage nothing short of the survival of the book and that temple of literacy the public library. Rex Libris: I, Librarian, by James Turner, features the titular Rex Libris, a Eugene Levy lookalike who crosses time and space to collect overdue books and return them to the Middleton Public Library.  His methods are both crude and high tech -- he thinks nothing of leaping from low orbit to trade knuckle sandwiches with delinquent borrowers -- but his motivation comes from personal knowledge of the burning of the Library at Alexandria, where he used to work.  The comic, paradoxically, is totally computer generated.  Simultaneously comes Read or Die by Hideyuki Kurata and Shutaro Yamada, a manga starring Yomiko Readman, a paper master who similarly kicks ass in the name of recovering rare and collectible seventeenth-century editions.  The faith these stories place in calfskin and ragpaper is quaint, but it points out an interesting oxymoron: increasingly as readers move to the internet for their reading, it's the comics that keep them coming back to the bookstore or the library.  Maybe literary publishers ought to consider returning to including half a dozen illustrations in each novel, as they did a hundred years ago.  The comic book collector is not so far from the rare book afficionado.   Douglas

Houses of Polythene