[penguicon-general] Fannish Material To Read

[Catherine Olanich Raymond]

On Sunday 17 December 2006 6:32 pm, Garrett Kajmowicz wrote:
> As some of you may have known, I've been recently appointed to the board of
> directors of Penguicon.  I have a strong background from the OpenSource
> side of things.  However, my background in the "fannish" side of things is
> weak. As such, I'm looking for suggestions of other items which I should be
> reading or watching to better understand the other side of things.

Matt is correct when he says the fannish side of things is *not* a monolith.  
There may have been such a thing as common fannish core experiences 20 or 30 
years ago, but I'm not sure that's true anymore (and I bet people could start 
a debate as to whether it was ever true).

In my opinion, Matt's suggestions are a good basic "cultural literacy" type of 
sampler for "fandom."  You might also want to look into a bit of fannish 
history, some of which you can get from talking with older fans, and other 
parts of which has been core-dumped into "The Fanac Fan History Project", 
whose URL is 
http://fanac.org/


-- 
Cathy Raymond <cathy at thyrsus.com>

"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
of doubtful sanity."  --Robert Frost