I‘ve written a time or two before about excursions my family and I have taken, going out and about in the vicinity of our own little part of the world. In truth, it’s an odd thing for me; I’m a homebody (if I put things politely, which not everybody does or should), not inclined to “get out” much, so trips further than going to the gym, to work, to church, or to the grocery store aren’t commonplaces for me. That’s part of why I write about them. I know that my field trips don’t show up as being the kinds of things of which major events are made for a lot of other people, they stand out to me for their relative rarity, even as I am aware that they don’t go far into the field at all.

The most recent little expedition we took was this past weekend, one last hurrah before my daughter started school. (She returned to class on Wednesday. It’s a late start, I know.) We returned to the vicinity of Lost Maples State Natural Area, one of the gems of the Texas Hill Country, lodging for a few days at one of the properties operated by Foxfire Cabins. We’d stayed at another of the properties about this time last year, finding it a generally enjoyable experience, and we decided we’d work to make it something of a family tradition. Hence the return this past weekend, when many of the area schools had already started back up, making for a less crowded time for us to enjoy.

My wife, my daughter, one of her friends (whom I’m still considering how to pseudonymize; I don’t generally discuss minor children by name for privacy reasons), and I made our way down to the location on Friday afternoon, my wife having taken off work and my own job being such that I’ve not been in office on Fridays for some months, now. Our drive was reasonably good, although we got off to something of a slow start, as there were some errands that needed running before we could pack up and head out. Too, we got delayed along the way; stopping off for lunch took longer than expected, as did going to the grocery store along the way. But, as ever, the drive was scenic, with the rolling hills parting at times to offer spectacular views of hardy trees stretching to the limits of vision in the distance.

We got to our lodging, the Alta Vista cabin operated by Foxfire, in good form around five pm. A two-bedroom, one-bathroom place with a wraparound porch, firepit, grill, and picnic table, the cabin–and the neighboring Buena Vista–offers remarkable quiet and excellent views of the towering hills enfolding FM337. There was a bit of a trick to finding it (including a steep drive up an unpaved drive), to be sure, and another window unit would have been welcome, but it was from the outset a good place and restful.

The next morning, all four of us on the trip slept in until close to nine. After breakfast, we went to the main Foxfire facility, right on the upper Sabinal River. There, my wife and the girls swam a bit, the latter playing with the children of another group of families that were having something of an annual reunion on the property; given that I swim just about as well as a rock (about which more later), I abstained. My wife and I got some information about local happenings, as well, and we decided that we would make arrangements to take the Frio Bat Flight tour that evening. Right off the intersection of TX127 and FM2690, the tour takes visitors to the entrance of a cave system that hosts between 10 and 12 million Mexican freetail bats–a colony whose emergence shows up on weather radar as often as not. The guide was informative, and the setting was beautiful–although I was sad to see the falcons hunting the emerging colony miss so many of their attempts.

We drove back to Alta Vista by way of Utopia, missing much of the scenery in the darkness that followed the bats’ emergence. After another long sleep, and a Sunday morning breakfast, though, we were back at it, heading down FM337 to Leakey (pronounced “Lake-ee,” for those not familiar) to see about visiting a river outfitter and floating the Frio. The one we visited in town gave an…unhelpful answer, but the next one we called, Happy Hollow in Concan, was much more accommodating. With them, we made arrangements to rent inner tubes and be shuttled upstream on the Frio River–I believe to the crossing on FM1120, but I could not see road signs from where I was sitting–to enter the river and float on down. While the water was generally low, and I managed to scare my daughter and entertain her friend with the prospect of my drowning where the river got deeper (she had complained of nearly falling through one tube, so I switched her to one with a net, and I went into the water more energetically than I expected), it was a generally peaceful, pleasant experience. Much of the float was shaded, and the people still on the banks so late in the season were friendly.

After the float, a picnic lunch, and more swim time for my wife and the girls–I abstained again, not wanting to tempt matters–we drove back down to TX127, where we put in at The Frio Float, a little ice-cream shop right on US83. I got a small cup of ice cream that I ate with delight; my wife and my daughter’s friend each got floats with Dublin Bottling Works Texas Red Creme Soda, and my daughter got a big helping of a strange concoction of ice cream and toppings. The three of them overestimated their capacities, which made for a bit of a delicate drive back to Alta Vista (once again by way of Utopia, although with much better views in the daylight than in the previous darkness), but things were well settled by the time we got back and lit up both the grill and the firepit on site.

Monday morning, we didn’t sleep in near so much, as we had to eat our breakfast, pack our stuff, and skedaddle. My wife and I both had to go back to work on Tuesday, and the girls had their Wednesday start of school; in preparation for the latter, there was a Meet the Teacher Night we were pleased to attend. It was a sadness to leave, as it most always is to return to the real world from a vacation from it, but we’re already looking towards next year, and we got back to our lives with more vigor for having had the time away.

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I‘ve been adding more to my ongoing Fedwren Project than Matthew Oliver’s piece or the work of Busse and Farley–albeit slowly, the demands of daily life outside academe being what they are. Most recently (to this writing), I read Benjamin Bruening’s “Word Formation Is Syntactic: Adjectival Passives in English,” which I entered into the Fedwren Project here. (It is the fiftieth entry in the project, although I am listing alphabetically rather than when I encounter and annotate the pieces.) There’s a summary of the article there, and Bruening himself provides an abstract, so I don’t feel any need to give another one here. I do, however, think I need to offer some response to the article here–not one in which I point out what I see as problems with the piece, but one that leads me to some reflection on what I see as a tendency in scholarship involving Robin Hobb–now that I feel I’ve got enough material described that I can speak with some certainty about such things.

As might be guessed from the title, Bruening’s article is a linguistics argument. I’ve got some training in linguistics; it’s effectively a requirement for working as a medievalist, and, as I noted long ago, my own graduate training had specific guidelines about it. (It’s been a while since I was there; things might’ve changed in the interim.) Too, my wife’s formal academic training is as a linguist, and, as might be expected, many of her friends from her adventures in New York City–on which I joined her for many years–were in similar training. I can safely claim, therefore, to have some familiarity with the discipline, although I am not a specialist in it by any means (insofar as I am a specialist in any academic field at this point in my life). Even so, Bruening’s article was…challenging…to read–but then, academic wok is written by specialists to other specialists, and I am, again, not a specialist.

(I do wonder what reaction Bruening has faced in challenging the orthodoxies he does in the article, however. He does seem to say he thinks a lot of people are wrong, and it’s possible they might be, or that he’s right–which isn’t the same thing. But it’s also the case that academics are all too human, and there’s no shortage of ongoing grudges attested in the literature of several disciplines. [I point at a small example here.] There are stories of fistfights, even–some of which are true; I saw one. It’s a personal curiosity, but one I’d not mind having indulged.)

Despite the challenge, however, I did manage to make my way through the piece. And I noted in it the use of Hobb’s work as an example of natural English language text, a use that follows the same pattern a number of other works I’ve annotated for the Fedwren Project display. It seems that several social scientists read Hobb; they make use of her work as examples of community formation, word formation, and the like. I suppose it suggests her appeal beyond “the usual suspects” (people like me who get accused of not being part of “the real world” or of doing work that has any utility or sense behind it), since it’s not likely the researchers in question would have recoursed to her without being familiar with her work already. I suppose, too, that it suggests Hobb’s writing style as a model worth mimicking, since it does seem to be accessible to non-literary types and even to machine learning. Certainly, there are worse examples for such to follow, although I have to wonder about issues of consent and compensation.

There is, of course, more work for me to do on the Fedwren Project. I have other articles printed out and ready for me to read and remark upon, as well as others in PDF waiting for similar attention. There’s a dissertation waiting for me to read, too, and I am certain there is other work out in the world that I don’t know about quite yet. How much, if any, of it falls into this same pattern, and what other patterns of research are out there, I look forward to seeing.

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I did not stop work on the Fedwren Project when I addressed Matthew Oliver’s “History in the Margins” not too long ago. Indeed not; I have a number of other articles to read and annotate, bringing them into the bibliography I’m happy to be maintaining and to which I hope to make more contributions, both in itself and in producing items to add to it. One of them I read recently, Kristina Busse and Shannon Farley’s 2013 “Remixing the Remix: Fannish Appropriation and the Limits of Unauthorised Use,” is summarized in the Project here. As with other pieces I’ve read, the summary matters; the summary’s useful for other researchers, and I know that there are and have been some doing intellectual work on Hobb’s writing who make use of the Project–which is at least part of the point of my maintaining it. But, also as with a number of other pieces I’ve read, the summary is not enough on its own; I feel the need to offer some response–which I do, below, in the hope that it will be useful.

As with Oliver’s piece, I want to stress that I found Busse and Farley’s piece to be a good one. While I am not as up on fandom studies as, say, Kavita Mudan Finn (whose work I wholeheartedly recommend) or Shiloh Carroll (whose work I also wholeheartedly recommend), and I am not necessarily part of fandom communities as such (as I explain here), I found the piece to be well written and easy to follow. It’s never a bad thing for a specialist text–and, to be clear, academic journal articles are specialist texts, written by scholars to other scholars working in the same or in closely adjacent fields of inquiry–to be accessible to those outside its anticipated primary readership. (For reference, I follow Richard Johnson-Sheehan’s four-fold readership model. It seems to work pretty well.) As someone who, despite lapsing, works in fantasy literature, I am likely in one of the “closely adjacent fields of inquiry” to fandom studies, although I think they run more toward the sociological than the literary (I’m minded of reading Gary Alan Fine in the past), and there is a gap between the social sciences and the humanities, even if it is not so broad as some might want to make it out to be. But however that may be, the clear breakdown of topics Busse and Farley provide works well, it explains its terms and their use, and it offers manageable chunks of information, all of which argue in their piece’s favor.

I note above that I read the article recently to the time of this writing; it will also be close to the time of this post’s release into the world. Both are in 2024. The article dates to 2013, and it discusses an event in 2006. Consequently, there are things in the article that come across to a current reading as somewhat dated. For example, the article makes some reference to Tumblr, and while that platform is, to my knowledge, still extant as I write this (I certainly use it enough in my Hobb reread), it also–again, to my knowledge–does not function anymore in quite the same ways now as it did then. Busse and Farley do note that the community standards they reference–again, at length and with clarity–in their article are evolving and changing, so they allow for the possibility of datedness, and it is the case that it is not fair to fault an article for failing to address what occurred after it was published. (To be clear, I am not finding fault with the work.) So much said, I have to wonder if any of the authors’ conclusions would change when assessed against newer standards of conduct among the communities they investigate, and how.

This is, after all, a reaction piece, and I can only react as I have it to do.

In any event, the reason “Remixing the Remix” came to my attention to begin with is that it makes reference to Robin Hobb–specifically, the “Fan Fiction Rant.” Theirs is not the only article to do so, of course; indeed, one of the major threads of research into and commentary on Hobb’s body of work (with the understanding that the Fedwren Project is not complete; I have other articles to read and annotate into it, and there is doubtlessly more work being done in that line of which I am not yet aware) is specifically on that piece. Something about that blog post appears to have caught the interest of a number of commenters, some of them scholarly, and I think there’s more to it than simply the intersection of the fanfic and scholarly communities. (There is overlap, of course, but not congruity.) What that something is, I do not know; again, I am not a scholar of fandoms, nor yet am I a sociologist, and I think it would take a sociologist working in fandom communities to untangle it (or else an ethnographer with an interesting focus). That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate knowing, once it’s known.

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