If I ever come to believe that Samurai Champloo and things like it are not important, that they are without merit and have no value—that is the day I would like you to kill me. I never want to become that person.
There was one time a speaker came to my school to talk about conformity. He was there to talk about its impact on him primarily as a gay man and did in a set of dinners and workshops.
For the assembly where he talked to the entire school, though, he told the story of when he and a friend of his spent the last summer before they went off to law school and medical school (respectively) reading poetry. At the end of the summer, his friend chose to get a tattoo, a blue star inspired by a poem. When he argued that an older her would be embarrassed by the tattoo later on, she told him that if the older her had lost so much of an appreciation for poetry that she could be embarrassed that she wanted her to be embarrassed. She wanted, now, to protect that love of poetry. The story has stuck with me, because it fits so perfectly how I feel about fiction and fantasy and fandom.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-10-22 06:30 am (UTC)For the assembly where he talked to the entire school, though, he told the story of when he and a friend of his spent the last summer before they went off to law school and medical school (respectively) reading poetry. At the end of the summer, his friend chose to get a tattoo, a blue star inspired by a poem. When he argued that an older her would be embarrassed by the tattoo later on, she told him that if the older her had lost so much of an appreciation for poetry that she could be embarrassed that she wanted her to be embarrassed. She wanted, now, to protect that love of poetry. The story has stuck with me, because it fits so perfectly how I feel about fiction and fantasy and fandom.
(The story appears in print, I believe, in Kenji Yoshino's Covering, with a quote posted on livejournal.)