Gray Wolves and Black Coffee

The New York Times printed this memorable
image of Ukrainian protesters in Kiev.

I try to vary my columns between trends in the news and personal experience. My first column of the year considered our future with Gray wolves, which are expanding their ranges south as reintroduced populations rebound. This morning's column is one in my unofficial series, Advocacy for Unlovely Causes. The cause this time was rising early in college, which may just get me stoned to death for cultural heresy. Oh well. Next week: making sense of Ukraine from 5,000 miles away.

Beaten to the Case

Some time ago I had the idea of writing an essay--like, a real essay--about my fascination with the world of fanfiction. I would talk about its modern flowering, its  lingo (complex as Cockney slang) and the way in which I participated: in it the first story I tried to write, in sixth grade, was an undisguised Sherlock Holmes knockoff. "I'm writing a Sherlock Holmes knockoff," I would explain to classmates proudly. In the essay I would try to connect my love for Holmes' London, seedy, huge, and umanageable, and my appreciation of the overgrown city of fan fiction as a comparably messy but still worthwhile human creation. However, by way of Emily Nussbaum's review of the third season of BBC's TV miniseries Sherlock, my current favorite TV show, I found that the game was on, and I missed it: Anne Jamison's book Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking over the World pointed out that when Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes to escape from the crushing popularity, his readers were so distraught that they wore black armbands and wrote what can be considered the very first fanfiction. It's the connection that would have made my essay make sense. I had the clues in my hands, Watson, and I let them go!

On the other hand, I've found a new book to read, and I can't complain about that. And perhaps I can figure out something a little different that would still work. Anyway, if you are a fan of Sherlock, or perhaps a fan of the books that thinks you will never watch the series, read Nussbaum's excellent review, which includes some insights that get us a little further into the mystery of why we still love these characters and their world enough to write new stories for them a century later.