Alaine Martaus

Thank you, Hank.

PenguinTeen tweets a link to an online quiz about John Green’s books – which is intriguingly called “Are you the Ultimate John Green Fan?”.
John Green shares that tweet, and his imperfect results on the quiz, on his Facebook page.

When my dissertation talks about using multiple social media platforms to engage readers, this is what I am talking about. Also, the problematic relationship between deep knowledge, engaged reading, and the definition of a fan.

Offered without comment for now. I will wait until I have an opportunity to share it with my media literacy for youth students next semester.

I love how much John Green loves his editor, and how much he values both her specifically and editors in general. I’m revisiting the video in which he talks about editing The Fault in Our Stars and explains how important editors are to the writing process, and every time I revisit it I appreciate his reminding us that there’s a reason The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises were edited by the same guy. And I really wish we taught high school students about the professional process and context in which novels they read are created. (Added bonus: it would combat the lone genius myth of art creation.)

I appreciate so much about this article, but especially this paragraph:
“Girls are hit makers but I don’t think you can sell them anything. I think they are really good at finding the interesting story in a band, in an act, not just in terms of the quality of the music but seeing the whole package or recognizing that there’s a kind of interesting narrative to engage. I think girls make that narrative interesting and then organize, in music, a lot of the infrastructure that tells everybody else how to like and understand this music.”

At the same time, placed in the context of the dozens of articles written in the 1960s about the exact same thing, these articles always have the feel of someone discovering something that already been discovered over and over again.