Books

The eighties was the decade of my childhood, a period typified by reading musty vampire comic books in my babysitter's basement, playing touch football, exploring sewers, kids making fun of the way I pronounced "hazelnut" and moving all over the country like we were worried someone would catch up.

I have a compulsion to google the term "riot nrrd" every few months to see what comes up, and lately, www.riotnrrdcomics.com has been moving up in the rankings. So I indulged my curiosity and clicked through.

Well I am on comic #35, and all I have to say is: Hooray, it's a comic about queer geeks!

After reading the copy on the back of this book I opened it up with some trepidation. It was billed as the story of a 13 year old prostitute named Baby whose father is a heroin addict; she cherishes "crumbs of happiness that fall into her lap". I only read it on the strength of a recommendation of a very good friend.

When I finished the novel, after 8 hours of sustained reading, I put it down and said, out loud:

Wow!

Zowee!

So I advise you to set aside any preconceptions you might have made reading that summary.

I have spent the first third of my life generally refusing to have anything to do with the nebulous discipline of marketing. If you had asked me to define it last year, it would have looked something like this:

"The process of getting people to want things they don't need."

I was mistaken.

Direct Action, Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla was originally lent to me by a pacifist friend after a discussion on Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill. He evidently regarded it as supporting his view of guerrilla-style direct actions as ultimately futile/pointless in Canada. Reading it has certainly caused me to put into question my own political practice.