Books | riot nrrd

Backlash04-12-2010

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.

Susan Faludi's Backlash put a new spin on the decade of my childhood, and it is scary to me to think about how the anti-feminist backlash she documents could have affected my own socialization. Particularly cutting was her deconstruction of the whole men taking care of babies abandoned by their mothers plot, a film genre that I think I took to heart as a kid and still have a soft spot for.

She also set off all kinds of speculation about how this backlash could have affected my entire generation.

riot nrrd comics15-11-2010

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!

"Riot Nrrd" originated for me in a smelly basement playing role-playing games with a bunch of other excessively bright and fucked up punk kids. We had a couple of female friends who were big into riot grrl and it inspired us to try and reclaim a little space too. We ran Slackware, played in high school punk bands, dialed BBSes, shared mix tapes and played Cyberpunk 2020. Not a lot of people still remember this, for some reason, but way back in the nineties being a geek was nothing to be proud of unless your name happened to be Jobs, Gates or Hawkings. Being punk rock and geeky was actually a pretty tall order.

(By the way, if you read the wikipedia article on riot grrl, you should probably also read up on these ten myths of riot grrl)

Still, somehow, I was weirder than most. Part of it was my sexuality - I tried really hard at being straight, but I just wasn't, and being bisexual at the time (seriously, it was too early for me to have heard the word queer used as anything other than an insult) was just cause for my fellow riot nrrds and so called friends to call me sleazy. Racism wouldn't become an obvious problem for me, outside of my family, until 2001, but I still had a group of kids who always wanted to talk to me about the "Lebanese problem" evidently assuming I would be some kind of expert.

So it's great to see someone using the term riot nrrd and tackling issues of oppression and privilege in the various fandoms and geeky subcultures.

What's more, these are Joss Whedon geeks. It's always bugged me that Joss Whedon considers himself a "feminist", and it was cool to see some alternative takes on his characters and story tendencies.

The story-lines are interesting, the characters are fun and the dialogue is intelligent. Also bonus points for use of the word Kyriarchy. So what are you still doing here? Go read the comic!

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lullabies for little criminals15-11-2010

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.

At the end of the book, in a short postscript, Heather O'Neill writes a good line about wanting to capture some of the fantastic nature of being a street-kid. She talks a tiny bit about her own life and rather a lot about things that inspire her and books she suggests people should read.

For my part I found it hard to accept this book was not biographical. It breathes life through every pore, with imperfect people and situations it's hard to believe were invented. But I sort of have to.

Lullabies reminds me of stories I used to tell myself as a kid in a strange way, origin stories for the skatepark in a parking lot and the woods near our home. The world of Baby is far removed from my own upbringing in some of this country's seedier suburbs.

In the novel Baby's a kind of bridge between a very adult world and one of children. Much of what makes the book so lifelike is that most of her experiences will seem familiar to anyone by the time they reach their early twenties - from first brushes with drugs and sex, through first loves and struggling to make a place for yourself in an adult world. It is easy to forget that Baby is thirteen in the novel.

I really liked the way O'Neill dealt with her two big taboo topics too, namely child prostitution and heroin addiction. Basically she dealt with it the same way she writes about everything else in the novel - straightforwardly with no excuses or pretensions. Her characters are not victims in any real sense. They are very clearly actors in their lives and while they don't always choose their circumstances, they do think about them and struggle to do what they think is best.

I have so much tenderness towards this book and its characters that I don't really think I can do it justice. It's a good read, and I would highly recommend it.

Fair warning though, that there are fairly graphic scenes of sexual and physical abuse peppered throughout the book - it could be a triggering read for survivors.

Made to Stick03-10-2010

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.

Just as I would not reject out of hand a system of analysis, say radical feminism, because it sometimes produces things I don't agree with, say abolitionism, I would be a fool to reject any system of analysis on that basis.

So, I decided to embrace marketing by starting with Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Their premise is that ideas all have a degree of stickiness, and, starting with an urban legend, they talk about how someone could go about deliberately crafting or recognizing sticky ideas.

Their ideas about what makes a sticky idea are pretty sensible - simplicity, clarity, concreteness, a degree of unexpectedness and story-telling all come into play. It gets quite gimicky - down to a SUCCES acronym to remember their checklist and all sorts of cornball stories about corporate success.

That said, a very useful manual for evaluating and fine-tuning our communications, and one I feel should be read by many an anarchist out there. Not just to help us better communicate our own ideas, but also to help us inoculate ourselves against sticky ideas.

Because here's the thing - the Heath brother's techniques privilege immediate emotional reactions over thought out responses. They are trying to identify techniques that short-circuit people's analytical frames of reference. They provide a good schema to analyze the reasons why certain political messages play better and drive people's actions more effectively than others. While the Heath brothers focus on the positive uses of their techniques, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how their stuff could be used to foster fear-based reasoning as well.

Which won't keep me from using their approach.

Getting back to the start of this post, when I ascribed to marketing the intention of giving people unnecessary desires, I don't think I was totally wrong. I think buried in that emotional appeal is this very intense way of thinking of other people as potential consumers of your stuff. But ultimately the techniques themselves don't presuppose those goals. There are lots of ways of doing bad things to people - I already subscribe to the thesis that it right and ethical to use violence to the end of self-defense.

Surely effective communications is a lesser evil than kicking someone's teeth in.

Direct Action24-09-2010

My friend's copy of the book, shortly before I return it to him.

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.

The thing is, I don't really think the book supports a hypothesis on the futility of guerrilla campaigns in Canada. Understandably, Ann Hansen injects considerable ambiguity into her analysis of the short and long term effectiveness of her group's actions. Not to mention ending on the closest I imagine she felt comfortable coming to a call to action:

Remaining passive in the face of today's global human and environmental destruction will create deeper scars than those resulting from the mistakes we will inevitably make by taking action.

She follows that up with eighteen pages of appendices - different communiques put out by the Direct Action group and her own statement to the court before her sentencing.

The overwhelming impression I got from her book is that she is not at all ashamed of her acts, and felt empowered by her training and Direct Action's success. I see that she questions her choices and their consequences, but not so much as she questions the society she felt compelled her to act.

What does serve as a considerable deterrent is the psychological environment she describes throughout the book. She invokes an atmosphere of fear, alienation and the incredible isolation of living underground. Although she does allow us glimpses at her exhilaration during actions, it does not seem like enough to me to counterbalance the negative stuff.

As a how-to manual the book is mostly shit. Which I assume was why she was permitted to publish it. There are lessons to be learned for anyone seeking to avoid police surveillance, but the technical stuff is so outdated as to actually be harmful to people who might take it literally.

When I finally put the book down, I felt primarily inspired and empowered, and it is on that basis that I would recommend it.

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The God Delusion13-09-2010

The flying spaghetti monster as imagined on venganza.org.

I picked this book up as an inflight read, completely unfamiliar with the name Richard Dawkins but intrigued by the title. I was not disappointed. The whole book is full of understated humor, particularly when it demonstrates the absurdity of belief in god. And I learned a lot from it; this book is skimpy on theology, but strong on the real world effects of religion and its consequences.

Most memorable were the celestial teapot and the flying spaghetti monster.

Where I was disappointed was the the third chapter of the book, an overview of arguments for Gods existence. None of them is explored in depth; on each proof (and they are famous proofs) I had to settle for one or two points scored and then fliting off to the next one, leaving behind a plethora of references to more complete refutations.

Where this book really shines is starting on the fourth chapter: "Why there almost certainly is no God". In a nutshell, God is so improbable, so irreducibly complex of a being that any simpler explanation is preferred. The notion of an intelligent designer is described as an 'ultimate Boeing 747', making an allusion to Fred Hoyle's example of a Boeing 747 assembling itself by chance in a scrapyard. He argues that a being capable of designing the entire universe is even more improbable than the universe happening by chance.

He prefers a scientific explanation, or rather a series of them. This is where I got to meet Richard Dawkins the biologist, as he spends a lot of the book discussing natural selection, clearing up some misconceptions around it, and explaining how it is a relatively simple explanation for all the apparent complexity around us. There is no way I am going to be able to do justice to his argument from natural selection here, but I believe that is the nutshell.

Richard is hard on Muslims. He does try to talk about the other Abrahamic faiths, but of course Islam does provide him with some truly spectacular examples of religious irrationality and brutality. His politics in general seem somewhat dated to me. He invokes feminism in terms of the kind of linguistic change it brought. I began to wonder if he was capable of using the word "person" without referring to this. I would be really keen to read his reactions to some of the modern anti-imperialist and anti-oppression scholars.

The feminist shift from "man" to "human" or "person" is provided as inspiration for another linguistic shift. Richard proposes we refer to a "child of Christian parents" rather than a "Christian child" (where Christian is whatever religion), as a means to combat the indoctrination of children into religion. He even provides an evolutionary hypothesis for the tendency of children to cultivate unconditional faith.

Children raised in religion is a real pet peeve for Richard, and I sympathize with him. My parents told me explicitly to make my own choices on questions of faith, throughout my life, and I am thankful to them for it. They spared me from nothing less than a nightmare; I was horrified to read about some of the things that people raised religious as children have experienced. I am forced to agree with Richard that forcing indoctrination on children is no less than child abuse, especially in the name of "diversity".

My current roommates tell a story about a five year old boy crying in class. To shut him up, his teacher threatened to call the cops. A five year old would have believed such a threat without question. How much worse is it then, when a kid is told he is going to hell, for all eternity, for any number of sins?

What really excited me in The God Delusion is a swan song to the beauty of the universe as envisioned by contemporary science. I was repeatedly encouraged to envision the universe, and our own complexity within it, as a thing of awesome beauty, made only more grandiose by the truths we have learned about it over the years. I wish I could summon up some of Richard's lyrical power to describe this stuff, but you'll have to read him to get it.