jenn northington, in a (rambling and extended) nutshell
because i am a card-carrying nerd, i decided to turn my reading from 2011 into infographics! here they are, for your delectation and information, with a bit of commentary. because wordpress is being a total jerk about inserting images, i did it over on tumblr.
a couple weeks ago i went down to Zuccotti Park with a tote full of books and some plastic bins for the People’s Library. it was late, and i was on my way to elsewhere, so i didn’t get to stay for long, but what i saw was inspiring. it made me want to write a post on the appropriate political leveraging of drum circles, and i have been to Burning Man so i know from drum circles (short version: they were doing it right).
somewhere on the internet last week (i searched but couldn’t find it again), there was a piece on the brains behind Occupy Writers, and how overjoyed but also overwhelmed they were by the flood of support and submissions. i sent them an email offering to help, and this weekend i got my first list of names to verify and format. i was delighted to see names of authors i recognize, authors i know in person even, joining the ranks alongside others about whom i am now curious, some international even (although for the record those are really hard to verify, and Google Translate is crap at Turkish).
i was in Baltimore this past weekend and was talking with some friends (some kinda New Agey, 25-35, liberal friends) about the Occupy movement. they were all decidedly on the fence, which surprised me. one of them in particular was irked that some person had gotten a ticket for sleeping on a park bench, and didn’t understand how that was helpful in protesting economic injustice. this same friend had been part of the march on Times Square. i am a political ostrich, and my help to the OWS movement thus far has been in entirely booknerd form, but fundamentally i am on board with the movement and i guess i assume that if i am, most people i know are as well, and that’s just not true, apparently.
Monday night i was on the L train and i saw a couple dressed up as Octopi Wall Street for Halloween, and they were grinning ear to ear and looked like they were having an absolute blast, and i wanted to hug them (but that would have been weird so i didn’t).
The Rumpus posted about the Oakland General Strike this morning, linking to a bunch of cool stuff including these posters (art geek alert).
note: ok not really doom, but that might be my favorite title ever. originally posted over on tumblr.
here are, to my mind, the most thought-provoking takes on the whole Kindle Fire thing:
here is what i am wondering. people are freaked (vocally, publicly) that Facebook knows (and can broadcast) what you’re listening to, reading, watching, etc. now there is a tablet from Amazon that will know all those same things. have we already forgotten the privacy concerns already identified with Amazon?
who owns your data preferences, and how will they use that information? it’s a question we should ask of everyone — Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, you name ‘em — all the time. if we want to play in the digital space we have to share this information, of course. it’s just something worth considering.
i recently had the pleasure of hosting Gabrielle Zevin (AUTHOR CRUSH alert) at the bookstore, and she and i ended up chatting briefly about dystopia, the labeling of YA books in particular, and how her new book ALL THESE THINGS I’VE DONE was not actually a dystopia (regardless of which, you should read it). the whole conversation made me cringe a bit (i MAY have used the word in my review) and prompted a trip to the dictionary.
according to Merriam-Webster, a dystopia is “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.”
pretty straightforward, right? i mean, you COULD get really hung up on what counts as “an imaginary place,” technically speaking ALL FICTION is imaginary, and ALL FICTION contains people living dehumanized and fearful lives, but let’s not split hairs. Zevin’s book takes place in a New York some 70-odd years in the future, in which the economic recession just went right along and the city is a crumbling mess. not a huge stretch, sadly. slang is different, social mores (and in particular controlled substances) have changed but otherwise life is pretty recognizable. dystopia? only if you’re stretching.
i think this is one of those “spirit of the law” rather than “letter of the law” issues. what’s the real crux of Zevin’s book? how a girl in a mafioso family will deal with the breakdown of her world, and the lengths to which she’ll in order to protect her family. whereas in, let’s say, UGLIES (which i would consider a true dystopia) the reader is asked to consider a totally foreign political system in which, yes, citizens are deliberately dehumanized and coerced.
why does it matter? dystopia is the new buzzword, a catchy marketingspeak term that will, theoretically, attract the teens! sell more books! and hey, i am all for the selling of books to teens. but a bait-and-switch situation is not particularly helpful. if a reader picks up ALL THESE THINGS and is expecting UGLIES (or vice versa), they may very well be disappointed. both books are excellent and well worth the read, but they’re horses of a different color.
we need a new word. what do you call a book that takes place in a future that’s not great? i’d like to use “futuristic” but i think it’s got too much of a techno-bent to it. it makes me think of flying cars. doesn’t it make you think of flying cars?
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