Grannskapsrevolution

A vacation is never complete without a book purchase! At my WWOOF host’s recommendation, my roommate and I dropped in to shop at the varuhall in Orsa while he went to pick up the sailboat for winter storage. The artisanal and tourist goods on display included copies of Grannskapsrevolution; if memory serves there was a sign about how it was a book from a local author. The topic matter was also relevant to a lot I’ve been thinking about recently, including my personal projects outside of work, so it seemed like a natural choice for a souvenir.

Author Lina Zakrisson works as a social sustainability consultant focused on helping various stakeholders (residents, property owners, etc.) create stronger, more vibrant local communities. Grannskapsrevolution is thus a combination of manifesto, marketing, and DIY guide on just that topic—she makes an explicit point of highlighting her consulting work, though you still get plenty of tips and information for your money without any scummy “sign up for my course to learn more” sales pitches. But Grannskapsrevolution seems like a condensed version of Melody Warnick’s This is Where You Belong tailored to a Swedish (Stockholm?) target demographic, so reviewing it in English feels a bit pointless. I’ll just wrap up by saying that I expect my copy will be circulating among the board members of my local buy-nothing association and by highlighting what was the most memorable anecdote in the book for me:

One of Zakrisson’s neighbors ran into her while she was out walking her dog and that launched a fair bit of smalltalk, since her neighbor was also a dog owner. As they parted ways, the neighbor invited her over for a fika sometime and Zakrisson agreed enthusiastically. Yes, of course! That would be lovely! Then when she got home, she thought, Wait, it’s a bit weird to just invite a perfect stranger into your home like that. Or what if she’s some kind of psycho? The fika gets put off and delayed for a while because Zakrisson isn’t sure what to make of it. Of course the story ends with her eventually making good on the invitation, and of course she has a lovely time, and in the end that neighbor becomes an actual friend. As an afterthought, Zakrisson adds that once she got to know this neighbor better, she learned that her neighbor was American, and even though she’d lived in Sweden for years by now, she had still had grown up in the US.

Me, an American: of course she was an American, lol

Also me, an American: so that’s how all of my invitations land with Swedes

Synners

A chapter out of Pat Cadigan’s Synners appeared in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and I enjoyed it so much I decided to read the whole book.

The whole book, it turns out, is a bit of a tome: 496 pages of a tome, to be exact. That’s a full two hundred pages longer than Neuromancer, its cyberpunk partner-in-crime and most apt comparison. Can the center hold?

For me, I’m not so sure. There’s a lot going on in Synners and I’m not even sure what happened.

We have Visual Mark and Gina, two music video creators working for a corporate behemoth called Diversifications, Inc. after their scrappy little independent studio was sucked up in a merger. We have Gabe, an adman also working for Diversifications, Inc., who is addicted to playing hyper-immersive video games (think Star Trek holodeck style) and the company of two AI? imaginary? personalities. We have Sam, Gabe’s estranged and emancipated teenage daughter and wunderkind hacker, returning to LA from a retreat in the Ozarks after receiving a mysterious data dump from her hacker friend Keely. That information, it turns out, is high-level top-secret corporate espionage material from Diversifications, Inc. pertaining to the next product they’re getting ready to launch: sockets that will allow people to connect to the Internet directly from their brains (Neuralink, essentially). The sockets work well enough…at first. Then crisis hits and Gina, Gabe, and Sam have to team up in virtual reality to halt the march of a deadly stroke-inducing virus.

I’m pretty sure that’s what I read, anyway.

In between those important plot points is a lot of stage setting to build the atmosphere of Retrofuturistic Cyberpunk LA, which I’m sure hit a lot different in 1991 than it does now.

This is where I’m of two minds. Cadigan has the imagination as well as the work ethic to really build a fantastic and immersive world that’s fun to spend time in, but the actual plot spends a lot of time stumbling around. The initial pacing of everything had me expecting a story about how our ragtag group of heroes would hack the planet, expose the corporate greed and malfeasance at Diversifications, Inc., and send the bad guys to jail.  But then somewhere around the halfway? two-thirds? mark, Diversifications, Inc. wins their much-needed approval from the Food, Drug, and Software Administration and the sockets become a fait accompli. Okay, well, now what?

If deus ex machina is the name for a pat and unsatisfying solution to a plot problem, what’s the name for a pat and unsatisfying problem introduced into a story to drag it out? The deus ex machina problem here is the virtual reality stroke virus: its connection to everything that happened before is tenuous at best, which makes the final climactic fight? showdown? feel slapped on and irrelevant. This is the stuff that seems most interesting to Cadigan, and she could have started everything right after the introduction of the sockets to slow burn the tension through growing numbers of unexplained deaths until we arrive at the existentialist showdown with the source of it all. So why didn’t she?

Synners was published in 1991. If I’m inferring correctly from Cadigan’s dedication, it was more of a “long time coming” novel than a “frantic and immediate burst of genius” novel, and that tracks with just how much The 80s come through in the story. It’s like a cross between MTV, the Sprawl trilogy, and a romcom, all in a Clockwork Orange-level patois.

Positive reviews from recent years enthusiastically declaim Cadigan’s vision of the future as “spot on” but you really have to squint to get Cadigan’s ideas and our world today to line up. People in Synners are still walking around with offline camcorders and connecting to the Internet through physical landlines; music videos, of all things, have gained primary cultural import; their online world has that distinctly visual/spatial paradigm the 80s futurists assumed things would take, with goggles and sensor suits and the like. It’s all extremely dated.

Of course, if you tilt your head sideways you can reinterpret music videos as the omnipresent video content on places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and people like Visual Mark and Gina as a kind of influencer, but even then it’s an unsatisfying fit because the ultimate climax of the book comes down to the naïve chestnut of But What Does It Mean To Be Human When You’re A Machine. Mark and Gina’s relationship to their audience, and even to the videos they create, isn’t really a topic of concern or at all relevant to the plot. The condensation of online content ownership and delivery into a small number of huge corporate overlords is the one thing that maps pretty neatly on to today, but it’s not much more than background radiation, the inciting incident that kicks off the actual plot.

Much as I love the spirit of linguistic playfulness in the slang throughout Synners, it did a lot to get in the way of the book for me. Not only in understanding what was happening, or what characters meant, but also in just enjoying the book. What’s fresh and exhilarating in a single chapter (in, for example, an anthology like Flame Wars) is exhausting to keep up for close to five hundred pages. For all of Cadigan’s focus on music, and groove, and rhythm, the language itself is often choppy and awkward. Even (tragically) in dialogue, where flow and sound is especially important. Or puns or slang that feel like a stretch. “Synner,” for one, short for “synthesizer,” as in people like Gina and Visual Mark: that one is just too cutesy and too much of a reach to really land for me.

All of that said, this is the rare book I can understand reading again. Going into things a second time, with foreknowledge about the shape of things to come, could well be a better experience than the first time around.

Historiskan 1/2024

My airport read ahead of my trip to the US in May. What did this issue cover?

      • An interview about a feminist history podcast, whose name now escapes me
      • A biography of Aphra Behn
      •  Svenska Norgehjälpen, Sweden’s aid project for Norway during Nazi occupation
      • Holomodor, which seems highly relevant these days
      • Tehuanas: Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico who have long enjoyed a relative independence from, and equal standing with, men
      • And, on the flip side of history in the new world: a biography of Inés Suárez, conquistador
      • St. Vitus’ Dance
      • A fascinating biography of Maria Enquist, a notable “beauty expert” (and probable grifter) at the turn of the twentieth century who offered some of the first cosmetic surgery in Sweden (paraffin injections)
      • Queen Christina of Saxony, the reigning queen during the Siege of Tre Kronor
      • Sweden’s first theater, a project put together by two noblewomen but which no longer stands today because it was torn down soon after its construction
      • Brief little bios of women long-distance swimmers
      • And of course the cover story on Amelia Earhart

En rackarunge

My hosts in Dalarna had a fantastic library of children’s literature spanning the interests of three generations. What a curious thing to see the Sweet Valley High paperbacks of my own childhood on the same shelf as authors like Ester Blenda Nordström!

Nordström’s series of children’s books, starting with En rackarunge, is purported to be an unacknowledged source of inspiration for Astrid Lindgren. The rackarunge in question—Ann-Mari—bears a resemblance to Pippi Longstocking in character as well as appearance, and predates the first Pippi book by some years. Admittedly, it’s hard to prove these things either way, so who’s to say for sure.

The Swedish half of the couple saw me paging through the book during my downtime and remarked on the differences between children’s literature now and then.

“I tried reading some of those older books to the kids when they were small, and it’s just a completely different experience. They’re so slow, nothing happens, there’s so much description. Books these days, there’s always something happening. It’s such a different energy.”

Indeed. En rackarunge is also more of a short story collection than a novel. Each chapter is a self-contained little adventure, although there are some recurring characters and situations throughout that (kind of) tie all of the adventures into one loose story. Not to mention it touches on pretty dark stuff for a children’s book of today: one of the red threads throughout the book is Ann-Mari’s friendship with a Josef, young man newly released from prison for murdering his physically and emotionally abusive uncle. He’s only scraping by at the margins of society when Ann-Mari first meets him, a total outcast from his hometown. Nordström’s reportage consistently highlighted the marginalized and the suffering, from her initial breakthrough as an undercover journalist investigating labor conditions for domestic help to her condemnation of the brutality of the bullfights she attended in Spain and her advocacy on behalf of destitute Finns starving near to death in a famine. Josef’s arc in the last third or so of the book is another culmination of Nordström’s concern for the downtrodden, and of course it’s Ann-Mari who decides to help him.

Why did Pippi become such a mainstay, while Ann-Mari vanished into obscurity?