So much for the "pro-life" church.

Thanks to Cinnamon for the link!

So I skipped a session and went in search of peace and quiet. A cup of tea, an empty classroom, a Willa Cather story, and nothing but the sound of the HVAC humming above me. For an hour, all was right with the world.

I'll network tomorrow, I promise.

But then Facebook started dicking around with its privacy policies, leaving users less and less control over their personal information and making it harder to keep stuff out of the public realm and away from greedy advertisers. I've spent a lot of time in the past few months reading nerd articles on how to keep my personal data safe, judiciously untagging myself from weird photos, deleting people's requests for farm animals and weapons.

But now it's just too much. I spend so much time worrying about the information on my page and in whose nefarious hands it may end up that I just don't enjoy the experience anymore. So, I'm out. I'll keep the page up for now, but I've deleted almost everything -- photos, interests, applications, notes -- and pruned my friends list by about half. If I pruned you, it's nothing personal. Just trying to minimize my exposure.

So I guess I'm going back to the old-fashioned Internet life: good ol' e-mail and this here weblog, my online home since 2000. Rubbernun will never sell my personal information or crap up my inbox with demands for livestock! All the goofy YouTube videos and witty observations and Monty Python references (like the title of this post) will now appear here, just like in olden times. I hope my pals will comment on posts and write to me so I'm not just barfing silliness in a vacuum.

Hi.

Oh, and I'm also on Twitter (@rubbernun).

The book drags in places (no pun intended), and some of the interviews are repetitive -- they sometimes read like repurposed articles taken from some other source. And no photos! What the hell! But Ciminelli and Knox get great stories and provide context for the homocore movement. And they give a decent amount of space to the ladies, showing the intertwined birth of queer punk and riot grrrl.

Ahem. So anyway. The book starts with the Pacific Northwest and DC twin-sproutings of the movement of punk and politics that eventually became Riot Grrrl. But Meltzer seems unsure about the trajectory that movement took. Was it appropriated into a radio-friendlier format that got further and further removed from activism (the Hole -> Alanis -> Spice Girls -> Britney -> Pussycat Dolls route)? Or did it lead through Bikini Kill to Sleater-Kinney, Ladyfest, Rock & Roll Camp for Girls, and the punk reclaiming of DIY craft? Or both?

Meltzer doesn't really have the answer (and leaves out the craft angle entirely, but I believe it's all related to reclaiming the skills and experiences of girlhood as a political/anti-corporate act). She might if she were less personally invested in the music, but that probably would have made for a much less interesting read.

My favorite bits were Sandra Cisneros' tribute to her mother, Don DeLillo's tribute to Nelson Algren, and Elaine Showalter's tribute to Jane Adams. But what I'll think about when I think about this issue of Granta, probably forever, is Alex Kotlowitz. His story is about gangs and violence, but it's specifically about the kids who murdered a former coworker of mine, which I didn't know when I bought the book. I don't know what else to say about that, except that the story left me feeling more hopeless and distraught than anything I've read in years.

Chicago has complicated problems.