the formless white void

Because I kept missing important news about things related to China Miéville, I set up a google alert on his name. A few days ago - just after I myself finished reading it - I got an alert for a review of Railsea. Normally, I don't seek out blog reviews of things, unless I have a very specific reason for it, but in this case I had just finished the book and was curious about another's take on it. So I clicked through and read quite an excellent poststructuralist "review"/analysis of the novel, one which organized and tidied up a lot of my as-yet-abstract senses about the book, and presented them in a far more intelligent fashion than I could. It was a relief, in some ways, to read that kind of write-up so soon after reading the novel itself; I don't feel, any more, the need to go back and tear through Railsea again to try to figure out what it's doing. Of course I have my own opinions and ideas about the novel, but the "literary salvage" idea that tomcat elaborates satisfies my need for critical analysis right now.

The Railsea review is, of course, wonderfully well-written and insightful, but as I scrolled through (looking for other books he discussed that I'd actually read), I came to one about The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  It's ingenious. It made me laugh - partly because I so rarely think about picture books in a deeply critical-analytical way - partly because of the tone of the criticism, and partly because of the defamiliarization that it forced. As tomcat notes in comments, it's not a "joke" review (although it is hilarious at the same time it's brilliant, a literary-critical feat that not many can match, though James Kincaid does a nice job) - you really can read The Very Hungry Caterpillar precisely as he does. [regardless of your critical orientation, it's a very odd book. I feel like I have a vague memory of once either hearing, or seeing on a conference program, a talk about TVHC and food/disordered eating books for younger readers...]. In the main, I'm used to thinking of TVHC as one of the mainstream classics, a book that I probably sold dozens of times when I worked at the bookstore - that, and Goodnight Moon, and The Runaway Bunny are really go-to baby gift books.

I am not used to thinking of The Very Hungry Caterpillar as 

"a phantasmagoric bodyshock horror story that focuses on the tenets of extreme gluttony and one creature’s psycho-compulsive desire to consume the world around him.  Taking cues from Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s conception of horror isn’t a hyperbolic focus on blood and viscera, nor is it concerned with gothic notions of ghosts or death: rather, the anathema is an internalised grotesque; it is the body itself that is to be feared, treacherous from the inside and predisposed to intense bloating, mutation and the eventual emergence of the literal monster from within."

I love the idea of this book as horror, or even a kind of quasi-gothic horror (I suppose one could make a decent case for the gothic, particularly around the issue of the cocoon), as heir to Lovecraft and Poe. I love thinking about "the protagonist’s hidden and difficult past."  I especially love the discussion of the formless white void (with accompanying illustration embedded in the blogpost; for some reason, that strikes me as the final touch, a bit of extravagant flair that both sends up and performs a certain kind of textual analysis.

It's a great analysis of the book (which, as I noted earlier, is rather weird), and highly, highly recommended. For people outside of "the academy," or people who didn't major in english or philosophy, it will probably read as humor. Partially, unfortunately, I think that reaction speaks to our cultural inability to take children's texts seriously enough to warrant serious literary analysis. It's part of why I find it amusing; I myself, invested as I am in the serious, scholarly study of children's literature and culture, have never thought of the Caterpillar as anything but "just a caterpillar," "just a picture book." In fact, there is no such thing as a book that is "just" anything; all texts are complex and polyvalent, and can give rise to any number of readings (some more convincing than others).
I am not sure I wholeheartedly endorse tomcat's reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but I am very certainly glad that I read it.
I suggest you go do the same.

John & Hank Green [should] Take Over the World; or, A Modest Proposal

The final part in my three-part series on the awesome power of Nerdfighteria and its benevolent "rulers," John and Hank Green (who aren't rulers, really, since it's more of a collective community, but they are a central magnetic force drawing in the nerds). I'm sure the world has been waiting eagerly for this long-delayed final post; it's a long one, so make yourself comfy.

First, a tiny update: a few days ago, John Green tweeted that the Nerdfighter group on kiva.org has now loaned over $150,000 in microloans. I'm not sure exactly when the numbers here started to boom, but it's been in the last six months or so. Again, a reminder that the majority of Nerdfighteria are young people - say, under 21 years old.

On to the Problem: When I was in high school, in my senior year I got interested in students' rights as a result of an amazing history teacher and the appallingly thwarted efforts of some friends to form a public Gay-Straight Alliance. For a long while thereafter, I seriously considered attending law school, with an eye on either civil rights or student/young person-related law. Obviously, law school went by the wayside, but for any number of reasons - including the fact that I specialize in children's and youth culture - I'm still quite interested in the plight of young people.

In some ways, this is a First World Problem: the disenfranchisement of under-21s (or even under-25s) is not quite on par with sub-saharan starvation crises, with southeast Asian political fighting, with South American paramilitary activity. At the same time, if we judged every cause by its relation to more dire causes, we'd be stalled out with inertia. Just because something is a First World Problem doesn't make it not a problem. Perfectability of society is a thing that should belong to all people, regardless of where they live.

Young people ARE disenfranchised. They are experiencing unemployment at higher rates than the general population, sometimes by as many as 3 or 4 times . 
Young people under the age of 18 pay taxes - sales tax, and if they DO have jobs, in the form of payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security. I started working at a Hallmark shop in a mall when I was 16 - I worked there for more than two years. In that time, I paid in hundreds, if not thousands, to Medicare and Social Security, yet I had absolutely NO voice in how that money was regulated, disbursed, etc. Then, as now, there was a fair amount of political chatter about making changes to both programs; chatter I followed, because I was and am a nerd, but which I was not able to participate in, despite being an American worker paying taxes. This - taxation without representation - is one of the biggest forms of disenfranchisement that under-18s face, and I think it's a significant one. After all, Taxation Without Representation was one of the central causes of the American Revolution, was it not? [debatable, but in popular mythology, still important]

Then we get to other issues: the drinking age, which weirdly supercedes the age at which one is a legal citizen. The arguments for lowering the drinking age to the age of legal citizenship (i.e., age 18) are various, but one I find especially compelling is that it could creation an altered culture around drinking, reducing things like alcohol poisoning and alcohol abuse among teenagers and college students.
The linkage of college financial aid to male enrollment in Selective Service (which is, frankly, creepy and a kind of forced enscription).

The very large, and increasingly more troubling, problems of student loan debt - partially highlighted through the work of the Occupy protesters - is another area of disenfranchisement for young people.


Then there's the fact that the United States, alone with Somalia, refused to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Amnesty International includes this very telling explanation of Somalia's failure to sign: "Somalia currently does not have the governmental capacity to ratify an international treaty at this time."
Primary objections include fears that the Convention would reduce parental authority, lead to lots of abortions, and result in children making their own (!) choices about religion. Two other issues loom in the background of the Convention: child soldiers (yes, weirdly enough: evidently, American 17-year-olds, who are legally children in the view of the convention, can join the US military) and capital punishment for juveniles.

This leads directly to the next item on the disenfranchised list: trial, imprisonment, and sentencing of minors as adults. This is an issue I feel very, very, very strongly about; regardless of crime, I do not feel any child (even a 17-year-old) should be tried as an adult. I would completely support altering penal codes to deal with juvenile offenders; at the moment, it's an all-or-nothing system, which frees teenage criminals when they reach majority, or which treats 12-year-olds like 45-year-olds in the eyes of the law. Neither is satisfactory.

A much smaller issue, but one I think is representative in some important ways of the way the issues of younger people are simply ignored, is the Car-Rental Dilemma. Even if you're the safest driver on earth, if you're under 25, you must pay a premium (usually a very high premium) if you want to rent a car. I have never been able to understand how this isn't illegal discrimination (and I've researched it at some length, but still my brain refuses to process it).

So what is the solution? What's the Proposal?

A powerful advocacy group. A lobbying and activist group on par with the AARP - the American Association of Retired Persons. Membership in that group is essentially automatic. I would model my group broadly after the AARP. I might even borrow their acronymic principle: Why not the American Association of Young People, the AAYP?

One of the criticisms of Kids These Days is their political apathy. I don't see this; most of the younger people I come in contact with do have at least a thin thread of interest or passion about some aspect of political and social life. They're just so thoroughly disenfranchised that they don't exert themselves. In the parlance of one of my favorite podcasters (Merlin Mann), young people have no skin in the game. In fact, they're excluded from the game almost entirely. They want to play, but no one's giving them a leg up.

I dislike, very strongly, the way lobbying operates in American government. I'd love to see that changed dramatically. I don't think this will happen any time soon. Until such a time when powerful lobbies aren't needed, I think it's vital that young people have one. The AARP is strong. It is one potent group of voters. There may not be as many young people voting - I'll limit my group to, say, ages 25 and under - but there are still a lot of them.

And no one speaks for them.
No one in any position of real political efficacy gives one shake of a dead rat's tail about the needs and wants of that age group. And I think that needs to change. The way to make it change is to form a group so numerous and vocal - and let's face it, financially strong - that the media, then the politicians, must pay attention to it.

This is where John and Hank Green come in. They have a large and broad platform from which to speak. John has over a million followers on Twitter. The two have repeatedly been able to marshal the forces of Nerdfighteria to undertake any number of causes, including lending and giving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, this is small potatoes in the context of larger political contributions, but I would argue that it represents a much larger "sacrifice" or percentage of income given than one sees in the population at large.

I've been daydreaming about my AAYP for years - ever since high school, when our GSA was reduced to dust, when I learned about PACs, when my folks explained to me how much power the AARP had. One of my huge stumbling blocks, when I try to think how such an organization would be formed, is the need for strongly magnetic, charismatic leadership that would draw in young people. A kind of celebrity spokesperson(or persons), but ones genuinely and truly committed to the cause of increasing the power and influence and respect for young people in this country. There aren't many of these sorts of people in the pages of People magazine.
But John and Hank Green are precisely the kind of people who would work beautifully as loci for a young people's movement. Both are intelligent and very articulate; they manage to be serious and funny simultaneously. They're able to compress information into tidy short packets or nuggets; they can do soundbites and catchphrases like nobody's business. They've clearly mastered the use of the Internet for social networking, charitable work, and general community-building. Both have connections in other fields: John, of course, in the world of books - teachers, librarians, publishing, and Hank in science and entrepreneurship. Those teachers and librarians are an invaluable resource, because they're working with a good portion of the young people in question, and a great many are committed to the welfare and well-being of young people. Yes, they're nerds, but they are also able to speak across a range of nerd-groups: readers, artists, scientists, musicians, computer geeks, video-game-enthusiasts, lego nerds, sports fans (yes. John Green maintains a twitter account for his commentary on sports - @sportswithjohn). They already stage an annual con.

I don't think for one moment that they should be the driving force behind this - essentially, I would pick them as the networking hub. Young people ought to run the show - there's plenty of unemployed, or underemployed, college graduates out there who could do a great job of branding, marketing, coordinating, doing whatever it is one needs to do to set up an advocacy organization.  Clearly, older people - especially those with experience in such things - would be needed as well, but I would want the heart of the organization to be younger people. The core board and directorate would be largely under term limits - say four years. Then new folks would come in. You'd have to have some unchanging people, of course, for continuity, but keeping the main players both fresh and young would ensure new ideas and relevance - if you continually recruit young people into the organization, you'll always have people on hand who are totally up-to-date with the current state of the younger world.

I just love the idea of young people being represented more thoroughly in the halls of power. Can you imagine a group tasked with advocating for young people taking on issues relating to education? or student loans? I am pretty sure there was no one at the table looking out for 22-year-old recent graduates when any and all student loan  regulation was put in place. 

It would be a lovely thing to give power to the young people. AAYP - or whatever you want to call it - for and by the young people of America - it would be a glorious revolution.

John & Hank Green [should?] Take Over the World, Part Two

Part One of this unexpectedly multi-part series concludes with a set of statements and queries:

So a couple of nerds with a big teenage following have had commercial success. Those same teenagers sent one of those nerds a few hundred bucks for his birthday.

So what? Why's it matter?
To find out why, stay tuned for part two.

So: WHY DOES IT MATTER?
One perceptive reader left a comment suggesting a "why," and s/he is absolutely correct, of course. There are a number of reasons why it matters, of course, but my question was one of those sneaky teachery questions, where there's a specific answer I have in mind.

One way to begin answering this, coincidentally enough, is by watching John's latest vlogbrothers video, posted on 27 July, 2011.  John runs down a quick (and abbreviated) list of nerdfighter accomplishments: raised $150,000 in 48 hours in the Project for Awesome; gave money (along with the Harry Potter Alliance) to charter airplanes of relief supplies to post-earthquake Haiti; got Helen Hunt to hear the Helen Hunt Song, etc.

Nerdfighters are pretty intensely invested in fighting world suck, the official term for - well, erm, world suck, which really shouldn't need any further defining. They make videos, they write songs, they do art, they knit monsters, they do whatever needs doing, or whatever they are moved to do. Sometimes the decreasing of world suck is a low-level kind of thing: being kind to one other person can do it. The everpresent acronym DFTBA reminds them and us and anyone listening to be awesome, the direct antithesis of sucking.
Not precisely highly nuanced, academic discourse, but not very many people except academics are very interested in - or, honestly, moved by - highly nuanced, academic discourse. The Brothers Green and their nerdy band of awesome followers managed to figure out what the national Democratic Party has failed to enact: quick n easy soundbites WORK.

Along with the art and the internet activity and the chat and nerdfighter love stories (of which there are plenty, it seems, up to and including at least one marriage proposal via John Green in a vlog, a marriage which has resulted in at least one new baby nerdfighter) and reading books and singing goofy songs and listening to wizard rock (because the crossover between nerdfighters and HP geeks is enormous), one of the other things nerdfighters - who, again, are largely teenagers or college kids! - seem to do very well is donate money. They're fundraisers of a prodigious nature, on either the collecting or giving end, and the funds they raise go to ferociously good causes - clean water in Haiti. Via the Project for Awesome (actually a vlogbrothers invention, if I understand correctly; alas, thus far Nerdfighteria lacks a dedicated historian with enormous quantities of time and resources for research and compilation), Shawn Ahmed's uncultured project which has done things like rebuild a school and provide clean water supplies in Bangladesh.

 More recently, and sadly, nerdfighters have been donating to the This Star Won't Go Out Foundation via the purchase of this star won't go out bracelets. The "Star" is Esther Earle, a Harry Potter devotee, HPA member and dedicated nerdfighter with a tremendous internet presence, who died a little less than a year ago from cancer. Esther is celebrated and memorialized and honored all over nerdfighteria (google "nerdfighter" + "Esther" to see how many folks who never met the girl in person are making Esther part of the awesome they don't forget); in fact, John Green's upcoming novel The Fault in our Stars is dedicated to Esther.
Esther was a huge part of Potter fandom, and her family attended LeakyCon2011 this summer as guests of the conference. Esther's father, Wayne Earle, wrote about it on his blog, and in fact it was reading what Mr. Earle wrote that prompted me to finally sit down and begin writing this blog post, which I have been contemplating and working on and mulling over for months. To wit:

Everyone at the conference was given a This Star Won't Go Out bracelet and I usually found a way to mention to the wearer that I was Esther's dad! We were witnesses to love in action.

The "fandom" as it's called, is huge and has made a gigantic imprint for good on the lives of this generation. It was Esther's world so we tried to give her space to make friends and be herself. Now that she is gone, her friends have become our friends. No surprise there. And they are awesome. They know how to give hope and accept one another. They are eager to show compassion and love without restraint. They know how to tell a story and they know how to celebrate life! They proved that by rocking out last Saturday night during the "Esther Earl Rocking Charity Ball." The ball ended with chants of "Esther! Esther! Esther!" She was also remembered at three other events there, one of which was when I read from the first chapter of my Esther book.

Remember again: a lot of LeakyCon attendees are younger people (not all, and probably not even most, though). And I mean young: college-age and younger. And here is the middle-aged dad turning up and being literally and metaphorically embraced by these folks, simply because he's Esther's dad, and they loved Esther, and because, as Mr. Earle says, "they are awesome. They know how to give hope and accept one another. They are eager to show compassion and love without restraint."

After I read Mr. Earle's blog post, which is also a testament to the power of reading and communities of readers, and is also intensely moving (ie, tear-inducing), I thought: "YES. THIS is what nerdfighters do. This is why they matter. This is power."

Because it is power.

But this isn't just a feelgood story about how Today's Youth aren't as bad as we think they are, or a counter to all those "We have no empathy" stories floating around out there. It functions that way, of course, but it would also be easy to write off nerdfighteria as a bunch of "good kids," nerdy readers of books who were always already going to Do Good Deeds. Nothing remarkable or praiseworthy because expected, and because expected, as if it had already been done.
And I expect that to an extent this is true. Probably a lot of nerdfighters are Good Kids (I was one myself, to be honest, though in a sarcastic, possibly sullen sort of way). They're a self-selected, self-selecting group, in a sense; readers of certain kinds of books, drawn to likeminded others who have also read those books.
But there are well over half a million youtube subscribers, and over a million people who follow John Green on twitter, and probably any number of people who have read one or more of his books or participate on the ning and don't subscribe or follow.  And I somehow doubt that every single one of those people is a Good Kid. Probably a lot of them are just regular old people, neither Good nor Bad. Probably a lot of them forget to be awesome on a regular basis. Probably a lot of them don't devote their out of school hours to charity work, to visiting nursing homes and hospitals, to working at soup kitchens or animal shelters or wherever. Probably most of them pocket their allowances or their babysitting money or their paychecks from crappy minimum-wage type jobs, and then blow that money on iTunes or ringtones or movies or technogadgets or taco bell or cute shoes or nice jeans or whatever else it is that teenagers spend money on.
But sometimes, they kick in some of that money to causes. Good causes, causes with tangible, real-world effects. They give money when they don't get anything at all back from it - no gimmicky bracelet (except the lovely this star won't go out, which I find far less obnoxious than many of the gimmicky bracelets, something I attribute to the use of lower-case letters). no reusable shopping bag, no "entered to win an autographed whatever," no t-shirt, no sticker or postcard or anything. Just because they can, and they want to, and they've remembered to be awesome.

And so nerdfighters can say, cheerfully and honestly, that they have rebuilt a school in Bangladesh and provided wells and clean water in Haiti and Bangladesh, that they chartered a plane full of medicine and essential supplies for Haiti during the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, that they help support families affected by children with cancer. And probably any number of other projects that I don't know about.
Meanwhile, they make videos and write songs and read books and chat on the internet about the weather and school and teachers and families and friends, and make art and knit animals and make music and get excited and get sad and don't forget to be awesome. Because mostly, they're young: teenagers, college kids, maybe kids in their early 20s.
But they are young.

Which is where I will end Part Two of this series. Part Three, hopefully the final part, will bring it all together and explain why all of this is worth thinking about seriously.

John and Hank Green [could] Take Over the World, Part 1

Part the First: A brief history of my discovery of John Green and Nerdfighteria; a brief recent history of the accomplishments of the Brothers Green

The first thing I read by John Green was Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which I picked up because I liked David Levithan and because I knew it had gay characters. Up to that point, Green's name was just a name to me, a name I knew was semi-important in my chosen field of study; a name on my very long to-read-someday list.
After reading WG, WG, which I loved, I intentionally sought out Green's other books: An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, this last which I only read this summer. I poked the internet with a long stick to see what would surface when Googling Green's name - I got about as far as "nerdfighters," and moved on. I had courses to plan, life to live, a dissertation to procrastinate on (and be confused by), back pain to contend with. I taught WG, WG  in the fall, making the rare choice to require my students to purchase a book still only available in hardcover. They liked the book quite a lot; I was gratified by this, and by many of them reporting that they had previously read Green's books. I was also gratified when they told me, some of them rather excitedly, that John Green would be speaking at the public library in January. I shelled out the $20-some for a ticket, after hemming and hawing - I am on an absurdly tight budget, and even a $20 ticket is a big expenditure. But I decided that John Green is an Important YA Author - and Award Winner!! - and how often do those kinds of writers appear at my local public library? So I went, and mentioned it in passing here. And the talk was terrific, though I was baffled: what was with the audience hollering "Good morning, Hank?" while the Guest of Honor filmed it all with a little video camera? All the references to "nerdfighteria?" And so on - baffling. I felt conspicuously old and out of place, but I didn't mind, really; I was delighted to see an auditorium full of teenagers, on a Friday night, come to listen to a writer. Teenagers who were chattering giddily and being excited and and being dropped off by their parents, for an evening at the public library. I grinned for a moment, thinking of those parents, who must have been delighted when their teenagers asked to attend an author's talk at the public library. On a Friday night. After the talk, Green signed books for the throng for hours. Again: teenagers, many of them easily in the mid-to-upper reaches of teenagerness, hanging out happily at the library, talking to friends and new acquaintances and buying books (John Green's, and Siobhan Vivian's, who teaches writing at Pitt and with whom I am very happily acquainted; her books sold out before the night was half-over, the news of which she received with a dropped jaw and delight). I think there was music in the Teen Room; there may have been some kind of drinks and/or snacks of a low level. All of this activity centering on an author. A good author, even - Green's books are very smart, and very well-written. On a Friday night.

Post-talk, I realized I needed to do some deeper research into this whole "nerdfighter" business. The internet, as always, was my friend, because this is where Nerdfighteria lives (sort of?) and where John and his brother Hank have cultivated a veritable army of nerdfighters.
They vlog. They post, three times a week, short videos on some subject. Each brother does a post in turn. They have done this since 2007, when, evidently, they began this as a project to stay in touch in different ways. Vlogbrothers has its own youtube channel, and has accrued millions of views (152+million upload views). The channel has well over half a million subscribers (including me). Videos that I personally have watched have covered everything from the uselessness of pennies to religion to finance to history to science to NASA. Nerdiness of all kinds, with the catchy and useful slogan "Don't Forget To Be Awesome" (DFTBA, which also has a hand/"gang" sign which, due to my inability to separate my middle and ring fingers from each other, I cannot throw down).

So, no big news here, right? Some geeky dudes making videos which a bunch of teenagers watch. That's basically the definition of the entire internet.

EXCEPT:
the effect the brothers Green have had are staggering. I realized I was in the presence of something genuinely awesome when Hank opened his birthday gifts on youtube, livestreaming it. Yes. Nerdfighters galore sent cards - mostly handmade - and gifts (likewise handmade, including a remarkably awesome anglerfish hat which someone promptly dubbed Hanklerfish) to Hank for his birthday. After much debate around the internets prior to the birthday, John & Nerdfighteria agreed that, for Hank's birthday, the appropriate gift was to send a dollar (or more - no limit specified) to Hank so he could donate it to the charity of his choosing. So on his actual birthday, Hank Green spent hours livestreaming himself opening cards and gifts sent to him by strangers (except in nerdfighteria, we're all neighbors, I guess). Strangers who were, for the most part, half his age. Strangers who sent dollars - singly, in pairs, in handfuls. Foreign currency came in as well, in considerable quantities. I sat, mesmerized, and watched for well over an hour (and I came in after at least an hour had gone by) as Hank opened, and read out, cards. He commented on them, he checked in on the chat window, occasionally responding to remarks there. He enthused over every. single. item. None of it felt forced, or fake. None of it condescended, in any way. I only stopped watching because I had to go to something - a meeting, maybe? an appointment? But I could have watched for hours, happily.

It was after Hank's birthday that I started thinking seriously about Nerdfighteria, and nerdfighters, and the brothers Green. After collecting up his birthday dollars, and then kicking in matching funds, Hank donated over $1200 to the water.org project he's "adopted" in Haiti at Savann Tabak.

This may not be massive fundraising, but it's the output of essentially one-day fundraising: dollars for Hank's birthday (aka Hanko de Mayo). even allowing for Hank's doubling, it's not a bad chunk of change from what's essentially a gaggle of teenagers.

I follow both John and Hank Green on twitter; only this summer, John's upcoming book The Fault in Our Stars became the number-one book on amazon and barnes & noble.com: nearly one year before it is scheduled to be released. When the book went up for pre-ordering, it had just a black & white placeholder instead of an image of the cover art, because cover art had yet to be created. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about this feat of best-selling, with the (offensive to my mind) title "Tweeting from a La-Z-Boy, An Unfinished Book Hits #1." Just this week, I discover that the release date for The Fault In Our Stars has now been pushed forward (that is, earlier) by a good four+ months, evidently due to the high demand. John Green, in what I can only conceive of as a fit of masochism, has committed to sign every. single. book. in the first run, which will be 150,000 books. (Questions about what books will be signed? Go here).

Hank Green, among other projects (he's an entreprenerd, he's a scientist, he's an eco-geek, he's a musician), just released his latest record, Ellen Hardcastle (evidently named for a nerdfighter; I do not know the story on this one, alas). Turns out that Ellen Hardcastle charted on Billboard.

Hank invented glasses for watching 3D glasses in 2D, which somehow sounds like the punchline to a bad joke (though, to be fair, the 2D glasses got mentioned on cnn.com AND by Roger Ebert, who evidently ordered himself a pair).

So a couple of nerds with a big teenage following have had commercial success. Those same teenagers sent one of those nerds a few hundred bucks for his birthday.

So what? Why's it matter?
To find out why, stay tuned for part two.

[I intended to write just one insightful post on this topic, but one post won't be enough. Thus, a multipart series is born]