Subculture

Matt and I spent a particularly satisfying evening at Barnes and Noble tonight. While he sat across the table with a cup of ice-water, his own fork for ease of splitting a piece of cheesecake, and the latest collection of Get Fuzzy comic strips, I read fifty pages of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, a holdover from last summer's reading list. This book easily wormed its way into the handful of quirky and interesting books that I find particularly amusing; I have become a sucker for the particular subset of non-fiction that combines economics, sociology, psychology, and popular idiom with anecdotal narrative bits that, while particularizing experience, end up universalizing it. I'm talking about books like Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point (or Blink, as well, though I have not yet read it), or Stefan Fatsis's Word Freak, or Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, or Barbara Enrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.

At one point, a friend of Matt's thought it might be amazing fun to immerse herself in the subculture of serious ultimate frisbee - to get to know a choice handful of eccentric and dedicated players and to understand how the world of post-collegiate frisbee functions - and then to write a book in a similar fashion to that of Word Freak. I can't say that the basic concept doesn't interest me immensely: finding a particular subculture in which to immerse myself, meeting the most devoted of aficionados therein, experiencing the nitty gritty and perhaps unexpected details of such a life, and writing a book about it all. Bonus points to me if I can find some sort of socio-economic/psychological undercurrent to it all.

Matt and I ended up talking at length about one subculture of which I am a part that might produce the sorts of quirks and characters worthy of writing about: female fantasy baseball owners. Inspired by his reading of Fantasyland, a look at the extreme characters that emerge within the fantasy baseball world and the intense and intelligent way in which they play the game, it seemed to him like a feasible idea. I could certainly try to track down women who play, perhaps begin a league just for women, market it as an "expert" league, and see what sorts of women show up. I could figure out why women play, and how they play, and what sorts of backgrounds they come from. I could certainly end up finding statistical geniuses, strategy gurus, ritual eccentrics...

All of this makes me step back and take a look at the particular subcultures to which I belong, all of which could certainly be fodder for turning me back into a writer.

I am a knitter.
I am a lover of choral music, and a choir geek also.
I play fantasy baseball. I am a female who plays fantasy baseball.
I am a future pastor. I am a female future pastor.
I have worked in retail.
I have lived in Princeton.
I cook.
I keep a blog (well, a couple of them, to be exact).
I am a PTS alumni. I am a St. Olaf alumni.
I am a Chicago Cubs fan.

And there are so many more. We all belong to our own particular worlds within the larger world. We all belong to particular subsets of people. Isn't this at the root of the popular noun-turned-verb word "networking?" Our subcultures are our starting points. They are the places where we make friends, and the shared experiences that connect us to new people. Our subcultures influence the sorts of people we meet and the sort of people we are. They influence what we consider to be important and the influence the ways that we impact society. They give us value and help us to create value. Along with all of this come the psychological impact of being a part of a group, the economic impact of the way we make decisions based on our perceived return, the sociological and anthropological implications of human interaction, and the dynamic interaction and overlap between individual and shared experience.

Subcultures fascinate me. They make me want to write lots of books. They make me want to be a writer. And I suppose that if I become a writer for real, then that is yet another subculture to add to the list...one that I would be very proud to add.