Summer is drawing to a close, and what better time than the back-to-school season for an “exposé” on the mainstreaming of nerd culture? It seems like we see a piece like this in the New York print media every couple of years or so, a wry overview of Dorkiana past and present, complete with timeline featuring the premiere of Star Trek and the advent of the personal computer — and Time Out New York followed the template in a recent issue with a cover story called “New Dork City.”

I can’t pinpoint exactly what I find annoying about this type of looky-loo faux New Journalism; part of it, I suspect, is the same thing I find annoying about the New York Times‘s editorial attitude towards the internet, namely that it’s the Hula Hoop of the new millennium, and only the mightiest restraint prevents them from describing it as a “newfangled” “gadget” favored by “kids today.” I mean, with the “a Web log, sometimes known as a ‘blog'”? Even my grandmother knows what a damn blog is, and she died in ’92.

But that tone of anthropological remove is equally tiresome when applied to so-called “nerdy” activities like playing Scrabble (or, more to the point, playing Scrabble and caring about winning), enjoying Roddenberry-adjacent television, or showing a facility for the higher maths. The article is always narrated like a nature show, or golf: “These language fanatics gather once a year to complete difficult puzzles, but to some, it is…a homecoming of sorts.”

It’s…a crossword-puzzle tournament. My mother went to the Stamford one every year back in the eighties. Will Shortz is like the Mick Jagger of word games now. The David-Attenborough-flavored condescension aside, it’s kind of a non-story at this point, isn’t it?

Time Out New York provides a helpful guide to geekish activities around the city — quiz nights, kickball leagues, Saint Reverend Jen’s troll museum — but, as most items on “avant-nerdism” or “hip-to-be-square-ness” do, it fails to mention what I think is a key point: dorkiness isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you are.

What makes an activity or interest “nerdy” or “uncool” is never seated in the activity or interest itself. Star Trek: The Original Series, viewed objectively (if that’s possible at this point in cultural history), is not a very good show; the acting is usually quite bad, the set design even worse. But you could say that about any number of shows from that era. It’s not the show; it’s the intensity with which the show is loved. It’s the thoroughness with which the show is known, understood, cataloged, reviewed. The how, not the what.

The same principle probably applies to Dungeons & Dragons, although I never got into that — but I did get super-into Wizardry. I would sit at the family Apple IIc for hours, a sheaf of graph-paper maps on my lap, freaking out because my mage had spent every spell but one and we’d rounded a corner on some nasty-looking orcs. Orcs! I cared about orcs! And I really did care about them, too; when one of my characters got killed, and the rest of the team had to haul him back up to the castle and pool their money to get him resuscitated, I felt genuine physical anxiety.

“Wow. You were a dork.” True. But I would argue that I wasn’t a dork because I got so invested in Wizardry. I got so invested in Wizardry because I was a dork already.

Okay, everyone says that, that they were dorks in high school or junior high; it’s like a taboo, now, to say that you didn’t mind tenth grade, actually, that you kissed a boy right on time and didn’t spend every minute of your adolescence coloring your fingernails with Sharpie and seething. The truth about my dorkiness, in context, is that I had friends; that I didn’t kiss a boy until very late, but I eventually got on it and had a boyfriend; that I didn’t really hang out with the popular girls, but with a couple of notable exceptions, I got along with them fine. But I’d skipped a grade, and got good marks, and those things got me attention I didn’t want, attention that was negative for reasons I didn’t understand. I had people to eat lunch with, but didn’t feel close to them most of the time. I felt lonely and misunderstood and I didn’t know what to do about it.

Wizardry let me control my environment; it let me put together a group, an all-for-one-and-one-for-all band of tight-knit brethren; it let me exercise magical superpowers in the pursuit of treasure and destiny. In short, it gave me something I needed, some kind of belonging, some kind of agency, and I think that people who already feel that kind of belonging in their lives do not need to look for it in things like RPGs and re-enactment societies.

A piece like “New Dork City” doesn’t address that. Nor does it address the hipster-appropriation factor, by which I mean that when the bars in Williamsburg start having theme nights for the nerdy hobby of the moment, said hobby is not only not nerdy anymore, but was never that nerdy in the first place, or they wouldn’t have latched onto it. Yeah, I guess a trivia contest is kind of dweeby, but…half my friends go to trivia nights, like, every week. Do I know a lot of dweeby show-offs? Yes, I do, and thank God, or it would get pretty dull around here, but I don’t think Trivia Night even touches the hem of King Dork’s garment. Start a Latin Club in Billyburg, see how many hipsters show up. …Yeah. It’s you, me, and that guy with the eye patch.

Not to bag on hipsters — if the white belts decide they do want to read The Aeneid in the Latin, I am in with both feet. I am a giant, unrepentant Latin geek, but again, we come back to the what/who split, because I think part of me enjoyed the intense, private society of Latin geekery. I liked its privacy (by senior year, the Latin section had shrunk down to three people), its difficulty (please, permit me to explain to you at pretentious length the gerundive), that it was hard and rare and could mark me as determined and smart, and I will continue to correct people obnoxiously on the plural of “penis” until they put me in the ground.

The mainstreaming aspect is great by me. I think it does irritate certain types of “dorks” that their “thing” becomes a capital-T “Thing” and gets adopted by the greater culture, but I for one wish it had happened sooner. I had read every single one of Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts by the time I was 15. Every single one. Multiple times. But this was twenty years ago, I was going to girls’ school where nobody else gave a hot damn about baseball, and even if they had, sabermetrics was a non-entity for most fans back then. James is a baseball demigod now, and most people who follow the game know who he is, and hallelujah, it’s past time. Reading the baseball blogosphere is kind of a homecoming these days, all these other people who know what range factor is.

But the TONY piece didn’t touch certain kinds of dorkaciousness: baseball, Catullus, true-crime book clubs, Beale-cipher solvers, Ren faires, Rent-heads. The lede talks about how, “[a]fter September 11, pundits gravely proclaimed that irony was dead. As it turned out, irony wasn’t listening,” and goes on to describe firmly-tongue-in-cheek light-saber battles and pirate-ins on the Staten Island Ferry, which pretty much makes my point about the how vs. the what for me. Like, it’s okay to do derfy stuff if it’s just a put-on, if it’s a big joke like Improv Everywhere (which is hilarious and awesome), but if you really mean it, if you really give a shit about medieval costuming or DS9, it’s not cool anymore.

And something about that doesn’t sit right. Not that the kickball league is spoofing The Warriors, or the bowling-kitsch fashion movement; it’s fine to make fun of the stuff. But a big part of the nerd zeitgeist is the sense that smartness is still deeply uncool — or, as I said above, not so much smartness but caring about smartness, caring about getting Jeopardy! answers right, caring about spelling and the word “ort” and beating BSD and JJ on the weekly puzzle on NPR. If it’s all kind of jokey at Trivia Night, and there’s a gong onstage, and you’re just pretending to care about winning, or pretending you only care about the cash prize, then it’s all fine.

But if you want to win because it means you got the most answers right, I feel like that’s still uncool, or at least weird, to a lot of people — that, on some level, it’s okay to do better at sports or whatever than other people, and to celebrate that and to celebrate yourself for that, but if you beat someone at Scrabble or something, you have to make sure to win extra-graciously and not seem to care too much, or they’ll feel bad.

And this is a can of worms best opened in another column entirely, probably, but I also feel like it’s more uncool for women. I feel like women are sort of encouraged by society to talk about what dorks they were in school, and how, if we got straight As, we had to pay for it with no dates, and that it’s especially important for women to kind of mediate our dorkiness so we don’t come off as “too intense” or “threatening” or whatever it is that makes a smart girl theoretically less hot. The TONY piece didn’t really touch on this, but I did notice that Saint Reverend Jen, while wearing Spock ears as a fashion accessory, is also a cute lady with a cute figure, and I have to wonder how that breaks down, for her; I mean, the ears really suit her, and whatever, follow your star, but if you’re already traditionally cute, does it read as more of a choice, like a hairstyle would be, versus if you’re less conventionally good-looking?

Because, for me, it comes down to the fact that dorkiness, or nerdiness, or whatever term you want to use, isn’t a trend. Calling it a state of mind instead seems rather overly grand, but I think it’s possible to dork out about anything — even if it’s something “cool” like Italian film or Kate Spade — because it’s that idea of looking to that thing, that signifier, to let you belong because that thing belongs to you, horses, baseball, Broadway, Harry Potter, Risk, loving it as though it will love you back, without apologizing for it or winking at anyone who might be watching you. This is what makes Max Fischer a great character — that the movie he’s in is like, “Look what you can accomplish if you don’t care who knows how much it means to you.”

Samurai Jack was a pretty cool show. Liking it doesn’t make me a dork, per se. Almost tearing up while talking about it the other night, because I just think it’s the neatest thing that I recognize some of the bird calls on the soundtrack in certain episodes, and the episode in the tower with the zombie arrow-fighters is one of the saddest and most harrowing moments I’ve seen on TV in ten years? Bouncing in my chair because someone else at the table thinks Genndy Tartakovsky is a genius? Dork-o-rama.

Every city is New Dork City, is the thing. You don’t need flash mobs or the Idiotarod. You just need two dudes on the porch of a general store in a one-stoplight town, arguing about mint marks, and that’s the point these articles always seem to miss. That, and that intending to look up a word and reading the dictionary for fifteen minutes instead really should be a point of pride, not shame.

September 4, 2006

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