Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

Read & Riot- enthusiasm in the face of political-WTFness

Nadya Tolokonnikova (Nadya Tolokno) has been in the news for several years as the band femenist punk band Pussy Riot created memorable disruptions. Eventually arrested for Hooliganism while singing Anti-Putin songs, Tolokno was locked up in a long chain of rights crushing prisons. In her book, Tolokno tells a compelling story of how persistance and resistance are unarguably intertwined.

Quote:
What happens to different things when they are placed in boiling water?
- Soft things like eggs become hard.
- Hard things like carrots become soft.
- Coffee dissolves and permeates everything..
The point of the parable is this: Be like coffee. In prison, I am like coffee.

How much more needs to be said about strong vocal women intent on being catalysts of change? Just read this book.

Interesting highlights from Read and Riot include
- For than 20 quotes I wanted to put in my review before selecting the above
- Knowledge that this book was not translated, instead weitten in english.. because it wouldnt have been worth it if it was easy
- a surprise statement by Kim Deal ;)

Worth noting, Pussy Riot co-founder Maria (Masha) Alyokhina has a number of books out as well. Between the two of them, there is a little mini activism library.… (meer)

. . . a critical social theorist who is not able to enjoy advertisements should not be taken seriously. -- Žižek

Sometimes, inexplicably, a book finds you pitch perfect. Sometimes it simply floors you with sparse genius. Comradely Greetings was such an experience. Returning to work after holiday, each day brought more rain, more concerns, turbulent slumber: more or less, a return to the normal. Insert here a YouTube clip of Morpheus welcoming us to the Desert of the Real. This heightened exchange conjured thinking but it also shed necessary light on those who commit, to whom the political and human are not just theory or simply a posture. Ms. Tolokonnikova depicts her treatment and the conditions of her fellow prisoners in her forced labor sentence. Such is simply harrowing.

Nadya and Žižek discuss the ongoing revolution of capital and production, the Russian history of dissent and the idea of the Holy Fool, the guises by which protest is rendered empty and what possible form future protests can acquire. Mandela is eulogized. Ultimately Putin relased the Pussy Riot members to keep a straight face during the Olympics, then the Ukraine and Edward Snowden fogged up the mirror. As I type this, I cling to some optimism… (meer)

The most enjoyable part about this short collection of correspondence between Slavoj Zizek and Nadya Tolokonnikova is her ability to not only keep up with but to expand upon Zizek's ideas and commentary. Not only this but Nadya comes through as a highly intelligent political philosopher and thinker in her own right. Her contributions are all the more extraordinary considering the oppression she faces in one of Russia's harshest prisons in the midst of the correspondence. It's certainly an eye-opening look at what is possible in Putin's Russia against all odds.… (meer)