Best MSM Media Criticism of the Year

There's a downside and an upside to this post. On the pessimistic hand, the sale of the Star Tribune to the seductively-named Avista Capital Partners most likely means more divestment in local news reporting. Already this year, Twin Cities news staff cutbacks have been felt as one consequence of the recent sale of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The upshot is that Star Trib columnist Nick Coleman has written the most trenchant critique of media economics I've ever seen published in a mainstream news source. It's particularly rare because he mocks both the old and new owners of his own paper. While Coleman is a bit too nostalgic about the erstwhile patriarchal rule of McClatchy's founder, he pointedly describes the greedy grubbing for minute increases in profit margin that led to the sale of the Star Tribune, which had been McClatchy's "flagship" newspaper. He gets right to the heart of the newspaper business's suicidal short-term run for profits and the neoliberal ethos that makes this possible by suspending all value considerations aside from immediate profit.


Check Coleman's column out at: http://www.startribune.com/357/story/903516.html

Schooling Thought

During my break between semesters, I get to read a more diverse range of books than I would get to taking classes that fit into my degree. I've picked up break reading somewhat randomly. A good friend sent me Nancy Chodorow's "The Power of Feeling." Browsing through library shelves, I came across a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories set in St. Paul (edited by Patricia Hampl, who I had a great class with last year). I've also grabbed some essay collections.

Being able to read in this way has particularly brought into a focus a way of thinking/reading/educating I've found rampant in graduate school, what I’m calling developing a school of thought. Again, I'm going to take the easy way out an not put much effort into really describing this phenomenon very well, but I'm guessing most grad students and academic types will know what I'm talking about. It's the attempt to develop a somewhat fixed, somewhat flexible, perspective. Situating yourself within a school of thought helps determine what kind of questions you ask as much as how you will answer them. It leads you to read certain people, ignore others, and usually fixate on a cluster of concepts and keyterms. Schools tend to validate particular ways of knowing (textual analysis, ethnography, therapeutic experience, etc) and discard others. While contemporary schools of thought attempt to avoid pinning themselves down too much as grand theories or narratives, they still work enormously to restrict curiosity. Not having many external demands right now gives me a chance to breath new life into that undisciplined curiosity.

There are great advantages to developing a school of thought. Once you've laid the foundation, you are able to address new issues through your established framework, or by making rhetorical moves that have become easier with practice. Schools of thought go hand in hand with professionalization and academic legitimacy. Academics authority and credibility comes from peer (or descendent) validation. I am pretty thoroughly convinced that not much academic writing would be compelling without such regimes of validation. Anyone who picks up a book by Larry Grossberg, Derrida, or Nancy Chodorow would probably not find it at all interesting without already being somewhat drawn to their established credibility. This is not to say the contextual situatedness of each of these writers within respect to their discourses makes their work less worthwhile. I'm just trying to point out the dependency on interpretive communities or regimes of legitimacy and validation.

As a student, it takes a certain disciplining to be able to think in the school of thought sort of way. It requires an internalization of the impulse to suppress certain kinds of questions and the productive power to create others that adhere to rules of the school. There's no way out of this. Without developing some kind of adherence to a school of thought, it might be impossible to develop a voice or write in a way that can escape schizophrenic illegibility. Yet, I do believe there's room for negotiation as to how disciplined you allow yourself to become. At least, I hope that is so. I try to keep asking questions of cultural studies, of critical theory, etc, even when I'm pretty cognizant that my questions aren't going to "fit" very well within the trajectories of the discourses I'm working within. My reference point for determining what is compelling (perhaps the most crucial question of all intellectual orientation) is usually to consider what I can talk about with a generally educated and engaged group of people rather than what a group of disciplinary specialists would consider compelling. Of course, my own "generally educated and engaged group" is a historically and socially specific; sometimes I think of the public that reads Harpers, sometimes a group of my own friends. Clearly, this is no universal category.

Structurally, a school of thought mentality could be characterized as "modernist," even though the structure is repeated often by schools of thought that claim postmodern positions. The structure I'm referring to has to do with how knowledge and insight accumulate. School of thought-ers tend to construct intellectual lineages that map progressions of insight. A parody: Husserl figured this out, Hiedegaar then made this advance, then Foucault gave us this concept, etc. This accumulation tends to occur among a group of people who are taught by or at least influenced by each other (as opposed to, let’s say, an intellectual bricoleur who pieces together ways of thinking from people who do not have much to do with each other). Now it doesn’t always work in such a straightforward linear way. It’s often most fashionable to find the roots of an idea in a neglected forefather (i.e. Bahktin, Benjamin, etc.). The point is that understanding comes from intellectual mastery of this lineage with the emergent critique in mind.

This route towards knowledge differs greatly from the path of the poet, literary writer or the everyday philosopher. Like many students, I’m trying to find a way to preserve my curiosity, uncertainty and respect for many different ways of knowing, while being able to produce writing that can make a contribution to an ongoing conversation.

Florida Holiday

Last winter while I was visiting my folks in Georgia, Wendy's restaurant and Airtran airlines run an irresistible promotion – buy 32 sodas from Wendy’s and get a free one-way ticket. Feeling the tug of both my grad student financial situation and a thriving travel-bug, I blitzed Wendy's during my week with my parents, hitting up chain location from Warner Robins (where my parents live) and throughout central Georgia on our short trip to Savannah. At first, I'd go in with my folks, order five sodas, and we'd attempt to drink them. But soon enough, we dropped all pretence of indulging in the beverage and just ordered straight-up cups, no soda necessary. The servers knew what I was up to, and of course, they couldn’t have cared less. However, others apparently had the same idea as me, as I noticed other patrons leaving the counter with tell-tale stacks of cups. Soon every location was strictly enforcing the 5-cup limit per order. Still, I accumulated enough cups for two round trip tickets.

But the Wendy’s tickets were only good for a one-year. Having one ticket left that I had to use before February, Alice and I decided to take a winter vacation. The restrictions on the promotional tickets, as to be expected, were pretty severe and annoying. We almost booked a flight to New York, but a little hesitation left the ideal times unavailable once we decided to go for it. Since we had only a few days open for our trip, spending 8 + hours (with connecting flights) out to LA or other destinations west didn’t appeal to us. So we randomly choose the one warm place the ticket would take us - Fort Meyers Beach, Florida.

It appears as if the hotel we booked on priceline caters to the Northern snowbird, especially, according to the cheers of their websites, those who are Packers or Steelers fans. It also features an “exotic” tiki bar. So stay tuned for reports from FMB coming the first week of January . . .

Tuneless Chairs

While I typically buzz around different coffee shops throughout the Twin Cities, for the past couple months, I’ve buried myself in the blossom of Cahoots almost every day. Cahoots has the most perfect atmosphere for serious study - from chairs to temperature to people - Cahoots is wonderful! But I’ve started to feel I’ve been spending too much time there, probably averaging 4 or more hours each day.

So today I’ve come back to my long-lost Wedge neighborhood favorite, Caffetto. It’s a lovely day in here, sunny, not crowed, a cascade of rhythms flowing from the speakers at just the right level. But something's missing. The flower chairs are gone!! One reason I use to come here so often is because they had very cozy yet upright chairs. True, these chairs would not win any points for pleasing the eye. The chairs were covered with a flower patterned plastic upholstery. The pattern consisted of early 80’s- era dull puke colors – avocado green, a light brown and a pastel pink, all sullied with the years of gook that had accumulated on the sticky surface. Most of these chairs had ripped at some point during their tenure, and out of their gashes spewed tangled masses of a crunchy filling that looked like Spanish moss. So yes, the flower chairs were ugly, ugly as hell. More grimy, even, than the dilapidated chairs of the erstwhile Someday Cafe in Sommerville. But something about them just fit me so well. For the way I sit, they were some of the most comfortable working chairs I’ve found in the Twin Cities. Even more comfortable than Cahoot’s legendary orange cradlers.

The new chairs don’t have any personality yet. Hard wood backs, a bit too low and too curved for me. Red vinyl-covered seats, no gashes. No flowers.

What I like in an essay (1 . . . or is it 2?)

Finally, I'm able to take a bit of a breather from some frantic paper writing and cramming other loose ends at the end of a semester. Every semester, I tell myself that I will not wait to start writing papers until the last few weeks. I know its a bad tactic for me. I've heard some of my peers talk about how they need the pressure to catalyze their academic muse, and admittedly a sudden burst of inspiration hit me near the middle of my two week paper. But for the most part I think writing a longer non-fiction work during a concentrated period encourages me to look for short cuts (i.e. coming to conclusions too easily) more than it serves to light my fire for any sort of thoughtful inspiration. I want to build my papers more gradually throughout the semester, writing whenever the inspirations comes, which is usually just after I read something provocative or having a good conversation.

But the title of this post refers to essays I like to read, not write, tho of course their is a emulative relationship between the two. Reading essays from different sorts of journala and book chapters lately, I've realized that there are some academic essays/articles that indeed have a certain similarity in form to the "bohemian essay" that I adore so much. The essays I like are the ones that tread along a path of thought full of switchbacks and twists. They are unpredictable. They don't exhaust their ability to provide insight or stimulation in a thesis money-shot at the beginning. Instead they are rich with the acuity of the wandering eye. I think the most graceful bohemian essays tend to render insight in an even more offhand way than good academic essays can. Baldwin, Gopnik and the like can throw out just one line or one phrase that puts an aspect of life in a completely new light, then move on to the next thought without hesitation. Academic essays rarely get away with that level of nonchalance, but maybe a stray paragraph or two, perhaps something that stretches to a far off counterexample more for an intellectual challenge rather than the demands of the economy of an argument. While these sorts of academic essays may still have a thesis, they do not move along the arborescent outline format that I teach students to do.