The New Bedford Street Gazelle

MN Senators : Please Explain!

2012-01-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Senators Klobuchar and Franken,

This coming semester I'm teaching a class at the University of Minnesota with almost 200 students concerning current issues in media. One of the issues we are exploring is intellectual property online and its legal enforcement. On January 24^th, I will be teaching a lesson about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. I know that you have generally supported this type of legislation.

I would like to be able to present reasoned arguments to my class on different sides of this issue, and I would like to be able to let them know where their Senators currently stand. Through significant online research, I have been unable to find any supporters of SOPA/Protect IP who substantially address the numerous criticisms it has received from technology leaders, online entrepreneurs, consumer groups, scholars, and media activists. Would you please provide me with a rationale I can share with my class that explains your support for this legislation?

Anthony Nadler, St. Paul, MN

USA Today On The Fritz?

2011-02-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

An article today in Minn Post by John Reinan suggests that USA Today's days may be numbered. Reinan draws this inference from a posting on 'Gannett Blog' (run by former USA Today editor Jim Hopkins) - though I haven't been able to find the specific post to which he's referring. According to Reinan, Gannett is considering ridding itself of its most famous newspaper, trying to sell it or spin off USA Today as an independent company.

USA Today's circulation has been dropping and its newsroom has been cut down drastically, but this is an industry-wide phenomenon. It seems uncertain to me whether USA Today's demise is very near. Nonetheless, Reinan makes an interesting analogy saying that the internet is killing USA Today in the same way television killed Life Magazine. While there are many ways to complicate these links, it's worth thinking about USA Today specifically as a form of journalism that prefigured a kind journalism that has been heavily invested in and promoted on the internet. Much of the discussion about online news has focused citizen journalism and interactive news, but as important to many web-based news outlets has been an effort to realize the dream of the kind of market-driven journalism that USA Today epitomized. Many web news sites are created to be easily scanable, nuggetized, and calculated to satisfy the perceived preferences of their visitors. Throw in a little news of the weird, a heavy dose of sports, and some entertainment - you've got the USA Today vision all over the internet.

The Gazelle Rises Again!

2009-09-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Now that I’m getting comfortably into the dissertation-focused phase of my education, I want to keep up regular blogging. My focus will shift mostly to working out thoughts in this semi-public space about my research project and about the course I’m teaching now – New Telecommunication Media. Most of this will probably be stuff that would be just as at home tucked away in my own journals or private computer files. But why not cast that bottle into the digital sea?

This morning I’ve been trying to think through various categories schemes to capture theories how journalism changes. By this, I mean factors that influence significant changes in basic expectations for and forms of news. Most of the case studies I’m thinking through come from two areas: 1) inquiries into the development of the ideal of objective journalism 2) the usually less historically rigorous, accounts of “tabloidization” as an increasingly prominent feature of the most popular forms of news in the last couple decades (or so). Here are some of the major types of explanations I can think of now:

 Cultural shifts
o On one hand, there are explanations that focus on journalism as responding to new social tastes, anxieties, desires, concerns, stratifications, or the development of popular expressive forms that have grown independently of mainstream journalism.
o On the other hand, there are a few accounts of shifts in the “culture of production.” From this angle the press changes reflect changes in the sentiments, aspirations, widespread beliefs, or work routines of news producers. Some examples of this might include two of Schudson’s explanations for the rise of objectivity after the penny press; one being his focus on the desire among journalists to establish themselves as legitimate professionals, the other being the way he describes a loss of faith in naive realism after WWI as a phenomenon particular to the class to which journalists belong.
 Changes in the structures of political life and institutions. Richard Kaplan’s Politics and the Press best exemplifies this kind of explanation that sees journalism reshaping to siphon legitimacy from political leaders as the sources of that legitimacy shift.
 Technological changes. The most well known theory here is probably the idea that telegraph led to the rise of objective reporting.
 International influences. This type of explanation is less prominent in histories of U.S. journalism, at least from what I can tell.
 Economic changes. New market conditions might be reflected in changes in news form, such as the well-supported claim that the professionalization of journalism and codification of objectivity in the 1920s was a way for owners to legitimize what were being widely monopolized local newspaper markets. I’m leaving this as too broad a category right now, for clearly there are differences between economic changes like the monopolization of the local press and reconfigured audience segmentation strategies.
 Individual innovators. While the “great man” mode of historical explanation is mostly rejected by social and cultural historians, there is no reason to deny that particular people in influential positions acted as agents precipitating changes that might not have happened without them.
 Innovative professional practices. As the aesthetic principles and practices changed for certain professional groups only partially situated within journalism, such as camera operators or graphic designers, these changes manifest themselves within journalism. Barnhurst and Nerone discuss the influence of graphic designers on late 20th century newspapers. Outside of news, John Caldwell’s Cultures of Production explores how the changing aesthetic philosophies of all sorts of video-related professions affected television.
 Transformations of “the industrial popular.” This is a concept I used in trying to explain innovations in cable news. It refers to ways in which communities of producers think about what their audiences want and what kinds of fare are potentially popular.

Where do I go from here? I will certainly continue to brainstorm ideas such as the ones above (and add them to this list), but I also need to think about various ways of conceiving of the interrelations among different kinds of factors. For instance, one notion of “overdetermination” (which is perhaps an overhyped concept) is that an event has multiple sufficient conditions. Another way more common way people use that term to mean that multiple factors have played a role in causing an event. Yet how those multiple factors relate to each other can be an important question. One factor might be considered “primary” even in a non-reductionist accounts. For instance, the claim could be made that a cultural shift initiated the need for a change in news form, making the cultural shift the primary factor. However, that doesn’t many the other factors need to be reduced to inert billiard balls. Let’s say a there is a cultural shift as a population is losing interest in the dry tone favored by professional journalists. There may indeed be contingent and creative ways in which journalists react to that change. Journalists or other news producers than still have some agency even while their actions are in response to something else that’s occurring outside their professional control.

Reading Bourdieu: Questions About Engaged Scholarship

2009-01-02T09:31:00.000-08:00

Before going to grad school, I worked at MIT as the Service Learning Coordinator. Basically my job was to set up relationships between MIT instructors and community organizations or NGOs for collaborative projects in which students could work for the community organization as part of their coursework. Much of this involved engineering or design classes, for instance in one class students worked with an NGO developing designs for de-mining technologies. There are many criticisms of "service learning” (which certainly can go under many names), and I was always aware that this work can lead to a paternalistic attitude towards "helping" others or to a general self-congratulatory consciousness. Yet on the whole, I believed the benefits of this pedagogy, when done well, far outweighs its harms. In my past two media literacy classes, I have incorporated community learning (a more preferable term perhaps) projects into my own class.

This is just background to get at a problem I've been trying to make sense out of since entering university life again as a student. I have been quite surprised at how much resistance there is to notions of engaged/public/activist scholarship among left-leaning academics. Now it’s probably true that much more of what I've noticed is lack of interest and initiative for changing the kinds of routines you get used to in the professional life of an academic (I certainly know this inertia personally). But beyond these habits of practice, I've heard many arguments about why aspirations for more direct scholarly interventions into political or social arenas outside the university are a bad idea. At first, I was admittedly dismissive of many of these lines of thoughts. But now I realize that there are serious questions and problems to consider here, and that not all of the resistance to changing academic routines can be disregarded as prophylactic defensiveness.

I'd say there are two main poles to the objections toward engaged scholarship - one is that is it is a danger to communities outside of the university (i.e. academic meddlers will try to assert rule as philosopher-kings), the other is that it will degrade scholarly integrity itself. It's the latter objection I want to focus on here, particularly through looking at Pierre Bourdieu's warnings about the pernicious effects of journalistic celebrity on academics in On Television.

The kind of engaged scholarship that Bourdieu approaches with caution, though certainly not total refusal, is academics working with popular media. Bourdieu's main concern is that when academics become to intertwined with journalists, what he calls the "journalistic field" starts to gain undo influence over academic/scientific fields. Without getting into detail about Bourdieu's complicated but suggestive analysis of fields, he is worried that journalism is much less autonomous from market forces than academic fields. From Bourdieu’s perspective, Journalists are in a strange social position. What they do wields enormous influence over the rest of society, yet they have relatively little control as individuals or even as a professional collective over the rules that journalism must conform to. Journalists' work, especially since the dominance of television news, is more beholden to the judgment of audience ratings and the advertising market than to the judgments of their peers. This is what makes journalism less autonomous than entomology, let's say, as a field in which professional entomologists act as the primary judges of the merits of each others' work.
In a nutshell, Bourdieu is worried that working with journalists will make academics conform more to journalistic expectations and this could take precedence over their own professional prerogatives. Being in the U.S. and not at an Ivy league school, the world of public French intellectuals that Bourdieu describes seems a bit remote to me. Yet I take his analysis as a good warning about what could go wrong if there were to be an increase in prominent public intellectuals here.

The counterpoint that Bourdieu seems to miss is that feedback from broader publics could actually make for more sensitive academic work, work that is even more rigorous in a certain way as is forced to respond to a wider array of criticism. If history tells us anything, insular groups of professionals studying society, ethics, politics, etc., miss a lot due to their homogeneity. Think of all the ways that considerations of race and gender throughout the history of every discipline were neglected or mostly reflected the narrow perspectives of restricted memberships groups admitted the professional field. While one solution is of course to diversify the groups recruited into each academic field, I think Bourdieu would be one of the thinkers most cognizant of limits to this approach even under the most ideal conditions. There are always going to be certain "ways of knowing" that will never be able to fully incorporated into the professional norms of academic thought. Nonetheless, academics may be able to encounter and react to these foreign ways of knowing in productive ways.

The problem is that journalism may not always provide a good space for such encounters or the kind of feedback from excluded knowledges that would be most humbling and ultimately most beneficial for academics. I agree with Bourdieu that under many conditions the circulation of ideas in certain journalistic spheres may only provide very limited forms of market-driven feedback from journalistic publics. However, I still have hope that many "alternative" forums from blogs to lefty magazines to journalistic forums yet-to-come can provide space for ideas to circulate among academics and larger publics without everything being reduced to market logic.

While I can't find the passage now, somewhere in On Television I recall Bourdieu fantasizing about academics working collectively to negotiate the conditions of their entry into the journalistic field. I understand how greatly difficult this might be to achieve, but I think there are some rather realistic steps that could be taken (many of these already happening):

1) Academics could seek to work with journalistic outlets that offer them more favorable conditions for expressing their views. Maybe academics need to work on building more relationships with the broad variety of the alternative presses instead of being so fixated on the prestige press, i.e. New York Times, or the most popular outlets, i.e. broadcast news, Time, etc. (Again, I realize this is already the case for many engaged academics, yet this tactic does not come to the forefront enough in at least the discussions I’ve witnessed concerning engaged scholarship).

2) Academics and other groups could try to work with the mainstream journalistic organizations to make some relatively simple structural changes. For instance, maybe people interviewed in stories could be offered special prominent spaces to comment on the stories publicly on their websites.

3) Academics can help create new forums for thoughtful analysis and discussion. The few sites I know in which humanities scholars have created such forums are Bad Subjects, Flow, and the public sociological magazine Contexts. If anyone’s reading this, please let me know of others!

Obama and Academic Reason

2008-11-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Like millions in the U.S. and abroad, Obama's election has given me a profound surge of hope. This hope doesn't come from the idea that an Obama administration will implement policies that will make everything better right away. I'm tempted to say it's hard to believe in the prospect of policy changes by themselves doing all that much to improve life. Yet even though "policy" may in general have such a sterile connotation seeminging incapable of generating felt responses, I realize that my own position from which policy changes are not likely to have an near-term felt impact is a particular one. My dismissive attitude towards policy-centricism was certainly humbled yesterday talking with a good friend who told me that his number one electoral concern was health care -- because he knows the pain for his mother and many of the poor folks he works with who are unable to afford it now.

That said, for me hope about Obama's victory has been more a sense that this will signify some exciting changes in American culture. On one hand I think there will be a new energy and vigor among progressives here, perhaps also an expansion of alliances among white and minority progressives. Obama will "disappoint" I'm sure in making certain decisions and not pushing forward some urgent issues. Still, my bets are that his administration will make progressives feel like they have more of a shot at being heard. Large-scale grassroots mobilizations on issues from poverty to media policy to war just might be able to wield a political pressure that hasn't even seemed to be a possibility in the recent past.

Even more narrowly focused, this Obama and Democratic victory are likely to make this a better time to be a publicly-engaged intellectual than any time since the 1960s. Let me offer just one example. A couple years ago I worked for a media activist/reform organization called Free Press (www.freepress.net). Throughout the Bush years, this organization experienced increble growth (after its founding in 2002) and played a large role in holding back some of the pro-media monopoly policies that Bush folks wanted to pass through Congress and the FCC. Still, the Free Press was a sidelined player in media policy, mostly working on the defense. Now their role is likely to be much more constructive. There's a good change that some of the visions for a more democratic media that Free Press advocates have in mind might actually get put in play. Tim Wu, the current chair of the Board at Free Press, has already served as an advisor to Obama during his campaigm. I happen to know media policy better, but I imagine in all sorts of sectors of government we're going to see new opportunities arise for progressive thinkers and advocacy groups to have a larger role in shaping policies -- the EPA, HUD, transportation, perhaps even the Treasury department.

As a graduate student, this makes me think that there are going to be new opportunities for scholars to play a role in shaping some of these debates and policies. Certainly academics and scholars are not always going to bring the best goods to the table - legacies of the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan should give us pause in any sort of unbridled celebration of rule by academics. But certainly I'd much prefer to have Robert McChesney drafting media policy than lobbyists for Time Warner or AT&T.

Econ at the Bowling Bar

2008-05-28T07:20:00.000-07:00

The Gazelle had taken a mighty long nap in a faraway pasture, but now she has arisen again!

Last night I went to the Bryant Lake Bowl to see "Cafe Scientifique: Principles of Economics." According to the UMN website, where I learned about this event, it was to be a lecture-performance. The sole author, performer and lecturer Andrew Cassey just recently completed his economics Ph.D. at UMN. Apparently Cassey first put this kind of performance together, based on years of teaching intro to econ, during a fringe show event when he "conceived of the notion of teaching economics as 'a performance art.'"

I posted this event on the Big Tent and got several takers right away, all perhaps with different reasons for wanted to see The Principles of Economics. Foremost for me, I wanted to see the adaptation of the lecture form to the theatrical situation. Somewhat to my surprise, there really was not that much adaptation. Cassey was full of energy, he dropped a few 'f-bombs' and he made a some irreverent asides. But all in all, this could have been a lecture taken right out of his intro to econ class. There was a way in which Cassey was able to distance himself from the serious and official demeanor associated with the classroom at the same time as he drew charts of GDP-and-CPI curves on a green chalkboard center stage. Was this position achieved through Cassey's own inventiveness, or did it at least partially have to do with economics place in our culture today? Can economics today claim a certain position of common-sense logic that more "critical" schools of thought would have difficulty achieving?

The audiences' response was the most interesting part of the whole event. They were not entirely compliant with all the demands of the lecture scenario, though they were to a large degree. There were side conversations, and a few challenging questions (None of these questions, however, really aimed at revealing the ideological assumptions encoded into the strand of economic thought Cassey was espousing. I didn't see a good chance to offer such a question myself). No one really heckled him nor was there any sort of revolt by audience members bored by the didactic nature of the lecture. Most everyone seemed in good spirits and thankful for their entertaining knowledge-nourishment. Maybe it was the peculiar self-selected crowd (not many academics, I suspect, but more middle-age good-citizens types), or maybe the lecture as a form is not so antithetical to popular culture as we might think.

I

The World According to Water

2007-09-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

I've recently gotten back from a wonderful trip to Finland and Russia, a new semester has started in the middle of a workers' strike at the U which has lead to all sorts of strife as well as political enthusiasm, I'm delving into some interesting readings about early media studies . . . all this could provide plenty of material for my first post in over a month.

Instead, I'll start with a much more modest piece of reportage: the writing on the bathroom wall (water pipe, actually) at Cahoots:

Humans were invented by water as a means to transport itself from place to place.

Reading this bathroom poet's inversion of human and inanimate nature seemed quite inspiring to me. Yet as I followed the arrow toward a penciled in reply to this statement, a respondent's comment diffused some of my awe:

Yeah, because clouds do this so poorly . . .

Update on Kinsella Interview

2007-06-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Though I had some technical glitches, my interview with Tim Kinsella with an introduction and a few edits has now appeared on the TC Daily Planet. I'm very glad I was able to get this out before his show tonight!

Tim Kinsella Interview

2007-06-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm in a little bit of a pinch here. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to interview Tim Kinsella before his upcoming show with Make Believe here this Saturday. I thought I'd be able to post the interview on the TC Daily Planet since I'm a registered user and I thought they offer open uploading. But apparently that's not how the Daily Planet works, or at least I haven't been able to figure out how to get my interview uploaded. So while I try to find a way to publish it, I thought I might as well at least post the interview here. I sure enjoyed this conversation. . .

Tony: First, I just heard that you were leaving Make Believe. Do you know if the band is going to continue to record and perform without you?

Tim: That’s the plan, yeah.

Tony: Do you know if they will have vocals at all?

Tim: I don’t know if they know what they know exactly what they are going to do yet. I mean they’re at practice right now, and I’m at home, so . . . .I don’t know what the plan is. Now is a good time for me to quite because we have the new record mostly written, too much to throw away. But the songs still aren’t developed enough, so [Make Believe] can figure out a way, if they want them to be instrumental or bring in someone new or something.

Tony: And will your vocals appear on the new album?

Tim: No, no. That’s what I’m saying that they have time to re-write, minus that aspect.

Tony: Are you going to be coming to the show in Minneapolis?

Tim: Yeah, I’m going to play these last two shows.

Tony: You just finished producing a film?

Tim: Yeah, I wrote it and directed it, and my wife and I produced it. She edited it. Our friend Chris Strong shot it. W have a premier August 15^th at this theater here [Chicago’s Chopin Theatre]. We’ve just been working on it all the time this last year. We shot it last August. So we’re very close now. We’re about 98% there now.

Tony: This is your first filmmaking experience?

Tim: Yeah, I’ve made a couple shorts before. And my wife works as an editor and has made a few documentaries and I’ve helped her with stuff. But this is the first feature.

Tony: Have you felt there is any similarity between filmmaking and musicmaking?

Tim: Oh, very much, yeah. I mean, the few people who have seen it are kinda shocked how much it has reminded them of a Joan of Arc record. I took that as a good sign. I’m not trying to make Joan of Arc records in a certain way, and I’m not trying to make this film in a certain way. I took it as a sign, I must have been able to express something true to myself clearly, if that same quality comes across.

Tony: Are there any particular filmmakers who have been influential to you in terms of filmmaking or general perception?

Tim: Yes, sure. I had a film minor in college. Not with Make Believe, but with other records I’ve been involved with in the last few years, I’ve felt like a lot of film theory was influencing the dynamics and pacing of how records were coming together, sorta the whole approach, having a lot of collaborators. . . . That’s been true a couple times in records.

I’ve really enjoyed that I’ve been totally immersed in this film for the last year except for when we go on tour. Other than that it’s all day, every day. It’s been a few years since making a record has felt like that for me. So it’s very exciting for me.

Tony: You are still planning on making music with Joan of Arc? According to a press release Joan of Arc has two albums in the works, is that correct?

Tim: Once, twice a week, I’ll be playing and something will sound good to me, and I’ll go in my little room and hit record. Then I forget about it, and I just have this pile of songs sitting around without any sort of ambition for when the record will get made. It’s just sort of a natural thing. This is how Joan of Arc records have come together for a while, I just get to point where I’m like – wow, there’s 60 songs here, let’s check them out. Without keeping count or anything, I just move some into a folder, some good, some throw away. And then there’s 25 songs that sound okay to me, and within that folder, it’s just weeding out.

Tony: Do you conceive of songs first more abstractly or mentally then move to a point where you can make it into something that’s made out of actual sound?

Tim: I think it’s more of a matter of trying to stay out of my own way. And trying to dig deep without any sort of editing or self-censorship, without – how should I say this? - any sort of logic. I don’t want my rational mind involved in it. My rational mind has enough preoccuptions, with going to work, and trying to make rent, and remembering to pay car insurance bills and stuff like that. Ideally music will be this liberating force. I think the greatest potential for those moments is actually in performing when you can sorta tap into a shared mind, with the performers and the audience.

Tony: I know that Make Believe played for a while on an all Christian venue tour. I was wondering whose idea was that, what were the motivations behind that, how did you feel about it?

Tim: You know how Christian culture sorta appropriates things that they think might corrupt the youth, then defangs it , and makes a Christian version. We were vaguely aware of there being a Christian indie rock scene but didn’t really have any interaction with it. Then this band, Me Without You, asked us to go on tour with them. At first we were like - no way, we’re not going do some Christian tour. But then we talked about it for a couple days and we realized it would be an incredible opportunity to have access. . . I mean that’s sorta like the whole idea of punk rock, to be able to go into different contexts and drop some kind of bomb. In general at Make Believe shows, people show up knowing what they’re getting into and just having their expectations satisfied. We decided that we could do the tour and go out there sort of being confrontation towards people’s assumptions.

Tony: Yeah, I really wish I had been able to attend one of those shows, not impurify the rest of the audience. But it definitely reminded me, hearing about that, of the Sex Pistol’s tour of the South.

Tim: Yeah

Tony: That sort of clash being the performer and the audience.

Tim: Yeah. There was definitely a small group of people there for us every night who seemed more excited than more because of the strange context and the confrontational aspects of it. I should say Me Without You are some of the coolest guys ever, and they’re our friends now. There were certain days we hung out. I think they are frustrated with Christian culture and how it operates. They were frustrated enough with Christian culture to ask us to do the tour.

Tony: Right now, do you think the indie rock scene is part of countercultural movement? Do you think rock music is part of any sort of subversion or break with more commercial culture?

Tim: I think there will always be a countercultural scene. But I don’t think it’s very related to “indie rock” as a style. I think indie rock as an infrastructure or like a business model, might the way that bands like that exist. Like I said before, music is just a means of communication and it could be anything. There’s definitely a lot of bands that I’m very excited about, that seem very vital and engaged in the present, finding new connection between neurons. But I don’t think of indie rock is a social force, I think it’s more lifestyle music.

Tony: You’ve been involved in indie rock infrastructure for a long time. Have you felt many changes in the indie rock infrustructure since the early 90’s?

Tim: Many. There were incredible changes since the early nineties. There’s sorta like two camps. There’s the indie rock bands who are there because the ideas they are trying to express aren’t represented anywhere within the dominant culture and this is an infrastructure that will allow these more subversive ideas to be shared. And then there’s sort of the indie rock camp that are just like the farm league to the major labels. I mean potentially millions of teenagers could love it, and it would satisfy the same sort of nostalgia, or whatever popular music satisfies in someone. They could potentially satisfy the same requirement in anyone who hears it; it’s just people haven’t heard it yet. Like a band like Postal Service, I’ve never heard them, but I have a sense that they are not very subversive. That’s indie rock, right?

Tony: Yeah, I certainly think that’s what would go under what a lot of people would conceive of indie rock or what comes to mind first often with that phrase.

Tim: Yeah, I don’t feel a connection to that.

Tony: Do you read reviews or other sorts of music journalism about your own stuff or other stuff you listen to?

Tim: Yes. When Joan of Arc first started, in the early days of Internet music journalism, I was really totally stunned by the response. The totally vitriolic response. It had never really even occurred to me to read the reviews, it wasn’t something I thought about. But then I remember getting a press kit from Jade Tree (a Joan of Arc label), opening it, and just reading something on the front page about what a horrible person I was, all this stuff. I read the whole packet. It was like all this hateful stuff that seemed to have little to do with the music. I was really shocked. So I had to purposefully not read stuff for a while. But I occasionally read stuff now. I think I’m over letting it affect me. The me that I’m most in the habit of being every day feels very little connection to guy that I read about in most of the reviews. So it doesn’t really phase me.

Tony : I don’t know if you’ve thought much about this or if you really want to answer this. But I’m wondering if you’ve thought about what about some of your work did produce such a vitriolic response in certain parts of the indie rock community?

Tim: Well. When Joan of Arc started, there was a real self-consciousness about it, a self-conscious confrontational aspect. We didn’t we know what we really wanted to sound like. But we were away there were these sort of micro-scenes that I felt a part of, and detached, from all over Chicago. There were all these no-wave bands, free jazz bands, and all these emo bands, all these hardcore bands. I was really engaged in all of them, and I could see these communities that were specific to certain genre expectations. I think really our only goal as a band when we set out was to be sure we couldn’t really be embraced to any one of these little micro-scenes that we all sorta felt a connection to. Like, I feel a real connect to no-wave bands, but I don’t want to just be ghettoized to only being part of this or that. So I think we sorta frustrated people in that way, I guess. I don’t know.

In defense of the journalists, I was probable a bit cocky at 23. I’m not super hung up on it or regret it or anything. I don’t remember specific stories of - Oh god, was I an idiot! But I imagine that if I now met myself as a 23 year old, I would maybe be annoyed by that guy. I thought I had things figured out a lot more than I think I do now.

Tony: Do you feel your disposition as performer has changed that much, or is this more of outside of the stage that you’re talking about these changes happening?

Tim: I don’t know. I try not to think of my disposition as a performer. There was maybe more of a self-conscious confrontational aspect back then than there is now. And I think that confrontational aspect faded, then was rekindled at the first immediate thrust of Make Believe. At that point, this was before the 2004 election and before even John Kerry represented some sort of alternate voice. I was just really overwhelmed by this fascistic, single monotone voice of power everywhere. There was no voice of dissent anywhere in popular culture. I was very aware of wanting to be confrontational and trying to shake people out of some comfort zone. Whereas, now I don’t feel that being confrontational in public toward an ambiguous mass of people is the most effective means of protest for me these days.

Tony: I saw some of those early Make Believe shows, and I thought that sense of confrontation was what made it so memorable

Tim: Thanks. It’s also something you’re bound to get tired of. And it’s not something I would want to fake. I’m kinda tired of it. I like the idea of being in a band and playing a lot. But it would need to be a band with wider parameters of what it could be. I couldn’t do it as just a singer, I’d need to play guitar too. (Unlike many of his other bands, in Make Believe shows, Kinsella would sing without playing an instrument).

Tony: One last question. You’ve been such a prolific songwriter for so long now. I’m wondering if you ever go through any sort of songwriter’s block, or if you go through any periods where you just don’t have anything you can materialize into sound? Or does it just keep on coming?

Tim: I don’t know. Like I said about how Joan of Arc records come together, I don’t really put any effort in to it. Not to say it’s an effortless thing that just comes to me, I just mean I don’t worry about it.

Tony: So you don’t really set aside certain times of the day and say, this is my song writing time - or anything like that?

Tim: I used to be far more disciplined in that way. I definitely feel that to-whom-much- is-given, much-is-expected kind of responsibility. I feel like I am really luck. I mean, I work, I’m a bartender. I’m not really getting away of anything. But on a global scale, in a global context, I feel so lucky. I’ve been able to travel and do what I love. But I definitely feel a responsibility to work harder at it. But I don’t care if I’m not ever able to write another song. I don’t care, it doesn’t really matter. I guess that’s why I don’t get writers’ bloc, because I don’t care if I do.

Short Stories

2007-06-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have had ambitious goals for summer reading, thinking I would make a whole syllabus for myself. But I’ve been jumping around different projects and ideas too much to really attain this goal.

Besides for finishing Marylin Robinson’s Housekeeping, the only fiction I’ve been reading has been short stories. There’s a lot I like about this form, particularly the time it takes to complete a work. Whereas novels can do a lot with change over time and different sorts of development, short stories can provide very interesting perspectives on particular moments and states. Yet it’s been hard for me to find the kind of short stories I most enjoy. Basically, I’m looking for short stories offer some sort of radical perspective or perspectives on some aspect of life. My favorite examples are just about anything David Foster Wallace has written. He’s able to do all sorts of things to cut into a scene from different angles to make it fresh and provocative. Yet, I also like more traditional narratives that usually rely on the thinking of thoughtful and original character’s to complexify and turn over their realities into something interesting. A good example of this that I picked up recently was the neurotic minds in Richard Ford’s Women With Men, a collection of three long short stories (an awkward phrase, I know, but I think that’s the language of the trade these days).

But I’ve been trying to get away from the old standbys and seek out some new writers. Since I don’t have many fiction-reading friends now (except you, Dave, who I should turn to), I’ve just been searching for new writers that literary magazines or other authors have named as good ones. I checked out a couple of short story collections based on Granta’s list of Best of Young American Novelists. I read a smattering of stories from writers on this list, and so far didn’t find anything close to what I was looking for.

Another tactic I’ve tried is reading stories from the collection Best New American Voices 2007 guest edited by Sue Miller. This is an anthology that every year selects stories solicited only from writing programs, from summer programs to M.F.A. programs to more community-based classes like Boston’s Grub Street or The Loft in Minneapolis. This year, and perhaps every year for all I know, both the series editors forward and the guest editors introduction begins with a defense of M.F.A. writing programs. One interesting observation made in both pieces is how writing workshops and small literary journals (often associated with academic institutions) have come to exert a much larger influences on the short story scene as general interest magazines publishing fiction have declined. Sue Miller makes the argument that with the new diversity found among students in these programs, American short stories have become more “multifarious, stranger, richer . . . less responsive to any particularly aesthetic.”

I’m not so sure. I think many of these stories do have a “workshoppy” quality, though I don’t know if this says as much about the students in writers workshops or the editorial regimes. More than anything, in these sorts of collections, I feel like I read a lot of good writing without insight. Certainly, I recognize that kind of insight I’m looking for only represents one way of making a good story (I also really like many stories without this quality), I just don’t know why this kind of writing is so hard to find. It seems to me that there’s a real fascination with what I might call, very cautiously, simple-minded characters in short stories. These characters might be portrayed as having complex lives, ambivalent feelings, etc. Some represent sophistication in an urbane sort of way. But rarely do writers tap into the struggling minds of the characters to flesh out original or jolting ways of perceiving the world.

If anyone has some suggestions for contemporary books that might fit what I’m looking for, drop me some recommendations.

Another Threat to Net Neutrality: Copyright Cops

2007-06-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

It sounds like AT&T is cooking up a new plan to get Internet users, media activist and media scholars all hot and bothered. It’s a new front against Net Neutrality both on an ideological and technical level. The plan is that AT&T will somehow create a technology to monitor their mammoth network, searching out copyrighted material uploaded to the Internet. According to a good article by Geoff Duncan at Digital Trends, this is the first time a large Internet provider has assumed the role of “copyright cop.” Because such a move will mean AT&T will creep into and discriminate against the content of Internet users’ traffic, this plan raises all sorts of ethical concerns as well as questions about what the unintended technological effects could be (Duncan suggests a new round of technology wars between providers and uploaders and problems uploading copyrighted material even when its legal) . Net Neutrality, Digital IP Rights, Surveillance . . . if AT&T continues to pursue this plan I suspect all these hot themes might help awaken some media theorists from their activist slumber.

AT&T and other big telecommunication companies clearly seem to be losing the battle of minds in their fight against net neutrality. Every segment of the public, once aware of the issue, seems to strongly favor an Internet in which all users can access any startup webpage creator’s site just about as easily as big corporate sites. The arguments offered by the telecommunication companies in their astroturf faux-populist campaign against Net Neutrality (Hands Off the Internet) have been glaringly pathetic: the smokescreen claim that Net Neutrality laws would be a layer of bureaucracy, the spurious claim that telecoms need to charge content providers for a new sources of revenue to build network infrastructure up and out, and, my personal favorite, the if-there-ain’t-a-problem-yet-why-fix-it argument. But now they’re trying to tap into an issue that the public seems more genuinely conflicted about – intellectual property rights and piracy.

In addition to Duncan’s article, you can find out more about AT&T’s plan on a Huffington Post entry by Josh Silver. It looks like this idea first surfaced to the public at large through an interview with AT&T Vice President James Ciccino printed in the L.A. Times. More general info on Net Neutrality and the campaign to keep can be found on the Save the Internet homepage.

Make Believe

2007-06-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

I still enjoy going to music shows much of the time, but there are only a few bands that really I count on to give me a visceral sense of engagement, especially: Faggot (http://www.myspace.com/aidsfaggot), the Knotwells (http://myspace.com/theknotwells), and Har Mar Superstar (www.harmarsuperstar.com). More than anyone, I remain admittedly obsession with the otherworldly performances of Tim Kinsella. My anticipation will begin to swell weeks before a show, and it will usually leave me with unshakable visions and fantasies for weeks afterwards. That’s why I’m overjoyed to hear that one of his bands, Make Believe, will be performing at the Cedar Cultural Center on June 30^th. Get tickets right away!

Tim’s performance often have the feel of something important, of some kind of transformational experience. A contortion of body, facial expressions and, on a more abstract level, emotion itself. My reaction, of course, may be a bit idiosyncratic. I’m not claiming any sort of transcendental sublime to Make Believe, tho the only reason I feel the need to make such a qualification is because I know my enthusiasm for him will make me sound like an adolescent extolling a pop messiah. Tim’s music is one of those rare glimmers of inspiration that unleashes a hyperbolic response in me.

Save Small Magazines!

2007-06-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

In the midst of hundreds of cable channels, a full dial of radio stations, and maybe billions of webpages, investigative journalism and thoughtful cultural and political analysis still thrives more in small magazines and newspapers more than in any other medium. I'm thinking of magazines ranging from Mother Jones to The Nation to Bitch to the International Socialist Review . Yes, blogs too can be good spots for analysis but not much yet in the way of investigative journalism and blog posts (like this one) are usually whipped out with much less care than a well-written magazine article (not that speed is always bad, but it has its disadvantages for sure).

Whether such magazines, or newspapers, are in danger of becoming obsolete in an Internet age, I really don't know. Certainly, such a dodo bird fate does not seem imminent just because of the net. But there's a new threat on the horizon for small magazines in the U.S. - a proposal for post rate hikes that will hit small publishers especially hard. The postal service initially proposed a plan for an across-the-board rate hike of 11.5% for all magazines, which most magazines had been prepared to accept. But then instead of accepting this plan proposed by the postal service itself, the Postal Regulatory Commission (a separate entity in charge of determining rates) decided to accept a modified version of a proposal put forward by media giant Time Warner. Time-Warner, of course, happens to own Time and People, two of the highest circulating magazines in the U.S.

The Time-Warner plan is very complicated and has all the smacks of neoliberal paternalism, rewarding publishers for good behavior, like bundling mail to be sent in particular areas, generating their own special labels, etc. But what these rewards end up doing is none other than providing further advantage to corporatization and large-scale operations. The complexity of the calculations makes it hard to know exactly what the hike will be for each magazine, but a study by McGraw-Hill estimated that many small magazines would see a 20-30% hike instead of the 10-12% that that they expected (see a press release from Sen. Sanders: http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0501-03.htm). Presumably, Time and People would do rather well under the new plan. Small magazines had very little time to comment on this plan before it was accepted; it is set to go in effect July 15th. Now, magazines across the political spectrum from the National Review to The Nation are banning together to fight this hike. Many magazines are saying these rate hikes will force them to fold. The best site for information about this issue and ways to get involved is the Free Press's page: http://action.freepress.net/freepress/postal_explanation.html.

As media activist and historian Robert McChesney reminds us, it's important to remember than from the beginning of the U.S. postal system, postal rates for small magazines and newspapers have always been subsidized. The need for this is to foster a public sphere and the circulation of diverse views and information. Let’s not give up on print culture just yet!

I've cross-posting this entry on Matt May's Socialism for Gunslinger:
http://democraticgunslinger.blogspot.com/.

Hopefully, I'll soon figure out how to get my links back up!

Lutsen

2007-05-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

No, a new blogging hiatus is not already on the horizon. I just spent a good part of this last week up at Alice's parent's cabin in Lutsen, right on the shore of Lake Superior. It was still a bit brisk up there (though I guess its the proximity to the lake rather than the latitude that makes it so much cooler); lilacs were just beginning to bloom there, about a month later than in Minneapolis. The Lepperts have a lovely, truly cabin-feeling cabin with a little gazebo perched right near a small cliff of the lake shore. We played lots of badminton. I learned to play spades, and most curiously, I learned that the supposed divide between wild and domestic animal may not be so great. Alice's dad has feed a chipmunk, who lives in a hole near their garage, for several years. Sunflower seeds and walnuts. Now he is so grateful that he lets us pet him while he eats or stuff his cheeks with seeds for later.

I got into a couple of discussions with Alice and some of our friends about popular culture and art. Now, I'm not happy with these categories (right now, resisting a temptation to throw them in some quote marks), but none of us could find more convenient terms. I was basically arguing that I don't think that because one cultural product is more commercially successful than another product, this doesn't mean that the greater selling product (or some might say more popular) says something more about the cultural moment than the other. I certainly agree that for a movie, a song, or a dance (the macarena as defining expression of the mid-90s?) to become a hit, there must be a certain degree of cultural resonance. But I think that this resonance is only one factor in a much more complex equation that involves a lot of market-based variables. This argument got me in some trouble because some of my interlocutors took it as a way to deny that what is most typically considered to be pop culture says more about the desires of most people in our society than what might be considered art or an expression more of a subculture. Does anyone know of any writers who really tackle this question of what a cultural theorist can extract from the popularity of a work in a market context? I'm especially interested in someone who would take seriously the numerous difficulties of this problem.

Hiatus . . . OVER!

2007-05-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

So April did not bring any showers of Bedford St Gazelle postings. I've spent much of the last month and a half finishing three term papers (and revising a fourth), bringing me to a total of over 100 new pages of paper writing this semester. As in the past, I greatly regretted saving so much writing until the end. I had told myself this would never happen again. So why? Have I simply not learned my lesson? Is it just laziness or a more complex reoccurring pattern that makes me save so much paper writing for the end of the semester? This is a major question I'm trying to answer for myself this summer; it's part of a general question I'm asking myself about whether and in what ways is grad school inspiring me to write and to think. One hypothesis is that I don't write until the end of the semester because I keep waiting for a feeling that I really have something to say, and when an inspirational feeling doesn't strike me, it's up to deadlines to do the motivating.

Product Place This

2007-03-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

One reason I decided to go to communication studies program instead of another home for cultural studies is because I thought more comm academics would be in touch with conversations about media and culture going on outside of academic journals. I thought there'd be a lot of people with backgrounds in journalism, filmmaking, may even TV writers in comm programs. I'm not sure if that was a correct assumption in general or not, but one of my classmates is just the kind of student I had in mind. Pam Nettleton has really enriched our program through bring knowledge from her many years in journalism.

Pam just wielded her writerly skills in an op-ed piece to portray commericial saturation of TV shows through product placements. She evisions what Dickens would sound like as a TV writer: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Luckily, I could easily tell time because I was wearing my Citizen 200 Meter Chronograph watch with titanium case and bracelet, only $400 online"
Pam' op-ed is funny and incisive: http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1073509.html

Bad Blog Changes

2007-03-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Hopefully only temporary, but I just lot all the links as I tried to "upgrade" the template for this blog.

As expected . . .

2007-03-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

Yep, the new Star Trib owners have been making rampant cutbacks in news staff. A City Pages article details the cutbacks: http://citypages.com/databank/28/1372/article15245.asp

When the City Pages run an article talking about their new ownership regime?

Another Writer's Block

2007-03-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm devoting most of my spring break to writing a paper analyzing how sixties rock critics helped to imbue rock with a sense of political importance. I had been really looking forward to writing this paper, but alas, it's eeking out all too slowly and uncomfortably. Alice has poked fun at me for my tendency to have more breakthroughs in terms of reflecting on general writing principles while I'm trying to write than actually getting anything on the screen (probably a more apt metonymy these days).

Lots of my reflection dwells on one of the most mysterious and fickle qualities of writing - flow. Flow is just as relevant to good academic writing as it can be to more literary genres, especially when you want academic writing to share at least some of the qualities of literary prose. I think the major factors that determine whether academic writing will seem just academic or move closer to a literary work has to do with "evocation." I take this ideas from Michael Hyde, tho perhaps I've distorted it a bit. But by evocation, I mean whether the writing calls forth something vivid - an image, a feeling, a tone. A perfectly logical argument or one that is backed by "good" (as in difficult to refute) evidence is not necessarily evocative in itself.

At first I was thinking that evocative writing is much more difficult than just writing good arguments, but I've come to think that assumption is flawed. One of the situations in which I write with the most ease is when I get to a section in my paper where I can write a narrative. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in the structure of human consciousness that makes narratives feel more natural. Narrative writing tends to be evocative and relatively easier to write than other modes that require careful planning to lay out a synthetic exposition of interlocking ideas. The hard part in writing academic papers can be finding narratives that actually fit in well with what you're trying to say. One reason I tend to like to read cultural history more than other forms of cultural studies is because historians rely more heavily on narrative. But it ain't easy to find the right narratives for good cultural history, as I'm finding out now trying to write about sixties rock critics.

Radio KAOS

2007-03-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

I had thought I was on a blogging momentum that wasn't going to let up, obviously not. It's not so much been a matter of having too much to do, just failure to really integrate blogging into my day-to-day routines.

A couple days ago, Radioactive Gavin from Evergreen College interviewed me for his Digital Crossroads program on Radio KAOS out of Olympia, Washington. I met him at the National Media Reform Conference in January, and I was surprised that he was interested in a paper I presented on applying anti-trust measurements to media markets for FCC regulation. It was a rather technical piece I wrote this summer while serving as a research fellow at the Free Press.

But I thought I'd be able to talk about the basic idea and give some descriptions of problems with ownership regulations at the FCC to an audience who might not be too enthralled about the details of adapting the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to media markets. It was tougher than I thought, however, to be able to speak well for a recorded interview. Being "on the record" made me realize how much I typically allow myself room to skirt around details I don't know. But aside from calling Michael Powell Colin's brother (instead of son), I think I got by well enough for Gavin to be able to make something coherent and accurate through chopping up the interview tape. The interview should air around noon pacific (2pm Central) time today on Radio KAOS (http://kaos.evergreen.edu/).

The Inevitability of Billboards

2007-02-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

Let me admit right away to feeling ambivilence about sweeping categorizations of "the cultural logic" of our times. Making big claims about cultural trends on the level of postmodernism, neoliberalism, empire, etc is of course lifeblood of many academic critics, especially those of the 'theory' bent. Even trends such as fragmentation or "suspecion of grand narratives" often appear more interesting to critics as pangea-like formations rather than in their fragmented particularities. It can be a bit too tempting to reduce what's going on in the world at any one time to a set of understood principles. Maybe there's not other ways of writing effectively about such trends without a good dose of overgeneralization.

With that half-hearted qualification, let me attempt to squeeze some culture into some overgeneralized boxes myself. The box is a big one, a very popular one these days among cultural theory folks - neoliberalism. The cultural fragment I'd like to place in the box is a story by America Public Radio's Future Tense (http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2007/02/05.shtml#009646).

The story's lead: ClearChannel Outdoor is suing the muncipality of Minnetonka for cutting off power to two digit billboards. Minnetonka is one many communities around the country who have passed laws prohibiting moving billboards due to the risk of distracting drivers. So how do you think this story would be structured - maybe some opposing views on whether billboards with moving images distract drivers? Maybe some interviews of people's opinions of moving billboards? No, while about a 10 seconds is given to a county attorney explaining the way Minnetonka defines "flashing billboards" in their ordinance, the arc of the story follows the inevitibility of this technology.

First, comes testimony that "the new technology [digital billboards] is the way world we're living in." According a ClearChannel Outdoor VP, "advertisers are demaning a proper forum to display their messages . . . it is an evolution of media. . . it is somewhat inevitable."

I guess there's no messing with advertizers' demands. Future Tense certainly doesn't suggest that option. After the ClearChannel interview, the story shifts over to Carnegie Mellon "Professor of Design" Ben Fry. He starts by describing another kind of evolution, that of the human's natural response of a attentiveness towards motion. The inexonerable evolution of marketing sophistication has caught up with human evolution. Whereas our "long-ago ancestors who would be eaten or killed" without an instinctual response to motion, today the utility of this instinct might go to waste if it wasn't for modern innovators, like advertisers.

Reflections on National Media Reform Conference

2007-01-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

As my friend Bill pointed out to me, I really drop the ball on what makes live blogging interesting -- a sense of continuity and something approximating real-time excitement. One posting doesn't cut it.

With that admission, I want to go back and angle in on the NMR Conference from a different angle. Overall, I felt very encouraged. Much of my positive impression is owed to the fact that I had the chance to work with some very great people - Free Press staff and volunteers. Despite all the stress of pulling off such a huge event like this, everyone I worked with exceptionally friendly, positive and cooperative. I don't just throw out these compliments ceremonially. This is a truly exceptional bunch of people. From having worked with many organizations, the only times I've seen teamwork equal to what I saw in Memphis were during my best moments with NCCC teams. I think there are many reasons the Free Press is thriving to the extent that it is, from picking the right issue at the right time to some very smart organizing strategies. But my summer at the Free Press's DC office and now this opportunity to meet most of the staff from both offices proved to me that the wonderful people who work for Free Press and their spirit of cooperation are certainly a big key to their success. If nothing else, it just felt good for me to feel part of a team again.

Aside from the enclosure, the NMR conference felt much different from the only major academic conference I've attended - the National Communications Association. As McChesney said, they only have one academic session per conference to prevent it from being any sort of vitae-padder. But the SSRC's Media Policy Research Pre-conference might have served that purpose. Most presenters were advocates or media folks. I can’t generalize much about the attendees who were not presenters, seemed to be a mix of age, some different styles, many occupations and passions. It was mostly white, though not as disproportionately so as NCA. During the sessions I saw, there were always some vocal and sometimes challenging audience members. A couple of ranters. The 9/11 truth forces were there, of course, tho I did not see them being disruptive. A disability-rights groups staged a protest in the middle of the conference center. It didn’t seem like this protest was directed against the conference organizers, just a good opportunity for media publicity. No one stopped them.

Here and there I picked up on an undercurrent of discontent among some of the participants. The issue was whether the Free Press was getting too comfortable with, let’s just call it, “the liberal establishment.” Had the constituents of the conference basically just become upper-middle class whites who don’t like corporations? The attendence might have reflected that, tho at least a significant chunk of the panels explicitly had to do with race and immigration issues, and many of the main speakers had come from marginalized communities. Another complaint had to do with lack of transnational perspective. Interestingly, Robert McChesney seemed to acknowledge this fault during his introduction at the SSRC pre-conference, telling us all that we wouldn’t see much from an international perspective this NMR Conference but that would be a priority for the next one.

I heard some criticism of the race angle voiced in a constructive way, and some not so constructively. I want to explore this a bit, acknowledging my own perspect comes from a particular place. One group, privileged in their own way, mocked the Free Press as “the White Man’s Free Press” even while Free Pressers had gone out of their way to set up some studio space for them. From my perspective, this was hard to not see as a form of snotty arrogance because this group seemed to see themselves as particularly sophisticated. That said, this media movement needs make sure it does not only respond to the white middle class. To say that the movement is only “white progressives” now is inaccurate and only marginalizes the contributions of those who do not fit that category. Still white progressives, as I said, do have a disproportionate amount of influence on the media reform movement right now. Unless that change, the media justice goals are bound to be shortchanged. I know the Free Press is trying to build greater connections with groups whose primary constituencies are not white or middle class, but this is certainly a crucial area where more work needs to be done. As Deepa Fernandez said into her microphone in the big ballroom, “Disenfranchised communities don’t just want to be invited in, and we don’t just want a mic put in our hands. We want to own the mic and own the station.” The challenge is not only “reaching out” to the most oppressed communities, but either really breaking down divisions or working in solidarity with leaders and groups putting the concerns of the most oppressed communities at the forefront.

Letter from the FCC

2007-01-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what petition this must be responding to, but today I received an email from the FCC. I had thought they were a government agency, but apparently they are a big-box retailer:

Dear Consumer,

Thank you for contacting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). We are reviewing your correspondence to determine how we can best serve you.

The FCC regulates interstate (between states) and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions. The FCC is charged with ensuring that communications service providers promote the public interest. Further information is available on the Commissions web site at http://www.fcc.gov.

Again, thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. Your views and comments are important to us.

The Federal Communications Commission

National Media Reform Conference

2007-01-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

My first live blogging experiment.

I'm at the National Media Reform Conference in Memphis, more on this generally later. Right now at I'm at a session on new media and citizen journalism with Chris Nolan, Chris Rabb, Jay Rosen and Dan Gilmore. The most interesting presentation was Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen who discussed his accidental rise in the blogosphere that brought him to be one of the few bloggers of color at the DNC in 2004. One of his main points was that if we think of blogging as revolutionizing who's creating the news we've got to make sure that it's not the same sorts of elite who gain attention in the blogging world as in the MSM world. What made his speech particularly powerful was that he acknowledged his position as a black person speaking to a primarly white audience, yet he also discussed his own privileges (such as his ability to call up "a buddy" on Capital Hill, access to the latest computer, etc) that had made it possible for him to become a prominent blogger. His point was not blogging is too mired in privilege to ever have a value, only that enthusiasts needed to be conscious of the ongoing segregation, classism, racism, etc that carries over from land to the cyberspace. He urged us to not to have faith in blogging solving all these problems. The meaning I took from him was that bloggers shouldn't simple swagger forward against Big Media waving the name-tag of the underdog, but must attempt expand their social networks and strive for greater inclusion outside of their own privileged circles.

Best MSM Media Criticism of the Year

2006-12-29T17:51:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-24T08:59:00.000-08:00

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

2006-12-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

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?)

2006-12-08T10:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Workplace politics

2006-11-30T08:26:00.000-08:00

These past two weeks have been particularly stressful for me as a paper deadline and Ph.D. applications deadlines near. So all I have to offer is a re-posting from my cultural studies class blog:

Please forgive me for the second-person voice –

I certainly agree that academic jobs/lifestyles seem to offer a lot more opportunities for many types of political activity than most job because, even if the "hours" are longer, academic demands tend to be much more flexible. After working for several years in jobs where I had to be a specific place at specific times for 40 + hr/wk, I revel in the luxery having less than 12 hours a week where I have to be a specific place at a specific time. Also, academic employment seems to offer much more flexibility in how you can appropriate your time. The time you spend researching for an intellectual project could also be part of a political project.

That said, much to my surprise, I've found myself less politically involved since I came back to grad school than while I was working. Obviously I don't mean to suggest my own pattern mirrors everyone else's. But I think a big factor that makes political involvement much more likely or less likely is whether your community is politicized, i.e. whether the people around you are involved in political projects. Not only does a general political culture help motivate people to participate in political activities, making it social and fun, but it's a lot easier to find interesting ways to get involved when you know others who are working on specific projects. It is indeed difficult to walk into to an organization cold, and say you want to work with them and find yourself doing something more interesting than canvassing, making fundraising calls, etc. Even in the case where you can go to an organization and propose a specific way to work with them, your ability to find the inspiration to make such a proposal is correlated (I think) with the degree to which your everyday life allows you some intimate knowledge of the organization or issue. When you hear your friends or coworkers talking about the cool stuff they are working on, you’re more likely to think of some way your own skills and interests might contribute to those projects.

This is all meant to bring me up to a point to say that at certain times university campuses are places where political activity thrives and other times they are not. I can only imagine that during certain times in the 60’s it would be, culturally, very difficult to identify as a Marxist scholar or critic of patriarchy, let’s say, and not be involved in any of the related political activity surrounding you. At other times, it may be difficult to be such a scholar and feel any connection to or affinity with work that’s being done outside the academy.

Hopefully this kairos is not entirely fixed. Collectively we can make it a little easier to blend academic and “extra-academic” political work.

Mariposa

2006-11-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

This morning in the Twin Cities is bright and crisp. There's a sweet damp scent in the air. It's probably the smell, more than the weather, that triggered a strong memory for me while I was walking to the 2nd Moon Coffee Shop. It was not a particular event, but rather an old routine and place that suddenly came to mind.

The last year I spent in Boston, I worked on Massachusetts Ave several blocks south of Central Square. Central Square was usually bustling when I got there during the peak of the morning rush, throngs of people exiting and entering the T, catching the bus or rushing from their apartment doors down Mass Ave by foot. But especially on cool fall or spring morning, there would be an aura of morning calm, a paradoxical stillness, to all this movement. It was the marriage of chaos and equanimity that you can observe in a shaken snow dome. Walking from the T station to my office, I would always pass a coffee shop called Mariposa and look in longingly at its denizens reading morning papers and conversing. It wasn't an addiction to coffee or a dread of work, but the idea of the pleasure to be had spending a morning in the world of journalism or books at a coffee shop that filled me with yearning. A few mornings I would be able to rouse myself from bed early enough to spend an hour or so at Mariposa before I had to be at work. I love sleep and I always love it most just as it is ending, so it was only on the most glorious mornings when I was willing to make the trade-off of sleep for coffee shopping. But when I did, the pleasure I had fantasized about on my rushed walks to work proved to be not just an illusion. As I wrote in my journal on those special mornings, I'd be able to see, temporally, the chaos of my anxieties in that beautiful morning light, fluttering with the graceful disorder of butterflies in an atrium.

I'm going to go over the berlin wall!!

2006-10-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, this is another re-posting from a class blog, but I thought it was general enough to land here as well:

Why are some many in cultural studies worried that Theory might eat up cultural studies? Why does Angela McRobbie say, “Cultural Studies itself can thus be deconstructed to show how postructuralist work has occupied a position of authority as ‘theory’. . .?” Why does she need to justify her call back to experience through the authority of two of the most densely post-structural feminists?

I just want to suggest a few reasons for the enticement of theory in the academia. Please, don’t read this as an anti-theoretical rant. I certainly don’t believe any work is unmediated by theory whether explicated or not. I just want to suggest some reasons a theoretical orientation might have a comparative advantage in valorization among intellectuals versus other methods.

1. Theory is relatively safe from political persecution. I agree that theory might do important political work (given the right sort of conjuncture), but as of now theory is one of the safest ways to claim radicalism without institutional backlash. Even if it is political, it is generally so hard to for anyone without immersion in it to comprehend that it is not seen as a threat. Butler and Spivak, for instance, did not make David Horowitz’s list of 100 Most Dangerous Professors despite their fame. (This of course could also be a strategic advantage of working theoretically in oppressive times).

2. Theory promises the ultimate intellectual capital. To the extent that everything meaningful happening in the world is reduced to a structural or post-structural process (it really doesn’t matter whether or not signifiers slip, all that matters is whether you recognize the process of that slippage), significations or articulations may change but it’s the derivative of that change that underlies everything. The intellectuals who have accumulated the most knowledge of those processes are best positioned to understand the world. Structuralism/Post-structuralism is the string theory of the humanities. Once semiotic processes are all that really matters, knowing the nature of semiotics process relieves one from having to deal with the messy world of actual historical contingencies and experiences.

3. Theoretical writing is hard to understand, thus it enchants us with its mystery. I feel this all the time myself. Having an understanding of writing is usually a pre-requisite to being able to evaluate it, criticize it and see its limits. When you can’t understand what Derrida or Lacan is saying, and yet you have invested faith in the institutions/communities that seem to affirm the dire importance of what they are saying, their writings offer an almost religious mystique. The bible, Torah, the Vedas, etc. are all enigmatic, not just by coincidence. (However, this is not to say the only value of difficult writing is its mystery- the cryptic is valued in the first place because at times it can indeed lead to profound epistemic breakthroughs)

4. Theory insulates the intellectual from all criticism from outside the academy. Theory forms a specialized knowledge that can only be critiqued by specialized knowledge of the same kind. Once the “political claims” made by a theorist are all staked on the sophistication of their semiotic analysis, the intellectual is safe from challenges by others based on their experiences or memories (which are of course thought to be constituted by these very semiotic rules that they can’t recognize them). For instance, when a theorist talks about battles of signification over words like “queer” from a purely semiotic standpoint, the experiences and testimonies of “everyday people” (i.e. people who do not articulate their experience through the grid of poststructural analysis) have no way to enter the debate. Thus the rigor of theory is channeled and managed by making it accountable only to peers who have been similarly trained. Only 6 people in the room of a hundred can begin to challenge Homi Bhabha, the rest better keep quiet.

Academic Reading I Like

2006-10-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

Just as critics of "mass culture" have described one of the debilitating effects of TV to be its relentless flow outpacing the viewers capacity for judgment, as a graduate student I often feel my critical faculties struggling to tread water in a deluge of words. One tactic for dealing this may be to suspend judgment and evaluation for the duration of the flood, and assume my student position to be one from which I should not put a stake in evaluating what I read but just collect a map of what others for thought. This way I could build an excellent citational dexterity and maybe think things out later. More realistically, however, it seems grad school encourages us to organize the onslaught of readings by developing a taxonomy of intellectual trends and positions, then pick one of those positions from which we can arm ourselves with general approaches towards critiquing the other positions (i.e. semiotics is too formalism, enthographic work erases political context, etc).

Yesterday at a concert I talked with an old friend of mine who just started a grad program in geography. He described the ways of certain well-performing students in one of his classes as conforming to pattern that appeared familiar to me. These students, he said, would pick a position then defend it very well. They talked in a language difficult to comprehend outside of their theoretical circles, a language with a forcefulness to it that seemed to foreclosed other perspectives. (Perhaps this is the kind of "theoretical fluency" that Stuart Hall observed proliferating among American cultural theorists). Among these students there was little room for ruminating or playing with indeterminate judgments; they would usually launch right into full-throttle criticism. My friend's image reminded me of the theory I had formed while living in Cambridge that so many Ivy students were not driven by intellectual curiosity but rather by a sense of competition that had pervaded throughout their lives. They had always been really good with at least one thing in their live, and often this thing would change (dance, a sport, a collectors knowledge of 30's jazz, etc). I thought many of them might have just well have been lawyers because debating and arguing seemed to be their game much more than the activity I in my own taste valorize as the intellectual in the most profound form, "grappling."

Perhaps most of the writing I read now is the product of such a drive. Competition might morph into a drive towards mastery, for unlike a lawyer who must continually reshuffle rhetoric as she is forced into new circumstances, the academic can steep themselves in a domain from which it is very hard for others to challenge them. They become unrivaled experts about a certain topic. A cultural studies orientation might work against the comfort of mastery, but may just leave us in the sphere of competition.

With this disaffected view of how the academy might work, my pleasure comes in encounters with writers who seem to retain that spirit of grappling. For all the countless pages consume of writers pounding out the flow of their narratives to conform to a structure of unilateral support for their theses, I delight in the few moments where I come across a pausing, wavering, uncertain voice that indicates a moment of real thinking.

A footnote:
Now as I write this I wonder if I've caught this same forensic disease, all too certain of my own categories. Yet for me the topography of academics that I'm evoking feels as if it is just a suggestion, one possible frame that makes sense with some of my experience but not necessarily one I want to hold onto. Perhaps this attitude, though, is shared by all of my fellow debates who I have chastised here, just they do not have the opportunity for such a footnote. For even with the footnote, the language I used above is still all too sure of itself.

Reading without Reading

2006-10-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

This weekend I talked with Julia and Joe, a couple who are in my cultural studies class, about work scheduling. Both have been in grad school for a couple more years than me, and I'm always impressed by how well prepared they come to class - appearing to have good notes on the readings, often having articulated positions on what they think are the key themes for the week, etc. Therefore, I was quite surprised when they both said they would usually end school work by 5 or 6 each night! I haven't even been able to attain my goal of ending work at 9 on weeknight.

How was this possible? Were they both just extraordinary quick readers? I think I found part of the answer as Joe explained to me his approach to reading: don't read every word! At least that was his take on most reading assignments. He said that he reads things quickly, somewhere between skimming and reading, marking the pages up a good bit, then he goes back at least a day later and reconstructs the arguments through an outline.

This approach might not work with philosophical work where the meaning of key terms and turns will be lost without very careful sensitive reading (and probably still will be in that case). But as regards most of the cultural studies academic articles I've been assigned lately, this seems like a perfect approach. Not just for its time efficiency, but because I think I'll actually end up remembering and taking more away from the articles choosing to put more time into constructing my own outlines of them rather than giving them more sentence-caressing readings. On a later post, I'll talk about how I differentiate the educational goals of knowledge, understanding and voice. Joe's approach I think will get me towards "voice," which is the goal I care about most.

Routines, Rituals and Schedules

2006-10-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

For the past several years when I've felt that I haven't been making progress towards my most important goals, I've blamed it largely on my tendency to designate time more to the tune of "external" pressures (work demands, friends' requests, family obligations) than internal ones (in this case, referring to my ideal long-term aspirations). Further, I thought this tendency had a pretty logical basis, the external pressures tended have a certain time urgency; whereas, the steps to take towards long-term goals could always be deferred. To the extent I was making decisions about how to spend time on a moment-to-moment basis, those more timely external demands would always trump the long-term goals, which may have a had a higher priority overall but were never punctuated by urgency.
So the solution, I thought, must be to stop making decisions about how to spend my time always in the moment. I needed to make allocations in a more reflective mode that could plan longer-term strategies. I needed a schedule.
Since then I've had a faith that just creating the right schedule and sticking to it would be the answer to all these woes. But I have yet to create a schedule that's really caught on for me. I've tried different techniques, from low-intensity to-do lists to more elaborate hour-by-hour scheduling with the aid of a palm pilot (given to me by my pal Bobby). Failure after failure. This weekend I made another attempt and realized just how incapable I was of estimating how long certain tasks would take, and more damning to the scheduling enterprise, I realize by now that it is not time but energy that matters most to productivity, something a linear schedule cannot capture. But I am trying a new technique - creating rituals. My first scheduled ritual: spending a half hour Monday and Friday mornings on this blog.

Teaching and Activism

2006-09-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been a long absence. And now I'm pulling a cheap move just to keep some momentum on the blog rolling. I'm double-posting a comment I left on the blog for our cultural studies class. I want to work on this idea some more, as it's something I've continued to think about this past week:

I’m positing two rather extreme and overly-simplified positions on teaching (which I’m sure are a bit reductive of the views people have expressed), then deploy some of our CS concepts as an alternative to these two poles.

1. The first pole is a hopeful, though not complacent, view of the social impact/function of university instructors. From this perspective, universities may produce all sorts of status-quo boosting effects (training workforce, all the other points listed in Matt’s first comment) and their state or private funding may even be based on such justifications, but still they are loose enough structures so that classrooms are not entirely determined by such structural forces. Teachers, in this view, have the opportunity to appropriate the space and resources of the university for progressive or even radical ends through leading students to critical thinking and to question ideologies.

2. The second pole, which I think is close to Matt’s fear of the absolute cooption of university, denies that individual professors (or programs) can effectively fight against the ways in which universities are overdetermined by these structural forces/relationships. From this perspective, even if teachers are able to help students learn critical thinking skills and incite their resistance to accepted ideologies, the net effect of this effort may really just enhance capitalism by creating a class of more valuable creative workers, more nuanced in their understanding of culture. Under this view, students might become “critical” of capitalism, racism, sexism, etc on an ideological level, but so what? Their ideological conversions will have no effect on the ways in which these oppressions are played out through institutional means. You can love Marx and voice as much dissent as you want on an ideological level, but end up working for an ad agency, employing your cultural sophisication for capital, if that’s the “best” opportunity you see for your career.

I believe both 1 & 2 have a lot of validity. However, I think a better alternative can be described through thinking about education as a practice in CS and materialist terms: education as the possibility of creating new subject positions. From this angle, educators have a stake in subject positions students come to identify as. These subject positions are not only nominal categories, like “educated liberal,” “queer liberationist,” etc, but they are articulated to specific practices enacted outside the classroom. For example, I think education can be (though certainly not always!) good at producing the position of the “educated liberal” who renounces the practices of vulgar prejudice, such as making racist jokes or displaying intolerance for certain cultural differences. Another subject position could be articulated to economic practices such as not shopping at Walmart or buying from fair trade vendors.

The question of effects is not such much over how much student’s ideological outlooks might change through class but what kinds of practices will be linked to their new subject positions. A great limitation on teaching, however, is that the articulation between beliefs-as-subject-positions and practices aren’t often forged in the classroom. These types of articulations depend on a broader cultural matrix of opportunities. What kinds of practices will be articulated to new subjects positions is beyond the control of the teacher. Much of it is fortuitous. If there is a strong anti-sweatshop movement on campus making demands on students to take part in actions or not, then teaching Marx, leading students into some sort of “marxist-sympathetic” subject position, is likely to be articulated with organizing, protesting or other practices that are part of that movement. If such a movement does not exist on campus, then the same class could win students identity as marxist-sympathetic subjects but in a way that is not articulated with any practices contesting labor policies on campus.

So do I think teaching is a hopeless endeavor for contributing to progress or radical causes unless the cultural opportunities are ripe for students to articulate new conceptions of themselves with political practices? In a way, yes. Perhaps the content being taught in American universities in the late 60’s wasn’t any more radical or revolutionary than content being taught today but the cultural matrix at the time articulated educated subjects to more overt political practices. I know from my own experience college seemed to take on a whole different tone when the whole campus was shaken by protest over Iraq sanctions, Kosovo, etc.
The challenge for committed educators, then, in times that are not fomenting with political unrest is to create this political culture outside of the classroom. We need to work with allies outside the university. The excuse of doing enough for the cause in the classroom doesn’t cut it, at least not unless the conditions are right for classroom efforts to be articulated with extracurricular practices.

Reading Susan's Journal

2006-09-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

A link arrived in my email today from a friend wagering, “because we’re in love with public intellectuals …why should we not read them in [their] private [moments]…?”. The click took me to a section of the NYT’s magazine that reprinted entries from Susan Sontag’s journals. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1)

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of reading diaries and journals (as mentioned on my first post). Regarding influential or famous people, the idea is not that their diaries will represent an authentic revelation of their non-public souls, as I would bet they (famous people) always write with some consciousness of potential public eyes. Perhaps many have so deeply ingrained the mental habit of publicity that the public, or a relatively broad public at least, is the default addressee of most of their thoughts. So it is not a chance to peel beneath all persona and posturing that is unique about encountering them through journals, but rather the opportunity to see how they write without revision. It may not always be true, but I assume that journals entries are written with greater haste and much less editing than published works (even for Kerouac). This speed I assume does reveal what comes most “naturally” for them as writers, meaning only the habits of thinking/writing that are most automatic for them. What I look for is: what kinds of mental connections and associations arise most reflexively for the writer? This is a vague statement, so let me break it down in two exemplary but not exhaustive ways. What is the texture of their quick writing like, i.e. the vocabulary range and specificity of detail? And what is the style of their narrative? Underlying these investigations is the question of how naturally (in the sense above) good writing comes to great writers. Inevitably I end up making comparisons with my own journal writing, which I tend to think of as involving overly earnest narratives and a dependance on cliched phrasing

So how did Sontag’s journal affect me? Most striking is the energy and frenzy of her thought (along with the fixated self-consciousness which is something I’ll leave unexamined here). Many of the entries follow the logic of a list, as I assumed she followed whims and swirls of thought/memory rather than approaching her journal with desire to sort everything out into a neat little story. Even through lists, she evokes some enchantment, an oddball kind of energy. She is not without her cliches. I noticed a few words that might make it to my list of “fresh words” – deracinated, marauding – but not many.

The frenetic aspect of her impression may come in part from the spin with which the journals are introduced by the Times, “Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation.” I have sometimes thought I should pursue relentless note-taking to be really productive (of course at a certain bulk notes would lose their advantages of condensed guides, but the point is more to exercise the passage of experience to words). I can’t really say from the journal selections if Sontag had this fantasy too or fulfilled it, but clearly writing was crucial to her even in the form of notes.

Not so cool

2006-09-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

Often when meeting a new person of a similar demographic, I find myself brandishing my knowledge of "cool" things - local bands, experimental films, coffee shops, etc. Am I just showing off a kind of indie culture connoisseureship? Maybe such cool is just an excuse to legitimize a taste for eccentricity?

Back at the U

2006-09-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

By nature I must be an optimist because I always enjoy beginnings. Whether it’s first moving somewhere, starting a new job or kicking off a new school year, the beginning of any of these transitions always charges me with energy to fill a slate of newness with positive vision. Unfortunately I’m not the kind of optimist who is able to remain ever hopeful and optimistic about any situation once routines have set in and the horizon of possibility is more clearly defined by the land mass of actuality.

I’m aware of this pattern, and the unrealistic expectations that go along with fresh starts for me generally, but still my optimism is in full force for the beginning of this school year. Last year, admittedly, I became quite frustrated with my school progress. Was I really pushing my potential to learn, stretching my mind as calastenically as I thought I should be during a time of intensive education? I didn’t think so, and this isn’t a criticism of my graduate institution but rather it was just a fact that I hadn’t found the intellectual focus or inspiration I had hoped to find. I hadn’t kept up with the exercises I had designed for myself (such as the metaphor-a-day), hadn’t written anything for alternative press as I had wanted to do, nor had I could I be sure I had found that ever elusive writing voice any more clearly than I had in the past . I was living to the tempo of the steady mundane almost all of last year when I had been craving a more blustery rhythm. My vision of scholarship was of something more engaged, maybe even more mystical, than what I found myself able to access.

Now, I haven’t done much to reconcile the split between aspiration and reality. Still, all these good feelings of freshness are making me see a rosy semester once again.

No Hands

2006-08-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

I finally did it! There was a prolonged moment of indecision and trepidation, like jumping off the high dive for the first time. But then I just let go and raised my hands in the air. I was cruising down a hill along the Mississippi River. Throughout my life, I've seen people do it like it was nothing. This summer in DC I saw lots of young kids looking cool as salmon as they swerved and speeded on their bikes through patchy Capital Hill streets, arms flopping at their sides. I figured riding with no hands was a skill that you either had and felt totally comfortable doing, or one you didn't and you would mess yourself up if you tried it. Like riding a bike itself. I hadn't taken the plunge when I was younger, so my adult self had grown catious and inhibitted. But this new bike with its fat mountain tires gave me new courage. It's much smoother than my old Gary Fischer Aquila, which was stolen from the UMN campus last year, and incomparible better than the beat up bmx bike I was riding this summer.

It felt like a new world I was perched upon while I coasting down that hill without hands. A world that just let me glide through it, taking care to prop me up so I didn't be concerned about myself. Then I tried pedaling -- back to the world of holding on.

When You Got A Subject And A Predicate

2006-08-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

These past two mornings I’ve been attending a workshop on grading and commenting on student writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me until after starting this session that most of the commenting I’ll be doing for my intro to public speaking course will be responding to speeches rather than writing per se. Still, the session was worthwhile. I ended up going to both session rather than skipping out as I intended to do if it just seemed like go-thru-the-motions bullshit. But it helped me realize how difficult it is to comment on student writing in a way that’s time efficient and helpful to the student.

On the first sample essays that I practiced commenting on, I leaned heavily towards copy editing in a journalistic way. Truncating sentences, shedding otiose adjectives, trying to suggest a more confident voice. This is the kind of feedback that I have particularly appreciated as of late (especially comments from Bill Lindeke from excitablemedia). Personally, I would love the chance to work with a good editor who would rip my language apart, just so I could start to see other possibilities for word choice and flow and identify my unconscious habits and self-imposed restrictions. The workshop, however, helped me realize this is not likely the kind comment that most undergrads need most. Perhaps the greatest single lesson of the workshop was the suggestion to think about how students will react to a first glance of the paper handed back to them. What will they think of something splotched with red on almost every line? A simple thought experiment in empathy that now seems obvious. The facilitator of the workshop suggested that comments need to be selected strategically based on where intervention is needed most – not only as a time saving strategy on the part of the instructor but also so as not to overwhelm the students.

It’s easy to think of writing instruction as a boring, mundane part of the job of an academic. It doesn’t help that the culture and publications that I’ve seen from the world of composition seem about as bland as it gets - perhaps this derives from an attempt by all parties to insulate writing instruction (in practice if not lipservice at least) from theory, politics . . . all the exciting stuff going on in universities. However, writing instruction is full of all sorts of deeply political and artistic questions. Writing practice (at whatever level) is certainly a technology of self. Helping students develop “their voice” in writing is a hotspot of institutional intervention on subjectivities and communicative habits.

The New Gazelle

2006-08-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, this little nook of the www has gotten as dusty as the peace studies section of the White House library, but now it's time for a little late summer cleaning. I just added "New" to the blog title, as a little R&D has led to a new and improved product. The number one finding: lower expectations. No more grasping at profundity in each post, despite all the gushing comments that suggested the old format was so popular.

No, now my goal is to find some sort of regular blogging rhythm that will work for me. I'll try to make it interesting and keep up with friends through this blog, but admittedly this is one of my mental exercises to routinize new forms of thought. Another one of these exercises is what I call "metaphor-a-day." Every day I'm trying to write down one metaphor I come across in reading or conversation that strikes me. The original plan was also to write my own metaphor each day, in hopes these twin exercises would grease up the associative flow of metaphoric thinking for me. Can't say I've been diligent enough at it yet to say whether it will work.

Here’s today’s metaphor from an article on Edmund Wilson by Louis Menand (found it while sifting through some old magazines):
"He was not obliged, as professors are, to pick out a single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career was devoted to the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important and, by doing some homework and taking care with exposition, make it interesting and important to other people."

Pre-emptive writers' bloc

2006-03-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

Is all thought in language? Some answer yes to this question (Volosinov, others), but to accept this seems to accept a very limitted definition of thought. The most easily explainable problem with this thesis is sensory imagination. Is the artist or architect not thinking when she images her next project?

Of course, there's all sorts of angles we could come at the relationship between thought and language, and it could be argued that even if all thought is not "inner-language" then at the very least all thought is thoroughly structured by language. Or that even images and other forms of sensual imagination are all semiotic, so in the end its all just like language. But really, it's not this particular dispute which concerns me now. The problem that's prompting this post is certain kind of frustration I want to describe, a feeling of having something to say or express but not having/knowing to accomplish that. Sometimes I call this writer's block.

The reason the thought-language dispute pertains to this problem is that most painful moments of writer's block come when it seems I have a thought, at least in some nebulous cerebral form, but can't find language to express it. The initial thought, it appears, is phenomenal, meaningful but non-linguistic.

Now this could be just a meditation on writers bloc, but my poststructual line of thinking wants to chime in and say the whole model is wrong. Am I setting this whole equation up on a model of a soveriegn speaking subject? Is this an outdated transmission model of communication? A thought appears to a subject as some sort of interior self-created apprehension, then the thought is translated into words endowed with a meaning through the force of the subject's intention?
While poststructuralists often seem like they strip any theory of language, besides those located in their own intellectual genealogy, of its nuance and complexity, I might as well just say I'm guilty here of their accusation. The model of speaking I'm working off here is much closer to a rather traditional modernist than their own. Yet, perhaps in my mind I've overextended the poststructualists dogmatism. Maybe invoking a transmission model of communication to grapple with the particular kind of frustration I'm dealing with here isn't so much a sin in their eyes. Perhaps different models of subjects and communication really can be deployed at different instances. Or perhaps, that poststructualist inside of me might anticipate with glee, the frustration I'm encountering is an inevitable problem of modernism, the desire to "express a non-linguistic thought in speaking" will always be frustrated. Maybe, but so far I haven't encountered a poststructual diagnosis that resonates with me.

Still, I won't argue that language in any way can act as "mirror" to reflect any non-linguistic phenomenon. Translation into language is not only always messy, but always a complete leap into another form entirely.

Redundancy of Theory 1

2006-03-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

In theory circles, at least from what I can surmise about them from my little grad student seat, there are a few refrains that come up again and again as to the nature of the grand illusion and religious fantasy of modern thought. One is that steadfast belief in a unified autonomous and effective self, a belief absolutely saturating all powerful modern institutions, except curiously enough, certain humanities departments at universities.

What are other such refrains?

Pleasure & Learning

2006-02-20T07:12:00.000-08:00

So, first a suggestion of five, often overlapping, "motivating forces": pleasure, survival, obligation, strategy and habit. I'm sure you can find ways that all of these support learning in some ways, but I'm going to zero in on pleasure for the moment.

Another disclaimer - I'm thinking about the question of "what motivates learning?" in general to some extent, but mostly drawing on preparation for an academic career.

Now, to get even more schematic, let's go to three kinds of pleasure that could go along with learning -

1. Autonomous Pleasure
The pleasure that is often figured as most ideal. It is the pleasure that arises spontaneously from the activity of learning. It is the immanent pleasure of the learning experience. It is like the pleasure of loving.
2. Social Reward
This is the pleasure that comes from social feedback loops as the learner masters or accomplishes something. It is the pleasurable reception of a goldstar, an A-plus, a field-trip privilege, a fellowship, a vigorous applause at the end of a presentation, a sense of respect and admiration from those around you.
3. Tension and Release
The pleasure that comes only after completing a stressful project. This resembles one of Freud's models of sexual arousal and satisfaction - that the initial stage is one of excitation, a stimulus whose contact causes a condition of tension that is unpleasant as well as pleasurable (as evidenced for Freud by the desire to linger in that state of tension rather than immediately move to orgasm). Writing a paper can be like this.

Compassion and Scholarship

2006-02-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

One way to think of ethics is as self-consciously endorsed explanations or guides for behavior, at least intended behavior. Like any behavior we tend self-reflect upon, scholarship has its ethics. Yet discussions about the ethics of scholarship seem to be rather rare or narrow, even though you might think academics are just the sorts who ask such abstract questions regarding everyday activity. Perhaps scholars in general are loathsome to critically examine their own practices and routines beyond "method." Talk about "academic integrity" usually boils down to a rather simplistic set of laws about not fudging data/facts or plagiarism.

But certainly there are a lot more ethical questions we can ask about scholarship. For many there is an implicit ethic that the scholar tries brings to the fore those experiences that tend to be most marginalized or purposively hidden or excluded from public view. That's certainly a principle that guides me in what I'm looking for while reading as well as thinking about my own work. Yet I think this ethic would be more robust if scholarship was more often seen as something that can be guided by an ethic of compassion. Compassion, to me, is a good-willed curiosity oriented towards the unknown or the other. Compassion is a response to a confusing and undeniably cruel world that affirms a faithful commitment of goodwill to what might be a groundless existence. Compassion need not rule out all suspicious or revolt against oppression, though I think it does place goodwill and care first.

More than anything, an ethos of compassion might make academic dialogues more comfortable spaces to be for people of different knowledge backgrounds. My guess is that one cause of anti-intellectual attitudes is the well-known tendency of academics is to either take the potentially condescending attitude towards someone as a student or pounce on perceived ignorance with scorn and quick judgment. An ethic of compassion may help us work out a cooperative ethos rather than making so many academic discussions sounds like rounds at a debate tournament.

Environmental Energy

2006-01-29T07:16:00.000-08:00

According to various media sources, from advertisement to health magazines to co-op newsletters, energy comes from certain consumables, from protein shakes, ginsing supplements, low-carb diets, wheat-free non-dairy raw-foods diets, or if you really want to unleash the beast without delay, you can get yourself a carbonated energy cocktail. From other sources, you might hear that exercise is really the way to go, and that its squats and swimming and ab crunches several times a week that will really get your juices flowing.

Images of either food or exercise as the sources of energy makes it seem like energy is something that people store up in their individual little tanks to later fuel biological engines. Now, I believe diet and exercise can help people feel more energetic. I've started putting a least one organic carrot in all my lunches, and I try to get to the gym a couple times a week. But as someone really seeking more energy, I've turned more of my attention to energy as something that comes from interaction with my environment. I'm trying to ask myself specifically what are the situations: simulate, inspire and call forth my effort. This energy can come from interactions with art, nature or architecture (a little credit to feng shui). But more than anything, individual energy is social. Even something as mythically lonely as writing, I see as largely motivated by networks of social energy. Without some sort of positive social feedback, it's hard to imagine that most anyone would be motivated to produce anything they do beyond what's necessary for subsistence.

Research Identity Statement

2006-01-23T17:05:00.000-08:00

I'm in a class where we're been asked to write a statement on our research identity in terms of: 1. our disciplinary/scholarly affiliation (media studies, rhetorical criticism, etc)
2. our method (historiography, comparative, social science, etc)
3. why were're interested in our topic.

I'm still fumbling around trying to find the topics that really inspire me, and the above template presupposes a fixed "identity" and compartmentalization that doesn't really fit the kind of way I'd like to talk about my work. Yet, still I found this a very helpful exercise - it's pointed me towards refining some research questions and thoughts on approach.

Here's my statement as-is:

I am a media studies scholar investigating the role that media technologies and institutions play in cultural shifts and ideological transformations. I am particularly interested in contemporary activists and critics of neo-liberalism and their relationships with media institutions. Some of the questions I ask include: What groups of people do these activists try to influence and through what media do they communicate? What role do media institutions play in constructing the possibilities for such communication? How do certain practices of activists groups that fall outside the normative uses of mass media, such extralegal media appropriations or creating alternative media sites, affect relations between activists and media institutions? Through this research I seek to articulate the kinds of media practices that have been or might be successful in affecting cultural transformation. I am also seeking ways to participate in cooperative research/praxis projects with media activists.

Imagine all the bloggers . . .

2006-01-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

When I was in an AmeriCorps program based in Denver, I heard an interesting story about a fellow corps member, Chris. He was on another team and I knew him only slightly as a sharp and somewhat enigmatic guy, but what I learned intrigued me even further. Chris was a writer and kept a prolific journal. What made his journal-keeping practices peculiar was what happened whenever he finished a volume -- he would go to the phonebook in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Milwaukee, or wherever his team was located, choose a random address, and send the lucky household his journal with no return address. He wouldn't even make a copy for himself. All his most intimate observations and accounts of feelings and experiences would end up in the possession of a complete stranger. I speculate that odds weren't too good that most of his journals avoided the fate of the graveyard of most modern things, the landfill. Yet I can only try to imagine the joy of those curious few who unexpectedly found the eccentric mind of a 22 year old in their mailbox one day. Perhaps some of them are still waiting in hopeless suspense for a sequel that will never arrive.

This was in 2002, before I had heard of the blogging phenomenon. At the time it was still possible for me to believe there would be something powerfully transcendent about diary sharing. Earlier that year I had been writing in my journal in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, a city I only planned on staying for a few weeks for a project, when I saw a young woman furiously writing in hers. She wrote in an unusual pattern, from bottom to top. Like me, she would pause between bursts of writing and look up with an expression on the stretched-out moment of hesitation before a sigh or smile. With the same passion, but different end in mind, of a sudden erotic desire, I wanted to read her journal. I wanted to propose a swap for an hour – what could possibly be a more intimate moment between two people who would never see each other again? But the standard social inhibition and concern about the creepy appearance of such a proposal, snuffed out another potential experience.

Now however if I want to peer into other’s minds and lives in such a way, I need not wait for a random journal show up in my mail or until the moment seems just right to make such a proposition at a coffee shop. I can simply do a random search on livejournal or scores of other blogging sites. Of course, blogs will not be written with the same lack of self-consciousness as diaries (and diaries themselves always presume some form of presentation and performance; while “public” and “private” are too bluntly overzealous as clear and distinct categories, it’s fair to say that the shift from diary to blog moves in the direction of public consciousness, tho perhaps also as something more ephemeral). Optimistic and pessimistic fantasies of where this shift could lead

- Imagine this utopia: Everyone in the world is a blogger (yes, there is no digital divide in this utopia). People write in their blogs as they do now in diaries or journals. In the first phase of this utopian transformation, all blogs are anonymous. Through random and strategic searches, you can swerve through the inner-most thoughts of all people, crossing boundaries of age, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Your empathy for the diversity of the people of the world becomes immense. You hear the intimate testimony of those who have been victimized as well as the guilt of those who have committed the crimes. You live in two worlds - one where people keep up all the fronts of confidence, certainty and absolute rightness as they do in terrestrial social life, then there is the blogosphere where all that is suppressed in terrestrial life is displayed most prominently

- “Private” diaries and journals were the last holdout where people could develop skills for articulating and reserve space for telling their most idiosyncratic, vulnerable and socially alien impulses and thoughts. Blogs may cover the same topics as diaries did in the past, but now under the gaze of social judgment. In the blogosphere, the defenses of wit and stylistic imperatives of the social must never be let up on, and thus these rules dig themselves deeper into our subjectivities. The truly idiosyncratic and socially defenseless imagination becomes submerged even deeper in the sea of silence.