I don’t go in for trend pieces generally, and I especially dislike trend piece about how the internet is changing people, society, our brains, etc., because trend pieces by nature do not try to capture the stunning diversity of ways people live in this world. However, I’ve noticed something about the internet that has shifted the way I consume media, something I feel like many people will identify with — though many others may not.
Spending much of my day on the internet, and on Twitter especially, has taught me to be an excellent curator of my own consumption. The decision of whether or not to click on a link and read the book review or news article or listen to an mp3 or watch a video often boils down to: do I already like (or like hating) this sort of thing? If the answer is yes, I click the link. If the answer is no, I don’t. And most of what I consume — music, essay, journalism, and fiction — fall into that “yes” category. I am savvy enough that I can even identify bad versions of the kinds of things I like, most of the time. My cultural consumption has become a well-oiled machine, generating mostly superb product with only the occasionally dud.
Only clicking on things I already like, only consuming certain kinds of things, means I very rarely consume things I dislike (or don’t enjoy disliking). This is good, because I am not as often exposed to narratives I hate (for example, misogynistic storytelling that makes me feel angry and sad) and because I rarely spend time with something that gives me nothing in return. This is bad, because I am rarely surprised by anything. A surprise-less world becomes a monotonous bore: the boredom of constant pleasantness.
Sometimes I am forced to or tricked into venturing outside my bubble of curated media. Sometimes it’s scary out there. I watched my first episode of Whitney recently, which I’d been meaning to watch because it had a person-of-color coming-out story, but I resisted watching for a while because I heard from friends it wasn’t even good hate-watching. They were right. The half hour was dull; the coming-out story was handled perfectly fine but so incredibly uninterestingly I just wanted to nod off.
More often, though, I get a treat. I recently read a short story collection — I Am an Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran — in order to review it. I rarely read short stories and I never would’ve picked it up on my own, and thus missed out not only on an enjoyable reading experience, but a visceral one. I had no idea what I was going to read before I read it, and the first story, told from the perspective of a Bengal tiger fleeing from a zoo, moved me and shook me. It punched me in the stomach the way only fiction that is both good and surprising can do. I had a similar experience with the latest album from the band Death Grips, “The Money Store.” I hadn’t listened to Death Grips before, because I thought I wouldn’t like it. I’d never heard a Death Grips song — why was I so sure I wouldn’t like it? Luckily, I started playing the album on a whim and, again, got punched in the stomach. I’ve been listening to it basically nonstop for a week and a half, and I haven’t yet tired of it.
I don’t mind my curated bubble most of the time; it’s a good place to live. It keeps the bugs out. But my suggestion for everyone is to build that bubble with as much detail, precision, and care as you can, and then take the time to knock its walls down.
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I saw some heart-warming things last week. People I went to high school with who used “gay” as an insult wrote impassioned Facebook posts about the ignorance of those who oppose gay marriage. I saw the word “gay” on the front page of the New York Times every day after Obama’s endorsement. I learned that there are a lot of straight Republicans who support marriage rights.
But there were also ugly things said in support of the cause. Gawker’s John Cook lamented the President’s endorsement as phony and useless. This reminded me of Cook’s piece about the Mike Daisey/Foxconn scandal. Daisey claimed that while he may have embellished the atrocious working conditions at the Chinese factory-city, he brought to light a larger truth about human rights violations. Cook’s headline: “There is No Such Thing as a ‘Larger Truth.’” This is a rhetorically appealing yet fatuous response — exactly like Cook’s rebuke of Obama’s announcement. The President’s comment, while ineffectual, represents for millions of Americans a “larger truth” about their changing position in society. It is, like so much the President does, symbolic. Daisey and Obama and all the people who understood the import of this announcement are capable of reading a symbol: a token that represents a larger truth.
Another ugly response: in reply to North Carolina’s vote to explicitly ban gay marriage, images spread across the Internet reading, “North Carolina: Marry your cousin, just not your gay cousin.” We have all become comfortable with cousin marriage and polygamy as punch lines. It is, again, rhetorically appealing to promote marriage between gays as less threatening to society than other forms of marriage, yet these jokes strengthen the very standards they seek to undermine. What we want to say is that marriage is a private matter and that all people have the dignity to make that decision themselves. What we end up saying is, “At least we’re more normal than them.”
When advocating for gay marriage, one can quickly start sounding more conservative than liberal. Obama’s support emphasized the importance of supporting monogamous and procreative families. In February, Frank Bruni wrote a piece for the Times that both explained and exemplified this conservatism. Called “Value Our Families,” the article seeks the moral high ground by positing gay marriage as a boon for the “unholy” state of matrimony in America; calling the rate of babies born out of wedlock “ignoble,” Bruni earns his place in the hegemony by creating yet a lower “other:” those who “haven’t bothered to” get married. It’s like the feminism that empowers women by calling men lazy and adulterous: empowerment by exclusion. It will win the right to gay marriage; it will not win marriage equality.
Both Cook and Bruni fail to recognize change as a process. The former wants Obama to support a federal protection of gay marriage, yet one could argue it would have been better for him to focus on getting re-elected rather than make a politically risky announcement. Bruni also wants a pre-determined version of change to come all at once — we will impose this reform on the system and it will have that effect. But maybe the unmarried mothers he cites point to even more reforms that will be necessary to facilitate the development of new family models. Perhaps with the gay community’s influence, marriage will have to learn to accommodate polyamorous relationships. There are many types of marriage that will still be illegal and many people who will feel excluded from the system just as gays feel now.
I understand that at some point in the feminist movement it made sense to demonize men — that may have been the only power some women felt they had. And I understand that the easiest way to convince people that gay marriage is okay is to convince them that it is “normal.” Change is a process and we are still at a fairly early stage of gender and sexuality reform. But we should be redefining “normal,” not bending to it. Lest our rhetoric get ahead of us, we must remember: equality is never won through exclusion.
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I read my last comic when I was probably 12, so to say that I’m out of the loop on recent graphic novel developments would be an understatement. I think that they’re stupid, but I say that not having read many. I thought comics never really got “out there,” that their weirdest developments involved familiar heroes in alternate universes. That’s why I was a bit shocked when I came across Forming, a super strange graphic novel published by the super strange English publishing house NOBROW and written by possible genius Jesse Moynihan.
Touted as a “Gnostic creation-myth comic of high and lavish weirdness” by Boing Boing, Forming takes creation myths from a variety of sources and jumbles them up into a nebulous superplot that makes up for what it lacks in coherency with surreal images and coarse language. As the NOBROW website puts it:
Since the dawn of human history, we as a species have sought to understand our existence through creationist fables of omnipotent deities, mythical creatures, and speculation of what—or who—may lie beyond the stars. In Forming Vol. 1, Jesse Moynihan takes these 50,000 years of socio-religious postulation and throws them in the blender to create one epic—and irreverent—battle royal between alien gods, Ancient Greek Titans, interplanetary assassin droids, and humanity itself.
It’s totally stupid, totally goony, and has opened me up to the possibility of becoming interested in graphic novels and comics again. I mean, look at the frames below. How could you not be interested?
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A few facts about my neighborhood in Washington: over one-fifth of those of us living around Capitol Hill possess some sort of graduate degree (not including me, I feel I should mention). About 54% of us live in non-family households — Washington is home to a burgeoning population of young professionals (a subset that does include me). A little bit less than one-tenth of Washingtonians in my area are foreign-born, which almost seems low for a city that hosts dozens of embassies, each with a small army of staff. For those of us paying rent checks every month, approximately 30% pay under $750 — a steal in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets. The average full-time, year-round male worker in my neck of the woods pulled home, on average, $57,856 (many of those with graduate degrees are lawyers).
I could, if I wanted to, go on. I could tell you what proportion of my neighbors are married, how many live in 1-bedroom apartments, how many have ancestry from the non-Basque parts of France. It’s just a matter of quickly perusing the American Community Survey, a statistical survey sent out with the decennial Census that enables a more accurate portrayal of towns and cities across the country. It’s also become, bizarrely, a political tinderbox, a focal point for small government rage — and, possibly, a relic of the past. On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 232-190 in favor of eliminating the ACS, citing its intrusiveness and unconstitutionality (the ACS, as proponents quickly pointed out, dates back to 1790, when the Census was administered by Thomas Jefferson).
With the Senate and White House in Democratic hands, it’s unlikely that the survey will actually fall by the wayside. Yet the vote seems important all the same, a watershed moment in the way we conceive of our relationship to the state. With the rise of anti-government sentiment, as championed by the Tea Party, the survey had come under fire as an intolerable measure to coerce private information out of Americans. Michele Bachmann, Tea Partier par excellence, even famously announced that, if chosen to fill out the Survey, she would refuse to do so — technically a crime, although one that is never prosecuted. That wasn’t an accident — opposition to the ACS is so commonplace on the Right that the front page of a Google search for “American Community Survey” pulls up numerous right-wing blogs and an article from the Weekly Standard decrying the measure as ‘Orwellian’.
Others have eloquently defended the necessity of the American Community Survey. While on its face it may seem absurd to collect data on household toilets, information on water usage will come in handy as the American West stares down a possibly cataclysmic water crisis. A government that knows what languages its citizens speak is one better able to ensure that language is no barrier to full participation in democracy. Information is the lifeblood of government.
Through that lens, then, Republican opposition to the Survey becomes easier to comprehend. Choking off aggregated information becomes part of a calculated neoliberal strategy to wither away the state. The vote is particularly telling when coupled with the House’s passage, on April 26, of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. A controversial bill likened to the infamous SOPA bill, CISPA would allow private companies to collect and share reams of information about their users, even in contravention of existing privacy laws and terms of service. Among the bill’s supporters were darlings of the Tea Party, including Bachmann and Florida Rep. Allen West. In a neoliberal America, even information-gathering has been outsourced to private enterprise.
To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about the government’s intrusion into privacy — consider, for instance, the reports about the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims in New York. Yet to a sizable chunk of our political class, the concern isn’t over whether such information is gathered — surveillance is a fact of life — but who collects it. Rather than limit these capabilities to a government over which we, as citizens, exercise some limited amount of control, they have opted to hand it over to private companies accountable to, at best, a small coterie of shareholders. This neoliberal privatization isn’t a new development, of course — David Harvey traces it back, convincingly, to at least 1979. And on Thursday, another small bit of public life was symbolically sacrificed. It will be missed.
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There was a time when I would fantasize about being forty years older than I am. The sixties just seemed more fun, more real, and more consequential than the early 2000s. But that feeling that everything important might have already happened, so tied to late-20th century declarations about ‘the end of history,’ etc. now seems ridiculous. Even if seven years ago everyone my age didn’t wish, as I did, that they could just become Joan Baez, I don’t think I’m alone now in feeling that the present moment is pretty much as important as any other particular time.
So if now is important, what is actually happening now? Last week I visited a symposium in Egypt’s breezy second city, organized by the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, which set for itself a vast and impossible question: “The times are changing, what will art do about it?”
The invited guests did not really address this proposition, but instead presented their own philosophies of the present moment. One speaker, Timotheus Vermeulen, discussed what he and fellow Dutch cultural philosopher Robin Van den Akker term “Metamodernism,” a new framework for articulating commonalities in contemporary cultural. Metamodernism takes a step past postmodern disaffection to seek out examples of oscillation (the ‘meta’ in metamodernism) between irony and sincerity, and the infusion of a tentative, somewhat self-conscious hopefulness into art.
Discussing a recent art exhibition on Metamodernism in the Berlin Art Journal, Vermeulen explained, “What happens with these artists is that for a moment, they put on this sort of sincerity or earnestness, and it’s just suspending irony. They know it’s there, but for a moment they say ‘I love you,’ or for a moment they will say ‘this is real.’”
On their blog, “Notes on Metamodernism,” various examples of this heartfelt oscillation are picked out and analyzed. But there is a sense that Vermeulen, Van den Akker, and their contributors are trolling through culture, looking for examples that fit into their framework — however loosely defined that framework may be. There are, understandably, certain producers that have been picked out to exemplify metamodernist art: the sweet, strange music of CocoRosie and Antony and the Johnsons; the warm and quirky films of Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson; and the grandiose writings of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.
The metamodernist project makes a brave and valiant effort at offering structure to a vast and fractured culture, but ultimately its scope feels limited. Speaking personally, the particular collection of references identified as a part of metamodernism feel not just very specific to my own demographic, but specific to a particular moment in my own culture-consuming life — a moment that is past. Is Freak Folk really a driving force in contemporary popular music? Is Wes Anderson setting the tone for film production?
But just as I was ready to scrap metamodernism completely, I thought of the very TV show that everyone seems to be talking about (and which, as many many people have discussed, is still very specific to my own demographic). In last week’s episode of Girls, Hannah tells her kind-of-boyfriend Adam as she attempts to break up with him that, although she is not the kind of girl who needs to have brunch, she just wants someone who “wants to hang out all the time, thinks I’m the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me.”
Maybe this straddling of conflicting desires is an example of the kind of oscillation metamodernism seeks to identify. And maybe this is, in fact, our contemporary condition: to want exactly what everyone has always wanted and at the same time to undercut the validity of wanting that thing.
In any case, identifying a post-postmodernism-modernism may be as impossible as figuring out what
art will ‘do’ about the changing times. But even if his project is doomed to failure, Vermeulen has a point when he says, “…many people think, ‘Ah well, what arrogant pricks who think that they can come up with something else,’ but I think it’s necessary that we all do this, that we try to make these enormous gestures again.”
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Maurice Sendak, 1928 — 2012
Maurice Sendak, who died on Monday, was awarded a Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are nearly 50 years ago. In his acceptance speech (which is worth reading in its entirety), Sendak describes witnessing children playing on the street in front of his parents’ house in Brooklyn. They’re playing a game in which one child turns himself into a “howling, groaning, hunched horror” and chases four giggling girls, “willing victims,” around the street. Sendak notes that such games are extraordinarily common, and “are the necessary games children must conjure up to combat an awful fact of childhood: the fact of their vulnerability to fear, anger, hate, frustration — all the emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can perceive only as ungovernable and dangerous forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction. Through fantasy, Max, the hero of my book, discharges his anger against his mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry, and at peace with himself.”
Sendak goes on to describe the unwillingness of adults to acknowledge the darkness inherent to children’s experience, and denounces some other children’s books’ presentation of a “gilded world unshadowed by the least suggestion of conflict or pain, a world manufactured by those who cannot — who don’t care to — remember the truth of their own childhood.” He goes on to say, “The need for evasive books is the most obvious indication of the common wish to protect children from their everyday fears and anxieties, a hopeless wish that denies the child’s endless battle with disturbing emotions.” Rather than deny a child their battle, Sendak jubilantly leads them forward.
Sendak is occasionally mentioned in the same breath with Roald Dahl — both men being authors of children’s books that explore unusually dark, fantastical themes. But to equate them is to misunderstand them both: Dahl’s darkness lay in a particular obsession with exploring and ultimately conquering the sociopathy of the school-age bully (and one needs only to read a few chapters of Boy to understand the excruciating life experiences Dahl was inspired by), while Sendak’s darkness was a more intuitive exploration of the role fantasy plays in the life of a child. I owe an imaginative childhood to both writers, but my debt to Dahl is significantly different than my debt to Sendak.
When I was a child, one of my favorite books was Sendak’s Outside Over There. The book’s rich illustrations, while recognizably Sendak’s, seem to owe more to renaissance painting than do the sparer sketches that define Sendak’s earlier books, like Pierre: A Cautionary Tale and The Sign on Rosie’s Door. I didn’t realize that the book was by Sendak until I was much older, and so it existed for me as an anomaly; a kind of secret treasure: a magic, magnetic story that I saved for reading only every so often, not wanting the weird tale to lose its power.
Outside Over There inspired Jim Henson’s The Labyrinth, so you’ll likely recognize its plot: Ida, the older sister, is supposed to be watching her baby sister while her father, a sailor, is out to sea. But the baby is stolen by goblins when Ida isn’t looking (bored by her babysitting duties, she’s playing her “wonder horn”) and replaced by a terrifying, goulish-looking changeling made of ice. Ida doesn’t notice the difference until the ice baby melts, which is when she realizes the goblins have stolen her sister to “be a nasty goblin’s bride.” She takes off in her mother’s raincoat with her wonder horn tucked in the pocket, to make “a serious mistake” — falling backwards out the window, into outside, over there. Flying backwards through the air, she almost misses her sister until her father’s voice, carried over the sea to her ears, directs her to turn around. She turns and lands in the middle of the goblin’s wedding — the goblins turning out, bizarrely, to be just babies, like her sister — where she plays a sailor’s jig on her wonder horn, which causes the baby-goblins to dance until they churn themselves into a stream of water, which flows away. She brings her sister back to her mother, who is reading a letter from her sailor father, telling Ida he will be home “one day” and to look after her mother and her sister until he returns — “which is just what Ida did.”
Sendak’s tales are often surprisingly complex, but a central theme is a desire for escape — Rosie wants to escape boredom; Max wants to escape his anger; Ida wants to escape responsibility. Rather than escaping their feelings, of course, the characters delve into them. They travel through their respective imaginations and magical outsides, over theres; they turn themselves into singers and kings and musicians, possibly getting eaten by a lion (Pierre) or baked into a cake (In the Night Kitchen) in the process, but always playing or dancing or wildly tangling with the beasts of their feelings. The characters inevitably return to the “real world” happy, exhausted, satiated — although their situations remain essentially unchanged. They find resolution through imagination, just as a child makes sense of the world through a game of pretend.
What I remember most of Outside Over There is how enthralled I was by its eery illustrations and frightening storyline — the terrifying ice baby, the faceless goblins, the weird concept of a baby-goblin wedding, the evocation of my childhood fear of being kidnapped — and the distant comfort of Ida’s absent father. 
He redirects her, from far away, during her flight to the goblin’s hide-out, and his directive to take responsibility at the end of the book is one that she finally, and happily, accepts. When I was a child and my own father was away traveling, as (it felt like) he often was, I wished that he, too, would give me direction in absentia, and accompany me through both my long-winded games of pretend and the burdensome real world, in which I felt an unusual responsibility for my three unruly younger siblings.
Of course, such direction and company is what Sendak’s work has offered generations of children: like the sailor-father in Outside, Over There, his voice leads children through the darkest thickets of their imagination, telling them where to take the right turn (especially when the right turn is the wrong one) to have a riotous adventure. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air last year, Sendak said, “There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.” Like all of his characters, he was ready to leave; and he has left so many beautiful things for the rest of us.
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I’m not into concrete poetry for the same reasons that Donald Barthelme wasn’t into conceptual art: it seems too easy, and once you “get” it, you don’t need it anymore. But it’s a lot easier to dismiss genres than individual artists. My exception to the rule is Robert Zend.
Zend (1929-1985) was one of those versatile geniuses who could do anything. Born in Hungary, he moved to Canada in 1956 after the failed revolt and settled in Toronto. For years he worked for the CBC, at the same time making himself into a skilled producer, poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, composer, filmmaker, and found-object artist.
Something about his autodidact intensity appeals to me. Most people who call themselves by so many titles end up spreading themselves thin — they kind of suck at everything, without ever mastering one thing. It can seem pathetic. But Zend had the work ethic of a craftsman. His sober attitude toward his projects was mature. He imbued everything he worked on with rough-hewn depth. It was an attitude that’s rare in contemporary scenes where snark and nihilism are the base line and art is as much about identity as product.
As you’d probably expect from a person who was a workaholic as well as a multi-talented artist, there’s a lot of material to choose your favorite from. I can’t pick mine, there’s so much good stuff that he’s done, but if I had to make a recommendation, I’d pick “Arbormundi (Tree of the World)”. It’s a portfolio of seventeen concrete poems made on a typewriter. Of course, Zend didn’t invent typeface art and layering on a typewriter, but his are some of the best examples of how to do it. They’re meticulous, superimposing shapes and figures in a way that hints at dimension and gives a sense of fluidity. The shapes he makes express texture while still appearing delicate, urging you to reach out and feel their dimensions before they float away or disappear. It’s just great art. Look for yourself:
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On the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog for April 30th, writer Naomi Shaefer Riley responded to “Swaggering into the Future,” a piece about Black Studies published in the Chronicle earlier that month. Truth be told, to say she responded gives her too much credit. Riley surveyed a handful of dissertation titles by Black Studies graduate students and dismissed them one by one as ridiculous, concluding on this basis that Black Studies itself should be eliminated.
There’s a history of academic title-shaming. People always love a good giggle about how irrelevant those silly egg-headed elites in their ivory towers can be. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pioneer of Queer Theory, wrote about the phenomenon after the title of her paper “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” — among others brought to the annual Modern Language convention — was torn apart by a writer in the Times who claimed the association always “yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex.” But even if you are skeptical about an argument, making fun of a provocative title does nothing to actually engage with the material at hand. The particular divide between academic scholarship and mainstream journalism, based on the perpetuation of populist — or, on the flip-side, elitist — ridicule is made symbolic in the Riley controversy.
Other bloggers, including Prof. Hacker for The Chronicle, rightly point out that Riley’s attack isn’t actually an argument, and criticize her for going after an arguably powerless group within academe — black female doctoral students who, though accomplished and intelligent, are without tenure and therefore lack the institutional support and networks of tenured professors. She defames their work, it’s worth noting, without including any further description of the work itself.
In a May 3rd response to the criticism, Riley offered the usual “Hey guys, why are you taking it so personally?” retort (sort of nonsensical in this case, seeing how her original post refers to each graduate student whose paper she ridicules by name — so, yeah, what Riley claims is the political is also the very explicitly personal). She then defends herself against charges of racism.
In her initial post Riley claimed that more useful than studying historical black midwifery (a topic she dismisses without convincing explanation — because black women giving birth is totally irrelevant, right?) would be “legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates.” In fact, these debates are being had, within Black Studies departments and without.
But this is where Riley makes her most disturbing assertion. She implies that any study of black people and culture should emphasize the “problems” in the community, thereby reducing Black Studies to Black Problems — which should be solved, she implies, solely by black people. As when Women’s Studies first came on the scene, Black Studies is here rejected as a niche pursuit, irrelevant to most readers. The marginalization of studies that seem to deal with a “specialized” group of people, but affects society as a whole, is a familiar technique of oppressive control.
In fact, in anti-intellectualist rhetoric, intellectuals are themselves portrayed as a kind of other — and are historically associated with foreign, racial or ethnic minorities who “think differently” than the natives. Riley’s claims are an extension of this trend, casting both Black Studies — and intellectual pursuit along with it — into the dustbin of “special interest.” For this seeming contradiction to occur in a newspaper about the academic world is no coincidence.
The relationship between scholarship and journalism is often expressed as an antagonism between the mandarin and the philistine — the former perceived by the latter as elitist and pretentious, the latter by the former as a shallow and catty little sister. This misunderstanding, in fact, works to perpetuate a culture of anti-intellectualism that continues to spread. The two professions — and forms of writing — though certainly in pursuit of different aims, each has its place, and they actually have more in common than is often allowed.
In fact, though Riley might not admit it, the job of scholarship is to work deeply into a topic and bring to light new knowledge that has not already been widely covered, or covered at all. Much of the time scholarship is, therefore, by definition not going to fall within what we might think of as “mainstream knowledge.” Trying to find in scholarly work some impossibly defined “mainstream interest” is not only pointless, but beside the point. Academia — one of the last few safe spaces in an increasingly anti-intellectual culture — allows the infinite exploration of ideas in whatever direction one sees (and can give evidence is) fit.
The thing about scholarship that irritates some people (symbolized by easy-target dissertation titles which, I admit, can sometimes sound gimmicky) is its perceived excessiveness — the extreme specificity of the topic, sometimes described in jargon that can appear to be show-offy or unrelated to common experience. But that’s the point! — to explore a specific, uncommon, and novel idea.
The job of journalistic criticism or cultural commentary (as opposed to straight reporting) is to bring otherwise unacknowledged events — actual or intellectual — into the mainstream and to make ideas understandable for a wider audience. In an increasingly fragmented and online medium, journalistic titles and subtitles can also fall into the trap of the gimmicky. Attention-grabbing alliteration, flashy pictures, and heightened controversy — all fodder for criticism by academic-types — prove that journalism can have its own title trouble.
The Riley backlash also brings to light the sometimes-unproductive way “both sides” journalism can profess to foster “debate,” when really, a non-argument is given airtime as if it were truly saying something.
While titles of scholarship may seem to obscure and alienate, journalistic titles can seem tawdry and reductive. But rejecting either a dissertation or a piece of journalism because of its title is like refusing a Snickers because you feel to it’s cutesy name is condescending (if you want to get into the politics of writing and marketing, go on ahead! But this was not Riley’s aim). Haven’t we all by now internalized the age-old maxim about not judging a book by its cover? There’s no point in either form of writing running the other down. And dismissing any kind of writing on the basis of its title alone is . . . well, just plain ignorant entitlement. The real juice, it seems ridiculous to have to say, is what comes after — the new ideas you’re exposed to if you have the unfashionable curiosity and unabashed desire to learn that keeps you reading, beyond “telling” titles.
[Ed. Note — last night, The Chronicle of Higher Education announced that they have asked Naomi Schafer Riley to leave her position as a blogger, as a result of her April 30th post.]
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Ah, the gilded hall* of The Full Stop Commenter Hall** of Fame, located in the basement of the YMCA, in fun-loving Plattsburgh, NY. Don’t be distracted by the water damage, general mustiness, or Gene, the mute janitor, but please proceed to the end of the hall, where you will find, inscribed, out first inductee, who goes by the simple handle RASHIEME. His comment on our October 31st article, The Presidents of The United States, Sorted into Hogwarts Houses, left only 2 days ago (obviously he ruminated for a few months), is beyond description. We re-run it for your pleasure below. It has perhaps out-internetted the internet.
Real Talk, they are just figure heads. Think of it like this, They were not the Harry Potters of thier Houses. Not even the Grand Wiz teachers of thier class. They were all the Freshman of there class. Top prospects, but Freshmen in High school none the less. When the flame of school, popularity, clicks, and fitting in felt like a drug that when first taken gets u higher than u would ever feel. So yeah its great to put a freshmen/women on top of a pedestal marked one, but the school still has people on sight to check them. Ppl off campus to check the checkers. Ppl playing checkers and no one checking them. Thats why i play chess not checkers. From the age of 8, id say i was pretty good. Infinte ways to win. Many was for both parties to win. If you have moved from the US durring the “RavenClaw” reign, than u probly want Bush back, right? As freshmen/women we develope “Poker Faces” and “Clever Words” to show our way of dealing with what is in our hearts. So lets say all houses were built from Love first and no Fear. I like the Ravens, but i am a Vick fan. Vick plays chess. Ravens are stuck on the masondixie line. Holding on to Gods words, and Hoping to make it to play infront of the Holy Trinity. When your fans believe and profect their souls with what they know is true, he died for me to turn my life around, then i might buy a Lewis jersey. But right now, all eyes on Turbo, Vick, Tigre, Luda!, Anthony, The Rock, Energy, Google+, Coke, Kaliah Rose, Bruce Lee, Wiz Kid, Android, O’s, Black Anchor Tattos, Reperations, United States, S.W.A.G., Pig Point, Jesus, Water Bears, 1∅, Trinity, and Barack Obama’s Fresh Face. He should get a chance at a school of high education. VOTE like ur puting the world on it.
P.s. Dash! U should give me a Call.-I stay in denton,md-
That pretty much sums up where we’re at as a nation, culture, and plane of existence. We will be reaching out shortly to RASHIEME to discuss further writing opportunities.
*It is a simple hall, neither room nor chamber.
**An actual hall!
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The first album I bought was Licensed to Ill. Sad day.
An MCA Playlist
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