I have become that person who is excited to teach close reading, Foucault, cultural studies and critical theory to journalism students.
Thinking about Monday's lecture on literal parasites, metaphorical parasites, and the film PARASITE (which is done and ready to go Monday already!), I'm stoke to share about the ways close reading can make for lively writing—especially in these times.
With so much interviewing happening over the phone & reporting on the sick or dying—and with so many experiences of life journos used to cover in person now being mediated—the ability to READ (social) media is so important.
Finding details, knowing how to read them, figuring out how to use them as prisms & how to triangulate them with theory/history/other reporting is so critical for thinking & writing in semi-lockdown.
Even gonna riff on @BenHCarrington's explanations of Stuart Hall (cultural studies) and Marx (false consciousness).
Have a good weekend, before we fall down the rabbit hole next week
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A side note to the Berkeley law dinner fiasco: Professors shouldn't have work events with students in their homes!!!
This is a problem which extends beyond this situation. "Chemerinsky, who is Jewish, says that the incident is the latest in antisemitic attacks on him and that free speech does not extend to his home." OK, then don't have work events in your house! latimes.com/california/sto…
This is all so bizarre to me. UC Berkeley is a public university & this was a UC Berkeley event! Yet the professor is arguing the mortgage is in his & his wife's names & "No one has the right to come into my house, or yours, and disrupt a dinner." HE INVITED THE PERSON WHO SPOKE!
Cheap rent made Philip Glass possible too, who told me in 2012: “The problem is, when I came to New York, it’s much more difficult now. You could work 3 days a wk loading a truck or driving a cab, and you’d have enough money to live off of" the other 3+ weeks to do your art!
“Work," Glass said, "was a seasonal business! Can you imagine??? "You worked the weekends around the first of the month. And then you had the middle of the month to do your sculpture or your painting or your poetry or whatever you do." Cheap rent made that possible!
Manual labor, Glass said, was great—they didn't even own a van! No pressure, even for parking! "You were in great shape. You were physically very strong bc it was hard work but easy. Hard work but easy to do. Didn't take any brainpower & you didn't have to go to work every day."
As the sheriff evicted an elderly couple and was removing a handicapped woman with Parkinson's disease from their home, her partner doused himself with gas and set himself on fire. "This," Aaron Bushnell so presciently said, "is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."
The framing of this story is wild - the headline makes it about the neighbors' reactions, and the sub headline says the sheriff's office "saved one life today, but the outcome wasn't what they wanted." But the deputies' actions took a life, they didn't save any lives.
Their execution of an eviction also executed the end of one life right away and two lives, really -- what is going to happen to this elderly, disabled and now homeless woman? She already lost her home, and the eviction killed her partner and caretaker.
This is very sad, but I have some thoughts. I think Cecilia would have wanted the truth out there (I certainly do) as she didn't want anyone to feel shame about anything, but I think she'd be sad the major response is to arrest and prosecute the dealers. patch.com/new-york/new-y…
I never feel comfortable when young-ish people die and no one says why. It's usually because they died of overdose or suicide (or, going back a few decades tho sometimes still now, AIDS). Treating them as unspeakable only increases stigma.
Cecilia didn't do stigma.
She didn't do shame, and she wouldn't want other people to feel stigma or shame or to experience barriers to getting help. And when we don't talk about HIV/AIDS, suicide or drug addiction, we increase the barriers to people getting help.
I have been getting really angry at liberals lately. I am not wholly sure why, but it has something to do with feeling gaslit when they pretend like verifiable truths aren't true, in (likely vain) the hopes Biden will stay in power because it benefits them, if almost no one else.
It is provably true that 2.5 as many people have died of Covid under Biden than under Trump, even tho the latter had the vaccines & the former did not. And it's true that death by genocide, record homelessness, and this latest ban on gay pride flags happened under Biden.
Liberals pretend like this simply isn't true, or that it doesn't matter. But it is true, so either a) it doesn't matter to them that Biden has done these things or b) they don't think he could control them. But if he can't control it, then c), it doesn't matter who is president.
There is a video of an Israeli drone that is so disturbing, it is worse than the most horrifying, torture porn scene Hollywood could ever imagine. I can't fathom the terror of the last man killed, hunted after seeing his friends blown up, knowing the end is coming. But selfishly—
what I find equally is terrifying is that there isn't an elected Democrat in Washington, or federal spokesperson, who will condemn it. It could be narrated in all its horrors and Matt Miller or Kirby or Jean-Pierre will look bored and say, "Yeah, so what?"
They won't condemn it. They don't mind it. It's coming here! Even liberal San Francisco voters just gave their police department the right to use drones! Every horrifying thing we have seen in Israel, every depraved act of SAW-like torture used on Palestinians, it's coming here.