Government Governs.

still scary. from capt Kodak's flickr.

Welcome to the technocracy: Obama is looking to govern for the sake of government as a technocrat in the center, rather than the left-wing ideologue that both the GOP and Democratic bases mistook him for.

Instead, he’s appointing Democrats and Republicans including old political rivals.  History says that non-partisan apointments get the job of government done best – which should return attention to questions about what government should be doing, if anything at all.

In many regards, left criticism has been hamstrung by George Bush in the Oval Office.  Folks got very confortable with lambasting every policy failure as a failure of incompetence or stupidity.  No doubt things will continue to go wrong under an Obama Presidency, but we don’t yet have the language to describe any impending failure in a particularly useful way.  For instance – while the current Bush-created budget problems will no doubt make Obama’s policy agenda difficult to implement, the focus on that issue alone sets us up for another 4 years of blaming Bush, rather than making forward-thinking criticisms of Obama (who, as the inheritor of the Bush Imperial Presidency and a unified government, will be the most powerful president in modern history).

Hopefully cutting off the head of the Bush-king will encourage people to think about the role of government on the whole, and reflect on whether it needs to do as much as we think.  I am encouraged by people who would like to see police officers reduced to basic first-aid responders and directors of traffic, and I think we need to do more of this type of reflection during an Obama Presidency.

Dreadful Genius

Another recommendation: “The Dreadful Genius of the Obama Moment“

A pretty jarring analysis of the numerous problems left unsolved, and the problems created by the Obama election.  I’m worried that my own focus on the symbolic/rhetorical elements of politics sometimes distracts from the real material facts of US exceptionalism.  We really do have a war on most of the world, with terrifying implications.

I feel very conflicted.  On the one hand, I know that no matter how right you are, you have to be able to effectively communicate and organize people for your voice to matter.  In the current political environment, trying to take ‘hope’ head-on and out and out deny that people should enjoy Obama’s election feels like political suicide.  On the other hand, I know that arguments about ‘effectiveness’ can straight-jacket real dissent, and prevent people from saying what needs to be said about Obama and the violence of the US government.

I guess my real feelings go something like this: I agree with the commenter on the article above that the real alternative is to ask people to hope further.  What did we hope for?  Was it Rahm Emanuel and a return to the Clinton foreign policy?  Or are we really hoping for an end to racism (white supremacy), and something more fundamentally just in the world?

Blogging Check-in

This is the end of the first week of my new blogging strategy.  I’ve been trying to do about 5 posts a day, with each post at 200 words or less.  I’ve met this goal 5 days running, and traffic has been more or less up.

Considering that the blog more or less revolves around my wandering personal interests, I’ve also been considering moving the site to a new address that reflects me a little better, instead of having this convoluted URL and evasive name.

I think the 5 posts/200 words works much better than 1 post/1000 words (about what I had been doing previously).  My concerns, as always, involve time (whether I have enough?) and relevance  (why am I doing this again?).  I’d like to make blogging a supplement to my education, as well as an independently successful venture that could provide the foundation for some form of employment in the future.  Hopefully keeping up the fast-and-loose strategy will meet both those goals, while avoiding the time-crunch problems.  Blogging is a cathartic process for me, and if it ever becomes too much of a burden/takes up more time than it’s worth, expect this to shut down pretty quick, but for now I’m digging it.

12 Ways to Become a Better Writer

List compiled for a class – most of this is advice I don’t follow, but I found the process of putting thoughts down immensely helpful in getting me back on track to writing more (and perhaps better). I encourage you to make a list like this one.

Thoughts assembled out of some personal experience, advice from people I trust, hearsay, and good books I’ve read.

1. Read a lot – People have been writing for a long time, and chances are that you aren’t the first person to think about what you want to write about.  Reading other authors sharpens your perspective on subjects you want to write about, but also keeps your writing fresh – hopefully by reading others, you keep tabs on overused clichés and overlaps in content or form.

2. Know your favorite authors and why they’re your favorite authors – I suspect that if you write, you’ve taken inspiration from some source that inspired you to write.  Go back to those writers and think about what spurred on your passion.  Keep track of why you like them – not just as stylistic source material, but to understand what makes readers want to keep reading.

3. Take notes – both on the books you see and the people you see.  Memory is in short supply, and the act of writing something down allows you to build on a passing thought by putting a bead on it and giving it extended thought.  This provides fodder for content and constructive reflection on ideas that strike you but may need substance to become viable foundations for larger pieces.

4. Outline obsessively – There should be no rush to finish off an article, and I think the final drafting stage should be the shortest step of what you do. Much of the final product should come cut and pasted from outlines and documents where the bulk of your thinking occurred.

5. Think about media – this means understanding the audience’s experience of reading in the format you select to write in.  Reading on the printed page directs thought in different ways than reading on the internet; your work should embody conventions that best suit the medium you – and the reader – have selected.

6. Don’t be afraid to change tack mid-work – your original inspiration isn’t a sacred calling that you must follow to the ends of thought.  If an opportunity presents itself to write a compelling piece on a subject you never intended to, it may be because your first idea wasn’t the real story, and you should shift gears.

7. Don’t look for bad guys and good guys – simple narratives are boring and clichéd caricature turns readers off.  In my experience, unambiguous good and evil almost never exists, and hammering human existence into simple narratives means your story will probably fail, in a myriad of ways.

8. Write every day, or as often as possible – keep the wheels greased linguistically.  You have to practice constructing ideas to find your best work and best ideas.  Treat daily writing as a process of sifting out the good ideas from the bad, and a sandbox for new techniques.  These shouldn’t be published necessarily, but having folks read daily writing might be helpful.

9. Don’t just be a writer – have a passion that allows you to put fervor and purpose in your writing.  I try to take the “80% of life is showing up” maxim to heart, in the sense that you only get an ear in on 20% of the interesting bits of life by spending all your time thinking about/through writing.  I’m an activist, and connections generated through my activist work has generated a huge number of valuable leads, numbers, and story lines that can distinguish a good article from a great one.

10. Take note of the environments where you work best, and create those environments – this is a point about work environments.  Think about pieces you were happiest with, and then think through the environments that let you produce your best work.  Seek out environments like those to write in the future.  I personally know I work best in semi-public, quiet spaces like libraries or study rooms, with people around but research resources at hand.

11. Never hold your best stuff. (Stolen from Clay Felker) If you have a scoop, a story, or a good idea, run with it.  Holding off working on or publishing a good story helps no one, least of all yourself.

12. Treat writing as something more (and less) than a calling. Understand and feed your passion, but know there is a utilitarian angle to what you’re doing.  Your passion and inspiration only take you so far – you must take into account the needs of your readers, and the needs of an industry that surrounds writing and publishing.  Understand the ends-means function of writing from the get go, and you’ll be more successful from the outset and  get over the feeling of soul-burnout in the long run.

Back!

Been back from Texas for a few days now; my trip was just right – not too hot, not too cold, and got to walk in the woods.  Going home I always get a sense of moving old muscles I forgot I had, finding that word that has been on the tip of your tongue for days.  I think this trip back sealed the deal for me: I know I don’t live in Austin any more.  I felt like someone getting dumped by their cool ex; lots of interesting stuff was happening around town, but I really didn’t play a part in it any more – I felt a little bit ignored.  Still, I saw good friends, plenty of trees, and the fam.

Being in Austin, brushing up against my past, I realized I’ve lost track of where I’m going, involuntarily resigning myself to ideological wandering.  I also realized that this next year will bowl me over into places I don’t want to be if I continue without the solid footing of knowing where I want to be in the future.  These next two weeks are the lull before the storm, and I want to take advantage of them to get some serious thinking done.

But I also have posts.  Lots, in fact.  Some of these will be contemplative ramblings, others will be more political.  Get ready.

Totally drained.

Against my expectations, this summer became an exhausting affair.  I ended the school year teetering on a blowout of sorts, and looked forward to a break.  After classes ended my summer never quite resolved itself into a real break: I had class daily for 3 weeks in a May intensive; family affairs for a week or so after that; orientation following not far after that.

While none of my myriad engagements quite took over my life (save orientation, but that was among friends) lingering obligations that trailed on from the Spring kept me from really stepping back from everything and making mental peace with myself.  I had to look for a job (and got led on by a few employers, making the whole process even more frustrating), had to do debate work, had to begin working on the Disorientation Guide, etc. etc.

The point being that I never quite got into the groove of summer, never quite shook that feeling of being busy.  Like, really busy. I don’t think people give credit to the labor that goes into being a student.  All last semester, I worked the equivalent of 15 hour days, 6 days a week.  10 am to at least 1am, daily – and the last few weeks during finals, I often worked more than that.

After meandering through half the summer, I wandered into being over-committed again.  I started freelancing with whatever free time I had; took up one internship, then another.  Now, I’m back to working 12 hour days again, with only 2 weeks of summer left.

Last summer I read 33 books.  That’s a lot.  This summer I read much less, I’m not even sure I could reach double digits.

I began this break with some vague goals – meet lots of people, read some books… really get to know New York.  For better or worse, I missed out on some of those, but succeeded in another way:  I feel like I live here.  It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way.

On Blogging: What Kind of Writing is Blogging?

I am a member of a writers collective that meets about once a week to discuss our writing and do collective editing.  Most of what we discuss is poetry, which I don’t ‘do’, and occasional prose – but I am the only person who contributes ‘published’ works (in the loosest sense of the term… I’m just some kid with a computer), typically in the form of posts picked up from here (or the upcoming NYU Disorientation Guide… stay tuned).  I’m always a bit confused about what comments to ask for, because I only have a vague sense of what blogging as-such does.  I’ve posted some thoughts on the potential uses of blogging for activist institutions, but I wanted to flesh out further what I think blogging does – in terms of how people read blogs, and in terms of good writing.

I’m taking for granted a few theoretical assumptions that sort of come out in the McLuhan post ,such as the remediation relationship between old and new forms of media, and the ways that new media reflect the desires and stresses created by the old.

Initially, blogging was pigeonholed as an online personal-diary of sorts, or as amateur journalism on a broad scale (with particular emphasis on ‘amateur’).  While I find these ideas generally misleading, they contain a grain of truth: both journalism and journaling involve an element of making sense of existence by framing and archiving events by committing them to public or personal record.  Both deal with the decay of memory across space and time.  I think the first function of blogging is the creation of personal-public memory – it  introduces ideas into a potentially public space in an attempt to create controversy, however this process builds steam from the highly-personal nature of blogging, which ties the introduction of those ideas/events to an individual writer in charge of their own blog.

So, blogging grows out of someone’s life – many blogs are explicitly personal, but ones that aren’t often rely on the reputation of its authors as interesting people able to drop smart commentary on events covered elsewhere.  Blogging as writing, then, remediates interpersonal interactions by treating them as potential content for publication, and blogs become spaces to manage the perception of those interactions by writing about them and submitting them to public memory.

However, blogging also takes a cagey relationship to other forms of media as well – the ‘agenda setting’ function of blogging described above grows out of the troubled relationship people have to contemporary mass media companies.  I don’t think its any surprise that blogging as a phenomenon grew up around the time that mass media consolidation severely reduced the diversity and critical content of mass media products.  Many (political) bloggers dislike mass media, or at least develop their sense of purpose in writing via the perceived failings of some larger media company.

The interpersonal function of blogging manifests itself in several ways – one, the tone of blogs (generally personal, casual), but also the way that bloggers relate to each other – the ‘blogroll’ practice, and the prorogation of links via email tips shows that bloggers relate to their writing as an (inter)personal venture.

Thoughts on McLuhan – Understanding Media

I’ll find this interesting, I don’t know how many other people will.  Here are my thoughts upon finishing Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

This was a strange and lucid book, and difficult to read; McLuhan’s apprehension (dislike?) for the medium of print shines through the text in its strange lucidity and obscurity.  I almost feel that McLuhan seems upset to be writing a book, and so he writes a book exactly how he wants to write it – in weird vignettes with a certain unhinged fervor.  Overall a valuable book for its opening of new theoretical avenues around an expansive notion of ‘media,’ but I found its individual conclusions about particular media forms generally off, but occasionally enlightening.

Why I Identify as a Student Activist

Pulled out some writing from earlier this summer.

I am a student activist because I believe this education is more than a training ground. I refuse to deny the value of my thought and action by asserting the existence of a more real world that lies beyond our imagined institutional borders. Positioning the university as training for a world of more real action to come makes NYU nothing more than a purple Disneyland in New York, reducing our intellectual and political activities to escapism in the service of established authority. I think ‘training ground’ notion of education fundamentally denies the purpose of being in school. Treating education as training already cedes legitimacy to the status quo as ‘the real world,’ at which point the individual contributions we imagine for ourselves as graduates lose their power and relevance. The lives we lead in our years as students necessarily impact the world around us – and not just in some impossible future. We labor, we consume and we educate each other in the process of obtaining a degree – that all-access ticket to ‘reality.’

I have three thoughts to add:

M-m-melancholy.

Whoa, the internet, this shit makes me crazy.  Not going to lie, been feeling pretty down for a hot minute, and I’m not really sure why.   Here’s another post to try and put my finger on whats keeping me from myself lately.

What am I doing here?

Already in writing this blog, I’ve felt a tension between my goals and needs. I’ve written to a few audiences in my life. Previous blogs of mine pandered to few other than myself. Other projects, such as NYUinc have a fairly explicit purpose and audience. My writing for the Village Voice has a typically journalistic bent and tone. Here, I want to split the difference between each of these projects, doing some investigative/original reporting, being clear about my personal agenda, while offering some space for contemplative ramblings that fulfill my sometimes very angry needs to sort out my inner-shit, so to speak.

What follows is a shit sorting out post.