Uncle Media Studies Wants You

Can You ... See a ... Brand New Day?

It's official. I have an underactive thyroid and will now start taking a supplement. I've gained weight over the past year, and Lord knows many a day I've felt like rolling over and staying in bed, but I thought it was merely age and the joys of chairship.

As the latter comment suggests, I don't need an irony supplement.

Brother Pabst Pointed to This: Media Chaos = Darn Good Fun (for Those Pointing the Finger)

How does this affect teaching journalism. I'm not going to come up with the solution; I just hope I recognize the solution when someone else comes up with it.

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Post Prandial

A pleasant meal for the Media Studies majors, though not as raucous or emotional as some I've been to. The question is: Does the reality of the job market mute the mindless hope to which all graduates are entitled, college or otherwise?

Back in '66, we had a nice little war, getting worse, so let's not pity the young too much. What I tell them and what I mean with all my heart is that there's a decent probability they'll live to 150, which means (among other things) they will have a decade or two to focus up and get serious. Bartend now, save the world or make a billion later.

To which advice, if I were a kid, I would respond with a polite nod and a renewed determination to figure it all out as soon as possible. If the old man is right, I'll take the 2060s off.

Having Plenty to Say Doesn't Mean You Say It

Cover of Lady's Not for Burning

I have posted -- really posted -- very little lately. It has been a difficult semester in many ways, and talking about it publicly wouldn't help. Oh my no.

Is anonymous blogging cowardly? Maybe. But certainly therapeutic.

In happier news, tonight we have the annual dinner for Media Studies seniors at the Villa Romana in San Francisco. That's where we had it last year, and I thought it a big success. I don't think students want their senior years to dribble away in a series of fragmented moments. This will be a pause, a signpost. Friends will be embraced. Faculty will be honored.

The last week of my own senior year of college went by well enough without such a moment, I recall. From one point of view, that last week was one big moment, a great holding of breath. E. and I had been secretly married for six months, and if that fact had emerged, even at the last minute, I would have been tossed out of school, and my lovely fellowship at Duke lost as well.

You may say: secretly married? Expelled??!! There you have Whooping Jesus Bible College in a nutshell, and why my memories are less than fond.

I'd already been expelled once my senior year, for having a roommate whose oil lamp set the room on fire. Not ciggies. Certainly not the dopeawanna, of which I knew nothing. It was just an oil lamp that turned over on his desk when we were out of the room.

What I remember -- my signpost -- from those final days is the night before graduation. (E. was driving in from Detroit the next day; we would announce our marriage to our parents in the parking lot outside the gym immediately after I had my degree in hand.)

Carl Haaland suggested we drive down to Ball State in Muncie to see a student production of Christopher Fry's "The Lady's Not for Burning."

In his car. In that vintage Volvo. I considered him quite the sophisticate.

I remember the play and then the drive back through the dark Indiana countryside afterwards, remember it so clearly. Carl and I talked about the future, and its uncertainty, but also how it was going to be okay, Vietnam or not. (As it turned out, Carl went. I didn't.)

I thought about telling him E. and I were secretly married, but ... no. No point showing off, and he was a pretty religious fellow, Volve or not, maybe more than he let on. Still, this conversation, this good fellowship, has to mean something, I thought, because this is a moment meant to mean.

But it didn't. Fifteen years later, after I had got the rest of my degrees, lost a job, moved around, come here to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, I got a note from Carl. He and his family were going to be driving through, from Arizona on the way to Oregon, and he wanted to stop by.

I wrote back saying he was so very welcome. As long as he didn't talk about Jesus. Because I didn't talk about Jesus anymore. And I never heard from him again.

That's Not an Ivory Tower. That's an Outhouse

Image via Wikipedia

Wandering around the web trying to get my mind around one of those trendy theoretical constructs that I tend not to take seriously because I seem to have gotten by most of my life with an attitude more than an actual philosophy -- though I understand most attitudes are a kind of trickle down from the status quo and thus we all have a philosophy, which we possess as naturally and unconsciously as bad breath.

I'm not trying to boast here.

But now I'm following links and staring into tangles, and I'm suddenly thinking that we academics in the softer of the liberal arts don't live in ivory towers, which imply a royal condition and/or being a trapped princess. We are like the Amish, sturdy and misunderstood, working with the oldest of tools, all those words we use to scrape at the rocky fields. We understand the power of manure. We talk in the old language of ideas, and fewer and fewer people understand us and fewer and fewer care.

I'm broadly generalizing here about our quaint unworldliness and our fierce clan loyalties. Chemistry and business school and so on, not so much, of course. But the rest of us: The world drives by and laugh -- or, worse than that, condescend. We are kind of quaint, you know.

I haven't quite worked this analogy out, obviously. It's just that today I'm in a bit of a horse and buggy mood.

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Wonderful News for the Media Studies Department

Image via Wikipedia

After frank and candid discussions with a gaggle of deans, I have decided to continue as chair.

Let is be stipulated that I am no longer pissed with anybody, a state of mind that ill befits a first among equals.

I've Got to Get Back to Making Videos, Particularly Those with the Power to Embarrass

I did this at the end of Spring semester 2008. I like to think I spoiled the moment for a really nice guy.

Sitting Here Giving My Reporting Students Their Final

Half the final is always a police report -- a real police report rich in irrelevant detail and bureaucratic language -- that the kids must boil down to 100 words. They may, of course, keep going after that act of summary, but they must not "go chronological," as I put it, too soon.

Story telling is a natural human act. Some do it better than others, but we all appreciate the art of Scheherazade, for whom the maintenance of suspense was an act of survival. Yet the aim of certain kinds of journalism is the destruction of suspense: Here is what happened raw and simple. Perhaps that sort of tight focus is a form of misdirection, even dishonesty, in its arrogant assumption that the reporter's frame somehow corrals the truth.

That's the student of Media Studies talking, and it's the right kind of talk. News is made (I obviously don't mean fabricated, only that certain information is selected and pulled downstage) by whoever records it. But that does not mean the summary lead is not a useful thing or always a dishonest thing. If you go too Postmodern and say the critic rules the text and the text is indeterminate as is the material world which is a kind of text, you may become as foolish as one of Swift's floating philosophers, trapped in solipsism.

So I teach the summary lead without shame, though I also try to teach the modesty that should accompany its use.

But moderation in all things, including modesty. Read Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts"

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Marvelous brilliant cruel poem. It's all about burying the lead, a reporter would say.

The Hat

Last night we had the Media Studies Christmas party at the lavish and talented downtown SF apartment of SK, complete with hot and cold running cats Tito and BooBoo, and it was all *very* cordial, and I had wine.

I also wore a Santa hat. There were two reasons for that, one general and one specific. The general reason is that every holiday office party -- which this was, though it lacked the bathroom snogging that enlivens such parties and destroys marriages or at least puts a dent in them or for all I know *revs* 'em up again-- needs an older gentleman in a Santa hat.

When you are young, you see an older gentleman in a Santa hat and you Pity the Fool.

But when you are an older gentleman, you are reconciled that you *are* the fool (it's a philosophical position; it's not personal), and life's a joke and what's a Santa hat but a socially acceptable variant on Cap and Bells?

But -- two in a row! is that a double negative? -- really I wore the Santa hat as homage to the past. Ah, those holiday parties at the home of Aunt Hester and Uncle Dell in Roanoke, Virginia, so long ago. What I remember with such pleasure is Uncle Robert and his Santa bow tie that lit up when he tugged at the string. (Of course, one was invited to tug at the string. But one did not.)

Such a child's pleasure at being the center of attention he took from it, and Aunt Iris was so innocently proud that this one day of the year her husband had something that compensated for his absolute lack of small talk and perhaps any talk at all when Aunt Iris was around.

The holidays are just a mush of memory, all the bland and all the spicy and all the grit simmering together in the brain pan. I put the silly hat on my head and remember those people -- all odd; all dead; all mine.

The Next Voice You Hear with be That of the USF Media Studies Department

Brother David Silver has done it. He has established a blog on which Media Studies faculty will converse about things that matter to it.

(Hmmm. Interesting grammatical point. I use "it" as the relative pronoun to suggest unity among faculty. Brave pronoun!)

This could be useful. One of the glories of working at an urban school like USF is the city and the greater Bay Area. One of the disadvantages is that the faculty are (oops; things are looking plural) scattered from one end of the Bay Area to the other. Also, there is no faculty club or even an informal meeting place for faculty. So we do not engage in much casual conversation. Meetings are taken up with large and urgent issues. Neither place nor structure exists to encourage the ebb and flow, the ramble, of talk about how we teach, who our students are, what things in common out in the big world towards which we might all turn our attention and the attention of our classes.

In short, if such a blog does nothing more than build a safe BS space into our lives, it serves its purpose. Let it be a space to wander and wonder, not to proclaim!