habitual Being

» So the semester is more-or-less over and I’m in a sitch of having to decide what next and where-to-now, for the summer, but also in the timeline of the next year or so. I was offered two pretty enticing external fellowships, one through the union representing our grad employees’ local and another through a magazine (a specific West Coast Rev. of Books you can just guess). I’m grateful for both of these

Reporters describe the work they hold as comprising a rough or first “draft of history.” The contravening lede buried in this statement reflects the newspaper industry’s late historical emergence in early modern Europe. This detail can sometimes seem beside the point; in any case, historians agree that reportage makes for an essential primary source—it is indispensable in the work of interpreting the modern past.

» I didn’t want to stay in CT, so I’m accepting the union fellowship which includes five weeks in NYC and Michigan, paid and with per diem and honorarium and a scholarship to take a grad cert at the School of Labor and Urban studies- I’m pretty charmed by it, as it is…

Historians can often find themselves moonlighting as half-time media critics. That is-misconceptions about the media timelines can sometimes seem to under-gird arguments and assumptions re reportage and its value as a primary source.

In engaging with past journalism, any good “history-from-below” can and should resist appealing to vaguer notions of transhistoricism. The press, among other institutions does not transcend time and space. Historical work is at its most rooted when it involves interrogation of the kinds of claims that suggest structures and ideas exist unaffected by time’s signature.

» I’m more interested in exploring writing that exists outside the spectrum of academic versus trade, I think it’s pretty boring. I think poetry could offer that and I do write lyrics but I’m also bored by the opportunities and/or lack thereof that exist in that range of pursuits. The piece that’s intersecting this is one I wrote for Radical History Review’s blog the abusable past, they never got back to my pitch so I’m cutting it up and posting it here. It’s about journalism obviously and its use as a primary source. The idea of cutting up the secondary and otherwise is pretty interesting to me. I feel pretty bored with the notion of constructing something using words sort of like been there done that and that’s that

and by the way there’s two words for that in the spanish/castellano language, there’s esto and aquello which were always explained to me by Senor Valero aka Don Frank as being that and that over there. so if you want or wanted to say i like that sculpture and hate that one over there you’d say « me gusta esa escultera y odio aquella »

The journalistic ethics of today’s newsrooms have not been the norm, historically speaking. Sensationalizing practices of so-defined yellow journalism have defined press practice, notably in the United States, but also elsewhere. The textbook example is the Necessary War (known stateside as the Spanish-American War), but there are others—up to and including the muckrakers of the Progressive Era. That moment produced great journalism, notably Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; though there are others that are less inscrutable and have not held up to the record.

At this time and earlier, the press was understood to have a more expansive role than that of a merely neutral source of news. Dating back further to the War of Independence, the press was seen by readers as a site for vested interest and trade, as well as a virtual vox populi and square for public exchange.

« I could only be interested in speaking to an audience for a long time because I was encouraged to follow my voice and building a bridge into which I could step through it and over it into it. and maybe others could go the other way. I remember writing a short fictional narrative adapted from a play, I did it for an English class in HS that i didn’t really care and i got a C+ in the course i think C-plus for care plus

Only as the press matured into a fuller-fledged industry—through the Gilded Age and into the early twentieth century—did norms, and understandings of the role of the press, evolve. Even so, the status of the press as a vehicle and mouthpiece for vested commercial interest continued to consolidate itself. In another example, William Randolph Hearst sought the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency, openly using his platform and media holdings to that end. These are just stateside examples, though they are hardly exceptional.

» but anyway I’m pretty surprised and even maybe shocked by the degree of sheer didacticism in the program i’m in. I worked as a publish writer and i wanted to try something different and i don’t really care about being published anymore because i’m secure in that and if i wanted to i know i could get other opportunities at this point. i wanted to do something different. and it’s interesting because the focus is very much on publish-or-die BS which i’m a little surprised by which maybe speaks to my naivete

The press as a political and institutional bloc inflected at the Age of Revolution—making manifest the mid-eighteenth century’s complex web of allegiances, ideas, and subjectivities. The Fourth Estate exists in clear reference to the three political classes of Ancien-Régime France. The term is accurate: as the Bourbon Regime collapsed, newspapers emerged as sources of not just information but as sites of political education.

Charlotte Corday’s killing of Jean-Paul Marat, the editor-revolutionary of the pro-Montagnard paper L’Ami du peuple, was a culmination and catalyst of these tensions. At this time, as in other parts of Europe and North America, papers bore open allegiance to political and commercial figures and ideas. There was no divide between what was news and what might now be considered “editorial” because no distinction really existed.

This in turn illustrates a crucial point of historical memory-mapping: contrasts must be drawn between competing claims to the past. Any good historian knows this. Claims journalism’s holding truth to power are made in good faith. They are, at best, motivated by an honest commitment to press freedom. Inscribed within these, however, is a faith in markets as a vector of ideas and claims.

The emergence of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere mid-2000s was could have been a moment of change in this regard. At the time it was thought to be so—it ultimately wasn’t—and it’s pretty fitting to think that Time published it’s “Year of You” issue in December 2006, a few months the recommitment of US military in Iraq (appropriately editorialized as “the Surge”). Anyone can now pretty openly acknowledge that the US invasion of Iraq three years earlier was by encouraged by falsehoods pushed by the Bush Administration. These were poorly-reported by, among others, the New York Times.

Any rigorous history-from-below hinges on seeing time as more than a line plotted along an x-axis. History is a coordinate system of memory; a web of contesting chronologies, it is planar, not vectoral. Historians—especially those concerned with what it means to present people’s history—should recognize the labor of love in parsing subjectivities. It seems there is less faith in applying this principle to reportage as it is applied to other primary sources.

These complications cast in high relief a reality that the journalistic record is always in various states of completion and coherence. I’m reminded of the Rolling Stones single, “Yesterday’s Papers,” from their 1967 Between the Buttons album. “Who wants yesterday’s papers”— He is singing about a girl; an entire subjectivity reduced to mere object-hood, she exists in a kind of permanent past tense. The same is as true of the “paper” as it is true of the “girl.” It is simultaneously fitting and ironic that the song was written in at a time of profound change. Reportage gives a glimpse into the emergence , the impacts of which may only be clearer in hindsight.