My love of The Wire connects pretty well with my interest in David Harvey, who taught at Hopkins for a long time and treated Baltimore as an immense site for empirical geographical work. I also suspect that the show’s taking place in Baltimore is part of Walter Benn Michael’s fascination with it, which he’s polished up for a piece in the newest issue of The Baffler.1
Anyway, I’m reading Harvey’s 2001 collection Spaces of Capital, which includes several of his old articles from the 1970s in Antipode, which is by itself cool. But the book begins with an interview from 2000 with the editors of the New Left Review (so, before The Wire made thinking about Baltimore cool), and in it the editors ask Harvey what the “particular profile” of Baltimore is, as an American city. He responds:
In many ways, it is emblematic of the processes that have moulded cities under US capitalism, offering a laboratory sample of contemporary urbanism. But, of course, it has its own distinctive character as well. Few North American cities have as simple a power structure as Baltimore. After 1900, big industry largely moved out of the city, leaving control in the hands of a rich elite whose wealth was in real estate and banking. There are no corporate headquarters in Baltimore today, and the city is often referred to as the biggest plantation in the South, since it is run much like a plantation by a few major financial institutions.
I read this and immediately saw the contemporary US. Congrats, America. We’re all turning into Baltimore.
- This post already sounds like all my favorite musicians taking the stage at once to play “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” or something. [↩]
Tags: david harvey, The Baffler, The Wire, Walter Benn Michaels
January 14th, 2010 at 22:14
Are you actually back to blogging? I need to know before I commit to this. Re: Baltimore, preach on!
January 15th, 2010 at 12:31
I don’t think tweeting a bunch and sharing google articles is enough of an online persona to satisfy @academicdave’s demand: “Be online or be irrelevant” (http://academhack.outsidethete.....rrelevant/), so I think it might be useful if I do a little more value added stuff about things I’m reading, etc. Or if I argue out the points I’m trying to make in what I’m writing “officially.”
Basically, when I went on hiatus the first time, I wanted to come back with a blog that reflected/used whatever it was I was doing in grad school. Doing that instead of grad school work, however, quickly became a huge guilt trip. So now I’m trying to figure out a space in the middle, by not, for example, spending 2 days researching a *blog post*.
January 16th, 2010 at 12:44
I think there is some un-necessarily harsh differentiation between “blog post” and “work”. That is, the research you do writing a blogpost is well, research that can be useful. Ok, maybe not on the Radiohead but you get my drift.
Aaron, for example, pretty much seems to do a lot of his heavy lifting on the blog, and I find, in retrospect, that a lot of links/arguments I made on CM helped me maintain the narrative thread in my head (not to mention, serve as an archive) for my “work”.
January 16th, 2010 at 19:22
Yeah, I don’t see it as a binary, which is the problem. If the blog were just blowing off steam, telling silly jokes at the end of a long day of “real” writing, that’d be one thing. But because I’m trying to make it part of the “real” writing, I get the feeling that I should spend time on the “real” writing, circular as that sounds.
But yeah, your and Aaron’s blogs have been inspirational in this regard, since they’re engaged largely with each of your work. Many blogs by PhD students–and this isn’t a criticism–often become somehow meta or about the process itself. I write posts like that, too, and my “Humanities Dissertation Project” category itself is made up of those kinds of posts.
I wish, however, that I wrote more posts along these lines: as soon as I found out that “Avatar” opened itself up to strong readings along the lines of empire and race, I knew that I’d be able to look forward to at least one post on the subject between you and Aaron. So I want to figure out what it is about what I’m doing that lends itself to that sort of thing. “Oh, crap, x happened. I wanna know what Moacir has to say!” Then, I think, this silly little page will have found its voice.
January 20th, 2010 at 17:01
I was actually just thinking about this; it’s not a resolution, but a hope that I can further integrate my blog writing into the academic process this year, which seems like a much more long-term effort than it originally did. I think you’re right that a lot of academics emphasize the personal experience of writing much more than the thinking itself in their blogs, which is one of those self-perpetuating things: blogs aren’t “real” publishing, a fact which both causes and is caused by not publishing “real” scholarship on them. But I’ve found it to be an invaluable part of my writing routine, even if there are some trade-offs.
The archival thing, for example, is really helpful. More personally, to wax meta about the process, I write in the morning because I can write most clearly when I’m fully rested, but I also sometimes have sleep problems which cause me to wake up at four in the morning when I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep to write the kind of hyper-compressed and polished prose the dissertation requires. It’s an anxiety thing about writing, I think, which is also self-perpetuating: I need the early-morning, fully-rested thing to write, but that process sometimes causes me to wake up needing-to-write before I’m fully rested (and therefore be unable to get back to sleep because dammitIneedtowrite!!!!!!1111!!!1). Blogging helps me mediate that; I can pick away at little ideas and bits of the dissertation, or chase down random tangents, or just write about whatever, without the pressure of perfection bearing down on me and making the anxiety a thousand times worse (OHMYGOD ILLNEVERGETAJOB UNLESSITSPERFECT ISUCKIHATEMYWRITING,etc)
Of course, the larger thing it does is put me in contact with other people thinking about the same problems, people like y’all, which is one thing the academy is becoming increasingly terrible at doing. So yay!