Hey Folks,
So if you didn't know, I'm switching to a different site. I'll still be checking in from time to time because this has a much better window to let you follow people from multiple sites, but I won't be posting very often anymore.
Here's the new one:
jeremymichaelreed.tumblr.com
See all you Marshall folks soon for Thanksgiving,
Jeremy
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Fog-Filled Morning
Fog is its own thing.
I walked outside this morning and it was just hazy. Everything seemed heavy and quiet. For some reason it seemed as if no one was supposed to be outside. Rather than the normal fifty-some people I see on my walk, I only saw three or four.
I walked past a few people and then felt a raindrop. It wasn't raining, it was just a single drop. And then another. But they were spread out enough that I could tell they weren't going to suddenly break into some downpour, and I was absolutely sure that I wasn't going to hear any thunder or see any streak of light flash across the sky. It was dark, suppressed, and damp, and I'd even felt a raindrop, but I knew none of it wasn't going to open up like that. It was so finessed. So as I walked, I was able to just pay attention to those few individual raindrops. One, two. One, two.
I got to the building just fine. Nothing happened of any importance while I made my way over there. It was just my fog-filled morning.
I walked outside this morning and it was just hazy. Everything seemed heavy and quiet. For some reason it seemed as if no one was supposed to be outside. Rather than the normal fifty-some people I see on my walk, I only saw three or four.
I walked past a few people and then felt a raindrop. It wasn't raining, it was just a single drop. And then another. But they were spread out enough that I could tell they weren't going to suddenly break into some downpour, and I was absolutely sure that I wasn't going to hear any thunder or see any streak of light flash across the sky. It was dark, suppressed, and damp, and I'd even felt a raindrop, but I knew none of it wasn't going to open up like that. It was so finessed. So as I walked, I was able to just pay attention to those few individual raindrops. One, two. One, two.
I got to the building just fine. Nothing happened of any importance while I made my way over there. It was just my fog-filled morning.
Monday, September 21, 2009
"Strange Things Are Happening Everyday"
So, something kind of cool but also really interesting has been happening to me lately. I keep running into the same themes everywhere. For instance:
The other day I was having a conversation with some friends about gender roles and ended the conversation saying I didn't understand conscious prayer.
The next paragraph of my reading for my Theo class was about prayer.
Today in my theo class we spoke of gender and the garden of Gethsemane.
Yesterday some other friends of mine spoke about the changeability of God and the idea of what happened in the garden of Gethsemane.
We're reading a book in my Word & Image class that talks a lot about the silence of God.
I read a phenomenal short story this weekend that talked about God's responding to people, and gender roles, and prayer (look up Andre Dubus if you don't know him, it was great).
I read Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" for my Brit Lit class and it said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", but the idea of what creative writing is has been something I've been reading from my American Lit class, and that Jonathan Franzen collection of essays, even to trying to find some more things about Bonhoeffer in the library to reading a book by C.S. Lewis a friend wants to talk to me about, and once more in what my friend Jake mentioned about this guy named G.K. Chesterton I have to check out.
Oh, and I've been dealing with the rhythm of thought and life and conversation and religion and the truthfulness of fiction over the real world since this summer (or how about our whole lives, right?), and hey, that seems to cover just about everything.
It's just been downright uncanny.
I'm going to post a story I wrote this summer on my other blog sometime soon. Thinking of putting it in for the literary journal here on campus. It's the only thing I wrote all summer. Kind of worried about it being the only thing I submit, but for some reason I feel a hesitation to go back to what I wrote last semester in my short story writing class.
Everything's going great, just a lot at once. Although, I have a penpal back and am looking forward to figuring out what the hell I'm going to write to her, haha.
Hope you're all doing just swell.
Oh, and keep your fingers crossed for my paper I turned in today. I didn't realize until I got there that I hadn't put the Works Cited page on it. I only used one book though, so let's hope my professor overlooks it? Well, let's keep up my illusion until we can't at least.
The other day I was having a conversation with some friends about gender roles and ended the conversation saying I didn't understand conscious prayer.
The next paragraph of my reading for my Theo class was about prayer.
Today in my theo class we spoke of gender and the garden of Gethsemane.
Yesterday some other friends of mine spoke about the changeability of God and the idea of what happened in the garden of Gethsemane.
We're reading a book in my Word & Image class that talks a lot about the silence of God.
I read a phenomenal short story this weekend that talked about God's responding to people, and gender roles, and prayer (look up Andre Dubus if you don't know him, it was great).
I read Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" for my Brit Lit class and it said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", but the idea of what creative writing is has been something I've been reading from my American Lit class, and that Jonathan Franzen collection of essays, even to trying to find some more things about Bonhoeffer in the library to reading a book by C.S. Lewis a friend wants to talk to me about, and once more in what my friend Jake mentioned about this guy named G.K. Chesterton I have to check out.
Oh, and I've been dealing with the rhythm of thought and life and conversation and religion and the truthfulness of fiction over the real world since this summer (or how about our whole lives, right?), and hey, that seems to cover just about everything.
It's just been downright uncanny.
I'm going to post a story I wrote this summer on my other blog sometime soon. Thinking of putting it in for the literary journal here on campus. It's the only thing I wrote all summer. Kind of worried about it being the only thing I submit, but for some reason I feel a hesitation to go back to what I wrote last semester in my short story writing class.
Everything's going great, just a lot at once. Although, I have a penpal back and am looking forward to figuring out what the hell I'm going to write to her, haha.
Hope you're all doing just swell.
Oh, and keep your fingers crossed for my paper I turned in today. I didn't realize until I got there that I hadn't put the Works Cited page on it. I only used one book though, so let's hope my professor overlooks it? Well, let's keep up my illusion until we can't at least.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Valpoland Begin Again
So I've been back at school for a little over a week now, and it's been great and downright lonely from time to time since I stepped foot on campus.
This is the place most like home for me now, I've come to figure out. Which is nice and great and warm and inviting and all those things you would want to feel on your way back to school in the Fall.
I've also been without a roommate the entire time though, which has been both liberating and lonely. I haven't lived by myself before and have been wanting an experience like that, but in the end I still have to come back to an empty room every night. I never realized how having a roommate all last year was a comfort in a lot of ways until now.
It's funny how this is so much more of a religious place than Marshall and my group of friends there. I mean, back at Marshall most of my friends live atheistic lives or at least ones devoid of religious worry and thought. I swear, within six hours of being here I was locked into a theological/social debate.
This I find really exciting and stimulating to this noggin of mine, but at the same time can be downright draining as well. It's funny how LCMS and ELCA shenanigans don't seem to matter to the outside world, but for some people here it's all they think about.
The basic debate for the past few weeks has been about the homosexual minister proclamation of the ELCA from their August meeting. You can obviously see the metaphorical shit flying now in this "independent Lutheran" campus. So, it's been really interesting the whole time talking to people about it, but I can't shake the surreality of it. It didn't even cross my mind all summer, and I had one of my most religiously free and at the same time religious-thought-filled summers of my entire life; religiously free in my daily life and religious-thought-filled in my letters back and forth with my friend Emily, whom I met here unsurprisingly.
Anyway, if anyone wants to shoot crap about religion I'm always here because I do still find it really interesting, but every once in a while I do have to take a step back and ask what this is all about, pull myself out of the fray from time to time and look around.
Classes have been really great. My Word & Image class is going great and we're reading Plato (aka, pumped beyond belief). My Theo class is really interesting and really skewed to the left in terms of student opinions, but it should be really interesting. My Brit Lit is going amazingly, and my American Lit is kind of like a history class right now but the prof is really enthusiastic about it so that's cool. My Hispanic Lit is going well, but is more like a high school class still than any of the others, although that could be because of our having more difficulty with it as well.
I've been reading a collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen in my own spare time entitled How To Be Alone (ironic, right?) but it's been sitting on my shelf all summer and I knew I just had to get to it. It's been amazing. A lot of really cool stuff about the place fiction holds and reading holds in society today, aka for all of us, aka it still can rock your socks and has been rocking mine.
Hope all is well with all of you out there.
Bye for now.
This is the place most like home for me now, I've come to figure out. Which is nice and great and warm and inviting and all those things you would want to feel on your way back to school in the Fall.
I've also been without a roommate the entire time though, which has been both liberating and lonely. I haven't lived by myself before and have been wanting an experience like that, but in the end I still have to come back to an empty room every night. I never realized how having a roommate all last year was a comfort in a lot of ways until now.
It's funny how this is so much more of a religious place than Marshall and my group of friends there. I mean, back at Marshall most of my friends live atheistic lives or at least ones devoid of religious worry and thought. I swear, within six hours of being here I was locked into a theological/social debate.
This I find really exciting and stimulating to this noggin of mine, but at the same time can be downright draining as well. It's funny how LCMS and ELCA shenanigans don't seem to matter to the outside world, but for some people here it's all they think about.
The basic debate for the past few weeks has been about the homosexual minister proclamation of the ELCA from their August meeting. You can obviously see the metaphorical shit flying now in this "independent Lutheran" campus. So, it's been really interesting the whole time talking to people about it, but I can't shake the surreality of it. It didn't even cross my mind all summer, and I had one of my most religiously free and at the same time religious-thought-filled summers of my entire life; religiously free in my daily life and religious-thought-filled in my letters back and forth with my friend Emily, whom I met here unsurprisingly.
Anyway, if anyone wants to shoot crap about religion I'm always here because I do still find it really interesting, but every once in a while I do have to take a step back and ask what this is all about, pull myself out of the fray from time to time and look around.
Classes have been really great. My Word & Image class is going great and we're reading Plato (aka, pumped beyond belief). My Theo class is really interesting and really skewed to the left in terms of student opinions, but it should be really interesting. My Brit Lit is going amazingly, and my American Lit is kind of like a history class right now but the prof is really enthusiastic about it so that's cool. My Hispanic Lit is going well, but is more like a high school class still than any of the others, although that could be because of our having more difficulty with it as well.
I've been reading a collection of essays by Jonathan Franzen in my own spare time entitled How To Be Alone (ironic, right?) but it's been sitting on my shelf all summer and I knew I just had to get to it. It's been amazing. A lot of really cool stuff about the place fiction holds and reading holds in society today, aka for all of us, aka it still can rock your socks and has been rocking mine.
Hope all is well with all of you out there.
Bye for now.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
books pt. 2
So, I finished my summer reading this morning (I ran a little over, but I was a little over-hopeful of finishing my last pick before classes started). I don't quite remember the exact order I read them in, but I'll give you guys a run down of what I managed to fit into those last few weeks.
1. John Updike - Rabbit Run
I really enjoyed this one. It took me a couple tries to get into it, I was such a fan of his short stories I've read and this felt so different from the very beginning, but his descriptions are remarkable and the honesty he gives to Rabbit was really great. There were parts that I completely identified with and parts that I completed hated Rabbit for, but in a sense, by my reactions, Updike did pretty well. The ending was a little off for me, but not overly so. It's better in reflection than at the moment you read it.
"Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes." "He misses the familiar Lutheran liturgy, scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription."
2. Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King
I read Herzog in my senior year of high school. I picked it at random for a project. It probably changed everything. This book was a great, different version of that. More entertaining. More outrightly emotional. Still Bellow. I would have a lot of Bellow to come after a visit to Goodwill turned up some great finds, but at this point in the summer, this was one of my favorite books in a long time, immediately recognizable as such.
"We were yelling and jumping and whirling through terrified lanes, feet pounding, drums and skulls keeping pace. And meanwhile the sky was filling with hot, gray, long shadows, rain clouds, but to my eyes of an abnormal form, pressed together like organ pipes or like the ocean ammonites of Paleozoic times. With swollen throats the amazons cried and howled, and I, lumbering with them, tried to remember who I was. Me. With the slime-plastered leaves drying on my skin. The king of the rain. It came to me that still and all there must be some distinction in this, but of what kind I couldn't say."
3. T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
I'd never really read T.S. Eliot. I mean, everybody knows him. I'd read excerpts. I'd tried "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" once. This is different. In these four poems, and that's all this book is, the last four real poems of his to be published, he basically gets life. Now, I know all poets get some part of life, and some poets get the big picture of life, but the pages in my edition are kind of falling apart, the ink has worn away in some places, and meanwhile he's carrying on about the entirety of life in ways that I never dreamed would be as beautiful. He was kind of a lunatic, intellect-elitist to the extreme, and one hell of an anti-semite, but goddamned if these aren't amazing.
"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l' entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
4. Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
A good little novella. Praised nearly unanimously, but I like his novels better. Still hits home in quite a sufficient number of places.
"It can't be studied in the abstract. You have to take a specimen risk so that you feel the process, the money-flow, the whole complex. To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water." (Not the best quote by far, but I've found it came in handy quite a few times.)
5. John Kennedy Toole - The Neon Bible
Not what I expected. I'm an Arcade Fire fan. I knew they always said the album had nothing to do with the book. I now see what they mean. But it is a cool phrase, and a pretty decent book. I was pleasantly surprised at how similar parts of it were to Flannery O'Connor (and that is a big plus in my book). All in all, worth the read, and very very quick to do so.
"If it was day outside, I could see where I was. I've never been this far from home in my life. We must be almost two hundred miles away now. With nothing to see, you have to listen to the click-click-click of the train. Sometimes I hear the whistle sounding far ahead. I've heard it plenty times, but I never thought I'd be riding with it. And I don't mind the clicking. It sounds like the rain on a tin roof at night when it's quiet and still and the only thing you can hear is the rain and the thunder."
6. Saul Bellow - Mr. Sammler's Planet
Definitely the preachiest of his books that I've read so far, but the main character is also a really old man. Great parts as always, but the hardest for me to get through. The Jewish perspective of the Holocaust survivor was especially amazing to me, a viewpoint I had little time to think about when it came to the history books in school.
"No matter where you picked it up, humankind, knotted and tangled, supplied more oddities than you could keep up with."
7. Jeannette Walls - The Glass Castle
I've had and wanted to read this book since I was doing my college visit rounds a few years ago and basically every school I went to was reading this as the "All Campus Read". It's a memoir, so the only non-fiction I read all summer, but was quick and moving and didn't get stuck in mopey dumps some hard off people get in when personally explaining their pasts. This probably had to do with the ability of Walls to protray her memories as she would have seen them as a child. Short and to the point. It was a good read. Page turner.
"For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we'd moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn't do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure."
8. Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
I've seen this movie about 5 or 6 times. I love it. The images and the story never go away. This book does the same thing but about 300 times more and in a way that's about 300 times more interesting. Moving, hilarious, modern, and blurring reality and fiction. I liked it so much that this guy's first novel is now one of my favorite books. And I'm looking for his second one any chance I get.
"Love, in your writing, is the immovability of truth."
9. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Now, I really like stories that have multiple story lines and characters that really pop out at you. This is why I love One Hundred Years of Solitude and Invisible Man, and this one is really close to just as good as those ones (but that's subjective). Far and away the longest book I read this summer, it was well worth the read. There are moments in it that I will never forget, and his use of different types of communication (dialogue, letter writing, instant messaging, telephone conversations, etc) was really interesting. You can tell he doesn't plan out his novels beforehand (which apparently he doesn't), but it doesn't in any way detract from what seems to be hailed as his best work.
"Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?"
So, from here I'm starting in on school reading, which has already proved good. I'm also reading a collection of essays I found at a Goodwill by Jonathan Franzen, read The Corrections if you haven't. It should prove easy to read in chunks as I have time. I'll probably update as to school and happenings sometime this weekend just to catch everybody up on what's been going on. That's enough typing for now. Bye.
1. John Updike - Rabbit Run
I really enjoyed this one. It took me a couple tries to get into it, I was such a fan of his short stories I've read and this felt so different from the very beginning, but his descriptions are remarkable and the honesty he gives to Rabbit was really great. There were parts that I completely identified with and parts that I completed hated Rabbit for, but in a sense, by my reactions, Updike did pretty well. The ending was a little off for me, but not overly so. It's better in reflection than at the moment you read it.
"Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes." "He misses the familiar Lutheran liturgy, scratched into his heart like a weathered inscription."
2. Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King
I read Herzog in my senior year of high school. I picked it at random for a project. It probably changed everything. This book was a great, different version of that. More entertaining. More outrightly emotional. Still Bellow. I would have a lot of Bellow to come after a visit to Goodwill turned up some great finds, but at this point in the summer, this was one of my favorite books in a long time, immediately recognizable as such.
"We were yelling and jumping and whirling through terrified lanes, feet pounding, drums and skulls keeping pace. And meanwhile the sky was filling with hot, gray, long shadows, rain clouds, but to my eyes of an abnormal form, pressed together like organ pipes or like the ocean ammonites of Paleozoic times. With swollen throats the amazons cried and howled, and I, lumbering with them, tried to remember who I was. Me. With the slime-plastered leaves drying on my skin. The king of the rain. It came to me that still and all there must be some distinction in this, but of what kind I couldn't say."
3. T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
I'd never really read T.S. Eliot. I mean, everybody knows him. I'd read excerpts. I'd tried "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" once. This is different. In these four poems, and that's all this book is, the last four real poems of his to be published, he basically gets life. Now, I know all poets get some part of life, and some poets get the big picture of life, but the pages in my edition are kind of falling apart, the ink has worn away in some places, and meanwhile he's carrying on about the entirety of life in ways that I never dreamed would be as beautiful. He was kind of a lunatic, intellect-elitist to the extreme, and one hell of an anti-semite, but goddamned if these aren't amazing.
"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l' entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
4. Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
A good little novella. Praised nearly unanimously, but I like his novels better. Still hits home in quite a sufficient number of places.
"It can't be studied in the abstract. You have to take a specimen risk so that you feel the process, the money-flow, the whole complex. To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water." (Not the best quote by far, but I've found it came in handy quite a few times.)
5. John Kennedy Toole - The Neon Bible
Not what I expected. I'm an Arcade Fire fan. I knew they always said the album had nothing to do with the book. I now see what they mean. But it is a cool phrase, and a pretty decent book. I was pleasantly surprised at how similar parts of it were to Flannery O'Connor (and that is a big plus in my book). All in all, worth the read, and very very quick to do so.
"If it was day outside, I could see where I was. I've never been this far from home in my life. We must be almost two hundred miles away now. With nothing to see, you have to listen to the click-click-click of the train. Sometimes I hear the whistle sounding far ahead. I've heard it plenty times, but I never thought I'd be riding with it. And I don't mind the clicking. It sounds like the rain on a tin roof at night when it's quiet and still and the only thing you can hear is the rain and the thunder."
6. Saul Bellow - Mr. Sammler's Planet
Definitely the preachiest of his books that I've read so far, but the main character is also a really old man. Great parts as always, but the hardest for me to get through. The Jewish perspective of the Holocaust survivor was especially amazing to me, a viewpoint I had little time to think about when it came to the history books in school.
"No matter where you picked it up, humankind, knotted and tangled, supplied more oddities than you could keep up with."
7. Jeannette Walls - The Glass Castle
I've had and wanted to read this book since I was doing my college visit rounds a few years ago and basically every school I went to was reading this as the "All Campus Read". It's a memoir, so the only non-fiction I read all summer, but was quick and moving and didn't get stuck in mopey dumps some hard off people get in when personally explaining their pasts. This probably had to do with the ability of Walls to protray her memories as she would have seen them as a child. Short and to the point. It was a good read. Page turner.
"For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we'd moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn't do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure."
8. Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
I've seen this movie about 5 or 6 times. I love it. The images and the story never go away. This book does the same thing but about 300 times more and in a way that's about 300 times more interesting. Moving, hilarious, modern, and blurring reality and fiction. I liked it so much that this guy's first novel is now one of my favorite books. And I'm looking for his second one any chance I get.
"Love, in your writing, is the immovability of truth."
9. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Now, I really like stories that have multiple story lines and characters that really pop out at you. This is why I love One Hundred Years of Solitude and Invisible Man, and this one is really close to just as good as those ones (but that's subjective). Far and away the longest book I read this summer, it was well worth the read. There are moments in it that I will never forget, and his use of different types of communication (dialogue, letter writing, instant messaging, telephone conversations, etc) was really interesting. You can tell he doesn't plan out his novels beforehand (which apparently he doesn't), but it doesn't in any way detract from what seems to be hailed as his best work.
"Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?"
So, from here I'm starting in on school reading, which has already proved good. I'm also reading a collection of essays I found at a Goodwill by Jonathan Franzen, read The Corrections if you haven't. It should prove easy to read in chunks as I have time. I'll probably update as to school and happenings sometime this weekend just to catch everybody up on what's been going on. That's enough typing for now. Bye.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
News Stations and My Loss of Respect for Brian Williams
"We are all in a front seat to history"
Well, yes, Brian Williams, that is true. We're all sitting here watching tons of "titanic" things go on in front of our eyes and we can only wonder how everyone else will react.
"Making Sense of it All. That's what we do."
Well, no, Brian Williams, that is not true. That's not what you're supposed to do as a newsanchor. You're supposed to simply tell us the news. Journalism is supposed to have a removed, objective stance that does not include the author. This isn't Gonzo journalism here, you're NBC news. Just report.
Now, I fully understand that NBC is nowhere near the only ones making this mistake, but a commercial aired this morning with Brian Williams explaining oh so graciously those statements I quoted above. When will the news report news without its own stance ingrained in the program or without their own aims and wishes being pushed? Really, that's all I want from you.
I don't want the Today show to have two hours of home-making and fluff slots and weddings. I want Ann Curry at her desk giving me a run down of what happened while I'm asleep, but with no cute aside at the end. I want the interviews and one-on-one pieces to be "specials" on at a different time of night. When I turn on the news, I want the news and only the news.
Now, the stations with the biggest threat of falling into giving me more than I want and with the worst track record in that are the 24 hour news stations. Down the line. NBC, CBS, FOX (dear god), and CNN too.
I've come to terms with Fox being a station of opinion pieces. That's also why I don't watch it.
NBC and CBS can have it out if they so desire, but it's not like I'm going to watch them if they don't step it up a notch here.
CNN. I do watch these guys, but that's why more than nearly any other, they make me sick. I mean, I can't deal with Wolf Blitzer for four hours. I really can't. I also can't deal with your reporting being so reliant on Facebook and Twitter. Actually do your own reporting. And the guy you have doing your mid-day news from Georgia, he can take a hike too. Looks like he took a few tips from Kathie Lee over at the Today Show. He just makes fluff jokes amid actual reporting that could be going on.
Now, Jon Stewart is funny because all of what I've said is true and he's better at picking it out than I am. But in terms of real newscasters out there doing their jobs, they do exist. Campbell Brown can really do a decent job. I've seen some of her interviews from the campaign last fall and they were what they needed to be, not acquiescing to the candidate's wishes but reporting what needed to be reported and asking what needed to be asked. I've only seen her show a couple times, but it also seems to be decent. Anderson Cooper could do a decent job if he didn't do those weird trying-to-get-the-common-person pieces, like video clips and viewer winner things, and all those really witty self-deprecating jokes he allows on his show via that sidekick. It just makes him look like a game show host, or like he's trying to one up The Soup.
RIP Walter Cronkite. He had his own interesting views, but he could report. Because they have nothing to do with each other. Weird thought, I know.
I don't know what I or anyone else will take out of this but what happened to real newscasting? Just cast it, we're all here to pick it up. And for god's sakes, Brian Williams, don't make sense of events for me before "reporting" them, if that's still what you call what you do. Just tell me what happened as unbiasedly as you can, and I can go from there. Thanks.
Well, yes, Brian Williams, that is true. We're all sitting here watching tons of "titanic" things go on in front of our eyes and we can only wonder how everyone else will react.
"Making Sense of it All. That's what we do."
Well, no, Brian Williams, that is not true. That's not what you're supposed to do as a newsanchor. You're supposed to simply tell us the news. Journalism is supposed to have a removed, objective stance that does not include the author. This isn't Gonzo journalism here, you're NBC news. Just report.
Now, I fully understand that NBC is nowhere near the only ones making this mistake, but a commercial aired this morning with Brian Williams explaining oh so graciously those statements I quoted above. When will the news report news without its own stance ingrained in the program or without their own aims and wishes being pushed? Really, that's all I want from you.
I don't want the Today show to have two hours of home-making and fluff slots and weddings. I want Ann Curry at her desk giving me a run down of what happened while I'm asleep, but with no cute aside at the end. I want the interviews and one-on-one pieces to be "specials" on at a different time of night. When I turn on the news, I want the news and only the news.
Now, the stations with the biggest threat of falling into giving me more than I want and with the worst track record in that are the 24 hour news stations. Down the line. NBC, CBS, FOX (dear god), and CNN too.
I've come to terms with Fox being a station of opinion pieces. That's also why I don't watch it.
NBC and CBS can have it out if they so desire, but it's not like I'm going to watch them if they don't step it up a notch here.
CNN. I do watch these guys, but that's why more than nearly any other, they make me sick. I mean, I can't deal with Wolf Blitzer for four hours. I really can't. I also can't deal with your reporting being so reliant on Facebook and Twitter. Actually do your own reporting. And the guy you have doing your mid-day news from Georgia, he can take a hike too. Looks like he took a few tips from Kathie Lee over at the Today Show. He just makes fluff jokes amid actual reporting that could be going on.
Now, Jon Stewart is funny because all of what I've said is true and he's better at picking it out than I am. But in terms of real newscasters out there doing their jobs, they do exist. Campbell Brown can really do a decent job. I've seen some of her interviews from the campaign last fall and they were what they needed to be, not acquiescing to the candidate's wishes but reporting what needed to be reported and asking what needed to be asked. I've only seen her show a couple times, but it also seems to be decent. Anderson Cooper could do a decent job if he didn't do those weird trying-to-get-the-common-person pieces, like video clips and viewer winner things, and all those really witty self-deprecating jokes he allows on his show via that sidekick. It just makes him look like a game show host, or like he's trying to one up The Soup.
RIP Walter Cronkite. He had his own interesting views, but he could report. Because they have nothing to do with each other. Weird thought, I know.
I don't know what I or anyone else will take out of this but what happened to real newscasting? Just cast it, we're all here to pick it up. And for god's sakes, Brian Williams, don't make sense of events for me before "reporting" them, if that's still what you call what you do. Just tell me what happened as unbiasedly as you can, and I can go from there. Thanks.
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