The Enlightening Discourse of Boers & Berstein

Ah Facebook...

You so often serve as a useless window, staring at the brick wall of human inanity, but sometimes - just sometimes - you illuminate the world around us - just a little bit.

As I've been perusing "the news" on Facebook over the last few days, reading first the meatball lead-up to a typically heart-wrenching end to a Chicago Bears season followed by alternately whiny Bears fan tearing their young, injured quarterback apart for appearing on film looking disappointed about not finishing the biggest game of his life and gloating Packer's fans, I've noticed a disturbing trend.

The tone and substance of the posts and comments that the end of the football season is being discussed are frighteningly similar to the parallel comments on the outcome and lead up to the 2010 elections. The gloating, the often vicious (or at least thoughtless) commentary, the bombastic tone - and ultimately the pathetically uncritical scope of most of the writing on facebook about sports events, elections... anything really demonstrates one of the real shortcomings of the medium.

Not so, though, the medium of the radio. Much like television, radio has enormous potential for imparting information in useful ways. Marshall McLuhan called radio the...


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July 2018
..."tribal drum".  What strikes me as most amazing about not just this observation of McLuhan's, but most of his work, is how prescient his writing is today


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October 2018
... and even today.  Or moreso today! 

The Tribal Drum seems like exactly the theme I was planning to return to not so long ago.  Boers & Bernstein has been the sound of Chicago Sports Talk Radio (and importantly, The Score has always been that same voice) of the aughts and most of the 2010s.  This post, despite its academic and leftist turn, was first and foremost a celebration of the best Sports Talk Show that I've ever know. 

Noam Chomksy (via Michael Moore) was the first person to point out to me that the discourse found on a typical sports talk radio show was more elevated than the discussions found on any NPR or news radio or (general right wing) talk radio in the United States. 

I don't mean to pretend that there is not a meatball contingent in sports talk - just that there is an equal or larger meatball contingent in any news broadcast (I'm looking at all y'all FOX News, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, ABCNBCBS, blech).

Chomsky & Moore point out that the American populace is not, as often seems the case, uninformed unintelligent unsophisticated.  If you listen to callers on sports talk radio (not all of them, but the good ones) the extent to which they are informed and intelligent, and their arguments sophisticated.  B&B ensured this - they elevated conversations and called out bullshit when it wafted in.

Our political dialogue today seems like our sports fandom.  Even more so in 2018 as it was in 2011, but it's been a trend line since the 1990s.  The primary difference between the two reveals itself on sports talk radio - the ability to be self critical and diagnose the problems within your own team. 

Of course the part that's easy to forget is that we're all on the same team...

Extra! Ordinary! Read all About it...

In his latest collection of short stories, Stephen King puts forth an argument for his own brand of "non-literary" fiction.  Full Dark, No Stars is a grim, harsh book.  The stories are, typical of Stephen King, both hard and easy to read.  They are stories of seemingly typical Americans

Source: Inverse.com

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February 2019

Uncle Steve is among my favorite people living or dead.  Since starting this post about his really great collection of short stories, i've subsequently read The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, his (i think still) most recent collection.

King is an exceptional short story writer.  He's also a pretty good epicist.  But unlike this latter, the former is exceedingly rare in modern literature.  King's stories are about something.  They are structured and planned and plotted.

As opposed to contemporary (often self-proclaimed) literary authors, King's stories go somewhere.  They begin and end.  They're clean and tight - rarely any longer than they need to be.  They're surprising and sometimes not.  "The Dune" (in TBOBD) is like an O. Henry and M. Night brain baby.

(When i started this place, i was in my 20s and in a work group of 3 Master's students working on their theses.  Jon was writing about blogs, Paul was writing about Bret Easton Ellis {and in part book blurbs}, i was writing about zombies - and around the same time i was re-reading and writing about House of Leaves.  On my copy of HOL there is a blurb by Ellis, which talks about the greats of horror writing, Poe, King... - i forget the rest - bowing down to Mark Z. Danielewski.  As i was trying to write the sentence about "The Dune", i was thinking all of this and trying to make the O. Henry and M. Night figures do the same to the story...

Which leads me to some alternate names for this blog that i never considered before now:

• Life is in the Parentheses 
• Living Parenthetical

)

I think my other most recent reading of short stories was the collection by April Wilder.  I liked some of them, but they are the epitome of contemporary fiction - Seinfeld fiction.  The stories - the ones i like and the ones i don't - wander around characters without knowing exactly why or where we're headed.  

Not unlike these blog posts i suppose.