After returning to my google reader account for the first time in a few days (I spent the weekend gallivanting about the increasingly gentrified North East section of DC), I realized that whether or not I actually catch back up on a blog is pretty much exclusively determined by how they write.
That’s not to say I don’t continue reading blogs after an absence, but let’s just say I’m more tempted to click “mark all read” on the legal blogs I follow than on something as thoroughly entertaining as Molly Schneider’s blog Things That Make Me Stabby (Of course, that does assume that she actually updates more than once every few months, but hey, everything up until this was really just an anecdote that only serves to introduce Molly’s blog anyway).
Now, Molly’s posts are really only tangentially related to what I’m writing about (she complains about random things in her life – primarily those that, shockingly, make her stabby), but since she’s a PhD student in film studies at Northwestern, she tends to write about or at least reference the changes in media culture in her posts. And I think that’s what makes her blog a lot more interesting to me than the various blogs that primarily serve to make arguments (like Blackspot, which I referenced last week) – she displays how her academic training influences the other spheres of her life, rather than constantly focusing on her academia.
Take her most recent post, “Bally Total Fitness, aka the Corporate Panopticon,” for example. Molly immediately establishes the absurdity of Bally Total Fitness by (re?)reading it as a “technodystopian cult.” But her analysis goes no where near the straight forward, logical structure of “here are the characteristics of a cult, and this is how Bally meets them.” Instead, she offers a couple consecutive sentences that not only reference Greek mythology, but also World War One politics and Michel Foucault – with pictures.
Really, this analysis is self-consciously academic. She knows the words she is using establish her as brilliant and Bally as an absurd, corporate structure that is part of a “fitness industrial complex,” or perhaps more closely resembling Nazi Germany – and the pictures she uses certainly help her case.
The best part about the blog, however, is not this super close reading of something that has become awkwardly normalized, but what comes next. After Molly has effectively established not only her intellectual superiority through high-level word choice and both name and concept dropping (I mean, come on, the title of the post has the word “panopticon” in it – which she assumes the reader knows and only alludes to in a middle paragraph), she goes on not to critique the idea of fitness clubs, but just rant about how awful their customer service is and the difficulty of canceling a membership.
And throughout the rest of the post, the academic word choice that is pretty much ubiquitous through the first chunk dissipates. The patronizing, condescending tone, however, gets much, much stronger. She relays, in extreme(ly biased) detail exactly what happened throughout the entire contract and contract canceling process. And her previously cool, somewhat detached tone becomes an angry rant because this, not the general panoptic structure, is what makes Molly stabby.
She relays at various points IN ALL CAPS THINGS THAT BALLY AND ITS EMPLOYEES DO THAT ARE ABSURD. Like saying there is no contract but then handing you a contract and contract ID number. Or generally just saying BULLSHIT to the fact that there’s only a 2 week window to cancel without going into a third month. Or that the manager of the gym belongs to a different gym (she actually says that in all caps twice).
And in case her relaying a few events wasn’t enough to prove Bally’s absolute incompetence, she then relays her conversation where she tries to cancel over the phone – obviously to no avail, or she’d probably be less upset. And all throughout it are the hints (overtones) of condescension and the “inside knowledge” that she has – like after saying her favorite “super passive aggressive shaming techniques” ("I'm sorry that you work for a company that doesn't give you the tools to do your job effectively.”), that she knows higher ups listen to angry phone calls.
All in all, Molly’s writing is fascinating because it tries to present an academic relationship to the world at large, and not just to traditionally analyzed topics. More than that, though, it uses academic training to establish a clear dominance over whatever she is complaining about so when she relays her side of the story, it’s hard to think it or imagine that the other side, the zombie-constructing, corporate fetish club filled with heiling Sisyphus-es could be anything other than incompetent.
And if you’re like me and think that fitness clubs are more or less the bane of contemporary society, it’s all a pleasure to read.
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