eight years later (how i met the outcomes)

I found that I had written 25 posts in the month since the midterm, which is not half bad, as far as production goes. I was happy with the trajectory I was on, and mostly wanted to focus on taking my thoughts deeper, as I am slightly manic and had to discard about three post ideas for every one I wrote. I began to focus on the themes of memory and the writings of Wallace Stegner, with lots of support in non-fiction. I served as a fearless team leader for non-fiction week, and those on my team seemed pleased with my input while contributing many valuable insights and readings of their own. (I would love to see a class at the university dedicated to reading travel writing!) I drafted a solid final paper as well as literary analysis. I am proud of what I have accomplished, considering that I had once fled the institution of BYU altogether.

TERMS + METHODS

In assigning a personal essay during non-fiction week, I certainly had to grapple with the terms. If I couldn't explain them, how could the class write them? I was pleased to see such an outpouring of creativity when it came to writing in a scriptural, speech, or travelogue style: these posts became among those with the most views! I was able to gather several terms relating to neuroscience from my personal reading, and building a quote bank helped me analyze Stegner's fiction. As a self-declared reference maven, I've been sounding the depths of literary terms and methods since January! (Seriously, the library's databases are so cool. Go on Simmons OneView's market research database right now. There are wayyyy more espresso drinkers in this country than Mormons, for starters.)

GENRES + TEXTS

For #dramz week, I was able to delve deeper into a genre that is just plain fun. (I did become a dedicated Studio C fan: they use allusion, litote, and repetition, for the record.) I continued my Essayist of the Day series with William James. Considering this man's pedigree (he's the brother of Henry James, whom I cannot avoid in my personal reading, whether I want to or not), I was glad to have the grounding. It was pretty dense, even for me, but indirectly informed my thinking.

ARGUMENTS

I saw the most productivity in this line, which is good, as that was my goal for the midterm: more in-depth analysis. I'm especially proud of the piece on Usher, the Shins, Diphthongs, and Hexameter. It got a good response, along the lines of "only Charly would have that take." The Shins alone are cryptic enough to produce three PhD dissertations. This was my most corpus-based analysis, and hit a lot of the literary terms, not for brownie points, but in strengthening the argument itself.

It was lovely being able to contrast the play version of Holiday, the movie The Philadelphia Story, and the textual version/movie of The Importance of Being Earnest. I'm an artsy person, but don't necessarily take the time to critically compare to this depth unless prompted. I think good reviews go beyond surface questions of "what happened" into the "why." I hope you, the reader, were convinced that Holiday is more like Earnest than Philadelphia Story is! (The conservative status quo vs. progressivism is an obsession of mine, later explored in our final John Donne exercise.)

I was able to put a "Mormon hat" on for Billy Loman and men's roles in society. Both Arthur Miller and Dieter Uchtdorf have this trope of "all the world's a stage" to draw from, which says something about its staying power.

In the fourth-most-popular post on the blog (haha, who am I kidding, it's because of the group assignment ;-)  ), I made an argument that we can use Saussure's ideas about the signified and the signifier to more productively analyze social networks. It was nice to use those PoMo muscles even though, to be frank, I am not really a fan and find the whole movement to be pretentious. A post-modern social construct, though, may need a post-modern toolbox.

Nearly all of my pre-writing for the Stegner paper was about staking claims and making arguments. (More information on how this paper came together can be seen in that post.) My mother always said that I was an argumentative person, so having this debate with myself was a natural outgrowth of my personality. From the pitch, to claiming a thesis, to engaging the counterargument, to seeking a good title, I honed my persuasive writing skills.

I like the flexibility of the English minor: between Persuasive Writing, Writing Fiction, and this course, I feel that I have become a stronger writer and have been able to fashion a minor that will serve me well in my professional writing career. Some of these pieces, like the one on Crossing to Safety, I'd be happy to expand to bona fide reviews.

CR8IV + SOCIAL

I learned some good things about what to do and not do when engaging literature socially. (I am something of a nerd, and more learning in this sphere can't hurt, let's be honest.)

I got dragged to a dinner theater Sherlock Holmes production: analyzing it justified my dislike. I was able to get my writing group's friends' feedback by posting on a message board on which I am a very active poster. I value their opinion and incorporated it into my so-called "tweethis." I even made a Goodreads friend by looking for reviews of Crossing to Safety.

I do not consider myself to be a talented visual artist, but making a sketch of a Stegner quote gave me a structure with which to work.

The most serendipitous social encounter I had was with a poetry slam which I only considered because of classmate Hilary's paper on the subject. Unfortunately, I was thwarted when no poets showed up, but great art is worth going out of our way for.

TOOLS + PEDAGOGY

Adding a Recent Comments widget should be worth at least a 2% grade boost, I'd estimate. :-) It made the daunting task of keeping up with the blog a lot more pleasant, and I hope it was useful to everyone else as it was to me. Further feedback from the class and writing group showed me which tools work for me and which don't. (Facebook: no one cares.)

In general, I felt that I was both learning and teaching. I am an experienced blogger, and was glad to help my classmates, and found the tools of blogging led me to get to know my classmates better than I usually would. I was an early adopter of Goodreads, but integrating it into coursework was really helpful, and got me thinking about genre. Although the class was exhausting, when reviewing it, I put a high percentage for "out of class time being useful to my learning."

In Conclusion

Thanks for going on this crazy journey with me, everyone. I'm not done reading, and I'm certainly not done writing seriously about literature. Follow me on Goodreads. Add me on Facebook. Email me. I'll be starting as a tech writer, but hope to move into reviewing and fiction writing, as well.

With that, I'm done. Enter to Learn. Go Forth to Serve. All that good cheesy stuff.

officially done!

no agenda but to tell the truth: the story of my paper

Writing "Surmounted, Comprehended, Possessed" was a three-week project, serving as a capstone of sorts for my collegiate career.

One of my favorite aspects was the initial pitch. I was pleased that Dr. Burton found this framework to be useful enough to encourage everyone in the class to sell their story. My ideas were not yet in thesis form, but I was enthusiastic about the material, and I got a lot of feedback at this stage in the game from both classmates and writing friends.

Writing five types of claims was a good way to narrow my scope as well as broaden my interest (funny how that works, huh?). My final thesis finally made an appearance two weeks ago; if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be this:

Authors, by creating fictional worlds, rewrite our experience of real spaces: this act of (re-)creation mirrors the act of writing itself.

I was excited to use the lens of Wallace Stegner's writing to prove my point. I had been planning on saving Crossing to Safety for my plane ride to Madison (ten days!); but it didn't last the night. I borrowed the concept of the hungry reader for my paper from Larry Morgan.

Now came outlining and brainstorming time. I always make a quote bank, and defending why I care helped me defend not just the value of Recapitulation, but to flesh out my ideas on how reading physically changes the brain.

My central conceit came from making a sketch of Wallace Stegner's quote about Salt Lake City—just as Dr. Burton is somewhat obsessed with Moby-Dick, I find deep metaphorical meaning in the layout of my hometown—and the chief counterargument I had to address was found in my personal learning in "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" This made my argument feel more timely and essential.

The turning point in actually drafting the paper came a week ago in searching for a good title. This gave me the three-part structure I was searching for (reader as observer, author as builder, literature changes us). I was able to quickly make notes from all this previously culled information. The central body of the paper came together well, and I used previously-written material in the introduction.

My spirit animal.

It was at this point that the social-learning component got serious. I had been getting comments from trusty members of Team Nonfiction throughout, and my writer friends were mostly interested in discussing the counterargument, so I had Hilary "Slam Poet" Packham read my draft in person. I am so glad I chose someone who could give me a fresh take on the essay: she was the single most-helpful critic, and I hope I was able to give her some Grammar Goddess (LOL) pointers of my own. She was articulate in telling me what was working, and what wasn't.

I also had my grandma read a hard copy. She can spot a dangling preposition like a hawk, having worked as a secretary for over fifty years. She was always able to tell me when I needed to clarify and put things in laywoman's terms, as she has little familiarity with either the author or neuroscience.

The least helpful aspect of my social learning was running it by my boyfriend. Not only did the "assignment" keep getting put off, I started to feel less like a girlfriend and more like a nag. His points were vague, far too late to be of any real use, and made me had a full-blown nervous breakdown. Having him critique my work made me feel like he was criticizing me, and clearly I am too deeply neurotic to take it. The only thing I got out of it was the moving of some paragraphs. In the future, I will definitely keep the romantic and professional spheres strictly separate!

Due to my own personal Charity "Where's Your Ambition, What Are You Doing in Life?!" Lang moment, the conclusion was hard-won, but I am satisfied with it, nonetheless. Here it is:

Through the unfolding sagas of Bruce Mason and Larry Morgan, we not only come to a greater understanding of their characters and of Wallace Stegner, we come to understand ourselves. Mirror neurons light up not just when we experience something, but when we imagine experiencing it. As adolescents and young adults, many readers have their first encounters with the powerful realities of sex, love, and death within the pages of a book. Both author and reader can experience catharsis through edification and consumption.Though reading may not be inherently virtuous or character-building, it does, biologically, demand sustained attention, imagination, and critical thinking. That legere—the sifting, choosing, collecting, judging—is ultimately up to us. As readers surmounting the great bowl valley of life, would we ultimately have it any other way?

it's the final countdown

In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep/ I write conclusions, and MLA bibliographies

Obstacles were surmounted. Ideas were comprehended. Hearts were possessed.

Enjoy.

reference maven

For the past five months, I have worked at the Humanities Reference Desk on the fifth floor of the library. I am uniquely qualified to find general reference works, because I am supposed to help other people find them.

From the library home page, I went to the drop-down subject guides, and selected English Literatures.

From there, under References, I selected American Literature. I clicked on Gale's Literature Resource Center for Contemporary Authors. I put in Wallace Stegner (shocking, I know) and got a rather extensive biography of him.

I knew most the biographical stuff, and could find that on Wikipedia, frankly. It was the critical analysis which I found more useful. I searched for "ism"  and got environmentalism and individualism. I was able to organically incorporate this quotation about his overall work:

Although admitting that Stegner's fiction is "almost invariably set in the western United States," Richard H. Simpson of the Dictionary of Literary Biography believed that his "main region is the human spirit... Each [novel] explores a question central in Stegner's life and in American culture: How does one achieve a sense of identity, permanence, and civilization--a sense of home-- in a place where rootlessness and discontinuity dominate?"

I am glad that I can use what I teach others to do. The subject guides are well-designed, and Robert Means, the subject librarian, is an affable fellow.

poetry slam: thwarted

When I saw this in SugarHouse, I immediately whipped out my phone and emailed Hilary over at Team Poetry. I had read her essay on slam poetry, which had aroused my interest in the genre.

Such promise! Such excitement!

She told me to go as her proxy, and I would not fail her. After a weekend trip up to Bear Lake and Logan, I told my boyfriend to come check it out with me.

No poetry was slammed that night.

No one showed up. If you're interested in checking the slam scene out, there's more info on what was supposed to happen over on this Westminster College culture site.

Disappointing, but I probably would never have made the effort without Hilary's project to pique my interest. Additionally, their fresh-squeezed watermelon juice is excellent.

Surmounted

Surmounted

Literature is about evoking a world in the mind of the reader. If the author fails to do that—what genre writers call "world-building”—then he has arguably failed the task. How we learn to read, in a post-industrial, highly textual society, is basically how we learn to think, how we learn to be. Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman's work on how we think shows us that we have a lot of heuristics we apply to everyday situations—shortcuts, really—and we are often unreliable narrators, even to ourselves.

Wallace Stegner was no cognitive scientist, but he was a particularly astute observer of human nature. We can consider him a model reader, one who has a telescopic view of the bustling city below and the human lives it contains. Much as one would read a text, one can “read” architecture. Recapitulation is grounded in the real streets, buildings, and institutions of Salt Lake City.

Philippe Hamon, a French literary theorist of the realist movement, asked, “Is there a specifically ‘literary’ vision of the city, different from the vision of the architect, the painter, the public health officer, the photographer, the politician?” (“Voir La Ville,” 1994, translation mine). Yes, there is a specifically “literary” vision of the city, and Stegner has perfectly captured what it is like to live through a city, within a city, and without (both outside and deprived of) it.

Courtesy of The Telegraph (UK)

Though we can perhaps never directly know ourselves, literature gives us a heuristic for understanding motive, love, loss, and the effects of time. In this metaphor, we may have to invert the typical image of the author as fly-on-the-wall. Here, the reader is observer and the writer is the builder. The reader, through the book, can survey both her life and society at large in the metaphorical foothills, and the author is down in the valley, erecting hotels and tennis courts with his pen.

Possessed

Possessed

            In Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, we have another largely autobiographical author avatar. In reminiscing about a life marked by voracious reading, Larry Morgan states:

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life (p. 254).

There are three main ideas that we can draw from this passage. First, that readers, by flexing the muscles of their imaginations, and becoming immersed in the world that the author creates, become citizens of the world. It was Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, who said that travel is “fatal to prejudice;” Larry Morgan had already been stretched beyond the mesas of Albuquerque by reading Milton and Dante. Second, Stegner is engaging a deep and broad literary corpus or canon.  Stegner is not easily contained by –isms:

Although admitting that Stegner's fiction is “almost invariably set in the western United States,” Richard H. Simpson of the Dictionary of Literary Biography believed that his “main region is the human spirit” (Gale Literary Databases, Contemporary Authors).

He is no mere genre writer. Third, the question which deserves the closest analysis: how is a hungry reader different from an avid one, or a merely attentive reader?

            The idea of literature as nourishment can take us far in our analysis. Ideas are not merely ephemeral; the books we read shape our very neuronal structure. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his Reading in the Brain, proposes that far from being a tabula rasa, our brains use neuronal recycling to learn to read. In reading, we adapt brain regions originally primed for other tasks (object recognition, for instance): astoundingly, the same brain regions decode the written word, whether it’s represented by the Roman alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Japanese kanji.

lit coma: Crossing to Safety (a review)

selfies in the computer lab

I spent the weekend in a kind of novel-reading coma. I was deeply offended that my copy of Crossing to Safety was two days late. So, rather than waiting til the plane ride to Wisconsin, as I had intended, I jumped into this thing like a chocoholic does into a See's store.

Aaaaaaagh this book is so good. There is my inarticulate, primal response. It just blindsides me with its ... language. Its imagery. Its believability. And its characters!

Charity Lang is not only one of my favorite characters in literature, she is perhaps the one I most relate to. Some may think that this is not particularly flattering to myself; however, it is true. She is beautiful and bossy, intelligent and controlling, idealistic and yet power-hungry. I am all of these things. Her need to acknowledge what a fun time she is having, in order to have fun? Yep. Her attempts to shape her husband into what she wants him to be? Indeed. Even her childrearing theories are remarkably like my own (untested) ones.

Not only was reading this book an unparalleled pleasure for me; not only did I make a new friend in my new locale who I think will pretty much become Larry Morgan to my Charity (a close, platonic relationship between two married couples) due to commenting on his review on Goodreads; I also found evidence for my argument!

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life. p. 254

Ding. Ding. Ding. Thank you for writing my paper for me. ;)

Whichever work you have chosen to analyze, I highly recommend reading other works by the same author. Not only is it fun, it can help you understand the author a lot better.

Searching for a Good Title

In case you can't tell, I enjoy creative, provocative titles. At the risk of being obscure or pretentious, a good, eye-catching title can really "sell" your story or essay.

I like my titles to either be clever, explanatory, or (ideally) both. Looking at the printouts of our blog posts (which I was sure to gather in because I wanted to read people's comments!), I have settled on

Surmounted, Comprehended, Possessed

I like this title because it is a direct allusion to Stegner's essay "At Home in the Fields of the Lord," and I think it also provides a good outline for my paper. I've been wrestling with the ideas of author as observer or builder, the neurological underpinnings of memory, and the text of Recapitulation itself. These are nice punchy verbs which really encapsulate these ideas of three ways Wallace Stegner, his avatar Bruce Mason, and we, as readers, interact with text.

1. We surmount it. We get up above it: in my sketch, I drew the reader in the Salt Lake foothills with a telescope. Literature broadens our horizons.
2. We comprehend it. I have absolutely loved reading essays about how we interact with literature, from Borges to William James to Oscar Wilde (a post on the latter soon, as his ideas are important to this essay, although it's hard to imagine two men more unlike each other than Stegner and Wilde. ;-) ).
3. We possess it. This is that personal connection Dr. Burton's always hounding us about. The idea that great literature does, indeed, make us better: or at the very minimum, shape who we are.

I will spend roughly two pages on each concept. About a page of textual exposition, and another page proving the point argumentatively. Embedded in all three claims is a Cause/Effect argument. 

I'm more excited to draft this thing, the last paper of my college career. And it all began with a good title!

fêted artiste

This is my attempt to engage with the following Stegner quotation:

Salt Lake City is an easy town to know. You can see it all. Lying in a great bowl valley, it can be surmounted and comprehended and possessed wholly as few cities can. … The streets are marked by a system so logical that you can instantly tell not merely where you are but exactly how far you are from anywhere else … Looking into the blank walls of cities … breeds things in people that eventually have to be lanced.

Do you agree with me that the reader is the observer? Or do you think the author is the observer? Weigh in in the comments!

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

In my personal reading, I read and shared a New York Times article entitled "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" It's a provocative Cause/Effect claim, which boils down to "not necessarily."

Gregory Currie argues that while he personally enjoys and advocates reading literary fiction, the jury is still out on whether it makes us better people: more moral, more likely to treat our fellow humans with fairness, better able to make empathetic decisions.

Courtesy of NYTimes.com

I was intrigued by this idea:

Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find in literature?

He's turning the Cause/Effect on its head: saying that it's possible that being a good person causes you to read good books, not vice versa.

memory and coming home: why I care

Literature is about evoking a world in the mind of the reader. If the author fails to do that: what genre writers call "world-building," than he or she has arguably failed the task.

I am very interested in neuroscientific research. I didn't come from a Humanities background. I worked in a DNA sequencing lab for two and a half years; I will be working for a medical software company; I read at least as much non-fiction as fiction. For several years, a key interest of mine has been the brain, and Stanislas Dehaene's work on how children (or illiterate adults!) learn to read touched something in me that few made-up stories can. How we learn to read, in a post-industrial, highly textual society, is basically how we learn to think, how we learn to be.

Another avenue of thought is Kahneman's work on how we think. We have a lot of heuristics we apply to everyday situations—shortcuts, really—and we are often unreliable narrators, even to ourselves.

I've always been a voracious reader, and through first-rate teachers, have always been comfortable with analysis.

So, reading Stegner's work, it was this incredible aha moment. Now, Stegner is no cognitive scientist, but man, he has such insights into human nature. I had two professors in the French department obsessed with the idea of "reading" architecture, much as one would read a text. Paris is full of beautiful architecture; just think of the history of medieval cathedrals.

Y a-t-il une vision spécifiquement « littéraire » de la ville, différente de la vision de l’architecte, du peintre, de l’hygiéniste, du photographe, du politique ? Hamon, "Voir La Ville"

Yes, Virginia, there is a specifically "literary" vision of the city, and Stegner has perfectly captured what it is like to live through a city, within a city, and without (both outside and deprived of) it.

Really, we can never directly know ourselves. I made a sketch of what Stegner talked about with its grid system and mountains. I'll post it, and hopefully it will explain the reader as observer (maybe inverted from what we typically think about!) and the writer as builder.

my quote bank

Reading Salt Lake City with Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City, Robert C. Steensma, available in the HBLL

At Home in the Fields of the Lord
A Gentile in New Jerusalem: certainly I was. Salt Lake City is a divided concept, a complex idea. To the devout it is more than a place, it is a way of life, a corner of the materially realizable heaven; its soil is held together by the roots of the family and the cornerstones of the temple.¹

Salt Lake City is an easy town to know. You can see it all. Lying in a great bowl valley, it can be surmounted and comprehended and possessed wholly as few cities can. … The streets are marked by a system so logical that you can instantly tell not merely where you are but exactly how far you are from anywhere else … Looking into the blank walls of cities … breeds things in people that eventually have to be lanced.²

In Salt Lake I wrote my first short story and my first novel. In Salt Lake I fell in love for the first time and was rudely jilted for the first time and recovered for the first time.³

Because I believe in the influence of places on personalities, I think it somehow important that certain songs we sang as high school or college students in the twenties still mean particular and personal things. “I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover” is all tied up with the late-dusk smell of October on Second South and Twelfth East. … “Exactly Like You” means the carpet, the mezzanine, the very look and texture and smell, of the Temple Square Hotel.⁴

Recapitulation
Progress had been at work on it. Old buildings had been replaced by newer, taller ones, and something drastic had happened to Main Street. Its sidewalks had been widened well out into the former traffic lanes, and the streets narrowed to half its width. … The effect was like the Soviet exhibit at a World’s Fair, something created by Heroic Workers. Merely human activites would be diminished on such a street.⁵

It Is the Love of Books I Owe Them
I am coming along Thirteenth East on my way to an eight o’clock class. It is a marvelous morning – it is always a marvelous morning, whether the air is hazy with autumn and the oakbrush on the Wasatch has gone bronze and gold, or whether the chestnut trees along the street are coned with blossoms … I am enveloped in a universal friendliness. I turn at the drugstore on Second South and start uphill toward the Park Building at the head of the U drive.^6
1p. 62
² 63-64
³ 66
⁴ 68
⁵ 12
⁶ 16

Can he give her up, or postpone her, perhaps for years? Can he cut himself away from everything familiar and secure—friends, job, tennis, Sundays when the whole hard week uncoils and stretches?
The answer is that he probably can, for he is tacitly planning to. But September is a long way off. Decision, though he has to sign his name to it within a few days, will not produce its consequences for three months. 
Recapitulation, p. 166

"Do not speak ill of society ... only people who can't get in do that."

I got a total of 13 comments over four posts on my thesis.

"S.A.M." said

5. Cause + Effect - As a pitch for an article to be published in Salt Lake magazine, find real locations/businesses that match Stegner's false but plausible locations, and compare the real life story of that location/business. That would be interesting reading, and ultimately advertisable.

I love this idea, and have concluded that I will ultimately have to pursue two parallel papers, one more formal and analytic, the other more crafted to sell papes.

I posted a link to "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?," and got two responses:

Courtesy of Following Day by Day

Rachel said,

my first social experience

So, I took the leap and tried to get feedback from my (vast!) social network.

My best friends, both online and off-, I met through writing for a BYU website. (It's top-secret. I can't tell you. Look at this week's Daily Universe Top 5 if you really care.) These are a group of unusually literary, witty, well-read, thoughtful, and just plain awesome twenty-somethings. So I had high hopes that someone would respond.

My online avatar. I once had a fling with a guy who looks like this, no joke. 

This site uses anonymous handles, which I really think helps take the edge off of some of the sensitive things we discuss both on the site and on its attendant message board. My good friend Rachel, codename Whistler, had this to say:

I feel some disinterest in your pitches since I'm not from/in Salt Lake City. Are you going for the local thing, or could you make it have a broader appeal to Utah/outdoorspeople?

We first met in a Book of Mormon class wayyyy back in '06, when we were both freshmen. I was really, really excited for her feedback both because we're friends IRL (I recently went to a huge houseparty she hosted, and she is married to my boyfriend's best friend's brother, if you can follow that thread), and as a psychology undergrad and comp lit master's dropout, I thought she was uniquely qualified to chime in.

I will probably lean towards a more global interpretation of Stegner's Recapitulation while not ignoring its Salt Lake City setting, if that makes sense.

Maybe this criticism seems negative, but I thought it was helpful! A. It's concise. B. It addresses real issues with my first thesis statements. C. It doesn't attack me as a person (always nice).

I am glad my social network includes such wonky people -- but please, would you expect anything less? :-)

staking my claim

Phase Two of The Pitch is here! We've convened around our newsroom table, bounced ideas off fellow intrepid reporters like Kirsten over at the drama desk, and we're up against deadlines set by our tough, but fair editor, Mr. Burton.

"I want to see your story ideas, and I want to see them yesterday!"

Just add glasses.

All right, all right, here are my five Stegnerian claims. (Thanks to my cubicle-mate Dawn for giving me a good template to draw from: though I may be a prodigious note-taker, I rely primarily on my great memory, whether that's at trivia night, to impress first dates, or recall obscure rhetorical terms. My favorite scene in Earnest was Algernon taking one look at the bills and ripping them up. I've been known to do the same. I sometimes want to do it with my stacks of notebooks.)

truth is stranger (and cooler) than fiction: learning plan

To continue my non-fiction reading, I want to delve into some literary neuroscience and psychological literature. I have a nice collection of Oliver Sacks, William James, and Stanislas Dehaene built up. I want to revisit their works, make notes (which always has something of the absentminded madwoman about it), and cull real ideas about how the brain works, stores memories, and how we react to and create narratives ... all to build ideas for my essay.

Neurons are beautiful.

That's what I love about non-fiction! It's real!

pitching a story

I'd like to approach crafting a thesis the way I'd approach pitching a magazine story. I've written for websites, school newspapers, and school magazines. Typically, when you have an idea for a story, you brainstorm ideas, scrap the bad ones, and then dump your thoughts about the best two or three. After outlining what you want to say, then you can fill in the material with quotations from interviews, photography, and typeset it, and you're good to go!

Additionally, I have been contemplating a project to submit to Salt Lake magazine for a few months now, so if it's good enough, I may pitch it for real.

The post which I most want to elaborate is that on "Stegner & Setting." Right now, my ideas range from the macro to the micro. Here they are, in very rough form:

• retracing the steps Stegner describes both in his fiction and his essays. Using the framework of Philippe Hamon (private link) to talk about how we interact with the city
• adding the previous idea to the idea of memory (using the Sonnet 122 idea of "tables within the brain")
• Going even more specific: looking at one passage (maybe "something drastic had happened to Main Street"?), and relating that to urban planning and cultural memory of today (City Creek Mall, anyone?)
• one of my favorite ideas—the idea of created space. The funeral parlor in Recapitulation doesn't exist, and as far as I can tell, never did, although he gives a very specific address for it and it's easy to believe it could exist
• could always frame it as a travel writing piece—but isn't that more of a so-called staycation?

I like all these ideas, nebulous though they are. And honestly, this project started out as one part literary pilgrimage, one part excuse to eat doughnuts on South Temple. Gotta start somewhere!

All literary pilgrimages should involve petit fours.

(Once I move to Madison, I will be making a Crossing to Safety pilgrimage for sure.)

What is Media? On Signs, Rituals, and Rethinking Networks

New Media platforms are analyzed often enough from the perspective of child development, commerce, and psychology. While all thee perspectives may well yield valuable insights, treading where others have trod is unlikely to prove either fruitful or timely. In the time I wrote this sentence, another sixteen-year-old with an app was probably bought out by an angel investor.

Rather than inveighing for or against social networks, I will make a claim that one can use the tools of rhetorical analysis—even some postmodern ones, though sometimes those tools can be a bit like using a power drill when a wrench would have done—to analyze what social networks are and how we can more usefully envision them.

If you were born after the release of "Smells Like Teen Spirit,"  then I'm not sure I'd consider you to be of the same generation as myself. Anyone who has a smart phone in high school, a Facebook account without a university address, or who has never used a hardbound encyclopedia is perhaps ill-equipped to examine, much less question, online media tools as such. No wonder premature nostalgia for the early '90s abounds (just try shopping without running into Doc Marten boots and ill-fitting tops; it's horrifying)—there's a vague idea that this era was more authentic, more individual, and less polite. 

According to Saussure, an idea, a sign can be broken into its signifier (say, the word blog, a rather unfelicitous chopping off of weblog) and the signified (the "actual" blog itself, whether you treat that as a series of 0s and 1s or its realized presence). I think this is an incredibly useful application for an old idea which struck me as academic at the time: a blog is just a configuration of electrons. You and I are ultimately protons and electrons. What is media? On one level, "it is such stuff as dreams are made on:" ephemeral and hosted on a server, perhaps in Iceland where it's cold and there's geothermal heating.

But looking at the signified—what we talk about when we talk about the Internet—is more interesting. I would argue that the new media are made up of and therefore are the playing out of social ritual. Really, the critical toolbox we should be throwing at the likes of Facebook is that of the anthropologist. Seen as a realization of mating rituals, scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch yours rites, and (of course) social posturing, maybe the hysteria of media agnostics and the evangelism of media millennialists could cool down a notch. (I say "agnostic," because presumably media atheists are out fly fishing or preaching Mormonism or hunting down Osama.)

Here's a map of the U.S. according to Facebook connections. Only the deluded or deeply eccentric have never met those on their social network: who's to say a guy I met on a plane isn't better suited to my confidence than whomever I happen to live by or work with?

There's a certain beauty to the idea that every line is not just 1s and 0s but two people who know and like each other. I'm reminded of corporeal metaphors: on Vronsky's horse in Anna Karenina,

the muscles stood up sharply under the network of sinews, covered with this delicate, mobile skin, soft as satin, and they were hard a bone.

Neurons "network" to make a brain. Media is as real as anything intangible, whether philosophy, your FDIC deposit insurance, or love. Human beings have never lived entirely in the realm of the tangible. The very act of language makes real the unreal: it always points to something else (arbitrarily, as anyone who has studied a foreign language knows).

Language, the cracked kettles for bears to dance to, is no better, no worse, neither more alive nor more dead, than at any other time in human history. Social networks both use language and constitute a language of their own. Specific platforms may go the way of engraved tablets and Kurt Cobain, but human communication and connection will endure.

Coming to Terms with the Personal Essay (Assignment for Thursday)

Now that you have had greater exposure to creative non-fiction as a genre, we will put our learning to work. In lieu of our regular in-class assignment, this week will entail doing a blog post between now and Thursday on the following topic:

Family Life and New Media: Help or Hindrance?

Now, to give you direction on this assignment, we will be flexing our non-fiction muscles by each writing in different genres. These are:

Scripture
Political Speech
Travel or Food Personal Essay
Literary Criticism
Confessional Autobiography/Memoir

Jocelyn, Jennifer, Philip, Lindsey, Sined
Andrew, Hilary, Briggs, Leah, Olivia
Richard, Kirsten, Clarissa, Taylor, Danielle

Kimara, Dawn, Jamie, Charly, and Caitlyn will be modeling each genre type. If you're in the red group, you might start your post, "Verily, verily, in the days of many gadgets," whereas if you're in the pink group, you may be starting with "let me tell you about time when ..." You can write a normal-length blog post, and please label them nonfiction personal essay. On Thursday, we over at Team Nonfiction will highlight our favorites, and we'll give you time within your groups to discuss how genre affected your approach to the common topic.

Best of luck!