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!

"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,

The Discussions of Facebook!

Seen this week on the Discussions of Facebook: Caitlyn posts and hosts a discussion of love poetry and its influence on the young mind. Does it fail or succeed?

I say SUCCESS.  I actually received some really great feedback and had some very interesting discussions with a few FB friends.  It got pretty real towards the end.

My topic of love poetry and its effects on love is pretty universal because everyone has an opinion of love.  I had to informalize my thesis to appeal to the internet world and it worked well enough.  Here is what I posted:

 

I think that I could have made it less academic feeling, but I'm satisfied with the responses I got.  The more specific questions led the discussion in the right direction and after someone would comment, I would respond with more questions to keep it fueled.  I was able to see certain faults of my thesis. For example, the use of the phrase "sophisticated mind" vs. "more mature/experienced."  The first definitely came off too snobby and someone else's comment helped me realize that.  The entire post ended up with 1268 words in 15 comments.   

Love Poetry's Unfortunate Influence on the Adolescent

As an extension of an earlier post and its comments, I have decided to elaborate on love poetry's intentions, using Petrarch's sonnets as a main source.

It's a heavy topic for me and at this point, I'm not sure I agree 100% with my claim, but it's controversial and interesting enough to make it worth while.  Let's see if I can spark some argumentative discussions. 

Haven't we all been messed with, at least a little, by The Notebook?

1. Policy Claim - Despite love poetry's universal acceptance and adoration, the adolescent mind should take caution when reading the genre in search for greater knowledge of love for there are forms of trickery, whether intentional or unintentional by the author.  A more mature mind can more easily absorb love poetry without falling susceptible and developing unrealistic beliefs of its peril, or lack thereof. hidden behind the words that appeal to the young audience and if accepted, conjure unrealistic beliefs about love. 

2. Definition Claim - It can be deceiving by how often times love poetry is not about the love itself, but the exploration of the feelings of love, which is destructive to the unripened and easily influenced mind.  People are raised to believe in a love that is more oft than not represented by the unstable and fast changing emotions that it brings than the love itself.

3. Comparison Claim - Though both the "love high" and heartbreak are represented in love poetry, the adolescent mind tends to retain and ponder the wonderfully overwhelming emotions of being in love over the horribly miserable emotions of hearbreak.  Caution should be paid when diving into the powerful genre.

4. Evaluation Claim - While Petrarch's sonnets are almost entirely about his eternal love Laura, he is more concerned with his own feelings of love and not Laura herself.  Standardized western beliefs of love, both unrealistic and realistic, are deeply rooted in both Petrarch's society and ours today.  The classical thought of love being a curse surely influenced Petrarch, although Christian, but it takes the more ripened mind to identify the ideal while consulting love poetry.

5. Cause/Effect Claim - Although the airy and whimsical tones to love poetry make for beautiful and unparallelled works, there is always a danger present of getting caught up in the benevolent aspects of love, and ignoring the malicious.  

Feel free to let me know your thoughts on the topic.

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.)