Blog post #13 on video essays

The video essays this week were extremely interesting!  The main one I watched was Mangoes.  Admittedly, I felt a bit awkward getting such an intimate view into how this man is taking care of his baby.  To some degree, I felt like I was seeing too deep into his special relationship to his family.  However, I know that is something more in line with what I am personally distressed by, and others probably don't see it quite the same way. 

His actual point about gender stereotypes was very poignant and strong, and I really found myself interested in what it had to say.  As usual, he made it very clear that we put far too much emphasis on gender as a way to force certain people into certain roles for absolutely arbitrary reasons.  There's no reason the dad should feel embarrassed by wearing his baby on his chest, yet that's the society we live in today.  It's a very powerful piece with a message that we deserve to see over and over again until it starts making a difference.

Blog Post #12-Creative Response to Gertrude Stein.

In responding to Gertrude Stein's "The Geographical History of America," I decided to create a Lyric essay response, influenced by the books style:

In the beyond of the notion of fear lies the greatest of centuries past we create with a burden of guilt wrought by hellish descent.  There is no hope in finding how, not when there lies creations end.  With fire's freeze the hellish noise and cinder crushing all hopes flight.

Not when humanity fights for the cause can they open the eye of the sword ripped in water destroy any wish for survival just doom by the end of the day its a plain of the damned.  Nothing can unmake the human inner voice compelling us to do as evil calls us to when all has made the madness all the omnipresent is there something left still sane?  When they continue down the barren steps of evil they can never know the burdening agony as nothing but wreckage remains there's only death to pay the twists of metal steel and blood torment the earth.

Logic wants the man to know his limits yet his voice compels a true distinction aiming for a great walled death seclusion riding valiantly through hypocritical descents to allowance.  There is only a distinction that man strives for never searching past the truth of soul.  Binded Blinded courted and elated thwarted never ending mortem only hell awaits.

The connection is real, but the balance is tight, and the line grows ever vaguer. 

#11

Gertrude Stein's Geographical History of America is easily one of the most frustrating texts I have ever had to read.  No matter how much we discuss it, I absolutely cannot wrap my head around what this book is supposed to be about.  Every time I start to feel like I see a through line, I realize that there's another dimension to the text that knocks that idea out of the sky.  It's structured in a way that just drives me up the wall, and I can't seem to reconcile certain contradictions that are in there.

Firstly, there's the way one is supposed to analyze this book.  because each sentence is a riddle, you have to analyze each little paragraph or sentence for a good 20 minutes before you start to get a solid idea of what she is saying.  I feel like once you actually have all of the themes in this written down in front of you (human mind, human nature, nature of war, nature of piece.  nature of reading, writing, language, and even the point of sentience vs non sentience, etc), you could figure out what the common theme was.  On the other hand, because of how the analysis is so time consuming, I feel like almost NO human would ever spend that much time decoding this book.  It's just so incredibly tedious.  That;s what I can't tear myself away from.  This book is just so outrageously tedious, I must imagine that somehow, the difficulty is in service of the book's main theme.  No matter how I approach this though, I inevitably fail and end up stuck on the tedium again.

Worse, I am starting to feel like that's part of the point of the book, but at the same time, almost EVERY COMPLAINT that has been brought up in class has also been said to probably be "part of the point of the book," which only further raises my skepticism.  I...feel like I'm fighting myself when I read this.  Is that the point?  I just don't know anymore...

I'm sure she ultimately has something very interesting to say about the Human Condition.  I really do.  It's obvious that whatever she's saying, it relates to the habits thoughts and skills that we humans learn early on without thinking about, and she's trying to draw attention to them so that we DO think about them.  Exactly what habits, thoughts, or skills she is referring to, of course, is the challenging part that she's encoded so well, and I can respect the skill it took to do so.  There is clearly a MASSIVE amount of time and effort put into this piece, and the language is absolutely beautiful.  I completely respect her and her writing style, and it's obviously FAR more advanced than mine.  I think I might just be starting to burn out on experimental writing and challenging contemporary art in general... I probably need to step back and watch some superhero cartoons for a while.  But since the class is almost done, I'll give it my all this weekend to try and dig in and latch onto something in this book that pertains to our class.  I promise!

#10

Reading Gertrude Steins work is always a challenge.  The language is non linear, and often times non narrative.  It doesn't flow like normal language, and it doesn't care to explain itself.  The sentences don't feel like they are complete, even though they are.  The text resembles a normal essay, but it is anything but.  I shouldn't enjoy this.

Yet I kinda do.  The constant contradictions within the text make the meaning of each sentence very difficult to understand, and it becomes very easy to think of each sentence as just being a conglomerate of abstract concepts.  I actually really enjoy letting the meaning of the words simply deflect away from my brain, in one ear and out the other, and just listening to the vocal rhythm of the sentences.  The text has an almost lyrical quality to it, the way it keeps talking about ideas in literal ways.  Actually interpreting what the text means is a very different story however, and i've yet to make much progress in that department.

blog post #9

This week, listening to Douglas Kearney was absolutely fascinating.  I've never actually been so interested in the way a poet reads their own work before.  I was totally blown away and almost even immersed.  I wish I didn't have such a hearing problem, I'd love to be able to understand any of the words he was saying while he read from his book The Black Automaton.  As is, his energy and emotion from his voice absolutely carried the entire two day set for me.  I found myself hanging onto every word he had to say, especially once he started talking more about music, my personal forte.

What stuck with me the most was when he commented that he was always shocked at the number of students he meets who love hip-hop, but they cannot recite any lyrics because they do not listen.  Although I did not know this for a while, I actually have this problem, and for a long time I did not realize this was abnormal.  I simply cannot understand any lyrics when they are sung over music, just like I can't hear people talk in a loud restaurant.  As a direct result, all of the thousands of songs I know well tend to have a heavy emphasis on instrumentation, because for me, that was where the real magic was.  Since I only understand every tenth word or so, I always though of lyrics as a way to set the mood for the music, and my personal taste and areas of musical expertise are directly because of this problem.  I learned only a few years ago that there are people who pick their favorite bands based on how strong the lyrical content is, and enjoy music where the music is just a mood for the lyrics to make the real art.  As I have to manually look up words on the internet, these genre's have been slow for me to get into, since my focus naturally gravitates towards other areas. 

Talking to Kearney after the performance, I was able to hear his take on this relationship for a little bit, and he had very interesting examples of hip hop artists composing their lyrics before, after, or halfway through the writing of the music, which also fascinates me because I have never written lyrics to a song before writing all of the music and instrumentation.  I have gone so far as to write vocal melodies with "placeholder lyrics," because my value's have naturally gravitated that way.  I am currently working on writing a song, and have been toying with the idea of writing the music and lyrics simultaneously, and I now feel extra inspired that this could be a new avenue for me to explore. 

#8

This week, I ended up thinking a lot about my project again.  I struggled really hard to think of ways for the pieces format on paper to reflect its content, and I wonder if perhaps the reason I have trouble with it is because I created a piece that isn't trans genre in the way this assignment may have required.  On the other hand, I'm still very proud of my creation, so I hope all the heart  I put into it still comes across in the writing.

I suppose the problem I now can see with the piece is that it's ultimately something of a standard narrative.  The story just follows a fictional character around from a first person perspective as he goes about a small chapter of his long ling life story, and while I tried to make that story as novel unique and original as possible, many of the strangest pieces we've studied in this class have eschewed formal narrative in the traditional sense, rather attempting more surreal and discordant forms of conveying messages through writing.  I worry that my favoritism for traditional narrative may continue to handicap me as I continue the class.

However, I do enjoy the touches I was able to come up with.  The Reaper character is a concept I created a year ago, based on the concept of what would drive someone with power over death to do the things that death is typically portrayed as doing.  Why would he appear at someone's bedside when it's their time.  To that end, I based it on an idea that omniscience changes a man so much, he's hardly a man any more, and would do things that the rest of us would think crazy.  The omniscience is what i hope really sets the character apart from other characters in first person traditional narratives.

Blog week #7

This week, after Mondays discussion on Gaga feminism, it finally began to hit me just how many different ways there are to frame the discussion, so that even if two feminists want the same result, the evidence they use to get there can be so different as to nearly make them enemies.  I'm noticing that because I frame my personal views on feminism so positively, I have trouble accepting other versions of it that are more aggressive.

Specifically, my main idea for feminism is that ultimately, there are still barriers that make Men, Women, and those in between different, and instead of focusing on treating everyone like their gender is irrelevant, I feel like it's more fair to frame it so that yes, there are differences, but because of the way the patriarchal system has oppressed all other non-conformers so brutally for so long, we should strive to respect everyone for what they want to believe, and we must strive to make things fair.  Compared to other theories that wish to proclaim gender as not existing, I feel like we arrive at the same conclusion, but ultimately disagree on a few points.

For example, the idea that Women buy things like shoes to be pretty ONLY because the patriarchal system has conditioned them to.  I agree that this happens and is mostly true.  I also agree that women shouldn't have to feel like they are weird for NOT wanting to buy shoes.  What bothers me are feminists who then say that buying shoes supports the patriarchal system, when in fact, a lot of women just want to buy shoes.  I think it is really hard to expect women to divorce themselves from the concept of gender as a form of freedom when so many still personally choose to identify as women.  I'd much rather frame it so that we make rules allowing women to buy as many or as few shoes as they desire, and do not chastise them for the feminine or masculine traits they may be exhibiting based on those kind of decisions.

I obviously understand the merits to such opinions, as an end to gender entirely would most certainly be a step towards ending the kind of inequality that women face.  In fact, the radical anti-feminist groups out in the world certainly justify the existence of nearly ANY kind of pro-feminist argument.  This is just something I struggle with, as I feel at it's core, feminism should be about making things fair for women and transgender people so that they can be happy.  It should be about allowing as many people as possible to get what they want out of life without having unfair boundaries put in their way.  I do understand that my perspective is limited, however, and I will continue to try and welcome in new perspectives on the subject.

Weekly blog post #6

This week, I found myself struggling to figure out what what exactly DuPliess was trying to say in her essay on essays.  She presents an interesting series of points about how an essay is such a unique place for text to exist, because of its powerful, almost fascist like attempt to control your emotions for the duration of the text.  You are presented an opinion, and you don't get to see any other side of the opinion that hasn't been filtered into just being more support for the argument.  It's very controlling.

Although, in a sense, all text is very manipulative.  In a fictional story, you can interpret things in a variety of ways, but the author is always trying to pull your emotions in very very specific directions.  You have choice, but you're strongly influenced.  In fact, even the choices are sometimes intended to manipulate you.  The ending especially tries with all its might to make you believe in the answer it has provided for the question that provoked the author into writing the story.  Very manipulative.

Week #5

This week, I'm starting to think about how I can frame my outside text presentation project as a piece of trans genre work.  My plan has been to present a Devin Townsend album called Punky Bruster-Cooked on Phonics, because of it's incredibly odd layers and structure.  However, a major nature of why it is so unusual is based on the artist who produced it, which has caused me to continue questioning exactly what constitutes a transgenre project, and what kind of parts of the creation must be taken into account.

Essentially, Devin Townsend is an experimental guitar player.  He got his start as a singer for Steve Vai and his hard rock guitar playing, but Devin eventually struck out on his own.  His first successful project was an extreme metal band called Strapping Young Lad, which was well known for pushing the genre incredibly close to just being noise, while simultaneously blending in very melodic passages.  However, he quickly used the success of Strapping Young Lad to fund a series of increasingly unusual solo albums, which ultimately would expand to cover nearly all genre's of music.  He has created metal albums, noise albums, sound-scape albums, pop albums, rock operas, folk inspired metal, and supposedly even has a country album coming out. 

All this being said, technically his first solo album was this Punky Bruster album, a sort of rock opera in which Devin tells the story of a death metal band who sell out to become the next Green Day. It mainly serves as a vehicle for him to eviscerate the idea of both rich punk stars, and other aspects of the punk scene in general, through a satire that gets increasingly vicious and hateful as the album goes on.

Ultimately, this means that when you listen to this album, what you are listening to is a series of punk rock tracks, made to sound like they were written for popular radio by stripping out much of the edginess the genre carried from its roots.  These sell-out punk songs are then supposedly being played by an ex death metal band, but are recorded mostly by Devin Townsend himself, who at the time was primarily a Metal musician.  So under all the other layers of being punk made for pop radio as made by death metal fakers, the songs are AGAIN influenced by the fact that Devin's skill set is based on something completely different from both death metal AND different from punk, under ground or popular.

Looking back on readings like Dictee,  authors often use much of their personal experience to create these trans genre projects, I am beginning to wonder if this might be the connecting thread that really makes it possible for every aspect of a piece to become trans genre while still having a uniting, connecting thread.  I'm interested to see what other trans genre pieces we will see in the future, and how many of those are also intimately connected to the authors experience.

Week #4

This week, turning in my first transgenre project was a bit stressful, but I finally feel like I understand how the transgenre moniker applies to different pieces of work.  Namely, I have come to decide that ultimately, as long as a piece heavily subverts the conventions of a genre, gender, or culturally enforced role or idea, then the work will be to some degree, a transgenre project.  By going against the conventions of modern society, texts become tricky, difficult, and they challenge people who read them.  This is an incredibly important service that literature must provide, as well as other arts.

However, looking back on my transgenre project, I can't help but feel that I didn't quite take advantage of all the creative freedom that was offered to me.  In hindsight, I feel I would have had a much more entertaining time creating some kind of narrative that subverts these convention instead.  I have thought of various ideas in this vein before, and I have realized that these kinds of narratives can be just as transgenre as the craziest of experimental poetry.  Even transgender ideas, which I used to struggle with the most, have become something I think I could still use my writing to talk about.

I realized this while discussing the transgender spectrum on Monday, as thanks to all that discussion, I had a realization I hadn't thought of before.  Namely, that physical biological gender and mental sexuality can be completely different, and that this allows virtually anyone to take part in the discussion.  In particular, just because someone is a straight, white male does not mean that they have to conform to all of the ideas and interests that are affiliated with that type of gender role.  In fact, it doesn't seem to me like it has to be a sexual discussion at all.  A story about a woman who seeks to avoid the various constraints of the societal gender roles placed upon her could be viewed through a transgenre lens, and sexual attraction or physical alterations to preconceived gender conventions do not necessarily have to factor in at all.  She could simply focus her life on a challenging career as a ship captain or such, and the unusual contrast of that situation can be set up to have undertones that subvert the ideas that gender roles are important enough to enforce.  I like this idea, as I feel like I have far more freedom bow than I did before.

The nature of Transgenre

So, this week I've been have a very difficult struggle with figuring out exactly what makes a work fit within the boundaries of this class.  The nature of the transgenre, transgender, and transcultural themes is to be very vague, which makes it extremely difficult to figure out exactly what constitutes a work that fits the class's goal.  I think I am slowly getting a handle on it, but I am not entirely sure.  This is how far i got.

I understand that one of the most important aspects of this class is the cultural aspects.  All of our readings have worked to subvert the expectations that were placed on the authors due to their status within their own cultures.  This is an idea I can very easily get behind, and I greatly enjoy the idea of writers being free to do whatever they feel they are most compelled to do.  Not conforming to cultural standards is a huge part of not only this class, but also the whole creative writing program here at EMU and i really appreciate that aspect.

Transgender is a little trickier to me.  I would think that it simply means to not conform to gender roles assigned to the author, but that doesn't always seem like a very reachable goal.  Several of the pieces we have read are by authors who identify as homosexual, and in doing so they are able to defy the gender roles placed upon them.  However, the actual texts themselves often don't seem to embody this spirit quite so clearly for myself.  If I were to attempt to write a trans gender piece, I am not sure how I could go about it.  The absence of transgender in my life is a possible topic, but I am not sure how much emotion I could really derive from a theme like that.  I may have certain interests here and there that are not inherently masculine,  but especially because I dislike writing about my experiences anyway, I don't find this avenue to be something I really understand.  I feel there are likely other ways to incorporate these themes into my writing that I have simply overlooked, and I hope to uncover them.

The other tricky aspect is the nature of transgenre itself.  So far, this seems to come most commonly in the form of mixing prose and poetry, while avoiding any straight narrative, something I've always been uncomfortable doing in my writing.  I prefer narrative writing above all other kinds of writing, so eliminating it from my available set of tools leaves me with very little else I know how to do.  However, I have a theory that combining non narrative poetry with music may be a more interesting avenue for me in the future.  This is the murkiest area,  suppose, because while at least for transgender I have an idea of what the goal is, here I sort of do not.  As we continue to stumble through the semester, I do hope everything slowly comes together.

Weekly blog post #2

This week, I found our discussion on the two essays to be very compelling, but I was especially stimulated by Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.  In it, she makes comments about the importance of Poetry in the grand scheme of social change, and how from a feminist perspective, it is incredibly important for the movement that women's poetry be able to consider what changes it wants to make.  I found this especially compelling because of a previous discussion I had in an early class about Realist theory, as opposed to Nominalism.  The ideas of each philosophy direct apply to her assertion, and they create a very interesting set of opposing viewpoints to consider.

Firstly, the one that connects and agrees with her assertion would be Realist theory, which among other things says that poets and other arts are responsible for constructing our signified concepts.  Moreover, because a signified concept is too perfect to exist in real life, real life versions of the signified will always differ slightly.  The real life versions of the signified will then be studied by artists, who will then create their own concepts of what the signified looks like, and the cycle continues so that artists play a pivotal role in shaping our reality.  This line of thinking very positively asserts that women's poetry will slowly be able to change public perception of feminist ideas.

On the other hand, Nominalism, as framed by Terry Eagleton, represents an opposing belief that the real world is NOT based on the Signified concepts created by poets, but rather all of its particulars.  Specifically, rather than having one main signified concept and a variety of different real world interpretations of it that allow for change, Nominalism believes that each variation is a completely different entity and that there isn't an overarching connecting threat between them.  In this way, feminist progress made by poetry is far more based on the luck and happenstance what kind of people feel motivated by what individual poems, placing the burden on the poets to make the change in the world directly themselves.  This is theory definitely helps explain why it is so difficult for it to feel like women's poetry will ever make great progress.  How it all will unfold in the future of course is yet to be seen, so it the meantime, it all seems to be a matter of preference as to how you frame it.

Hi class!  This here is my test post for the class blog I will be writing my weekly entries into.

This week, reading Precious, Disappearing Things proved to be a bit challenging, but still extremely interesting.  Reading the first essay, in which the text Ava is described, a few very interesting questions are posed.  What stuck out to me the most is the total condemnation of traditional popular fiction, a genre of writing that I personally prefer above all others.  The writer makes a few points about its failings, and her problem seems to be the idea of conventions.  She says that mainstream fiction is at fault for its "complacent, unequivocal truths, its reductive assignment of meaning, its manipulations, its predictability and stasis", as well as "it's tyrannical plot lines, its linear chronology, and characterizations that [leave] no place in the text for the reader, no place to think one's thoughts, no place to live".

This is a very aggressive stance to take, but poses an interesting point.  In a lot of ways, mainstream fiction is generally fixated on the strategy of showing the reader a story in which people have to deal with adversity, and either surpass it for a positive message, succumb to it for a negative message, or only succumb to some of it for a more mixed and complicated message.  However great of a simplification these may seem, there is truth in that the message is generally laid out with as much detail as necessary to make sure that this message will be noticed by readers.  This seems to be where the issue is, as this essay writer suggests that a more ambiguous text is able to avoid the problem of simplifying a world for narrative description.  She criticizes the way a normal narrative must force  the complexities of life into more simplified terms in order to be understandable, and by being ambiguous, a reader can bring all those complexities with them into a text to give a more accurate reflection of the world.

I must admit, I have trouble buying into this as a solution to a problem that may not need to be fixed.  The text that follows, Ava, is a poem that is very well written and filled with strong imagery as well as patterns, and despite its ambiguities, it still manages to get several possible messages across to the reader.  However, readers are still very good at only seeing the truths they want to see, so the freedom this text grants can, in  a way, restrict a reader to the confines of their own ideas, since the text is so light on direction from the writer.  Of course, Ava DOES still have some direction, so other readers may still stumble across new ideas in this poem that I simply failed to find.  What I seem to take issue with is the idea that mainstream fiction is at fault for its lack of ambiguities, when rather I find its conventions useful vehicles for forcing a reader to consider a slightly different viewpoint than they are used to.  When reading a piece of conventionally written fiction, the writer can use its precise and unambiguous language to force a reader to think about a new critique of the human condition that the writer feels people should consider.  It allows people to present their opinions freely so that others may examine them and decide if they agree or not.

This is not to say Ava is wrong in what it tries to do.  It is a very unique a clever text, and it's special approach certainly delivers a freshness that the world very much needs more of.