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.