over the course of the semester, i believe i have developed my ability to open a story with something that grabs the attention, before hooking it back in with something that establishes place.
i need to work on the way i write dialogue.
i should read more didion. i'd like to write more like her.
Friday, December 11, 2015
blog #5 - planning an interview
for my final project, i will be interviewing my mother. she is a profoundly complex person who has changed remarkably over the course of her life. moreover, i will be focusing on the past 5 or 6 years over the course of which her life has be markedly changed by various types of social media. her political affiliations have swung from one end of the spectrum to the other - she went from a life long conservative to a more progressive affiliation in large part because of her interactions on twitter. she had an opportunity to flex artistic muscles that had been long dormant as she got more and more involved with instagram - and now gets 100s of likes on almost all of her photos.
questions i'd ask
1. when did social media first seem approachable / attractive to you?
2. prior to instagram, how do you think your latent creativity expressed itself?
3. can you pin point a time when your political identity started to change? what was happening?
blog #6 - responding to a piece of literary journalism
“How an international man of mystery scammed my grandma”
This
profile centers around the author’s grandmother, an elderly widow living in Connecticut
whose taxes are done by her son in law, whose speed dial presets were set by
someone other than her and who operated ATMs out of sheer luck. The action of
the piece is centered around a call the grandmother receives, convincing her
that her grandson has been arrested, is being held by crooked cop, and will be
released without any legal action just so long as she wires a certain sum of
money to the man on the other end of the line.
That being said, the profile is not
so thoroughly dismissive of her. She is described as a remarkably creative
woman, and a well read one at that (I even have some trouble with the endless barrage
of information that is the economist).
Still, the woman is mostly described as technologically impaired, and perhaps
as someone that doesn’t so frequently venture forth from her home.
That being said, the most
interesting aspect of this woman is that she was targeted by a scam artist –
this piece probably wouldn’t have been written on the strength of the author’s
grandmother’s impromptu story-telling abilities alone. The journalist positions
himself as an invested party, and perhaps one of some irrational guilt (it was
the belief that he was in danger that the con artists used to cajole the
grandmother out of 3,000 dollars).
“At home, using her landline, Grandma
called my mother, who gave her my number. At no point did she mention what she
needed it for.”
The above
quotation is indicative about what I liked most about the piece in that it
succinctly expresses simultaneously what is crucially hip and unhip about the
grandmother. On one hand, she is calling the author’s mother on a landline as
the scam artists in question instructed her to keep her mobile line open so
that she might receive further instruction (in reality, they’re hoping to
prevent her from contacting anyone who might rouse her as to the reality of her
situation until it’s too late). On the other, while covering her bases, she’s
suspicious enough to acquire the phone number of the author so as to confirm
his supposed arrest all while keeping the mother in the dark – in the event
that her grandson is being held hostage by a crooked police officer, she doesn’t
want him to get in trouble with his mother for it.
That’s a cool
grandmother.
blog #4 - responding to a memoir
within the excerpt provided, Krakauer
walks a fine line between firm investment and journalistic detachment. He writes
with a certain understanding of the motivations of the major players, exhibited
in sentences like: “It doesn’t seem to far-fetched to speculate that because
Hall had talked Hansen into coming back to Everest, it would have been
especially hard for him to deny Hansen the summit a second time”. In this we
see his understanding of the intimate nature of the relationship between the
climber and his guide, one which transcends the particular venture in question,
occurring in the larger context of a lasting partnership defined by challenges
and allowances.
Due to the uncertain nature of the
story in question – there is really no “first-hand account” of the events
detailed – Krakauer is forced to use qualifying language (“farfetched” “speculate”)
which while distancing himself from the role of a totally authoritative
narrator, simultaneously allow him to position himself as the-person-who-probably-knows-better-than-anyone-else-does-so-you-might-as-well-take-his-word-for-it.
This alters the utterly definitive statements that he makes (ie: “It was an act
of heroism that would cost Harris his life”), in that they move from the realm
of the kind of corny to an area of real gravity. A reader is prompted to
forgive that which might otherwise be viewed as heavy handed and is instead
invited to “enjoy” the offerings in shades of finality and inevitability.
Finally, Krakauer does an excellent
job of revealing what he knows in uneven ways. The death of Harris is revealed unceremoniously
and definitively as a means of further amplifying the drama surrounding Hall.
The latter man’s death however is not fully revealed until the final sentence of
the chapter in which his body is found half covered by a snow drift and even
then, the words dead, death, dying are never used in relation to him. Rather,
Krakauer chooses to intimate the inevitable, saying as the chapter began to
draw towards its close, “In truth, Rob
had never even left the South Summit”.
blog #3 - responding to a photograph
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/prk2000001031/
Arteum
was drunk, again. He was comfortable enough. The wool of his collar had ceased
to bother him and the November sun sat pleasantly on his red cheeks. The
photographer pressed away, capturing him against the cotton station. Fiddling
with cigarette, Arteum thought about the night before and how, quite
unexpectedly, it had turned into this particular morning. He had only intended
to stand a round, and had only intended to allow himself to stand 2 – but as
the shift supervisor, he reasoned, he was obligated in some way to give back to
those who which his own position so clearly depended on. And they were a
relatively competent bunch, and he did make nearly double what his nearest
subordinate made and he did after all truly and deeply enjoy drinking. Not
getting drunk, which he regarded as a grim and bearable necessity, and not
being at the bar exactly – which he considered tacky and inhospitable – but he
held the actual act of drinking in the highest regard. There was a certain warmth
to the coolness of the glass pressed to his lips, the slow fullness a little
lower, and the dawning numbness lower still (his wife had run him ragged
recently trying to conceive their fourth, and it was only when he was so drunk,
utterly incapable of physical arousal that she exasperatedly left him alone).
And so
he was, leaning against the unseasonably warm breeze, still drunk and perfectly
happy: our tour-guide-shift-supervisor of the Botanical Garden, next to a laughably
impossible plot of cotton. The photographer stopped and poked his head up.
“Could
I get one with your hands folded in front of you?”
Arteum flicked
his cigarette over his right shoulder, clasped his hands together and showed
the man his teeth.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
#2 - author's note on vignette
i am not from philadelphia. i grew up in the suburbs of new york city, in nassau county on long island. i live in philly for a little under 3 years during which i helped gentrify a couple different neighborhoods, writing music and bussing plenty of tables while i was at it. it should be noted that while the piece at times attempts to humorously reflect on race as it functions within a city landscape, it is an issue that i reflect in a serious way on daily. i believe that gentrification is unequivocally an act of violence that i need not necessarily take part in; accordingly my current living arrangements (some bullshit too expensive converted factory space in bushwick) speak volumes as to the extent that i'm willing to address the issue --- apparently, it's all fun to do creative work that addresses the problem with which i am directly involved in, but it need not translate to my actual behavior (here i am, gentrifying brooklyn).
at any rate, i think i quite like the piece. the only thing i'm concerned about is the (possibly) two dimensional representation of the woman in question, especially as she is all but explicitly identified as a woman of color. this is an issue i might like to discuss in peer review, had i turned the assignment in on time.
#1 - introduction
my name is simon tangney. at 25, i'm a little older than most of the class. though i'm generally a liberal arts major, i have much more specific goals. i want to work in public education, specifically at the post-secondary level. though i have a real interest in teaching, i would like to eventually work in an administrative capacity - hopefully one day being in a position to design and implement curriculum. in pursuit of this, i am in the process of applying to the CUNY Baccalaureate program, in which I'd be able to tailor a major to my interests and hopefully setting myself up in a positive way for graduate studies.
i also work full time in a restaurant, which i truly enjoy as well. i bartend and wait tables at a Sichuan restaurant on the upper west side. i'd worked for the owner in philadelphia as well and admire the manner in which the business is run, even if what i like most about it is its occasionally haphazard happenings.
this is technically my first creative writing class at LAGCC though i had a professor last semester who taught his ENG 102 class as if it were in fact, a creative writing class. i write music, with special attention to the lyrics, so i have a real interest the ways in which words work together. longer prose doesn't come as naturally to me so i'm excited to develop my skills in this way.
i tend to be a little crass and casual in my work, though i would be comfortable toning it down for the classroom setting if i were asked to.
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