Project 2 Reflection

For our second project I knew I wanted to do something about social media just because lately I’ve been seeing it used in various different ways. For example, on every news station, no matter if it’s the weather or Fox 2’s Let It Rip section they keep showing the responses of the people that either follow them on twitter or have commented on their facebook page. I just find it ridiculous and a bit offensive, even though I know it’s meant to make the news more approachable, to make the people feel like they have a say or they matter but most of the time I feel like their comments just take away from the discussion. Anyways, I wanted to play around with this in my work and I took actual facebook posts from a number of my ‘friends’ and incorporated them into the text. 

The content itself discusses communication and the problems that we still have even though using social media is so accessible now. The narrator, although it seems ‘his’ (I say ‘his’ but I never specifically address him as a male in the short series of narrations) words have no meaning, and actually to him they don’t, it appears that his struggles are with ‘his’ interactions with others.  He is influenced by other’s opinions easily and feels pressure to keep up this facade of a social life yet, although he takes his lack of social interaction into account, he doesn’t want to go on an date with his girlfriend, he doesn’t want to go to work and he becomes suspicious of the new intern that keeps smiling at him. 

The organization of the content also follows this disconnect between reality and this social sphere, it’s jumbled together and sometimes confusing, it’s up to the reader to follow the stories and connect them on their own. Also, the fact that I never address the narrator by name or pronoun asserts this question of identity that people seem to always be searching for and now turn to social media to express this desire. I also try to deal with societies attitude towards things that don’t necessarily concern them and their lack of interest in anything that doesn’t directly benefit them. I don’t know if anyone would really get these things from my work but at least that was what I had intended when I started on it. And so, that is the summary.

Gaga Feminism/f-words

For Monday’s ‘creative’ response I looked to “Gaga Feminism” for my topic and responded to various things concerning that and, I had meant to bring up a passage in class to look at but just never got around to actually saying it so what better time to do it than now? On page 84 there is a sentence that says, “…when a woman stops dating other female-bodied people and takes up with a biological male, people then refer to her as “going back to heterosexuality,” as if she had been on a short vacation, strayed away from her regular life but was now back on track.” And again, the sentence after; “…lesbianism can never be either an origin or a destination – in other words, it can never be a primary mode of identification, nor can it be the goal a woman might shoot for.” This suggests that lesbians only choose female partners because they have run out of options and must be desperate which is actually what various doctors, lawyers and priests thought about lesbianism in late 19th early 20th centuries. Although, for the masculine women they thought it was just something congenital or inherent. Because apparently, if a good-looking “normal” women chooses to go lesbian she is only doing it because of “certain dire circumstances”. 

This is find highly interesting and wonder if the same thing was thought about men being gay. Do men only turn gay because they are unable to find someone that will love them? And what about the women that were mentioned earlier who, by the time they are in their 40’s and are still single end up choosing some undesirable older man because their pool of potential marriageable candidates has gone down. But, notice that they did not choose to go with a woman even though their situations would, under normal circumstances, be considered ‘dire’. People are always trying to define and find an origin to homosexuality like it’s a strange disease that has a cure if only we could find the cause of it all.  

As for Duplerris’ “f-words” I can say that it is extremely dense and it took me half an hour just to get through half of it. Although I have to say I was actually able to somewhat read it this morning as opposed to before class on Monday when my brain was obviously at a low-functioning point. I won’t attempt to try to connect or find some revelation about the text but one thing that is obvious from it is that essay’s are a form of their own, completely separate from other literature and apparently unable to be categorized. It was interesting to see examples of the first few forms of essays (which didn’t seem like essays at all) transform into how the modern essay came to be. I never did think before just how complicated and complex the essay could be by just being a writing about a reading which is to say a wreading/writing text. Hopefully if I read the next half it will make more sense to me…hopefully, but doubtfully. 

“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” (1pg Response)

By the title of Claudia Rankine’s book “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric,” I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting. Will it be a sad story addressing the lonely life of the “me” mentioned in the title or perhaps the general state of the American people; a state of loneliness? What I found was the adjective lonely, a word that seemed to act as an undercurrent throughout the entire text. Claudia’s style is at once technical yet extremely personal and relatable. Relatability is exactly one of the reasons that I chose this text. The first line of the first page of the story is “There was a time where I could say no one I knew well had died,” and yet as I moved through the text there was the constant questioning of death and the subtle and un-subtle expressions of depression (5).

Rankine includes various stories of death and her own personal struggles with depression as well as the people that are close beside her. She takes a position outside of herself with which to see the world and society that surrounds us all. America’s desensitization of death and our incapability to deal with our own traumas makes us all lonely because we do not know the means to express ourselves. Before the story even begins Rankine starts off with a quote from Aime Cesaire that I believe accurately describes the meaning of her American Lyric. “And Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the steriles attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear….”

In terms of transgenre, this text certainly does it credit. Beginning with format, each page varies in length and content of its words; from one paragraph inserts to strategically placed pictures of static televisions, when you skim through the pages it does not look like a normal novel. It does not move chronologically nor does it only tell of her experiences but the experiences of many whose stories may have or may not have mattered. A six-year-old beaten to death to millions of HIV-positive South Africans, Rankine makes the point that these lives do not matter. She also questions this statement and at one point writes that this expression of grief or physical pain over a loss “is not something an “I” discusses socially.” (57).

She is constantly questioning her own lack of emotion over this fact that millions of lives never mattered. Why is she sad? She writes about these deaths without experiencing some sort of grief or pain and thinks that maybe that is the reason for her sadness. Claudia Rankine does not like the news. Another theme that I got out of this text is that the American people are all trapped by the same apathy and treatment of death. Our media and government bombard us with death each day and by the time we are grown we have this detached notion of death, as if it is not important, as if it doesn’t directly concern us. But, although we are lonely because of this inability to express ourselves over one of the most important events of our mortal lives in a social atmosphere, this combined loneliness is the thing that connects the people in this nation.

To say that this text has influenced me to write differently, well, I cannot determine that yet, but I can say that it made me think. It made me think of my thoughts on death and the various stories covered in the book and it also made me think of how a writer can use other people’s stories to enhance their own. A creative writer must not only be able to come up with fictional events but factual ones that can give the reader a true connection to their story. Images also play an important role in Rankine’s book, the photographs being able to invoke strong emotion out of the reader even when the writer is not using words to do so. A writer’s tools include so many things, and this book has taught me how to use a variety of them effectively. Although I’m sure I’ve barely touched the surface of this book, I’ve been able to connect with it and because of that I believe that this was a successful interaction.

“Dictee”

Cha’s “Dictee” is a very interesting and innovative novel and I find that, although I do not understand all that is going into the work and the message behind that effort, I can connect with it in a way that other books do not make me. I enjoy the cultural aspects of the work, which is more interesting to me because I have an interest in the Asian cultures but also because it gives emotion to the work. It is an unusual combination of prose and almost like poetry written into it although not made obvious. There is a lot of repetition as well as fragmented sentences that make you stop frequently while reading. Family, religion, culture…it deals with a lot of topics and I am looking forward to understanding the meaning behind her words. 

Project #1 Reflection

When I first started thinking about how I wanted to do my project it was in the form of an essay that would attempt to explore the nature of my relationship with both English and Japanese and how they function in my mind. I think I would have continued with that idea if time would allow it but I couldn’t organize my thoughts fast enough and in the end I tried to do a story that would touch the surface of these thoughts as well as others. 
I can’t say that I’m completely pleased with the result, although I may write prose most of the time, this style as well as the length is not what I am used to. Even though I don’t feel fully connected to my work the project has at least invoked my curiosity about these topics. Writing transgenre is hard and easy at the same time and Rob’s class we wrote in accordance to other author’s and their form but writing my own transgenre piece is different because there are absolutely no guidelines to follow. We’ll see how the next piece turns out.