writing to me [part 2]

1. At the beginning of the course, you mentioned two or three aspects of your writing that you most wanted to work on. How well have you met your goal of improving in those areas?
I feel like I've been improving, slowly, but surely. As for as organizing my papers, I feel think I'm getting the hang of it. I just need to remember each paragraph needs, in order, rationale/examples, examples, then analysis. In my beginning papers I know the focus got a little confusing, but by paper 3, I was at least able to identify what exactly I needed to do to change the paragraphs to fit the correct style. This all goes hand-in-hand with the flow of the paper. I believe my introductions and conclusions "start" and "end" my papers much better than they used to.

2. At this point, what would you say are your strengths as a writer?
I focused a lot on the "why" of my topic in paper 3 which I feel is a great improvement and something I was on the verge of conquering. I also spend time making sure I address my audience and never sound one-side in any argument I present. I talked about curiosity in that first post, and looking back it reminds me of how intriguing I found my paper 2 that I wanted to go further into it and develop paper 3 from that!

3. What do you need to improve in your writing in the future?
Structure, Structure, Structure. Forming my paragraphs as neatly as possible is very important. Also, providing sufficient details and examples to back up my rationale is something someone can always improve on. My problem is sounding too repetitive trying to shove in all these reasons "why" that I disrupt the flow of the paragraph's structure. I feel like this is something I will always need to keep in the back of my head before, after, and during writing. Once I master structure (eventually), the style of my writing will be more evident. In getting my point across as directly and persuasively as I can, the tone will come across much better too.

This tandem has really been a unique experience. I've never been in a class so small - who would have thought it'd be in college! I've loved learning about different women and men in the spaces they inhibit and using similar concepts to create digital pieces in 2D. As a nursing major my schedule is pretty tight, but I was thrilled to find a W course that also let me incorporate art. I've had a blast in both 2D and HUST and am sad to see the semester end!

Translations

Translation:
1 : an act, process, or instance of translating: as a : a rendering from one language into another; also : the product of such a rendering

Translations is an appropriate name for the play in that a translation of something is not merely a renaming, but it is a reinterpretation of a word or words. This is exactly what the Owen and the British soldiers are doing. They are recreating something new out of something old. In reinterpreting something, the original will be lost, but the hope is that an essence of it will still remain. The British soldiers pay no attention to this at all, except for Yolland. Their only worry is to entirely Anglicize place names. Any Gaelic essence left is irrelevant to them. The original names most likely contain natures that cannot be translated and do the originals no justice. Therefore, the reconstruction—or the translation—of something is not completely real; something has been altered and will probably never resurface.

Fork in the Road

I find that Lucy's quest for identity is much like Omishto's. Both struggle between two entirely different settings. I chose to include a picture of a road split because it resembles their choices in their lives. Lucy's stuck between America and her homeland, Antigua, while Omishto's being pulled between modern society and her native heritage.

Mother figures are very important for both stories. It's funny how neither Lucy's mom nor Omishto's are main characters, but their presence remain with the girls forever. Lucy's mom provides a connection to her past in which she desperately tries to escape. Omishto's mother serves as her link into modern society and her potential future. The two also have other key influences in their lives, being Mariah and Ama. Their presence serves as a way for the girls to question their surroundings with what they know and what they don't know. Both girls want what the other has. Lucy looks for new experiences while Omishto searches for her roots to decide what path is best to take. That's where the two are different. Lucy made up her mind in the beginning to travel to a new land and almost forces herself to become a new person. Omishto's approach was far different. She observes rather than taking action. She finds Ama and her own Taiga heritage incredibly interesting and "watches" Ama and looks for reasons behind her actions. The panther's death and the two courts she attends symbolize the choices she has to make in her life.

Both girls are at an age in their lives where decisions they make now will forever effect their futures. Lucy must either make amends with her mother and accept her past or hold her peace and move on. Omishto has the choice to follow her mother or Ama who now has been banished from the tribe. This is a crucial moment for her, since Ama is no longer around, Omishto sees the tribe is at danger of disappearing like the panther.

POWER

Linda Hogan’s novel, Power, presents two different ways of perceiving the world from a couple female perspectives. The beauty of this novel is that it reveals the similarities and differences, uncovering the dangers in both and the ways in which power is used within both belief systems, for good and bad purposes. The story starts off very strong, with the storm scene and the climax of the panther’s death. I found this section very powerful and expressive.

“She. She has always watched for it. She has always believed it is there. Sometimes at night she has looked out into the darkness and seen its eyes. They have exchanged glances.” (57)

Ama is in complete control of her destiny, her actions directed toward bringing Omishto into the clan. Omishto finally connects the dots and realizes that Ama knows what she’s doing even if the panther is endangered. The sick panther represents the death of the old ways of the clan as Omishto represents their future. The language flows so well here, I felt embedded with the story. The world is portrayed here as hostile, not literally, but through the language. A split occurs after the initial storm scene. I feel that the remainder of the novel consists of Omishto’s journey to settle this schism and more importantly to understand it and where she belongs within it. Power in this novel is represented by the storm, the clan, and feminist power, in which Omishto’s power has potential in both worlds.

NAMES

Names take a powerful role in this novel. Lucy understands that her name symbolizes important characteristics of her own identity. Her last name, Potter, shows an influence of colonialism that she figures is from an English slaveholder. Lucy cannot stand how her mother ignores her dreams and expects only her brothers to attend college and for Lucy to simply become a nurse. Her middle name, Josephine, hints at this low expectation her mother has for her. It comes from a rich uncle of Lucy’s that died broke and lived in a tomb. Her first name, Lucy, has the worst meaning, deriving directly from the devil himself, Lucifer.

I chose to include an image of Lucifer because I really like the reference to Paradise Lost by Milton. The triumph of good over evil is very clear, but the way Lucifer is seen as sympathetic in his quest to be free from God’s control relates to Lucy’s struggle of rejecting morals. God’s morals are good, clearly, and do not need to be challenged. Setting one’s own path comes from human experiences. Lucy obviously despises most cultural norms out of the pride that people see in Lucifer. It is not clear either that Lucy strives to find new norms for herself as she searches for her new identity.

“I understood that I was inventing myself… I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. I did not have anything exactly in mind, but when the picture was complete I would know” (134).

Lucy constantly contradicts herself throughout the entire novel. She wants to be free and love her new self but, to her, that would only mean she is not free at all. Eventually drastic freedom must let itself become real, life commitments. Lucy is hesitant at this idea. The way Lucy perceives her past as being “[a] person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in" is completely untrue (137). Her past is what causes her to undergo such a difficult transition. After she frees herself from her past attachments, she now longs for “[loving] someone so much [she] would die from it” (164).

i d e n t i t y

“In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my drowning soul...Now that I saw these places, they looked ordinary, dirty, worn down by so many people entering and leaving them in real life, and it occurred to me that I could not be the only person in the world for whom they were a fixture of fantasy. It was not my first bout with the disappointment of reality and it would not be my last.” (3-4)

Lucy’s survival comes from her ability to handle disappointment and her continuance to create her own identity regardless of it. Although she is frustrated, Lucy remains loyal to dreaming. Dreams remain her “lifeboat” during her first few days in America. Even with that, she does not dream about her future but of “green figs cooked in coconut milk” (7). She dreams of home, because her memories keep herself connected with what she knows and understands. At the same time, they will continue to haunt her as she tries desperately to separate ties with her past.

As Lucy describes her living situation she builds independence and pushes past racial boundaries and class that she perceives. I feel that her room represents her alienated state and shows how difficult it is to fit in with the style society has laid out for her. She explains:

“I was only an unhappy young woman living in a maid's room, and I was not even the maid. I was the young girl who watches over the children and goes to school at night.” (7)

This is critical in realizing how Lucy perceives her own self. She makes note that she is not cargo. She also is not commodity, no source of labor whose purpose is related to her ability to work. Thirdly, she is not a maid. Lucy despises any job title. She does not even consider herself an au pair. Lucy only mentions her duties as watching the children and attending school in the evening rather than being defined by a title. Lucy brings up her “unhappy” emotional state as another reason to defend her difficult transition to her new environment.

The title of the chapter, “Poor Visitor,” enhances those feelings. Since everything Lucy is experiencing is new to her, like the running water and food, naming herself too quickly would initially limit herself. Though she exists in a brand new world, she feels alone. Her search for a link home has only brought her farther away.

O and Othello

When Shakespeare composed the play Othello, televisions were not around. Life around the late 1500s also had many different qualities than it does today. The time period of Othello did not have wars on drugs or high school shootings. Peer pressure back then was not an issue. Othello’s audiences in the 1500s did not face the situations that I, once an American high school student, faced. These significant differences make it hard to relate modern day tragedies to those of the 1500s. The common themes and characters from Othello were, I thought decently represented in the movie, O. The movie represents jealousy as a dominating factor over how people live their lives.

As I began thinking about the movie, 0, in comparison to Shakespeare’s Othello, I realized that I would not care much for the movie without having read the play beforehand. The drama, jealousy, and love are all very intriguing and relevant, but a few things caught my eye that I do not believe accurately represent the play. I feel that we never really understand why Hugo involves an unreliable, unpopular, rich kid, Roger, in his scheme. Also, I do not get why his own girlfriend and Desi's roommate, Emily, so easily go along with the deception Hugo presents them, including the scarf. Emily knew very well Desi and O were fighting and the scarf had something to do with it. A great deal of time is spent developing the honest and pure love story between Desi and O, so I find it hard to swallow the fact that O would throw away his obvious potential over a rumor concerning Desi’s impurity he heard from only one person. Though full of confrontations, I sense a missing scene one in which O demands the truth from both Desi and Michael face to face. Racial issues are dealt with in different ways-lightheartedly between Desi and O, obviously. O deals with it directly and Hugo, along with the adults, with understatement. I do, however, find it interesting that O is the only black student possibly in the entire school.

Love

After finishing this book, I thought I’d talk about the theme of love. Love, in Othello, is a bitter victory. It gives Othello strength but not the direction he gets from being a soldier and Desdemona access to his heart but not his mind. Desdemona never fails to stop loving Othello, even when he blames her of cheating on him, calls her a whore, hits her in public, and even strangles her. At her last moment, she still holds herself responsible for her own death rather than accusing Othello. The strength of her love is actually impressive, as it proves to be the only thing resistant to Iago’s scheming. Emilia proved her love through friendship toward Desdemona. She stood up against Iago, her lying husband, for her and was killed for it. Instead of believing in true love, Iago uses it as leverage and resorts to his personal desires-particularly regarding Desdemona. He tells Roderigo he loves him to deceive him, get at his money, or persuade him to do something where he is the only one benefiting. Iago even tells Othello he loves him but actually whispers the cruelest things in his ear. Though he does succeed in ending Desdemona and Othello’s marriage and essentially their lives, he fails to destroy their love. Love’s role in the play is complicated even more by Othello’s statement that he loved "not wisely, but too well." I feel Othello reminds us in this line that the passion of love will always surpass logic.

Plate 7

Between 1998 and 2002, Gregory Crewdson created the “Twilight” series. It consists of 40 very elaborately staged and large photographs. They delve into the relationship between North American homes, landscape, and the imagination. His photos are striking in the way that they reveal a familiar suburban landscape as a place of anxiety and wonder. Typically these photographs contain a single isolated person or figure, giving off a glimpse of shame that almost shouldn’t be there. This idea causes the photos to feel slightly awkward. For example, Crewdson constructs a typical living room setting. The colors in the room are neutral, there are paintings on the wall, furniture in all the right places, a view into the dining room, a few lamps on-one even in the closest-but in the center of the photograph lies a man crouching on the hardwood floor simply gazing at beams of light shooting out from it. He dug out these beams himself. I find it a little odd… For one, if I cut open my floor to find rays of light I’d be a little frantic and confused, but the man is quiet and practically mesmerized. Secondly, it’s as if the room’s telling more of the story. At first glance I did not realize this. The objects within the room are specifically placed to make it seem like the man was previously eating or watching T.V. This leaves me wondering why the man suddenly chose to cut open his floor. Was a small stream of light already exposed?

This photograph, Plate 7, presents a story. Reading the photo more, I notice there’s only one hat on the rack. I’m assuming the man lives by himself, but the table in the corner appears to have enough food for two. I wonder if there’s someone else, waiting in the kitchen perhaps. Regardless, the man is clearly infatuated with the light as if he has just discovered something new about a place that’s always been so ordinary to him. Then I realized why this photograph belongs in the “Twilight” series. The man has been awoken at the very moment of twilight, his moment of twilight. The light represents reality; therefore the man has had a revelation of the real. That’s specifically what this photo reveals. The light exposes the inevitable drama in life. What we don’t know is what the man actually took from the light. Is he suddenly aware of the structure of reality while we remain in the dark, concerned with our made-up beliefs?

Un-novelness

I did not care much for Invisible Cities and it’s “un-novelness.” I do admire this book for its fascinating structure in and of itself. The fact that different categories of stories and cities travel up and down in number sequence and are then replaced by others is very intriguing. All the cities seem to have the names of women as well. I think what kept me fascinated were the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn about their different viewpoints of the cities, eventually questioning even their existence outside of each of their imaginations. But this book was still cold. There are many reasons to admire it, but I could not love it. Its form was an experiment that did not connect with its language to create a story. That was troubling.

On the outside, Invisible Cities is simply a dialogue between the Emperor Kublai Khan and the explorer, Marco Polo. Polo describes his cities physically or imaginatively. But through the progression of Polo’s stories, Khan is unsure of Polo and the truth about all these cities he has traveled to. I developed suspicion as well as the descriptions become more dense. The descriptions themselves are brilliantly written and organized between Polo and Khan opening and closing each section as to frame the different cities. It’s interesting how the city descriptions are tied loosely together by their repeating titles. But I still did not feel free to read the novel in any order I please.

The questions Calvino imposed made you really wonder what his point was in writing this novel. He explores the idea of the cities but then we take personal experiences and our own interactions with our environment to decide if we created the cities or if they created us. Going along with the same idea, I think the cities represent different aspects of ourselves. Calvino toys with experiences like fear of death, love, weakness, and longing. The novel as a whole probes at broader ideas like truth and permanence.

This was not a novel that I could not dive into all at once. Sometimes I found myself doing just that, which is why I’m not surprised I found the text confusing. Its beauty is better revealed when the story is slowly unraveled with time to think and, most importantly, understand the specific ideas and imagery Calvino expresses.

Names and Desire

All of the cities in Invisible Cities bear feminine names. For the traveler Marco Polo, who misses his homeland and the comforts that come with it, each city is female and represents the object of desire. The names are mostly exotic and even hint at the qualities of the city in some way. So, for example, the spider web city is Octavia. I feel its inhabitants constantly live in unease and tension but believe the city and “net” is protecting them. Invisible Cities is generally a dialogue between two men, and so the theme of desire in the novel is consistently a very male one in which woman are chased. This idea is explored quite literally in Cities and Desire 5, Zobeide. Zobeide is the white city under the moon that draws in the dreaming men. After building the city in hopes of reeling the woman from their dream in, they soon realize the city itself has trapped them. Calvino suggests that uncontrolled desire has resulted in “this ugly city, this trap.” Though the cities Marco Polo describes may or not exist, or the stories he tells may be multiple descriptions of the same place, it’s not the point. Marco Polo demonstrates that cities or places in general exist primarily in our imaginations and perceptions. Zobeide and Octavia portray desire through the longing yet trapped feeling that Marco Polo gives them.

Girl, Interrupted

After watching Girl, Interrupted, the only response that seems appropriate is one of shock. While it can be argued that Susanna did have a sort of mental disorder that caused her pain and anguish, it’s crazy that the mental institution that took her in just filled her with meds and never entirely explained to her what was wrong with her. And I think it’s so odd that Susanna spent two years of her life in a mental institution based on the findings of a man who had talked with her for maybe 15 minutes in the beginning of the film. I feel that if Susanna had been able to understand her disease, she may have been more cooperative in her treatment.

Susanna's narration in the beginning of the film said: "Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted." I believe the title, Girl, Interrupted, comes from the interruptions in Susanna’s life such as sexual relations with men and expectations from her family. Maybe these prevented her from living a normal life, and if certain things had not have happened maybe she would've been like any other teenager and not have ended up attempting suicide, being in a mental institution, or suffering from borderline personality disorder. So I think it means simply what it says: a girl whose life was interrupted. Susanna also toyed with madness, and Lisa represents what Susanna no longer wanted to become. Susanna was interrupted on her way to becoming Lisa, perhaps? By the end, I feel, she had begun to figure out how to be herself.

Virginia Woolf stresses and argues the fact that women need a room of their own, and their only way of achieving that is through money. Women’s creativity is hidden because of their lack of power and money. "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses..." This era during Woolf’s writing held the idea that women are here only to encourage men and nothing else. Woolf is tired of this idea. So few women have written successful poetry, because she believes that writing novels occur with frequent starts and stops. Women must endure interruptions while they work without a room of their own. A woman needs time and space to engage in her writing, a luxury most women did not have. This room symbolizes privacy, leisure, and independence-all of which women were not accustomed to and what sets men and women apart. So at the end of Woolf's ranting she means, without money, women and their art will always remain second to men.

Tres Preguntas...

1. What are your strengths as a writer?
Curiosity-When assigned a topic I know previously nothing about, I find it easier to become excited about writing it. It's new. It's exciting. It makes me smarter in the end!
Understanding-It's incredibly important to not only realize both sides of a story or argument but be able to defend and learn more about each viewpoint. Being aware of the type of audience I'm writing for is also very important.

2. What do you need to improve in your writing? (not what do you need to do...what do you need)
Organization-Keeping my ideas straight is crucial in any writing. I always feel like I could have placed certain sentences or even paragraphs in a different order to improve the flow of the paper.
Pace-Sometimes I become too intense or slow in random parts of a writing which can confuse the reader. That's not a good thing. Repeating details and commentary also interrupt the paper's flow.

3. What two or three aspects of your writing would you most like to work on this semester?
Details-I would love to be able to include more commentary and details to back up my writing topic without sounding repetitive. Details develop an image of an event with attention to all senses and specifics. Details are small parts that create a whole and used incorrectly can disrupt a writing.
Style-It's about saying what I mean. It's as simple as that. I want to be able to give my writing a unique tone while getting my point across as straightforwardly as possible. Expressing my ideas more directly, persuasively, and elegantly will enhance my writing style.

4. What is your writing metaphor? In other words, complete this sentence: "For me, writing is like..."
Writing for me is like…catching a creature. I can discover ways to make my attempts more successful, but the actual hunt and capture are different each time. Finding my creature-my idea or argument-is the toughest part. They could be small or nearly anywhere. During the capture itself sometimes I’m sneaky, quiet, and patient. However, other times the writing could be a mad dash. Like finding a butterfly-the second it spots me it's on the move, so I have to follow. It's a race through the grass and trees, but it definitely gets me going and reveals what I am capable of.