Summer Plans

Every summer I tell myself I'm going to write.  Even just a few pages a day.  One year I was going to write a novel.  Another, a screenplay.  But at the end of the summer I have just as many pages as I did in the spring - zero.  So when I tell myself I'm going to write this summer, I'm not quite sure I believe it.   The story I want to tell, though, is getting more urgent.  At the beginning of April my great uncle passed away.  We were not particularly close...but it was my grandfather's last surviving sibling.  His sister died when I was very little, I barely remember her at all.  And his youngest brother died about 70 years ago in a death camp, along with their mother.  I've heard my grandpa speak about his life during the Holocaust several times...and each time I learn something new.  As the resident storyteller among the grandchildren, I've always wanted to document it.  It's the story I've always wanted to tell...and now more than ever I need to actually do it.  At first I was thinking a novel would be good...then I was on a screenplay kick.  However, there's been a shift in Hollywood from movies to television.  To anyone reading this: would you watch a TV show about a Jewish family during World War II?  Regardless of the medium, though, I think this is the summer to write down this story once and for all.

Life Lessons

One of the most common pieces of advice I've heard about writing is "write what you know."  As a kid, I HATED writing about "real life."  I liked to make up characters and experiences.  Now that I'm graduating, all I want to do is write about real things.  Everything I've submitted in this class so far has roots in truth.  I guess now that I'm older I've actually done and experienced things worth writing about.

Fan Fiction.net

I'll admit...towards the end of middle school I was OBSESSED with fan fiction.  I consumed it in mass quantities.  I fell in love with creative writing at the age of eight, and had been dreaming of literary fame ever since.  So when I discovered fan fiction, I obviously had to write some myself.  What I find most astonishing, in retrospect, is how much time and effort I put into it.  I wrote 120 pages of a single RENT fan fiction (still incomplete...my computer was smashed and I lost everything).  120 pages of a "new" novel would have been a good start, but suddenly I had 120 pages of one fiction plus dozens of others that were essentially useless.  I couldn't use them to further my dreams of success.  A few times I thought about changing some of the names, twerking a few things to make it fresh, but it seemed wrong to take it out of the RENT universe.  So I was particularly compelled by the Henry Jenkins article we read this week.  What would happen if my old fan fictions became usable?  I started that fiction in 2005, and to this day I still get messages from people who read my stories, begging me to continue them.  Maybe this class will give me a reason to.

Fiction into Film: A Story of Heartbreak

"It wasn't as good as the book" is the mantra of turning fiction into film.  And for obvious reasons.  It's hard to bring the depth of a novel onto the big screen.

Last summer Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby was released in theaters.  I had been looking forward to this for years.  YEARS.  It was my favorite novel, and obviously anything with Leonardo DiCaprio can't be bad.  As a film major I've sat through a lot of bad movies, and you start to appreciate even the most boring things.  As a result, I've never understood why people walk out of movies, especially when you're paying $10+ to see it.  I almost walked out of Gatsby.  I kept waiting for it to get good...but it never did.  I would even go so far to say it's my least favorite film ever, and I've seen a lot of crap.

My point is not about how much I absolutely despised this version of The Great Gatsby, though.  Rather, it is about a style that Luhrmann used.  As the release date got closer and closer, I read an article in some magazine about the film, and Luhrmann was quoted saying that he felt the novel was really a modern piece.  It was a taste of modernity when it came out, and so he wanted to hold onto that feel almost a century later.  He tried to achieve this by using modern music instead of pieces more appropriate to the period.  Even if I hated Gatsby, there is something to be said for that.  Film and fiction are so different, and it's interesting the kinds of liberties people can take when adapting one to the other.

And here's a picture of Leo to make everyone's day a little better.

Parafiction Around the World

So after today's lecture I was doing some reading for another class I'm taking about Polish cinema.  Over the semester we've watched a dozen depressing films about Communism, repression, and other sad Polish things.  This week, though, we got to watch a Polish gangster film ala Tarantino and Coppola.  Which was a nice change of pace, for starters.  But as I was doing my readings for said film, I found an interesting fact.  Today we talked about how even though paracinema makes a lot of money, they are rarely (if ever) Oscar winners.  Gangster films and other genre films (HELLO PARACINEMA) became SUPER popular post-1980s in Poland, and many even won some of the highest awards there.  So yeah, thought that was pretty cool.

Good Morning, Mr. President

I missed our manifesto class to go see President Obama speak.  And his speech made me think about a lot of the things we've been talking about.

First of all, he knew how to grab our attention.  I am not Obama's biggest fan, but I can give credit where it's due.  And that man (and/or his speech writer/s) knew his audience.  He talked about Zingermann's and basketball and so many other things that as Wolverines we hold near and dear to us.  And he managed to do this while simultaneously incorporating the political points he wanted to address.  As we continue to write our poems, I think it's important to think about this juxtaposition.  Regardless of whether or not we write with some deeper meaning in mind, there are good ways to bring together lots of ideas in a harmonious way.

Another thing that particularly stood out was the response to this picture.

For anyone who doesn't know that's me.  And that guy in the background wearing the white shirt is Obama.  I thought it was pretty cool I got to see the President speak, so I posted this picture on Facebook.  As I found out, many of friends didn't think it was all that great.  In fact, I got a lot of hate for this picture.  This doesn't seem related to our class, but I think it is (to an extent).  We are all writing about things we care about (I'm assuming).  And just because I care about something, doesn't mean everyone else will.  And it goes the other way, too.  I don't necessarily care about all the same things as the rest of class.  However, that's what makes this world great.  We all have different opinions.  What makes it not so great is when people believe their opinions are fact.  I understand that there are a lot of people that don't like Obama, but their animosity about him was directed at me.  Just because they don't like Obama meant that I couldn't either and I was dumb for having gone to hear him speak.  As we continue to write and reveal ourselves to the class, I'd like for everyone to keep in mind that there's a huge difference between criticism and constructive criticism.  People were mean to me just to be mean.  Because they thought they were right.  Only one person said "Eh...I really don't like Obama.  But it's cool that you got to see him."  I think we've done a great job so far being nice about each other's poems, even if we don't like them or think they could be better.  So keep up the good work!

Ekphrasis: The Original Fan Fiction

So I'm going to pull a quote from the "Ekphrasis: Poetry Confronting Art" article that Bruno gave us.

"Auden's poem is an example of how ekphrasis has changed in modern times. ekphrastic poems are now understood to focus only on works of art—usually paintings, photographs, or statues. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5918#sthash.vKQCWAGD.dpuf""

I don't know about the rest of you, but to me that sounds a lot like fan fiction.  People are using existing pieces to make their own art.  Which is pretty much the definition of fan fiction, right?  Ekphrasis seems pretty legit, so maybe fan fiction isn't as low brow as everyone thinks it is.

Group Work

I thought gathering in our small groups was really helpful.  It's one thing to read someone's comments, but it's completely different to talk face to face.  Personally, I found that trying to write 250 - 400 words was a lot for each poem.  I'd get to about 150 and realize I didn't have that much more to say.  And I think that happened with my other group members as well.  Their written comments were helpful, but it was much nicer to talk to them informally, where we could use as many (or as few) words as we wanted.  With no constraints, it was easier to get to the root of what everyone thought.

Blast from the Past

While we're talking about poetic devices and such to make our poems better, I thought a few videos might be in order to remind us of how awesome words can be.

Success!!! ...oh wait nevermind

I'm quite familiar with the Laura Mulvey essay we talked about in class (we spent an entire unit on it in another class last semester).  It's all about the male gaze and cinema taking on aspects of the Oedipus complex etc etc in its most simplified version.  In response to this article, we watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (which is AMAZING if any of you haven't seen it).  There are so many films and TV shows that objectify women through image, so why Rear Window?  Because RW STARTS to flip Mulvey's norms on its head.

GO WATCH THIS NOW

About a minute in, the camera pans down the length of Jimmy Stewart's body.  HALLELUJAH IT'S A MIRACLE!!!!  We are seeing a male body being objectified (sorta) just like a woman's would usually be!  Oh wait...as soon as we finish panning over Stewart, we pan up from Grace Kelly's feet.  Like usual.  SO CLOSE.

Camp Poetry. Population: Chelsea Minnis

After reading Chelsea Minnis' poem and the attached article about Gurlesque, it's obvious that the poem fits into the category.  It's not only the words, though, it's how they are put onto the page.  Separated by dozens of periods, the reader is forced to fill in the silence.  But with what?  There are so many options.  The first time I read it, I glossed over the pauses.  They were too silent and awkward.  The second time, though, as I understood the words more, the periods gained a voice.  Or, rather, lots of overly sexual moans and groans.  These ooohs and ahhhs and don't stoppppsss were so ridiculous, even in my mind, I could only think of this lovely lady, who is a whole blog post of her own.

Camp

"41.  The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.  Camp is playful, anti-serious.  More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.'  One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious" (Sontag).


This quote really stuck out to me (which I'm about to note on the attendance sheet).  It was one of those "aha!" moments.  And it made me think about the show Chuck, which aired on NBC from 2007-2012.  I've been rewatching it with my boyfriend, and a few episodes in he said this - "It's like a B film, but for television."  I'd never thought about it like that before, but he was totally right.  It takes itself so seriously (even when it's trying to be funny), but it's not really serious at all.  The situations and solutions that the main characters come up with are completely over the top.  And, like its B story predecessors, it is pretty campy.

Our Soviet Friends

This video is based on the Kuleshov effect, which was coined by another early Soviet filmmaker like Eisenstein, who we spent a lot of time talking about today.  Hitchcock does a good job explaining it.

Here is the original video.

The idea is that after seeing the soup, the man looks hungry.  After the dead child, sad.  Etc.  However, his expression never changes.  This is the power of montage editing.

Legos & Gender

I thought this Buzzfeed article related to what we talked about a few weeks ago.

Silence

Last class we spent a lot of time talking about silence and lack of space.  "10,000 Hours of Looking" (or whatever it was called) and things of that sort.  

There is a Polish movie called "Roza" (2011).  Here's the synopsis from IMDb.

A harrowing tale of survival centers on Rose, a Masurian woman, whose husband, a German soldier, was killed in the war, leaving her alone on their farm. A single woman had no defense against Russian soldiers who raped as a form of revenge, nor against plundering Poles who found themselves in desperate straits. The law of the jungle had replaced the rule of law. Help arrives for Rose in the form of Tadeusz, a former officer in the Polish Home Army who survived the Warsaw uprising and is attempting to hide his identity.

At the 1:21:30 mark, the main character is arrested and is tortured for ten years.  However, for the most part, the audience doesn't see any of this torture.  We only see his face get more beat up, but we never see the actual action.  This silence makes the scene more powerful, because the torture that the audience imagines for Tadeusz is even worse than what the director could have come up with.

Let's Talk About Sex...

...or not, according to the Foucault reading for this week.  It reminded me of a scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life.  Hilariously uncomfortable hearing the word vagina and clitoris being thrown around in a classroom by John Cleese.  Gotta love it.

Identity

A few days ago my boyfriend showed me this.  Identity is such a personal thing that it's easy to forget that outside forces can influence it.  One of those sources being our parents, of course.