Author: Monroe Street

Jace Clayton deftfully opens his essay on Vince Staples with a description not of the TOPICS he intends to write about—Vince Staples, noise, violence—but with a description of a SOUND, the sound (and corresponding silence) that ends Staples’ debut record.

For this week (Friday), I want you to try writing an opening to your Essay 2 that is inspired by the way Clayton opens his essay on Staples & noise.  Focus on 1 sound in particular and describe it as carefully as you can in order to get your reader to “hear it” (imagine they’ve never heard this song/sound before).  I suggest you listen to your song at least three times to choose your sound (like we did during the Zoom exercise).  Strategies for describing your sound:

—compare this sound to something else the reader may have heard (does this beat sound like a “robot,” a “machine”? does this singing sound “angelic” or like “birds” or like “yelling”?

–consider the length of this sounds: does it go on for what seems like a long time?  or is quite short?  somewhere in the middle?  Time it on your phone: how many seconds does it last?

–does this sound repeat throughout the song?  is it repeated in an ongoing way throughout the song (like a drumbeat) or is it only repeated a couple of times (like the lyrics in a song’s refrain/chorus)?

Lastly, notice how Clayton includes his own emotional (and intellectual) experience of listening to this sound for the first time and then for a second time (“When I learned this tear…was intentional, I was shocked…”).  Include a short paragraph describing your own experience listening to this sound for the first time and then re-listening to this sound a second, third, and fourth time.  Write about differences you notice in your experience.

Share your new beginning to Essay 2 as a comment below.

1. Next week we will be focusing more on how to listen to and write about music more carefully—a skill that will be key for developing your Essay 2s. For Friday, I want you to work on close-reading the lyrics of your selected song (e-mail me if your song has no lyrics). Specifically, what I want you to do is to write out the lyrics line by line and identify a social issue in at least five lines (using your own words).

EX (from Drake’s “Hotline Bling”):

“You used to call me on my cell phone”
possible issues: loss (used to…), love, friendship? Trust?

“Late night when you need my love”
possible issues: love, sex (late night), dependence (you need)

2. In the text we’ve read this week, “Drake: Rapper, Actor, Meme,” Jon Caraminica creates a thesis about Drake’s “Hotline Bling” that connects this song to a key contemporary “social issue,” the meme. In a few sentences, unpack (using your own words) the connection Caraminica makes between the aesthetics of “Hotline Bling” and the issue of memes and meme-making. If you’d like, you can also add your own response to this article—ideas or opinions you’ve had while reading.

For Friday:

–(re-)Watch our Zoom as a reference for thinking about what a scholarly article is.

1. Briefly compare Lane’s “Addicted to Addiction” and Griffiths et al’s “The Evolution of Internet Addiction.” One of these is a scholarly article, published in a scholarly journal; the other is not. In your response, tell me which of these articles you think is a “scholarly” article and explain to me how you know this.  (You do not need to read much of the articles to answer this.). BONUS: Tell me which of these texts you prefer and why.  MEGA-BONUS: How are these two texts making a similar argument about IA?  (You’ll have to read carefully to answer this latter question.)
2. Look at your list of social issues you began thinking about working on for Essay 2 a week or two ago. Choose one social issue and find (don’t read…yet) TWO ARTICLES on this social issue—one scholarly article and one non-scholarly article—using two different resources linked in Essay 2 Research Resources. Share links and publication info (Author name, title, etc.) for these two articles under #2 in your response.
3. Briefly paraphrase in your own words the thesis of either:

—K-Hole, on “Normcore” (pp. 27–41); OR

—Jerry Salz, on the selfie, p.1, 2, 3 (bottom), 6,

Explain how K-Hole tells us what Normcore is by telling us what Normcore DOES; OR
Explain how Salz tells us what a selfie IS by telling us what a selfie DOES (ie what does a selfie SHOW us; how is it MADE?  how does it IMPACT us?).

NEXT WEEK WE ARE ON BREAK: USE THIS TIME TO REVISE ESSAY 1 & DRAFT ESSAY 2.  Your revised Essay 1 and your draft of Essay 2 are both due the following week (10/21).

For Friday 10/2

If you missed our Zoom today, please view the recording and post a summary in the Zoom summaries category.

1. For Friday, let’s begin wrapping up our work with Essay 1, the second draft of which will be due in your Google Drive portfolios on Wed, October 21. Read and/or re-read the feedback you received for the draft you posted under Essay 1 Feedback and share here a paragraph or so of writing that describes the changes you intend to make to your draft: additions you might make, things you might delete, paragraphs you might put in a different place. Please be as detailed as possible in describing the changes you’ll make and explaining why you want to make said changes. See if you can write 7-8 full sentences.
2. As we began working on in the Zoom call today, we will be shifting from thinking about narrative writing (Essay 1) to thinking about analytic and thetic (thesis-based) writing as we advance toward Essay 2. To that end, we talked about what a thesis statement is and two different types of theses—definition based theses and critical/theoretical theses.I don’t want you to worry about having your own thesis for Essay 2 yet… That will come much later. What I want you to focus on for now is understanding what other writers’ theses are in the texts we are reading. To that end, using the Zoom call as a reference, what I want you to share below under #2 are

2A) what you think Jerald Block’s thesis is in “Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction”—and what kind of thesis this is;

2B) your own brief summary of how Christopher Lane responds to Jerald Block’s thesis in his text titled “Addicted to Addiction”—does he agree? Disagree? How/why?; and

2C) in light of these readings, whether you consider yourself to be an internet addict—and why you do or don’t think you are.

We worked on the various uses of listing today—including the use of anaphoric lists to generate new thoughts and the use of sub-lists (what you did when responding to other people’s Media Share #4).  What I want you

For your comment below, please:

1. Post your list of anaphoric sentences from today’s Zoom 5. (If you didn’t attend, please watch the recording and do the prompt highlighted in yellow on the link to the Zoom 5 agenda I emailed you earlier today; also, for those who missed, please post a creative summary of the meeting.)
2. Post a quick note on how you might connect your list above (in #1) to something in your Essay 1—did it occur to you to expand on a thought that came out in your list? Do you think you can find a place to include anaphora in your Essay?  If so, where?
3. Post a list of 5 social issues possibly relevant to Essay 2.
4. I studied with a writer in college whose mantra was “Every good text is a list, but not every list is a good text.” Connect this to what Lauren Duca is saying in “The Viral Virus.”  What are some of the critiques she makes of texts that are only lists?  (Bonus points if you catch the word she uses to describe this genre of online text.)