Author: Monroe Street

For Friday 9/18

OK, so I’d like to take this week to catch up on several things, including Essay 1 feedback and revisions to last week’s writing assignment related to Serpell’s text (#3, for Fri 9/11). We will speak more about this text in our Zoom meeting this week, and I’d like you to re-think and re-write what you wrote in response to it for last week (or, if you’ve yet to complete last week’s work, you lucked out and now have a second chance ;). Please share your revised responses as comments on the original prompt post.

In addition—also for this Friday (9/18)—please read 3 Essay 1s and share feedback for each of them as a comment responding to each person’s post.

Lastly—and still for this Friday (9/18)—please read at least 1 other person’s Media Share #4 (their list of weird stuff they’ve seen online) and comment on it in the following way. I want us to keep working on identifying patterns in lists, as this will help us to establish connections between different parts of Essay 1 and also to begin topics to research and write about for Essay 2 (more on this in the weeks to come). So what I want you to do is this: read the person’s Media Share #4 list; then make 2 sub-lists, each containing a few of the things on the original list that have something in common. Title each sublist using a word or phrase that describes what each of the items in the sublist has in common. Here’s my example from last week:

Original List of weird shit I’ve seen on the internet – > What have I learned from the internet? (question to connect this to Essay 1 assignment)

–an owl eating a man’s rooftop strawberries
–a gaping butthole, sent via anonymous link
–a hog galloping through a city
–a semi-nuclear explosion in Beirut
–video of the Twin Towers falling
–a polar bear cuddling a dog
–a Trump supporter being shot in Portland OR
–George Floyd being asphyxiated by a police officer

SUBLISTS (based on topics/patterns/themes I’ve noticed in my original list above)

Violence:
–a semi-nuclear explosion in Beirut
–video of the Twin Towers falling
–a Trump supporter being shot in Portland OR
–George Floyd being asphyxiated by a police officer

Animals:
–an owl eating a man’s rooftop strawberries
–a hog galloping through a city
–a polar bear cuddling a dog

AGAIN: what I want you to do is read someone else’s original list and comment on it with two sublists organized in terms of patterns, topics, themes that *you* notice in their original list.

1. Read & comment on one other person’s Media Share #3 (someone with no comments or only a few comments).

2. Read & comment on one other person’s Essay 1 (scroll down and choose carefully). In your feedback, tell them what you think the conflict they should try to develop is as well as a moment in their essay that they should expand into a scene (a “movie in the mind”).

3. Namwali Serpell’s “Triptych: Texas Pool Party” is the next on our reading list, and what I want you to pick up on here is not only the conflict at the heart of this essay—racism, police brutality, and so on—but also the extremely creative way in which Serpell plays with perspective in this experimental narrative. You’ll notice that she tells the story in three parts, hence the title. Each part re-tells the same story from a different perspective. Here’s what I want you to respond to in this text and how:

A. First, tell me why Serpell may have titled this text “Triptych” (hint: click the link above). Then I want you to describe to me the perspective—the point of view—from which each of the three parts is written. For each part, consider: is this one or more than one person narrating and how do I know? Is this even a person narrating—and how do I know? If this is a person, can they be identified—and how do I know or not know? If so, who is this person—and how do I know?

You’ll notice I just said “how do I know” about five thousand times. This is because I want you to get into the habit of asking yourself this question when you interpret texts you are reading. To that end, in each of your responses—to parts 1, 2, and 3 of Serpell’s text—I want you to include one quotation to serve as evidence of who you think the narrator is (who the perspective of each part belongs to). This will be fun…and probably hard!

A1. Part I

A2. Part II

A3. Part II

Optional/Extra-credit: How does Serpell’s telling this story through these three different “lenses” lead us to think differently about the main conflicts—racism, police brutality, etc.—that are at stake in this text? What, moreover, do you think of Serpell’s work?

B. I want you to write two versions of a scene for your Essay 1 (a scene, remember, is a description of action that allows your reader to form a “movie in the mind”). In the first version, I want this scene to be written from your perspective (using “I”). In the second version, I want you to experiment (like Serpell) with writing the same scene from another perspective. You can write from the perspective of another person present in the scene, from the perspective of an animal present in the scene, an object present in the scene (a desk, a phone, a car), and so on…

B1. Scene for Essay 1 from your perspective (“I”)

B2. Same scene, told from the perspective of another person, animal, or object

Unit 1 | Appearances that Deceive…
Scene and Conflict

Although by now we’re acquainted with Essay 1, I’ve yet to comment on the theme of our readings so far in the first unit of the course—the idea that appearances can be deceiving—which is something you might (still) consider writing about for your first essay.  In Naylor and Coates’ texts, they allude to the ways in which race—or, in the case of Naylor, racialized language—can be deceiving: the “n-word” doesn’t always mean something bad (even if at first glance or hearing it seems to); meanwhile, for Coates, the very notion of race—or looking at a body in terms of its “race”—is a fiction, the product of racism rather than its cause.  On the other hand, Chu’s text confronts the deceptive appearance of a person’s gender: while a body may appear to be that of a man, a transgender person like Chu may nonetheless feel more like a woman at times (even if obtaining a vagina via surgery doesn’t quite clinch this feeling).  In the next reading, Mirene Arsanios tells a twisted “love story” of sorts that highlights the deception involved in contemporary romance, rooted as it is in text-based (mis-)communication.

Remember the readings for this course are there to inspire you to take chances—as all of these writers have—with becoming vulnerable and chancy in your essays-in-progress.  Please take inspiration from both what these writers are writing about as will as the WAYS in which they are doing so.

OK, so for Friday (respond to 3A and 3B as a comment below; label each part A and B, please):

1. Comment on another classmate’s “Media Share” (1 or 2, doesn’t matter). In your comment, include at least 1 thing you found interesting about their post and 1 question you have about it.
2. Read Mirene Arsanios, “April-May-June.”
3. A. Something I want you to notice about both Chu’s text and Arsanios’ essay is the way that both of them center around a CONFLICT—as do most good stories—and yet how neither of these texts ends in a way that really resolves this conflict.  These are both well-told stories (as your Essay 1 will be) but they aren’t stories that lead to a happy ending or an epiphany.  Each writer concludes their work in a way that is messy or unsatisfied or confused in some way.  For this part of the prompt, focus on either “The Pink” or “April-May-June” and explain what the main CONFLICT of the story is before moving on to analyze how the story ends.  What remains unresolved?  What questions are left unanswered?

B. Both of these writers create vivid scenes in which time slows down and we become able to imagine a kind of movie-like documentation of the writer’s mind perceiving the world around them as well as their own inner thoughts.  (I’ll be talking a bit about this on the Zoom call for this week, so please refer to the recording of that for more explication of some of the key scenes from these two texts and the elements that make up a “scene.”)  For this part of the prompt, please write a long (2+ paragraph) scene that you might want to add to your Essay 1.  When thinking about a scene to write, first think of a central CONFLICT related to what you’re writing your Essay 1 about and try to think of a SCENE that shows this CONFLICT building (or exploding!).

 

1. Read the Essay 1 assignment (see link above under “Student Work” à “Essays”).
2. Finish reading the first two reading assignments (#1 and #2, by Gloria Naylor and Ta Nehisi Coates, in “Readings”).
3. Respond by Friday evening to the following two prompts. Share your response as a comment below (see “OpenLab Bible” under “Course Info” for instructions on how to comment).I. On reading Naylor. This is a narrative-based essay, like the one you’ll be producing for Essay 1.  Let it be an inspiration to you all.  Write a response to it, considering some (if not all) of the following questions.  Please write your response in paragraph form; please do NOT simply answer the questions in order.  It’s better for you to follow your own train of thought than to try to answer my questions as though they were a test (they are NOT a test).

   II. On definition in Coates. Whenever one declares what something IS, one is making a definition. In essay 1, you will (somewhere but not everywhere in the essay) formulate and argue for your own definition of what “education” is.

We’re looking at Ta Nehisi-Coates text for inspiration regarding how definition can be used. In Ta Nehisi-Coates’ Between the World and Me he forms a powerful definition to frame the story he tells his son about living as a black man in America in the 2010s.  He writes: “race is the child of racism, not the father.”  As you may have gleaned, this is no ordinary dictionary definition of race; this is one of the ways Coates wants to define race.  I want you to do two things with this:

A) Unpack the implications of Coates’ definition of race. Why does he think this?  What impact does it have on how you think about race?  How is it related to current events that you are aware of?  Again, begin with 1 or more of these questions and see where it takes you.  Don’t feel obligated to answer all of them in a row.

B) Write your own definition of “race” or “education”—up to you. Explain why you’ve defined the term as you have.