xx Monroe Street xx
For Tuesday 9/22, 5p:
That’s all for now—will try to catch up on reading, responding and grading in the coming week, I promise!
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:Â 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. As your Media Share (#4) for Tuesday (9/15), please share your lists of things you’ve seen online that we worked on toward the end of our last Zoom meeting. Include a link to at least one of these things.
2. Read & comment on one other person’s Media Share (any of them—a post with no comments or only a few comments, preferably).
3. 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”).
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
In your feedback, please comment on at least 1 specific passage in the essay you’ve learned something from (and explain what you’ve learned) and make 1 specific suggestion about one passage in the essay that you think could be improved (and explain how to improve it). Please quote from the essay at least once in your post.
NOTE: Please scroll to the bottom until you find someone who has yet to receive a comment from someone else—or someone who has only received 1-2 comments. We have to make sure everyone gets feedback!
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):
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!).
Zoom Summary Guidelines
If you miss a Zoom meeting, please write a 250-300 word summary, including at least one paragraph, one direct quotation from the conversation, and as many bulleted points as you like.
You are encouraged to make your summary interactive, responsive, and —NOT simply informative. What did you learn from watching & listening to the recording? What would you have said or asked if you’d been present at the meeting? Would you have used Zoom emoji reactions to any particular moment in the Zoom? Would you have used the Chatbar? Would have wanted to do a Screenshare—and, if so, what would you have shared?
These are just a few questions to get you going with the creative part of the summary—don’t feel obligated to respond to all of them or in order… Basically, I just want your summary to indicate what you learned from the Zoom (the important stuff related to the course) and also how you responded to it, the ideas it gave you, etc.
Note: When posting, please title your post using your name and the meeting # (i.e., Monroe Street Zoom Mtg 1 Summary) and remember to check the box next to the “Zoom Category” before posting.
You can test that you posted correctly by clicking this link; if you can’t see your post there, then go here, scroll down and look for post (you can search for your name as well), and click “Edit” then make sure you’ve selected the right category. Rinse and repeat.
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.
As my intro, I’m sharing a piece of video art by Arthur Jafa titled “Love is the Message, the Message is Death.”
Whenever I watch Jafa’s short piece, it makes me laugh. It makes me cry (every time). Alternations of white and black and black and white, violence and hope. The Kanye soundtrack, replete with Mahalia Jackson wailing via sample, the shots of small children pleading with their drugged-out parents, learning to fear police—this makes you wonder: when in need, who will save you? There Jafa plants a rather cruel reply: the indifference of the sun, far away, glowing, flaring. I am trying to think of what brings tears for me whenever I watch. There is something of the essence of what it means to be a human—living and dying in America in the 20th-become-21st century—here. There is something of me here, I don’t know quite where, when I watch this.
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