I’ve spent my summer working with high school students on their college applications. My forte in the office is editing essays— passing opinion on as many as five or six each afternoon, delivered face to face to 16 and 17 year olds.
But many times I will read an essay and then set it aside, and then spend my time simply talking to the student about themselves. Tell me about your family. Talk to me about what you want to do in college. Who is an important person in your life.
Important: Where do you find yourself happy? What activity do you do or person do you spend time with that causes you to lose track of time?
Very Important: When do you feel as though you are MOST YOURSELF? With friends? Family? Playing sports? In a science lab? Volunteering at the animal shelter?
I just read a great Atlantic article on the importance of imagination in telling stories. The most important reason: because it is more interesting to tell a story that engages the reader’s imagination as well as your own. Doesn’t matter what is true, even so long as it is compelling.
For example, try this story:
Batman weighed 188 pounds. His hair was black. His complexion was fair. Young Batman grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where he spent an unhappy and decidedly disturbed childhood. His grandfather was well known in town as the man who had invented the machine that lays down lane stripes on highways all across America. Batman’s mother was an insomniac. She could sew pretty well. She loved a good pork chop. Batman’s father, by contrast, preferred seafood. The church Batman attended was made of limestone. His school was a brick structure. The family car was an Oldsmobile.
Did you make it through that? It wasn’t even much of a story, just a list of facts. And now try this one:
When Batman was 6 years old, he grew a big, bushy tail. Often, it popped right out of his pants. This was embarrassing, of course, especially in a place like Sioux City, where tails were out of fashion among midwestern children. As a result, Batman had no friends. Kids laughed at him. One day after school, as Batman was walking home, his tail dragging in the mud behind him, he looked back and saw that he had painted a long dark stripe down the center of the road. His grandfather, who happened to be driving by, took note of this, and of how the stripe neatly divided the road into two separate lanes. What a wonderful way to prevent collisions, thought his grandfather. If only that stripe were yellow! That night at dinner, Batman’s grandfather talked with great excitement about building a machine that would replicate what he had witnessed on the road that day. “We’ll make millions, maybe billions,” he said. “We can finally get out of this cruddy town.” No one else at the dinner table seemed impressed. (“Pass the pork chops,” said Batman’s mother.) But the next morning, undaunted, the grandfather tied young Batman to the rear bumper of the family Oldsmobile and handed him a can of yellow paint. “Just dip in your tail whenever it runs dry,” said the grandfather. “A nice straight line.” And so for miles and miles, Batman painted a neat yellow stripe up and down the streets of Sioux City, Iowa, past limestone churches and past brick schoolhouses. Not a month later, the city’s accident rate had dropped dramatically. Batman suddenly had friends. A parade was held in his honor. Sioux City, Iowa, became known, and is still known today, as the safest city in the safest county in the safest state in America. And little Batman had his first sweet taste of what it was to be a hero, almost a superhero, although to this day his tail remains an appendage he takes great care to disguise. You probably hadn’t even noticed it.
This story gives you a much greater insight into the life and times of Batman. What’s more— it’s ENGAGING. It’s fun to read.
And I can’t tell you how many high school college essays read like the first Batman story. “I did this. And then I accomplished this. And I did this.” I end up trying to teach imagination in my one on ones, and then I have to get them to completely ignore their previous papers and engage in a separate conversation. I’ll talk to them about their lives, what they like to do, etc, and they’re usually surprised when I say “PERFECT! That’s your essay! Look how inspired you are! Write about that!”
College essays are a perfect opportunity to get fired up and passionate. They should be fun. They’re the opportunity to present yourself, to let the admissions counselors get to know you, and you end up writing a resume instead…
I think we’ve got to be teaching our kids a little differently. At least, they shouldn’t feel like every time they’re sitting down to write something that it has to be work, that it has to be written in a certain way.
Anywho, read the article, I enjoyed it. Made me want to start wearing tails.
JAMES O’DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word
Marx was right: the “state” will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization
Working on a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost— on the fall of Adam and Eve.
Trying to work through a problem that I came up w while reading the text: What must be the circumstances through which Adam and Eve could fall from paradise? What compelled them to eat that fruit?
WHAT HAPPENED: Our original sin was initiated by our eating the fruit. In that moment, we chose to disobey God. We did not act completely out of ignorance, or lust, or irrationality— although they might have played roles. We have the free will and reason to consider the things we do, to overcome our impulses. We should have the temperance to command our desires.
SO THEN WHY’D WE DO THAT?: Was our fall the fault of our own original flaw? No. Our fall was the result of it— original sin being our first transgression that caused the others. We CHOSE— God gave us free will, to stand on our own or to fall on our own— and we failed. Eve still ate the fruit, and Adam followed her.
SO LETS BLAME TEH WOMAN!!
I hate blame, especially once you’ve understood a person. You know the situation where you’re in a group of people and one person starts complaining about another person who’s not there, how horrible they are, how much they suck, and the person in the group who actually has a relationship with that human being sticks up for them? They aren’t necessarily saying that the original person was wrong, but often that there is a lot more to the story to know before you pass judgement.
Adam would stick up for Eve. So would Milton, and so does JESUS.
I’m jus gonna post my paper up here in a little bit…
What is life?
Or, to reject the simple black and white of it all: When are we living?
I read this article today—
The Riddle of Consciousness (New York Times):
The deeper that investigators dig, the more hidden chambers they find. Last Wednesday, scientists in England and Belgium reported that five people with severe brain injuries who had been identified as “vegetative,” beyond reach, showed activity on brain imaging that strongly suggested conscious awareness. One of them, a 29-year-old man thought to be “vegetative” for five years, began to answer yes and no questions by alternately showing brain activity when thinking about tennis (lighting motor areas), then about walking in his house (lighting spatial areas).
A locked door on consciousness had swung open, all right; but on the other side was yet another dark corridor. After five years of being in effect buried alive in its own skull, what kind of consciousness was left for this patient? Who, exactly, lives behind those blank eyes? And, for that matter, what name do we give to this conscious state that looks totally absent, except for the ghostly blinking pixels on a brain imaging machine?
Deathly hallows, showing life but not in action
Socrates described life as the function of the soul. Our soul it needs to be quenched, it needs to be completed. Our mind, our self, will usually receive this ethos of our soul in the form of desires, and responds in the form of action. We go to the world for its objects; beautiful, satisfying and fulfilling, and in that way we become alive.
We are then most dead when we are not actors in the world. When we are not responding to beauty, when we are not engaging, seeking, acting— when we are comatose, when we are dead— our soul suffers. But is it still living?
Our lives, our bodies, our selves, our minds, are the vessels for our souls. If they are not strong, if they deteriorate it is like the cup that holds our tender soul (our wants, our desires, our eros) is leaking. The substance within still exists— our soul still the same— but our agency, our potential to quench our soul is inhibited as well.
If the cup breaks, our soul may be scattered, helpless as a puddle. Still existing, still yearning, but lost to itself…
Back on the CC campus, my good friend Ali Abraham is doing great things with a TypePad blog, titled “The Neon Zee”.
ALI WORDS: Poet, brilliant, ridiculous, insane, GaGa fanatic, penis fascination, ketchup, romantic, hopeless, hopeful, stubborn romantic, chef, tree climber, philosophy, crazy, octopus.
You should know these things cause Ali has really taken off as a thinker/blogger in the last few months, and its been awesome to watch. Here’s a recent post of hers, about some boy following her around on some night:
All I can say is that having 100% of the power and being in complete control WAS NOT a turn on. it was boring. it was like dragging a fish through the water by the hook piercing its lip as it slowly dies. DEAD FISH not a good thing to be compared to!
it felt evil bad. and it felt good to be so fucking bored.
LETS PLAY A GAME.
DONT BE THE DEADFISH. DONT BE THE FISHER (HE SUCKS.)
be the fucking hook. or the puncture wound.
?
From the excellent post, “Let’s Play a Game.”(The rules of the game are pretty spot on for me… almost too spot on…)
‘
Her time in Greece, “Things that Ring”
And a poem of hers:
SO Shoot Me, Another God Poem.
I thought God was opposite of man,
something uncomprehending.
Judging, but indifferent.
And I thought,
here I am,
a man,
dreading judgment,
spurned by indifference.
but when God speaks to God,
how does he address himself?
who responds?
If each man is a piece of Him,
when we speak to each other,
are we eavesdropping
on yahweh’s senile mutterings?
The lack of sex makes Christianity so sexy.
until my grandmother took me to church when I was four,
I thought I was a beast.
I am 20,
and my sweet heart
rots through my breast bone,
tickling my skin.
I want to fuck. and I want to laugh hard. and I want to cheat at life,
where is the wonky Christ to save me now?
Again, go to theneonzee.typepad.com.
Also, I’m working with Ali to start a new blog that’ll feature Colorado College artists of all makes and models— we’ll be posting student creative writing and artwork, interviews with student/teacher/visiting poets, upcoming arts events, guest posters, creative writing prompts, and whatever else we can think of. We just put up a feature of beloved professor-poet Jane Hilberry there.
Check it out at theleviathanblog.wordpress.com.
My brother Connor just sent me the link for this.
KAWAIIIIIII
My bro is also starting to learn how to play the ukelele himself.
And he’s going to start practicing for the Portland Center Stage production of Snow Falling On Cedars, which will start running in Jan.
Talented guy, my bro…
CC rugby represent.
Back in only a week…
The last part of the paper I wrote for my Media, Race, and Politics class. You can find the first part here, the second part here, and the third part here… although you don’t really need to read them to read this last one. Just read…
I have heard it said: “Why should I feel guilty about what my ancestors did (as slave owners), I didn’t do anything?”
Another: “I want to befriend the blacks at work, but they always seem to isolate themselves.”
Another: “Eventually we’ll all become so racially mixed that race won’t really matter anymore, right?”
Another: “How is it that black communities are the only ones that haven’t gotten themselves out of poverty yet. Other immigrants are at the same level as whites now.”
Another: “I have black friends, and they don’t feel the need talk about race all the time. Its not a big deal.”
Some of these words spoken to me before this school year had begun, but I am only now beginning to realize what their true significance. Race and racism does exist. We only try not to notice it, but it’s impossible for one not to develop ideologies around the tensions that society constructs itself around. We stop listening to it. We close our ears and our minds. We hope that we won’t have to talk about race, that via harmony and equality the barriers will disappear.
The ultimate goal, the majority believes, is for race to no longer exist. We believe that we share this goal with the minority; that they want nothing more than to join the ranks of the majority. This reinforces so much racism and race trauma in society today— black on black hate, dynamics of oppressor and oppressed, self-loathing, among much more.
In the beginning of this essay I felt as though I had to explain my own racial background before I could speak on behalf of the non-racial majority. I felt that I must acknowledge my own disinclination to embrace my racial heritage and my proclivity to join the non-racial majority. I do not know what being Asian means, as a singular identity or as a part of a group, and I have not felt the need to reclaim that. I do not want it to define me, just as a white person does not feel the need to consider their whiteness.
But our society forces blacks to define themselves as the minority, as the oppressed, as African. I can move throughout my life without thought for my own race, and a black person cannot. I can claim myself as a non-race; black people cannot avoid the claims of others. Realize this, our speakers seem to be saying to us. Realize that being black means something. Realize that it is something that is carried, that is never forgotten, not for a single day of our lives.
“Then what can we do to solve things?” We will always ask. “Where do I start?”
Just keep listening, I am told.
Don’t let anything keep you from listening.
Basil Fawlty beats his car out of rage, retribution, and ridiculousness. We laugh, because Basil is acting so looney— we laugh at him, we laugh at his irrationality. Why not just figure out the problem with the car and fix it? Thats the sensible thing to do.
This video does a good job of summing up how I feel about the Death Penalty. This is the only way I can explain its continued existence in our society: that it is irrational, overly emotional, and ridiculous.
I got the idea for this post from an article written by Richard Dawkins, in response to an Edge Magazine survey asking for Dangerous Ideas. Here’s an excerpt:
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn’t surprise me).
But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
You can get the whole article here. And scroll around the rest of that page— I spent over an hour myself trying to absorb some of dangerous ideas there… make sure you’re sitting down when reading them…
This is the third part of a paper I wrote for my Media, Race and Politics seminar. You can see the first part here and the second part here. I lied… there’s one more part. I’m going to post that on Thursday.
Every time someone tries to engage someone else on the issue of race they run up against the same fundamental issue; that those in the racial majority have been brought up to not believe in racism. We (I certainly include myself in the majority) might acknowledge the existence of race and racism in America, but we have also been taught to proactively dispel thoughts of race and racism in our own worldviews.
Happy Monday everyone! Wooo hooo happy Monday!
My Monday present for you: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Try and watch this and not crack a smile. Impossible to keep a poor mood. Good morning everybody!
Without giving it much thought, I mimicked the dress attire all the varieties that I had seen. I would wear a collared shirt on one day and a formal shirt and tie the next. I would switch between dress shoes and basketball shoes, between trendy colorful sweaters and dull beige ones. I was doing the same things every day, so it wasn’t like I ever needed to dress up or down for any reason.
This is the second part of a paper on the topic of race that I had for my Media, Race and Politics class. The first part is here. I’m going to post the last part on Tuesday.
I will say that the occasions when I feel aware of my own race are very rare. My friends have recognized my denial of my race, and Asian jokes/references/conversations are kept to a minimum. I am not deeply affected by my race. It was not until my semester in Chicago that I have had to reconsider what race and racism meant. This semester been an eye opening experience, and in a different way than I had expected.
Woah… Sure is nice to be in college right now…
(Click on picture for link)
What’s the weather like in North Dakota? Allll aboard for ND!
Excerpt from “The Sparrow”, by Mary Doria Russell:
“And so he turned his aesthetic sensibilities to the experience of orgasm and found the courage to sing of that evanescent moment which, for the fertile, brings the weight of the past to bear on the future, which holds all moments in its embrace, which links ancestry and posterity in the chain of being from which he was barred and exiled. With his poetry, he severed that moment from the stream of genetic history, carried it beyond the body’s drive to reproduce and the lineal need for continuity and, focusing the mind and soul on it, discovered in climax a reservoir of piercing erotic beauty no one else in the history of his kind had suspected.”
Photos by Alan Sailer.
I am thankful for the opportunity I get each day, by the possibility of each day… simply given to me by my being, by my doing, by my being, my being.
