froggies315's blog

This story was inspired by everything.

First, an apology:

At the end of class today, Anne asked us: “What is science?”  Truthfully, I find this question (and all the other definition questions like it) incredibly irksome because I feel that it assumes 2 things:

1. That I haven’t thought about what science is (I have)

At the end of class today, we started talking about what the Statrapi’s comics mean.  We talked about images of death from a child’s perspective and how pictures can convey this message.  These types of conversations are hard for me because finding meaning in art has always been difficult/impossible for me.  I didn’t understand why I struggle to find meaning until I read Understanding Comics.  McCloud drew a beautiful continuum from reality to meaning (p. 52-53).  If I think of my life as grounded in reality, then it follows that my life has little meaning, no?  This explains why I don't "get" art in the way that is often expected of me.  McCloud helped me again by explicitly saying what art means.

related to our talkings about interruptions and disability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/the-art-of-distraction.html?ref=todayspaper#

I liked our discussion at the very end of class today about the importance of “drawing a line” to indicate that something is special and unique instead of expanding definitions to include everything.  If I remember correctly, this conversation sprung from our discussion about the end of Scott McCloud’s second book.  I understood his argument to be something like this: in order to maintain comics’ relevance in the digital age, artists have to remove panels and embrace the infinite.  We talked briefly about how removing panels from comics makes them reminiscent of the cave drawings from which they arose.  

If McCloud is right, and the future of comics relies upon removing the panel, then their evolution serendipitously ends up right back where it started.  This is nice for my brain to think about.  I like circles.

not sure how I feel about this, but it seems related to our discussion from thursday.

http://www.good.is/post/is-sweden-s-classroom-free-school-the-future-of-learning/

also related (re: free schools) act three from this episode of This American Life.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/424/kid-politics

This week has been one of my favorite weeks at college, ever.  I think it has a lot to do with the conversations we’ve been having in class.  I’ve been connecting things from this class to lots of things in my life outside of class, I’ve been reading more, thinking more, smiling more, and writing.  I feel really lucky to have been a part of reading what we’ve read and saying what we’ve said this week, and I feel sad to be saying goodbye to this unit.  I hope that we can make graphic novels as exciting as academic writing (I’m laughing at myself because the response to that seems so glaringly obvious to me: YES! OF COURSE WE CAN!)  

Anyways...

I left last Thursday class a little shaken.  Our conversation and the Breaking Project reading made me think about things I didn’t really want to think about.

Some background:

Of all the words I have ever used to define myself, writer has never been one of them.  Every time I write, I write for someone or something else.  I write papers for school because I’ve convinced myself that school matters, and  I write letters for Amnesty International because issues of justice are important to me.  When I first started writing this web-event, it was an assignment that I “had” to do.  During a round of revisions, I realized that I was writing for myself.  For the first time in my life, I was writing just for myself.  So, this is for me, but I want you to read it.  

Understanding the Evolution of Change

One of the major themes in our class discussions and readings thus far is that the concept of originality is bogus.  Everything we write, say, experiment, and do is just some iteration of what has come before.  I’ve been convinced.  In another one of my classes this week, a professor mentioned the idea of “evolutionary tinkering.”  Here’s a definition written by Francois Jacob posted on Larry Moran’s blog Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist: