Student 24's blog

What is striking about Katy Mugford’s chapter, “Nature, nurture; danger, adventure; junkyard paradise” is the four photos of children all in front of different landscapes. And they all have very grim expressions and the same awkward, unenthusiastic, reluctant postures.

This reminds of me of parents taking photographs of their children when on trips to various places, with the classic reluctant child pose. Why do we like taking family photos when we travel to new places, monuments, historic sites, etc.?

There are already countless of photographs and documentations — both professional and amateur — of the Eiffel Tower or the Capitol building or the Rocky Mountains, and yet we still take our own because they are not as meaningful as when they include a familiar, non-stranger person. When we know the subject, or we are ourselves the subject, of a photograph in any landscape, we are capturing ourselves inserted in that landscape. Printed out on a flat surface, that photo physically levels out the degrees to which we may be separated from the landscape. We become part of the landscape.

My family has countless photographs as well, of our own trips. I owe so much to my parents for giving me the lifestyle and platform that allow me to create a relationship with the many environments I’ve experienced. However, I don’t know if I’ve consciously gone about relating the books I read in my childhood with the way I learned about my ‘setting,’ my environment in the close world around me.

Here are the lyrics to the song I wrote for the creative project:

Ghost Town

Oh, can you take me to your ghost town
Where no one’s winter is a May crown

I ask, but even if it were true
you can’t have it belong to you

I heard the song of a canary
its feathered wings coated with coal dust

and still it sang with proof and pudding,
There’s no place else to go.

I found a minimal connection
within a mineral correction

to be compatible with wildlife,
don’t let’s be guides who make ourselves at home and
draw maps on the earth
of what parts of the earth
will go where on the earth
and for whom on the earth,

are we ruling with a May crown?

How do I illustrate one landscape different from the rest,
when they all begin with the end of my nose
and end with the gaps in my tongue?

Blotchy sky and tangled structure
the terminology of rupture

the solid stars on trees of sweet gum
have heavy wood but soulless bodies

a colony of great blue herons,
they err on ivy made of poison, impoundment

oh can you take me to your ghost town
where no one’s winter is a May crown

a crack in the stream’s ice; but I only sadden because of the excavating machine behind it, which is only guilty by juxtaposition, so I apologize.

I begin this paper with with a brief walk-through of my places of origin. The where-I-am-from’s. They are like stepping stones. Or building blocks. By contemplating this list I am browsing through my memories to find the right ‘slice’ about which to write this essay. I find that thought process is worth paying attention to in order to observe what triggers your mind to go in what direction, especially when searching through past experiences and emotions.

Gliwice, Poland
Houston, Texas, USA
Richmond, Virginia, USA
Georgetown, Washington DC, USA
Dupont Circle, Washington DC, USA
Nairobi, Kenya
Istanbul, Turkey
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA

I started writing a new introduction, but after rereading the one I posted at the beginning of last semester, I realised I was still pretty fond of it, so I'm going to use most of it again, and adjust it according to the changes of thought I've experienced since then.

I played with Frost. It was October. If only I had learnt from Ray Bradbury that October was a grotesque Country where you should only step foot if you are looking to be assaulted by the skeletons your mind shoved in a closet on purpose in the first place. It was October, silly.

I opened the closet, and out walked Robert. He brushed off the Frost from his shoulders; it must have been cold and dusty behind the Doors. Or he was tired of being cold. He walked out. And I stepped into his Home Burial.

I fell deep. The door was wide open and I fell damn deep. I told myself all I had to do was pull apart the words and reconstruct them into a window. So I sat on the narrow, creaky staircase and listened attentively to Frost and his wife. But slowly – I found – slowly, I was listening to myself. And I had the same voice as his wife.

I was accusing. I was hurt. I was pushing away. I was losing. I was missing. Home Burial. 

There wasn’t a way to pick out my own words, care about his, and try to assemble a window which might cast light on our conflict. What we needed to was to smash open the windows we already had, and get some fresh air.

I was overwhelmed as I fell deeper and deeper into Frost’s Home. Or was Frost just pulling out some things that already existed deep in the back of my closet?

Lay them on the table. Let me hear you say what you already know about them, but use a different voice so you can hear yourself do the talking. 

What bothers me is that Sontag's essay is written as if we – or, rather, I since I am the one reading this essay... Okay. Start again. What bothers me about this essay is that it is written as if I, along with the other readers, were all audience and no artist. As if audience and artist were two separate groups of people and neither took part in the activity of the other. As if creation-and-production and observation-and-interpretation existed independently in separate bodies of people.

These are a few photos of my play in the snow by the St. Stephens Church.
Most are of the treble clef I traced, and then one is my stage name, "fenceless," signed in the snow.
I'm short and so I couldn't get a solid shot of the entire images, but they should be relatively recognisable.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

To regard Albert Barnes as a character is to reduce his life story into symbolically significant elements that represent his journey and his ultimate purpose. To do this, I will only focus on the main steps that led him to becoming the character by which he is known today. Because I am not treating Albert Barnes biographically as a real human who once existed in real life, it allows me to critically and analytically approach his actions as if they were symbols that express aspects of his personality and character. I feel more comfortable making speculations and exploring themes in his lifestyle if I state that I am not talking about a real person; it is less judgmental and less disrespectful this way. I can also make remarks that might perhaps appear outlandish in relation to the real person of Albert Barnes.

I will first outline the main events and actions of Albert Barnes’s life and then I will select a few to explore in detail. I hope to examine which elements hold stronger representation of his character in relation to what he ultimately intended to achieve (which, according to chronology and the linear plot I assuming this story to take, is the establishment of the Barnes Foundation). 

At what point in time after death does a person become a figure? A legend? A character?

In my rewrite of my essay, "The Tree's Solemn Warning," I'm going to explore a few ideas. I'm going to move more into the three neighbouring portraits that surround Utrillo's painting. This will introduce the idea of large, close-up images of individual persons versus the small, basic people figures depicted by Utrillo. So, who's a figure? Who's an image? Who's a person?

I reread the articles and essays, and I think I'm mainly going to stick with "The Barnes Foundation, RIP" article, which gave me some great ideas. I haven't fully organised them all, but they are something along the lines of: looking at Barnes as a figure - about whose depiction I am mainly learning from this article - and as a character who carries symbols and meanings in his story. These items would include his history as a wrestler, his career as a "pharmaceutical magnate," and his intentions of creating an educational institution. After his death [the point where he now becomes a character] his story more strongly tells of economic and business incentives in the mask of others' educational intentions.

The gallery was full of conversation, dialogue, and dynamic between each and every piece of art. Try putting a bucketful of paintings into one room and keeping them silent. Please, they have so much to say to each other. Compliments, complements, completion and competition. So many voices; it was an exciting hum. But to find one painting, I needed internal dialogue, between the elements within a singular piece. I needed a filter, so I listened to the paintings while keeping a lens of my own poems in mind. A few paintings reached my ears, but it wasn't until I saw a sketch by Glackens that I chose which of my poems I wanted to use. The sketch was of a park with trees and a bunch of people simply milling around. That took my mind to a poem that I wrote, sitting in Maçka Park in Istanbul, Turkey last year on the 24th of October. So I knew that I wanted to use this poem as my filter, though it didn't quite fit this sketch in particular because there was no lamppost. I needed trees and a lamppost. This is the poem:

24th of the Tenth
Do I prefer the black-painted old-fashioned lamppost?
Or the autumn tree, slowly starved and stripped to shame?
Do I prefer the misty beam of yellow light and electricity buzzing, humming, in harmony with the fluttering moths,
or,
the tree’s solemn warning:
“Don’t make me beautiful because you’re lonely,”
as it shakes its balding head.