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Non-Fictional Prose
Class Notes: 9/23/10
9/23/10
Anne: talks about web papers, highlights ones she has read since last class. And JMac coming?? Upcoming class schedule, etc etc. Watch Johnny Cash’s Long Black Veil. Is Solnit’s description of this true?
TyL: overdramatic.
Place, Truth and Ecosophies in Naess
I’ve picked a few things to post here and several more to mention in class under the headings of things added and things to question. I tried to pick moments in Naess that speak most readily to the themes we’ve already discussed in class.
He asserts, for instance, “reality is all possibilities,” (Naess 17). Later on the same page, he suggests: “seek truth but do not claim it,” (17). Both of these aphorisms make interesting points around the topic of truth, reality, and who owns either of these intangibles.
Is There Really One Reality?
I found the essay, The World of Concrete Contents to be an interesting illustration of the idea that reality is relative. One good example of the relativity of human senses is that of the two people exposed to different external temperatures putting their hands into water that is the same temperature and not being able to tell if the water is “warm” or “cold.” Protagoras’s describes this phenomenon well; “the senses undergo transformation and alteration in accordance with one’s age and with other conditions of the body.” This ties into the idea that there is not absolute truth, and that everyone experiences his or her own reality because everyone’s body and mind is different.
"Every love has its landscape."
Speaking of love, I am in love with the sections Solnit has written to talk about place and our emotional attachments to it. Ever since Tuesday's class I've been mapping and re-mapping in my mind. That exercise really made me consider the places and spaces in my life--the proximity of some, and also how far I feel from discovering/drawing/knowing the terrain of the places I have not yet been. I feel the way we did when our class started blogging last semester-- like I've just uncovered a way to better process and understand my self, and now I need to do it over and over again.
Notes from Tuesday Sept. 21
I'm writing these notes as a condensed conversation. I'm sorry that it doesn't flow very well...
Discussion on Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost
- Students learn best with what they're interested in, but the problem is that students don't get to ask about what they're interested in with our current education system
- Have you been in environments that don't allow you to ask your own questions?
- Yes, but I prefer that, because that's how life is outside of school as well.
- I'm a better worker when I take control of the situation and ask questions myself
- Kids only pay attention to grades, not feedback. Grades are distracting
GPS?
After our discussion of maps in class on Tuesday I began to think about GPS. With GPS one is unable to get lost without a computerized voice yelling at you. At least maps require human interpretation. GPS only requires the address of your final destination, and the rest relies on your trust of directions from a satellite in space. How many times has GPS led someone the roundabout way to a familiar location? In that instance, am I "lost" because I do not take the determined course for me, even though I know the destination better than the GPS? Which raises the question, who dictates "lost"?
Transforming the unknown into the known
In Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" she has a quote on page 5 saying, "But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea." They being scientists. She describes everything in terms of being lost and quite frankly reading the book provides that emotion for you sufficiently. She describes scientists beginning their journey in the dark sea but making their way back by transforming that unknown into the knows, I'm assuming this means discoveries and experimental data. I don't see it that way at all since many of todays science is based on theories and hypothesis' which aren't the known, but more like the assumed.
Course Notes from 9/14
We started the class by wrapping up Reality Hunger. It was decided that the book was oxymoronic, with the search for the 'real' paradoxically reveals the constructed-ness of Shields' book. Some of the ideas we talked about included: Organizing the world around ourselves, and reconsidering the ideas of shared sources, along with the implications of copyrights and copyright violations. Deciding whether or not to take Shields seriously was also discussed a bit more.
Life as a Landscape
Reading further into A Field Guide, I enjoyed Solnit's parallels between our lives and a physical landscape. I was able to appreciate this parallel even more after our class activity on the connection between geologic maps and our lives. Solnit works this theme into the book in a few ways. She talks about country songs references to specific places, and she talks about properties of geologic maps.
Is Sonlit a "Field Guide" at All?
The title of Rebecca Sonlit's book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, indicates that in some way, Sonlit is going to try to map the unknown. In a sense, this is what she does - she presents unorganized, conversational prose intended to inform the reader of what, exactly, is the most effective and fulfilling way to get lost, and what one can expect to find if he does take her advice. But I'm wondering if her literary undertaking is effective - can one really map the unknown? or is she simply suggesting ways in which venturing into the unknown might be useful? It seems like the latter of these two is more likely, and that in respect to suggesting why getting lost is useful, Sonlit comes up short.
Notes from Class 9/21/10 (or Day Seven)
We began the class discussion on the topic of our recently submitted web papers. The four page limit felt too short for some, but Anne encouraged us to take the space we needed. Some raised the issue of how a publically posted paper caused them to write differently, as for a different audience. These papers are allowed to have more of our personal touch in them, yet are not just for our classmates but for a larger and unknown audience. Anne encouraged us all to take more advantage of the internet for our papers for both audio and visual stimuli.
Getting Lost
When I started reading "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" by Rebecca Solnit, I did have to read some pages more than once because I found myself getting lost at some parts. From our discussion in class today about what Solnit meant when she said on page 14: "Never to get lost is not to live," I had more time to think about it after class. I went back to page 14 and I re-read that paragraph. On page 15, she also says: "...Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round...do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature." I agree with what Solnit is saying here because I think that people learn when they experience things they don't know.
More about getting lost
In continuing to read A Field Guide to Getting Lost after class, I focused my attention on figuring out what Solnit's argument is about getting lost. I think that when she says that you can't truly live unless you are lost she is assuming that living life without getting lost is impossible because everyone is lost, at least mentally, at one time or another. In fact, I would make the argument that people are born "lost" because a person is lost (how Solnit defines the word) until a person finds his or her place in the world...which can only come with maturity. With this assumption, I think her book is not telling us to necessarily lose ourselves but telling us HOW to be lost, when we inevitably are, and how to grow from it.
Getting lost in the book
Reflecting on the first half of A Field Guide to Getting Lost I think that, in opposition to Fun Home, prose is a good form for this novel. Pictures allow the reader to follow the story more intimately, where as with prose, the reader is able to "lose" herself in the text. The mix of stories, facts, and personal anecdotes fit together well, yet are varied enough that I did not know what to expect next as I read.
Medical History, constructed or compiled?
“I explained that we all had accumulated stories in our lives, that each of us had a history of such stories, that no one's stories are quite like anyone else's, and that we could, after a fashion, become our own appreciative and comprehending critics by learning to pull together the various incidents in our lives in such a way that they do, in fact, become an old-fashioned story.” (Coles, 11)
class notes 9/16
- looked at maps on pages 126 and 144 in Fun Home: they show the same map, but the second one is labeled. highlights how maps can be selective and labeled/changed in different ways --> map are fictional representations
- read closer: EVD lead us in reading page 3 --> "think and hear"what the people are saying in the pictures rather than just read what is written
- there's an interrelationship between text and images: Bechdel uses different types of framing:
Changed Attitude about Comics
I, like others in the class was never encouraged to read, or even exposed to comics as a young child. Therefore I always believed that they were not as "worthy" as novels or other works of literature. However, seeing the depth of feeling and amount of intricate physical and metaphorical detail that Bechdel puts into Fun Home has definitely gotten me thinking about the relevance of comics. While I am still not convinced that a graphic novel should be treated and discussed in the same way as a one-hundred-year-old classic novel, I do think that this art form deserves to be discussed in more intellectual forums, such as this class.
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