Literary Kinds 2012

I had too much fun creating this video. Some clips were cut off too soon, and others need to be cut, but I think I'll just keep it the way it is!

"Do it all."

A professor of mine just past me on the sidewalk. We stopped and chatted for a few minutes. This literally happened five minutes ago, so my thoughts may still be a bit jumbled, but if I wait to write this down I may loose this feeling, and I'd be doing the exact opposite of his advice- "Do it."

Somewhere along the line I was taught, or taught myself to believe, that the truely great people are the ones who invest themselves entirely in their passion. Mozart in his music. Martha Graham in her dance. I think I've conditioned myself to believe that if you truely want to be great, unique, groundbreaking, you have to choose a passion and develop into it. 

Five minutes ago, my professor said, "Do it all." DO IT ALL...

I thought having more than one passion meant you had to split yourself up, and therefore never fully commit yourself to one thing, one mode, and become truely great. I'm not sure I think that anymore. Maybe a person is more whole than that, and is able to take their "self" completely from one passion to the next, never spiltting, but fully investing with each new passion. 

My tongue is “jumbled and jangled”1. Growing up speaking Arabic, English, and French, I am most self-expressive juggling between all three, casually in conversation. I relate feelings and emotions with specific language expressions that are meaningless if not incomprehensible when translated. The importance in the phonetics in the Arabic language allows me to translate my emotions in the stress of the sounds in words. Saying “stupid” in Arabic is not only the same word for “ass” but also has an “h” sound that resonates from the roof of your mouth, as if having a bundle of red chili peppers scorching one’s throat while shouting out a sharp “HHH’OT!”. I cannot however participate in a serious, intellectual discussion in Arabic but rather speak English, my language of education, from which I have learned the big words and forms for argumentation. First learning French from TV or overheard conversations between my parents, I speak it to communicate my work and education to those who do not understand English. All three languages have become inevitable pieces to my language and cultural puzzle that intertwine to translate my thoughts and ideas to others.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the genre of magic realism as a “literary style in which realistic techniques such as naturalistic detail, narrative, etc., are similarly combined with surreal or dreamlike elements (www.oed.com).”  This is clearly not a genre we looked at in class, and yet it is not all that different from other genres we have studied.  For example, the OED defines science fiction as “imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and involving space or time travel (www.oed.com).”  If magic realism is the combination of realistic and surreal elements and science fiction of fictional and scientific elements it is not unfounded to say that these two genres are cut of the same cloth. 

Literature LAB 

Very often I turn to my friends at the dinner table and say, “You know what would be cool…” or, “I have this great idea…” or, “What would you guys think if…”. Very often ideas pop into my head and I spit them out like rotten cherry tomatoes. What makes them rotten is because as soon as dinner is over and we leave the table, the idea leaves my mind or I become disinterested. The idea rots. But, not this time. I refuse to believe this idea will become rotten, and I’ve instead committed to its growth: I will create a literary lab that applies the scientific method to story creation, and I’ve devised a model and a 4 step guide to making it a reality. 

Literature LABS

Qualifying

I'm very disappointed with Bryn Mawr's time limits for classes.  I thought our discussion of Adaptation was an important one to have since we compared the movie to the book and talked about what the movie was about and it's value etc.  However, I was so disappointed with what was not said - or rather what there wasn't time for.  OK, we can't agree on if Adaptation was a good/poor representation/purposeful-non-representation of The Orchid Thief.  Fine.  I guess I thought we could take the film at face value at least - meaning what the movie in of itself does and how it reflects the messages in The Orchid Thief.  I guess the example that stands out to me the most is that Charlie kept saying he wanted to show people that flowers were pretty.  In the movie, Charlie "writes in" a scene that didn't happen in The Orchid Thief.  When John is leading Orlean to see the ghost and John is lost, he gets very frustrated.  John says (something along the lines of), "People are always leeching off me.  Get your own passion!  Stupid bitch."  When Orlean sees the ghost orchid, she says, "It's just a flower."  She couldn't adopt anyone's passion or fascination with orchids because it wasn't hers.  This scene parallels Charlie's inability to make a movie that 'shows people that flowers are pretty.'  This is precisely because even if he had made a movie that exhibited flowers, he would not have succeeded.  He would not be able to force his audience adopt an appreciation for flowers.

For this webpaper, I have made an artistic rendition of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", inspired by Kim Northrop's Neil Gaiman-inspired paintings. To accompany this, I have also played with my writing style. Once upon a time when I was in Year 10/11 (so the equivalent of high school freshman/sophomore), I did a GCSE course in fine art. We had to document our work, and I used this style to present the process that I used to create my piece. Within this style, however, I have used others, such as a letter format to communicate my ideas. With this documentation in the form of a "portfolio" of sorts, I hoped to parallel the method that Rebecca Skloot used to write her book. However, a lot of the things that I have written are ironic in the sense that I take the book as full "truth".  But, my final piece changes this a little bit as I use it to problematize Skloot's first line: "This is a work of non-fiction."

I've put images of the final piece and the pages from the "portfolio" here rather than embed them into Serendip as the image size was too big. Just click on the pictures and you'll see a bigger version of the piece!

I noticed in class that everyone's movie version of The Orchid Thief  emerged from their own personalities.  I am the most ironic romantic - a story for another time - and consequently, my movie was a love story.  I was thrilled by the idea that a writer searching for the 'facts' who seems really down to earth, who claims she isn't passionate, etc. totally falls in love with LaRoche.  Even when I read the book, I kept waiting for something to happen between them - it was killing me.  So my movie was a love story of a mismatched couple.

KT prefaced her movie with "we need something to draw people in."  KT worked in marketing; therefore she was most concerned about making something that would sell.

Anne told us that her movie is "very word based."  She took one quote from the book and made it her first scene.  Then she based her other scenes off of other quotes from the book she had picked out.  No wonder Anne wanted to preserve the book's message as much as possible - she's an English teacher.