My friend Megan is in a band. A rock band. We were also in marching band together in college so when she started saying stuff like "I have band rehearsal now," I'd snicker and advise her to be more specific. She took to declaring "I have rock band rehearsal now," which was way more awesome.
I also find myself in something of a rock band, and I would be remiss if I didn't include somewhere in this blog a mention. It's called Tyranny of Dave and is led by a guy named Dave Wechsler, who has been writing and performing his own music for years. I met him when he came to my undergrad campus to record an SAI recital in the spring of 2009; in return we recorded some background vocals and horn parts for his self-produced album, "The Decline of America: The Bush Years," released in May 2010. (Follow the link to download the album for free; we're on tracks two and four. You can also download ToD's 2007 album "Vacations.")
A year later Dave paid me a huge honor by asking me to sing and play trombone with him and his reassembled band. He also offered me a tambourine once and then quickly took it away and gave me an egg shaker instead. Smart man.
The full band played our first show together this past May, and then Dave and I played an acoustic set last Thursday. We're busy rehearsing and setting up more shows; if you want to be kept in the loop, "like" us on Facebook.
I wasn't expecting to like Virginia Woolf. I had some preconceptions, I guess. I mean, she is British. And that can only lead to trouble. Or maybe that movie with Nicole Kidman rubbed me the wrong way. (I haven't actually seen anything but the opening scene, where Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, drowns herself in a river.) I don't know what my deal was, but as we readied ourselves to read eight of her essays in my English Prose Style class, I was setting myself up to not like her. I was prepared.
Wow, did I have my head up my ass.
Before I say any more, go here and read "Craftsmanship" (written in 1937, 2,900 words) and go here and read "Professions for Women" (written in 1931, 2,400 words). I'll wait.
For those of you too lazy to hit the jumps -- but really, especially if you've never read Virginia Woolf, spend 15 minutes of your day and read these pieces. Trust me on this one -- here are some excerpts from "Craftsmanship":
"No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room."
"Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still--do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught?"
"...words do not live in the dictionary, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order."
I mean honestly, the woman is writing an essay about words. Just words. Stylistically there is so much going on here; the repetition that suggests she's rewriting, clarifying her ideas as she goes ("if you could teach, if you could learn" could almost have a "nay," in between the clauses) -- this is the major stylistic element Woolf employs that we talked about in class. We see her thought process as she goes, and gimmicks aren't needed to add emphasis; it's almost, in a sense, pure. She also can never seem to find exactly the right word, so she uses a bunch of them along with some asyndeton to give us a fuller picture: "unlectured, uncriticized, untaught." (In other essays, "it creates; it adorns; it enhances" and "a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat." And so forth.) It's almost poetic, this apposition, this redefinition. Both of these stylistic techniques -- along with Woolf's characteristic interrupters and parenthetical asides -- have already made their way into my own writing, as evidenced by this very paragraph. It's amazing how quickly something like that clicks in the brain and adds itself to the standard cannon. It seems simple enough, but I'm continually surprised by how much you can learn about writing simply by reading a lot.
Plus, how could you not love a woman who makes a joke about a typewriter? That shit's hilarious.
And then there's the content of what she's saying -- that "words, English words" really do offer an infinite number of possibilities. The relative ease of the modern publishing process -- as opposed to 200 or 100 or even 50 years ago -- has created a completely different literary landscape. There's a lot of crap out there. And yet Woolf points out that it doesn't matter, because there is still so much greatness to come. Isn't that just a wonderful and refreshing idea? I'm going to get straight to work creating beautiful, never-before-seen prose!!
Or, you know, writing a blog post about not hating Virginia Woolf. I think we'd be friends. Maybe we'd like hang out and go to the movies and she'd be the kind of person who talks through the whole movie about all the elements they didn't consider when writing the script. Then I'd shush her and tell her that you know what, Sofia Coppola is doing the best she can, and anyway she's been nominated for an Oscar and so you should just calm down and enjoy the cinematic presentation. And then she'd sulk and be silent at dinner and she wouldn't call me. And then she'd drown herself in a river.
Wow, that hypothetical went downhill really quickly.
A somewhat unexpected side effect of working as a journalist is that you come to feel ownership over certain issues, especially those which you spend a lot of time researching and reporting on.
So I felt when I saw this news development, posted on Gizmodo this afternoon: a week from today Rock Band 3 drops, and it's made a huge advance in controller options: one controller features buttons that you play just like a regular guitar, and another is actually a guitar, with pressure sensors under the fingers so the game knows whether you hit the note. What this means is that Rock Band can actually market the idea that the game will teach you how to play a guitar (or at least how to follow along with certain songs).
Of course, being a former PC Mag intern, I was familiar with the idea, to the point where I immediately went and found this story, which I wrote in the spring of 2008. (Because of a PCMag.com redesign, the publish date says January 2009.) I wrote about how games like Guitar Hero have roused interest in rock music, but aren't doing anything to actually teach kids (or somewhat reclusive adults) how to play guitar. My theory was proven when I gave my stepdad with 20 years of experience playing guitar the game for Christmas: He could barely keep up with strumming along at the beginner level at first.
I mentioned in that article a product called Guitar Rising, which had won an award in 2007 and was being developed to be released as just what Rock Band has now: a game into which you can plug in an actual guitar. The Guitar Rising website doesn't seem to have been updated recently, so one can only wonder what happened to the "licensing talks" that were underway when I wrote the article more than two years ago.
This is a super cool development -- using video games to actually teach people a musical instrument is a whole new frontier -- but of course, there's always a flipside, though a minor one. The Gizmodo writer notes, "Harmonix, do you realize that you've got in your powers the ability to make kids learn the songs you want them to? Which is basically shaping the future of music? Use it well, my friends." Everyone will know the Billboard Top 100, but no one may know [insert obscure, largely unknown song that is actually a brilliant piece of music]. But that just may be my wannabe music snobishness talking.
Fun fact: Rock Band 3 will also add a keyboardist to the band. Now people get the chance to butcher those musical lines as well! Wonder if it'll be as effective as teaching drums and guitar now will be?
Some days you don't want to move. It has nothing to do with sadness, and only a little bit to do with fatigue. Movement just seems like a lot of effort.
I would like it noted that I did include an apostrophe in my spelling of "'Cats" in the copy that I turned in. The Daily editors are apparently not a fan of correct punctuation. Otherwise I'm honored that they ran my letter; I wrote it as a coping mechanism and in response to a friend's plea to flood the paper with letters in support of the team. Pull it together, guys. Let's go 'Cats, beat the Spartans!
My life fell apart this weekend, in a number of ways. Central to the implosion was the 'Cats' loss to Purdue. I'm not sure I've ever been so crushed by a football game. Throw in car trouble -- a fender bender and a leaking gas tank (unrelated) in the same day -- and a few other questionable decisions on my part, and you've got a whole lot of first-world problems. It's Monday morning and the figurative hangover hasn't even begun to lift. (Thankfully the actual hangover was cured with a quick trip to McDonald's. Another bad decision, but one I definitely do not regret.)
Here's to using Monday to shake off the blues and refocus. Maybe I can set an example for the 'Cats and we'll come back with an amazing victory over MSU at homecoming in two weeks. We are the perennial underdogs; maybe we're just more comfortable down here.
A Google image search of "words" turned out to be quite fruitful.
You know you've made a good choice in grad school programs when a required class that you didn't expect to like finds its way under your skin. Such is the case with History of English Prose Style, which on its face sounds not at all riveting; in fact by the course description I really had no idea what the class was about:
This course seeks to make meaningful distinctions among various prose styles in two ways: first, by considering alternative theoretical approaches to the study of style, ranging from the purely impressionistic to the rigorously quantitative; second, by exploring the rhetorical dimension of stylistic choice by examining the intersection of style and rhetoric in English prose from the Renaissance to the present, including writings by John Lyly, Thomas Browne, Elizabeth I, Addison and Steele, John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
I mean, that sounds impressive, but in practice I had literally no clue what the class would actually cover. I cheerfully signed up for it anyway and just hoped that it would somehow be useful in my development as a writer.
It turns out that it boils down to studying the style of writing -- ie the sentence-level elements like structure, word order, figures of speech, etc. Our working hypothesis is that you cannot strip away these stylistic elements -- for example, an author's incorporation of repetitive schemes like isocolon and alliteration -- without taking away some of the meaning. In other words, style and content are inextricably intertwined (hey there alliteration!), and if we understand why the author made the stylistic choices they made, then we can start to gain an understanding of the author's epistemic world view.
I'll insert a note here to remind the reader that I am a graduate student in the study of English writing, and yet this class made me realize that I was never once taught the basics of English grammar. Like, clauses and phrases and predicates and participials and basically why we put words in the order that we do. Understanding syntax -- the combination of words that indicates their relationship to one another in a sentence -- is apparently the key to being a good writer. A high school diploma and a Bachelor's degree, and no one really ever explained that to me until now.
Anyway, as one example of how style impacts prose, our professor had us read a piece written in 1578 by John Lyly. Think of it as a 16th century Oprah's Book Club choice. Everyone who's anyone read it, including a moderately famous contemporary of Lyly's named William Shakespeare. (He was 14 when it was written.) Lyly writes in a way that would make a high school freshman and a college professor weep, but for completely different reasons. (If you're super curious, you can read the piece -- titled "Euphues: The anatomy of wit" -- here. Jump to page 33.) Eventually the prose came to be seen as outdated -- think still talking like a 1980's Valley Girl in the year 2010 -- but it's a really amazing example of what can be done with antithesis and repetitive structures to reinforce the ideas expressed in the content of the piece. In other words, if you're going to compare two things, Lyly showed us how you can write it in a way where the sentences are balanced to the point of ridiculousness, to better make your point.
Lyly was also a big fan, at least in this piece, of playing with the sounds of words. A typical Lyly sentence: "[I]t is no marvel that the son, being left rich by his father's will, become retchless by his own will." See what he did there?
Our assignment for the week was to replicate Lyly's prose style. Mine isn't perfect, but I'm posting it up here as an example. Note the parallel structure and use of opposite ideas (lawless harmony, lascivious entropy) to make the point. Enjoy, and go forth about your day pondering how the public education system is completely failing us when it comes to teaching basic English grammar.
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It may be that a mother’s love is unconditional, a child’s trust complete, the bond between the two absolute—but what guarantees this connection? One look into the eyes of the infant born of her may be enough to bring any woman of any level of maternal nature to her knees, but how is she to maintain this relationship with one whose eventual humor she cannot foresee, whose sense of wit may be overlooked given the child’s garish characteristics? What natural fortune can this child expect, when her mother’s own unfortunate circumstance was to bear a baby amounting to such a ghastly abomination of nature?
Surely the father is not to be left out of blame; he was present when her entry to the world was painfully wrought, the future population perceptively wronged. Through her wide-set eyes stares the narrowness of a soul without a trace of means or modesty, a person whose holed pockets can do nothing to contain the whole of her ego. Her perfume may be stridently pungent, but her manner is surreptitiously repugnant. Her upbringing stressed lawful harmony, but her subsistence relies upon lascivious entropy. She prefers the payoff before the production, the profit before the performance, the promotion before the presentation.
I mean not to suggest, having evidenced my hypothesis that her existence is unsavory, that her very animation lends itself to the inanity, or even that her parents are to be shackled and shellacked—though I would be dishonest to claim that the thought had not entered my mind. Rather, would you not also conclude that, based upon the evidence, perhaps some sort of winch should be employed to ensure that this particular wench is denied admission to this painstakingly selective program of higher learning?
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Special shout-outs to Chrissie Watras and Liz Tavares, who will enjoy this post more than anyone else, and who also help me process my homework each week. Thanks ladies.
I give you my first piece for my memoir writing class. I'm still working on it, so comments or suggestions are certainly appreciated.
Taken the evening this story is based on.
Snow fell for the first time. It glittered like pixie dust in the light from the street lamps and landed on the ground softly, as if it didn’t want to cause a fuss. But there was no one around to be bothered; the streets and sidewalks were empty, hushed.
I stepped outside and filled my lungs with the cold air, watching my breath slowly leave me in exhale. I smiled. For the first time since arriving on campus I felt at peace, light on my feet. I’d just finished finals week, placing an emphatic period at the end of my first quarter of college. I was giddy, practically euphoric.
I started toward my dorm, where my friends were waiting to celebrate. I hummed. I knew I’d aced that test, and I looked around for someone to rejoice with before remembering that everyone else had gone home for the holidays already. The snow was my only companion.
To be alone in a place that is usually full of people and life and noise unnerves me, but on this night I reveled in it. I soaked it in and I felt like a god, alone atop my snowy mount. I walked with my head back, my face pointed straight up, watching the snow come down. My snow. The sky was a dark gray, almost black, and the white flakes were falling evenly, a perfect grid, as if it had been planned that way. I had planned it that way.
I’d moved to Hawaii with my family right before starting high school, and aside from the occasional visit to family on the mainland, I hadn’t seen snow up close in more than four years. Moving back to the Midwest felt like coming home, though my years on a tropical island had severely depleted my cold weather wardrobe. I owned two pairs of socks when I arrived at college, and no winter coat. One extreme winter clothing shopping trip later, I was fully outfitted for even the most arduous blizzard. My collection of long underwear was something to be envied.
On this night, then, the gentle snowflakes had no chance against my many layers of clothing. Still they landed on my cheeks, in my hair, melting in contact with my skin and dripping down the back of my neck. I shivered as I walked past the arch, the gateway to campus. It looked like a postcard. Untouched snow glazed every tree branch, every surface. It was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt as though everything in the world were just perfect.
I considered the fact that I was done with a third of my freshman year. I felt like a little kid, one that counted her age to the closest fraction possible so as not to be mistaken for too young. I wasn’t five, I was five and three quarters. I wasn’t a college freshman, I was one-twelfth of the way done with college. I would go on to harder classes, and a thousand new experiences, and I would walk this sidewalk hundreds of times. I would lead the marching band, join an a cappella group, dance for 30 hours straight (twice), and teach myself how to make giant papier-mâché ants. I would also gain 30 pounds, have my heart broken, and feel utterly lost more often than not. And I’d meet my best friend.
But at this moment, alone in my winter wonderland, I was blissfully unaware of all that lay before me. My life was uncomplicated. College was still a concept. I was still figuring it out. As I walked up the steps to my dorm I realized that, for the first time, I felt ready to handle whatever came next. I’d survived one quarter. I could certainly make it eleven more.
