http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/ weblog en Copyright 2007 Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:34:35 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Hopefully this reads better than the draft. Thank you all for your helpful feedback. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/revised_review_of_neurons_firi.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/revised_review_of_neurons_firi.html Reading Reaction Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:34:35 -0500 I hope I didn't start too strong without leaving myself anywhere to go. Frances and Joe have both come along beautifully while Marcus languishes at the table with his Dad. I know where I need to go with him but I'm not quite sure how to get there. Oh, and I think he might now be a closet homosexual. Joe, I think, has the most fully developed arc and his is the crisis that seems most prevalent in the three characters' respective consciousnesses. But its Frances who is the "hero" of the piece. She is the only one of these three who confronts her past, accepts it for what it is (don't know exactly what that means yet but hopefully that'll work itself out over my remaining writing sessions) and moves on with her life. Marcus "confronts" his past - in the form of his father - most directly, but he refuses to deal with what he finds and ends up literally running away from it. Joe is at the other end of the spectrum. He is haunted by the specter of his ex-wife and by the residual pain of a life spent feeling sorry for himself and he "deals" with it by overdosing on diet pills. In all I think its working and I think the close third person voice helps me to abstain from judging these people too harshly which, I hope, increases the pathetic response in readers by helping them to see these characters in a more sympathetic light. For example, Joe may be dealing with his problems in a less-than-productive way, but I'm hoping readers will follow the voice as it reveals the anxieties and personal circumstances that have lead him to this point in his consciousness. Same with the other two who are, I think, far-from-exemplary, but also far-from-despicable. As far as the fugal arrangement is concerned, I'm thinking of creating three columns, one for each voice. Only one voice would be speaking at a time with a little overlap when one voice "takes over" the narrative from another, except at the end when all three voices will be going simultaneously which, I hope, gives the piece a kind of symphonic resonance at the climax. We'll see if it works. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/reflections_on_final_project.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/reflections_on_final_project.html Creative Writing Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:26:25 -0500 It's not fair. No one should be able to write the way Keats wrote before the age of fifty. The guy died at what, 26?, having secured for himself a place in the upper echelon of the Western literary canon while I, at 28, have nothing to show for my creative life but a handful of ephemera and some half-baked ideas about literature. How is it possible for anyone to write like this while he was still so young? http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/keats_impending_death.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/12/keats_impending_death.html Reading Reaction Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:43:49 -0500 Chaya B. Gopin's entry on the (mis-) labeling of patients.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/summer_at_camp_popalottapills.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/summer_at_camp_popalottapills.html Reading Reaction Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:51:59 -0500 For my final project, I'm going to continue work on my creative writing workshop piece which I'm now thinking of calling "The Fugue of the River Bend Diner." Kitschy? Eh, maybe. I don't know, we'll see. The piece follows the thoughts of three characters (Marcus, Frances, Joseph) as they navigate their way through an afternoon at the River Bend Diner in River Bend, Utah. Their voices weave in and out of each other in much the same way the "voices" of a fugue move in relation to one another, with one voice developing the theme at any given time while the other voices play counterpoints. The overall idea I'm working with here is that everyday represents a kind of reckoning with one's past, and this reckoning takes place in the loneliness of one's consciousness, even while one is immersed in the minutiae of day-to-day interactions. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/final_project_proposal.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/final_project_proposal.html Creative Writing Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:58:47 -0500 All this talk of sleep problems last time got me thinking about my own sleep and dream issues which, I think, are intimately linked. In part, I think dreams are the brain's way of sorting through, and explaining to itself, the intra- and extracorporeal phenomena it is picking up while asleep (I don't know if those are real words but I like the way they look). http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/dreaming_and_sleep_consciousne_1.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/dreaming_and_sleep_consciousne_1.html Consciousness Reports Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:45:27 -0500 Neurons Firing. I guess it's meant to be for something like the on-line version of Learning or Teacher magazine or any publication whose readers are in the educational field. As many of our fellow students are themselves educators, I thought this would be a particularly relevant blog to review and get feedback on. Thanks y'all.]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/review_of_neurons_firing_1.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/review_of_neurons_firing_1.html Reading Reaction Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:11:37 -0500 movie out of this? Despite the typical promotional histrionics, it looks like it could be decent, though I'm not sure what snowboarding has to do with anything. (And I just looked over Tougaw's blog and found out these last two sentences were completely redundant. My apologies. I'm a total rip-off artist.)]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/reading_bauby.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/reading_bauby.html Reading Reaction Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:08:52 -0500 So there I am, one of what must have been thousands of race fans posted along the curb a few strides after mile marker 24 in Central Park on Sunday afternoon, scanning the river of runners going by for the familiar faces of our loved ones. Mine, I knew, was wearing orange. This was Natasha's first marathon and, as she's from Florida, she decided to wear a Florida Gators running shirt - orange with blue trim. My camera was on the "burst" setting and I was poised to strike. How could I miss her? Surely, with an orange shirt and red hair, she'd stick out like a sore thumb. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/a_funny_thing_happened_on_the.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/a_funny_thing_happened_on_the.html Consciousness Reports Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:27:58 -0500 I was born in Colorado in 1980, a healthy 7 lbs, 10 oz. to a mother with thick brown hair and a father with a sharp nose and a perennially clueless air about his movements. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/andrews_autobiographical_lie.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/andrews_autobiographical_lie.html Creative Writing Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:40:57 -0500 Lauren, Lauren, you pesky, saucy minx. I think you may have lied to me, but I can't prove it. Tisk, tisk. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/reading_slater.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/11/reading_slater.html Reading Reaction Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:51:28 -0500 Speaking of nostalgia, I went to a wedding this weekend. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/consciousness_report_5.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/consciousness_report_5.html Consciousness Reports Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:17:21 -0500 I used to think Wordsworth was full of shit. "Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind." Strength? In what remains behind? In nostalgia? You gotta be kidding me! http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/sacks_and_nostalgia.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/sacks_and_nostalgia.html Reading Reaction Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:02:47 -0500 change over time in language:]]> http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/link_to_cognitive_daily.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/link_to_cognitive_daily.html Blog Response Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:51:03 -0500 Criticism anymore is hard for me to swallow. Not that it ever was "easy" to read or understand. But there's something much more accessible and honest in the pre-theoretical criticism of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling, or even Samuel Johnson for that matter, than there is in, say, the Freudians or the post-structuralists who all seem to write criticism for the sake of criticism as opposed to writing criticism for the sake of the reader. So much of what passes for "literary criticism" embraces that technical jargonistic gobbledy-gook of the theoretical sciences that it's entirely unreadable by anyone outside of the handful of academicians who have read each other's papers. The entire enterprise smacks of career advancement chicanery. http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/zunshine_reading_into_woolf.html http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0907N_1599/001/2007/10/zunshine_reading_into_woolf.html Reading Reaction Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:45:21 -0500