What a semester--

I've learned a lot in Dr. Chandler's Creative Nonfiction class.  After two back-to-back semester of being a "blogger," I've decided that I kinda like it.  I'm going to keep blogging.  If anyone else wants to, let me know, and I'll add you back on my side bar.

Thanks to everyone for a great semester!

Joe

Course Eval

Course Evaluation/Reflection

1. Meeting course objectives

What did you learn in this course?  

Firstly, I learned what Creative Nonfiction actually is.   When I came into this class, I really thought that Creative Nonfiction was synonymous with memoir and first person oriented feature writing.  After realizing this, I learned how to start writing in a new style.  I really do feel that through this course I’ve learned how to expand my own writing.  I’m much more conscious of the way I write now, thanks to that.

About the form of CNF? 

Creative nonfiction is a very personal genre that can take many forms.  Sometimes, creative nonfiction takes the form of a story-driven narrative.  Other times, it takes a form that’s more fragmented.    Creative fiction always has a truth-seeking, personal aspect, by which the writer tries to make the reader come to the same conclusions the same way the writer has.

What did you learn about how to write CNF?

I’ve learned that I can’t really get away with pounding my reader.  This is where CNF really separates with Journalism and Editorial writing.  If I have a point to make, I’ve realized instead of using just facts and arguments I can also describe my own experience and other important details, and attempt to persuade the reader to come to my own implicit conclusions by allowing them to walk in my shoes and look through my eyes.

About where to publish/find publishing venues for your creative writing?

There seems to be a lot out there, and there’s definitely a lot of people interested in it.  However, one thing I did definitely notice is that creative nonfiction seems to be by and large a writer’s genre.  It’s not always the kind of writing that average readers can understand or have the patience for.  It’s generally for people who like reading for the sake of reading, and like genres that sometimes play games with them.  This isn’t always true, but it seems to be true in general.

Did you change anything /try anything different in your writing process? Please describe.

Definitely. I’ve never written this way in my entire life.  I almost always try to avoid personal experience in my writing, which changed.  I copped a lot of personal experiences for these essays, more than I was sometimes comfortable with.  I also never willfully tried to juxtapose two seemingly unrelated things as I did in my essays.

Which class assignments/class experiences helped you learn whatever you learned?

Any chance we had to write in class was fantastic.  I really enjoyed my “place” essay and will try and work on it some more before attempting to publish it.  I also think that I can use my first essay as a long term piece.  Reading everyone else’s work and workshopping  in class was very valuable.  I think that the class would be even better with more time to workshop each other’s work in class.

What do you wish the course spent more time on?
Workshopping each other’s work.  Though we all posted on blogs, unfortunately, people didn’t comment on each other’s work as much as I would have wished.  I had a Business Writing class where the professor spent a lot of time at the head of the class with a few written assignments every week, and the whole class got to critique the works which were made anonymous.  The criticism was tough to stomach sometimes, but it was definitely valuable.

What do you wish we'd spent less time on?

Nothing.  If anything, we didn’t have enough time to cover everything.  This is a common problem in University classes.  I don’t think we could have had enough time to work on being writers WHILE making sure we had a pretty firm understanding of CNF’s major works.

2. Structure of course/assignments

Questions:

Right pace/schedule?

One blog a week—no problems there!

Coherence of material?

Yes, though it was interesting reading non-CNF precursor pieces first.  That makes sense chronologically, but I also think it was a little confusing as an introduction to the genre.

Workload => Too much, too little, just right?  What would you change?

Here’s my big confession for the class—I never purchased the book!  I couldn’t afford it the first week of class, and then we didn’t have so many readings from it, so by the time I got paid I figured the semester was already half over and that I didn’t really need it.

Still, I found myself being made busy enough by the class. Again, I’m not sure we would have had enough time to read CNF and also work on our own writing.

Cover material appropriate to course goals?

Eh, see above.  I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I admit that’s NOT something I’ve been able to say for a lot of my classes at Kean…

Enough feedback for grades?

Yes.  As always your comments were very valuable.

3.  Provisions for feedback/grades

comments/grades for blogs

Good.

comments from classmates

Not enough L

reading aloud from journals + class discussion

Was always very helpful and very interesting.

conferences with professor on papers

Great.  Thanks for making so much time for your students!

group work with classmates on papers

Not a fan of working in small groups, to be honest.  I feel like I can’t be myself.  I do like the anonymous group workshopping I described above, though.

written feedback/grades on papers

Was EXTREMELY valuable to my revisions.

reflective writing about your work (in you journal, on your blog)

I’m going to keep at it.  I’ve even bought a trendy moleskine notebook.  I can’t wait to go to B&N, get some Starbucks, and start writing in my Moleskine~

Questions:

Which form of feedback was most helpful? 

The Conferences, followed by the in-class discussions.

Which did you enjoy most?

Conferences, and getting “off-track” in class.

Any which you felt was unproductive?>

Working in small groups to break down readings.  You either read, or you didn’t. 

What would you do more of?

In class workshopping.

What would you do less of?

The one I felt was less productive.

Did you feel the grading system was fair?

Yes

Did the grades/grading system contribute to learning?

I already learned through writing for cyberspace that my blogs needed to have substance, so I tried my best to keep that up.

4.  General response

Is there anything you could tell me that would help me teach a better/more engaging course?

Anything you want to say about your experience of the course? 

I think I’ve posted a couple suggestions through the whole reflection, so I won’t write ‘em all again.  I will say that, as expected, this class was a very interested one which I feel I’ve come away from knowing something new.  I’m a better writer because of it. 

Blog 23- Average Divinity and the "Me" Team

I remember wearing headphones on the bus.  Everyday was like a private concert. 

     I had those big headphones that wrap around your ears, and I liked to turn them up loud.  I didn’t want to hear all the noises of the people around me, or the corporate pop that normally blasted through the bus’ speakers. 

     When I was a teenager, I liked rock and rap.  My parents approved of some of it.  As for the rest of it? My Dad considered it “pornography coming out of the speakers.”  I didn’t care. 

      At the time, my parent’s feelings about my music weren’t that important to me.  I was constantly exploring, using the internet and other means to find as much new music as I could.   High school was torture for me; scared, inept, unattractive, awkward—and music was my way out.  I played guitar.   Tool’s “The Patient” became my mantra:  “Wait it out.”

     I loved those days on the bus, when I could listen to my music and stare out the window at everything passing by.  Sometimes it was chilly and rainy, and that was always my favorite: listening to music, bundled up in a big coat while raindrops fell against the window.  Other times, I would simply shut my eyes and listen, waiting for the bus to reach my home near the end of the line.

     During the summers and on the weekend nights, though, I spent less time with headphones on and longer hours in front of the computer.  A friend of mine recently commented, “the internet’s like a huge support group for losers.”  Maybe, but in high school it was more or less a window to a world of people I was afraid to touch and shut-out in real-life.  I was that kid who didn’t talk to people much in class, but initiated conversations on AOL instant messenger.  I loved the net.  Everything was there:  Religion, music, art

     Sex. 

     Sex was on the internet, in abundance.  Years earlier, in the sixth grade, a lunch table buddy informed our clique that he’d found a box of his dad’s porn on VHS.  We were all pretty shocked.  My Roman Catholic upbringing outright rejected it.  I told every authority figure I could about this evildoer.  All the teachers and parents seemed deeply troubled.  This was, of course, a big “red flag.”  That a 12 year old boy should want to look at naked women was a sign of real concern.

   No less than three years later, I was habitually browsing porn of all kinds on the internet.  More: me and my friends were trading sites, talking about it to each other, watching it together in a strange, sanitized kind of way.  All borderlining taboo—but everyone’s doing it.  We were all kind of like that little brat who’d gone down as the red-flag example.  That little, snot-nosed kid who was the same age as us and now, a junkie somewhere, a lost cause not yet blossomed into a regular sex-offender.

    In 1995, an electrical engineer at Carnegie Melon, Martin Rimm, did a study and came to the conclusion that almost 85 percent of what was being shared on the internet at the time was pornographic.  This was, obviously, before most people were online.  Some people claim Rimm’s numbers are bogus, and maybe they are.  But no one will argue the validity of his point:  that the internet is full of porn.  Porn makes up a huge portion of the internet.  Even now, while some people estimate porn sites make up only one percent of web pages on the internet, that’s still enough for porn to be among the most top-searched terms.  Porn breathes life into the internet.

    But Music, music, music. 

    Music was always my Muse, my main inspiration, my “way out.”  Before long, I was using technology to a new extent, downloading music.  That opened some new windows.  But this was still before iTunes, and before you could find the really good stuff anywhere online.  This was before the 99 cent song downloads of today. 

     I never listened to pop music, but I was spellbound by the oiled Aphrodites and   Xochiquetzals that graced MTV’s video countdown.  Even before the internet, and the world of porn—even before the kid at the lunch table had brought anything up—I’d been captured.  These condescending sexual goddesses drove me insane, frustrated me.  Frustrations that would be echoed later, in high school, by the average batch of perfect girls who went tanning, dyed their hair, and had just gotten their braces off. 

    It was around high school that guys and girls started caring about the cosmetics.   Today, I see kids still in grade school wearing make-up, wearing skirts, doing their hair.  I don’t remember it being that way when I was in grade school, but I could have been oblivious.  I started noticing things.

     I started noticing, for example, when my brother’s friend, a boy, started straightening his hair and wearing girl’s jeans.  I started noticing the girls who made it a point to unbutton the tops of their blouses, and wear their skirts up a little bit higher.  We could pick apart the ones who were suitable, the ones who looked like the people on the reality TV, from the rest, unfortunate, like ourselves.

     Shit. We started noticing the teachers who noticed.

    In my first years of high school, I had a friend who I’d share my pain with.  This was Kevin, someone who joined me on my explorations of the opposite and music.  We shared the same tastes.  Kevin was heavier than me, but had a long-time female friend who was not his girlfriend.  Kevin, unlike me, did not have the internet.  Kevin knew more than me, though, and had friends who knew how to look in the right places.  Porn and music became our currency.  A floppy disc full of photos hand plucked from the internet was the equivalent to a CD full of music.  It was symbiotic.  A barter system. 

     When I parted ways from Kevin, I also parted ways with sharing my frustrations with other people for awhile.  Our family moved back to Jersey.  I dove into the world of the internet even further than before.  What was once a sort of communal ritual had become habitualized, mechanized. 

     A weird thing happened with music, though, from the time I was in 7^th grade ‘til the time I was graduating high school.  Music, and what popular music could be, started to change.  When I had reached the end of grade school and getting ready to think about high school, there was a variety of popular music.  Between Britney Spears in Catholic school-girl attire and a sweaty, half-nude Christina Aguilera getting “Dirrty” with shirtless body-builders, one might hear the melancholic crooning of Scott Stapp, inviting the world to approach one another “with arms wide open,” or Blink 182’s lament of a young teenager who gives all of his things to his friends and “never steps foot in his room again.”

     By the time I graduated from high school, though, that had disappeared.  All the music playing on MTV was some deviation of electronic pop, with repeating beats and thumping bass.  Girls had to be urged not to “grind” at homecomings and proms.  As annoying as Creed’s rehash of the 90s grunge scene was, it was still real.  It was like technology had finally caught up with the mainstream.  No need for instruments, no need for live bands, no need for real things.  Now, we had this.

     The real music fans outlashed against this and, once again, I was able to learn about it via the internet.  I learned that record labels were in the middle of what was popularly dubbed a “sound war;” a race to 1.) make songs that reached a catchy chorus within the first thirty seconds, 2.) be loud—if not ear-damaging in a heavy metal concert kind of way than at least louder than everyone else songs and the commercial breaks if possible and 3.) be clean.  This was always a rule, but as long as songs were censorable they were deemed O.K. and usually made it on the radios in one form or another.

     Software like iTunes brought some of this on, though indirectly.   Music that’s mixed loudly—especially music that has no dynamic range, (that is, music where the soft and loud parts are both “loud” as they can be turned up on a mixing board without immediately notable distortion) is exhausting.  Try listening to a newer album in an iPod from start to finish.  It gets old quick.  Ears start to hurt.  There’s no reason to buy a full album most of the time, anyway.   iTunes lets you download individual songs, and when those songs get old, they don’t need to be thrown away.  They’re just data, sitting on a hard drive, barely taking up enough space to be noticed.

     In the past, even the loudest most obnoxious musicians on the planet accepted the ridiculousness of the sentiment voiced so eternally by Spinal Tap:  “But these go to eleven.”  But that was the old format.  There’s a format now that leaves zero room for creativity, zero room for innovation, zero room for aesthetic statements.   

     Now, I hang out with my 12 year old brother and am amazed by how loud his music is.  I can’t listen to music the way he does anymore.  I’ll take a well-produced album, and some nice stereo-speakers at an enjoyable volume instead.  If I want loudness and intensity, I’ll go to a live concert and see the real band do it.

   

     Sometime, toward the end of high school, I stopped being an introverted teen and turned into an adult who wasn’t afraid to talk to his peers.  I stopped looking at girls, and started trying to date them.

    Dating is something my generation’s been accused of being very bad at.  The millennials, they say, are too interested in their own careers and making money.  The MTV generation is too self-centered to produce very many meaningful relationships.  

     These arguments are backed-up by some pretty terrible statistic.  Half of marriages don’t make it past the first couple years.  Not like centuries ago, before people married for the sake of “love,” and pragmatic interests were more important.  Marriages lasted longer then—and it was perfectly acceptable for a young husband to piss on his fidelity through mistresses and trips to the public house.  Silly “love.”  Today’s couples crumble at the first sign on infidelity. 

   

     Me and my buddies had pretty high standards about who was dateable and who wasn’t.  There were girls who hung out with us, but they were “friends.”  Sure, they weren’t horrendous.  Sure, they liked the same music as we did.  Sure, they shared an abundance of other common interests and genuinely cared about us—but they were “friends.”  They were “around.”  The hung out with us, talked to us, had nothing actively working against them.  We liked them, but deep down inside we knew the truth: that the other girls; the popular, attractive ones—the ones who seemed to try really, really hard— were the ones we needed.  That’s what we all secretly knew we were entitled to, and that’s what we wanted to be able to show one another.  The entirety of our sexually-aware lives had been pointing to one thing: these were the girls who looked like the girls in the videos and online, whose very existence to us was more grounded in myth than reality, who were already built in like archetypical forms but just as ephemeral as sublime.  They were captivating, entrancing, flustering Medusas. These other girls were the average ones who just “showed up.” These girls were it; these girls weren’t.  We were young, obsessed with ideals, gasping and panting for air amid a sea of average goddesses.

     In retrospect, I wonder if our girl-friends felt the same about us?

-Joseph E. Tingle, Jr

Blog 22: Power Point for Monday

Publishing Venues    

We should...

Go out to eat somewhere, and talk about our writing

Blog 21: Revision Narrative

Revising my narrative:

I'm going to completely overhaul the narrative of my 4th essay.  What I have now is very journalistic, very "sketchy" but not very much like creative nonfiction.  So what I've done, and what I'm doing, involves almost completely changing all of the material into a first person perspective.


I hope that by doing so I haven't gone too far the other way.  Even at the end of this course, I still feel incredibly uncomfortable talking about myself.  I'm getting better at it, but I'm not there yet.  At least I'm no longer afraid to use "I" and to write about my own experience as if it were valid.

I also think that my transitions into the historical sections have become arbitrary.  I'm going to have to think of a way to have them not stick out so much.

I'm also looking into changing the title.  I admit that the original title, "Bored," was something that I just kind of threw out at the last minute.   I'm going to write down a plethora of new ideas this weekend, and see what I come up with.  I'll also scan my text for phrases and such which I think make a better title than the one I have currently.