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This is my compete portfolio of essays that came out of Reading and Writing 1. The class used discussion and writing to look at successful essays and then create out own. I've posted them in order from the beginning of the class to the end to create a timeline.
This is my compete portfolio of essays that came out of Reading and Writing 1. The class used discussion and writing to look at successful essays and then create out own. I've posted them in order from the beginning of the class to the end to create a timeline.
Friend, Enemy, Bystander
(an object essay)
In the quiet of
the early morning when no one is around—even then it never sleeps. The long arm
travels a full rotation around its sun every 60 seconds. A year for it is just
a minute to us who circle another center beneath our feet, but it holds time in
its hand and tells us in our own tongue just how late we are. Get up, go to
school. Tick, tick, tick. No, it isn’t time for lunch yet. Tick, tick, tick.
You have three minutes to get to class. Run!
Lately, time is
a thing of last minutes and frantically used seconds. The silver arm racing you
to the finish is a terrifying sight. It moves fast and hard and without pause.
To be fair to this devilish creation, we made it. We’re the ones who measure success
and failure in the little metallic ticking, the masterwork of little gears
turning together in perfect synchrony. We want so badly to be a machine. Metal
links belt tight to the skin, only a spring loaded button can set us free for moments
at a time.
This band of
silver mechanics wasn’t always a burden. It can be a dreadful reminder but it
can also encourage. Once when I
looked down it wasn’t about the number of fleeting clicks until I was late. The
sun made my wrist glow and it was beautiful. For billions of seconds I counted
it a gift to observe time moving onward. A piece of jewelry that’s only purpose
was a friendly reminder to travel home from whatever I was doing that day
before it was too dark to see. We were friends once, time and I.
But now, now he
is a little silver soldier welded to my wrist by fear. His heart is pure energy,
trapped from the sun and wound in a silver shell. His face is a mask of
intricacy but his hands spin with deadly force. Before it all, he has a clear shield
to repel invaders. Scattered around the globe he has millions of brothers and
sisters, all with the same power. How can anyone hope to stand a chance in a
fight against time?
“You’re all
going to die,” says the little gleaming monster. “All I have to do is watch
while you scurry around like ants.” What he’ll never understand with all his
math and precision manufacturing is that it’s okay to die eventually. We spend
the time we have doing whatever it is we can and then we die, with or without a
silver wristwatch.
We were friends
once. Maybe it’s about time we are again. To be friends with this silver shining
form of metal and plastic and sunlight we have to be able to deal with our
eventual mortality. We aren’t machines, we aren’t perfect, and eventually we’re
all going to die. But there is something intensely beautiful about this that a
wristwatch can never know because it isn’t alive and never will be. We get to
grow and laugh and walk around this beautiful planet while it can only live in
our thoughts. Time is a construct of the mind, wristwatches are as well. We get
to move and breathe and change in the real world of the living. We get to live.
All the clock can do is laugh.
Art or Academic
(a narrative essay)
My
mother has always been better than me. She could sit down and draw anything
that popped into her head, clear as the words that sit on this page, before I
could even crawl. It discouraged me from art. I tried drawing as a kid but I
just didn’t have the patience when nothing I did looked like I wanted it to
look. For a long period of time art was just another subject to me like math or
science. I knew how to get a good grade, but that was the only point. In eighth
grade I won the art award at my school, naming me the best artist in the class,
but other people got sports awards and academic glory and I didn’t care.
I
have always been a good student: I pay attention in class and do all my
homework, but I don’t get any joy from being a good student. To do well was
never an active choice but rather one that I felt was impossible to deviate
from. I believed that if I kept on this path of doing perfectly whatever my
teachers wanted then I would have a good life and make lots of money. I never
really thought about what I wanted. By this point my classes were made of the
same 30 people that I met in preschool but I didn’t fit in like I had as a
jubilant five year old.
On
the first Friday of some month my mom asked me if I wanted to come along to see
a school she was looking at for my sixth grader brother. I got to miss school.
As I hated school I said yes immediately. Liam had never done quite as well at
school as I had. He was musically minded and couldn’t sit still for very long
to hammer out academic assignments. We went to tour Toledo School for the Arts
and it changed my life.
I
had been shopping around for high schools in the area already, to find one that
would be the most natural extension of my grade school years. I could tell right away that this place
was different but I liked it. When we walked in the walls were covered in giant
swatches of eye smarting color. It was built into an old warehouse and the
second floor held golden-lit art rooms from massive plate glass windows looking
out over the downtown area; everything seemed warm and inviting. All my life I
had lived without much color and never bothered to give it much thought. As I
stood ogling some kids ran down the hallway past the lines of guests, laughing
as they went. Murals covered the walls and I loved it from the moment I first
saw it.
Sitting
through a presentation I couldn’t contain all my emotions. I whispered to my
mom “I think I could go here.”, it was such an understatement. Afterward we
walked through some of the classrooms to get a better feel for the place, and
that’s where I met her. There was a girl there with a black beret, vivid green
eyes, and more charisma than all the politicians in the world. She talked to me
and I liked her immediately. Walking out of that room I wanted two things more
than I ever wanted money and the highest paying job: I wanted to work in that
art room that smelled like coffee and paint, and I wanted to be friends with
someone like the girl in the black beret.
The
school operated on a lottery system, so I waited anxiously for a letter to see
if I could go there. I think I jumped around the kitchen for ten minutes when I
found out I was accepted. A million things happened that year. I learned that
the girl with the black beret’s name was Alissa. We wound up being best friends
and through her I met even more people who I still talk to and love now. I
realized that I could do my own work that was different and sometimes even
cooler than I thought my mom’s was. She was of course, through all of it, my
biggest supporter.
Sadly it was
when I finally got comfortable and loved every part of the school that my
parents decided to move us to Minnesota. I was devastated, but I moved without
having much choice. Once again I was in a massive academic school that, this
time I wasn’t prepared for.
I
wound up at a coffee shop with a notebook to decide the course of my entire
life from that point forward; it was a high pressure experience. For three
hours I wrote and examined what I wanted from life. Should I be an academic and
make the most amount of money as a CEO somewhere or could I be an artist that
loves what I do? I realized that I found very little joy in the purely academic
route and that art inspired me like nothing else I had ever found. I did the
fun thing, the cool thing, I did what I wanted to do. It was easy in the end to
become an artist. I don’t think there is less work involved, but it isn’t
unbearable because it is fiercely and truly what I want to do with my life.
It Never Happened but it Did
(an essay about place)
Toledo
was supposed to be something huge. Ohio and Michigan fought over the city until
the federal government finally stepped in to settle the dispute. Ohio got to
keep Toledo but in exchange Michigan was given the massive tract of land now
known as the Upper Peninsula. I only heard about these things later, growing up
in Toledo I had a much more personal connection.
When
I was little the city was incomprehensibly large. I was only allowed to go a
few blocks from my home without supervision but that was plenty of space. The
neighborhood children and I played games of pretend every waking moment. Those city
blocks must still be covered with aging rubble from razed castles, crashed
starfighters, circus tents, restaurants, and super hero hideouts, that no one
can even see. We were best friends in magical places that I fear I’ll never
find again or even begin to describe. From sun up to sun down I was a busy kid.
Toledo was everything I needed.
School
changed very little of my life. I added a few more hallways and rooms to the
“The City of Toledo” map in my head. Teachers kept trying to teach me things day
in and day out. I suppose I learned well enough, now I know how to read and
write, but my only real memory of the tall stone classrooms was when we were
turned loose to play at free time.
At
age 13 the city changed in a crazed sort of puberty. I was given a bicycle that
multiplied my two blocks of sidewalk nearly to infinity. For a month I was
content to stay within the three mile square area condoned by my parents, but
then I got reckless and struck out exploring. The pavement was rough, the air
was cool, and I flew through all of it on tightly controlled wheels. I quickly
found hundreds of places that all my life I’d needed a car ride to reach . I
loved building a map in my head of how everything connected. I kept moving
further and further until I was too exhausted to go anywhere else. Then I would
meander back home, coast through the now ignored battlements, and collapse on
the black leather couch in my sunny wooden living room. Toledo went on forever.
In
high school I decided to become an artist and a photographer. Everywhere I
looked the world shuddered and, like a flower opening, produced detail. Inch by
inch I rediscovered the place I had lived all my life, camera in hand. It took
almost a year to feel like I’d covered any sort of ground at all. That’s when
they told me. I knew every tree, every divot in the sidewalk, this was my
palace of imagined worlds. But it didn’t matter, we were moving.
In
Minneapolis my mom sometimes remarks “I’m glad we got out of there before it
was too late.” Toledo has been dying since before I was born. It was supposed
to be such an important place, a famously well located shipping port, but it
never happened. When I went back after a year, the streets were cold and empty,
it was dreary and gray, trash piles lined the residential streets. Toledo is
dying.
So
much had changed; who were these people? Walking through my house behind pulled
curtains, I didn’t know them. What had they done with my home? My neighborhood?
My life? I panicked and began to cry. It took a while, but I realized that it
was all still there. The experience of playing with fireworks in the front yard
was made as much of the people there, and imagining in my head, as from the
actual concrete and gunpowder. I don’t have legal right to that concrete
anymore but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have part of that place in my
head. Toledo is still here.
A Photographic
Identity
(an analysis of a piece of art)
(an analysis of a piece of art)
Lewis Powell was
born in Alabama on 22 April 1844. His family moved to Florida and became
farmers before the onset of the Civil War. When the war broke out Powell was
seventeen years old but he hurriedly enlisted in the Confederate Army. It was a
night at the theater that made Powell a dangerous friend. “According to the historian Leon Prior, Powell obtained
permission to visit Richmond one evening. While watching a play, he became
mesmerized by the performance of an actor named John Wilkes Booth. “ (E of ACW).
Their friendship, as many likely already know, would later lead to the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attempts to take the lives of his
cabinet members. Lewis Powell hereby renamed himself Lewis Payne. While John Wilkes Booth succeeded in his
assassination the conspirators were rounded up and hanged for treason. Alexander
Gardner, a war photographer of the time, captured portraits of the
conspirators.
Lewis Payne, by Alexander Gardner (1865). Here
is one of the first celebrity portraits. Payne was a criminal; he had
attempted to assassinate President Lincoln's Secretary of State, William H.
Seward. He was hanged for his role in the plot. There were 10
conspirators; Alexander Gardner photographed 8 of them, but Lewis Payne was
the only one who knew how to play to the camera and use his good looks to
seduce his contemporaries and every succeeding generation. The portrait
of Payne is indispensable in reminding us that the camera can make
celebrities out of both the worthy and the unworthy. The image is not the
reality. (Buckland, Gail).
Something about his pose and
expression inspire people to this day. On the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive
users talk about images in comments below and while over half of them offer
interesting historical context to be enjoyed along with the image the remaining
comments are viewer reactions to each image: “Looks like a Calvin Klein ad.” or
“He really does look like Tobey Maguire doesn’t he?” While they may seem
uneducated opinions these statements show an identification and in fact a
mysterious allure this image has to a general audience. Lewis Payne wasn’t
comfortable in 1865 when this photograph was taken. He was 21 years old,
strapped in rigid irons for months, and held captive in the belly of an ironclad
ship anticipating his own execution. Yet he has a detached air of strength for
his last portrait. He doesn’t look insane but rather noble, if not regal. The
portrait has an otherworldly quality about it. This image is flat on a
piece of printed paper but depth is suggested to the mind by tonal variation
and lines of different sharpness and blur. His feet are cut out of the frame
but they aren’t missed because the frame darkens at the edges to black. The
black border of the natural vignette keeps the viewer’s eye in the frame.
Texture on the walls gives the setting its macabre feeling but because many of
the lines are dark or blurred they do nothing to distract from the mournful but
proud face of Lewis Payne. The image seems to be taken from straight on at
chest level of the man in the chair. Looking up slightly at the subject’s
tilted-back head gives him a solemn regality. Payne
knows that this image will go forward in human history while he will not.
He looks out of the page into the future long after he is no more with
sightless eyes. This is how he wants to be
remembered, his last words and an echo of his soul combined.
Works Cited
Works Cited
Buckland, Gail. "Indispensable
Photographs." Academic Search
Premier. EBSCO. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.
"Lewis Payne: 1865 | Shorpy Historical Photo
Archive." Shorpy Historical
Photo Archive | Vintage Fine Art Prints. Web. 18 Oct. 2011.
"POWELL, LEWIS THORNTON (“PAINE”/“PAYNE”) (1844-1865)." Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A
Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO,
2000. Credo Reference. Web. 18 October 2011.
Critical Essay Review
Annie
Dillard is a contemporary poet, author, and an explorer of things large and
small. She writes from the experience of her own life and more abstract
concepts of wondering to understand.
Annie Dillard’s essay This is the Life addresses cultures in the abstract and what they value. She talks of climbing up to the top of whatever sector of the world you find yourself in and then achieving enlightenment by realizing where everyone else is in the world. The piece then shifts to state that Americans as humans must believe that our lives and ideas are no more important than an uneducated immigrant or homeless person on the street. If we do not believe in that equality, she says then we might as well do away with our precious democracy.
Annie Dillard’s essay This is the Life addresses cultures in the abstract and what they value. She talks of climbing up to the top of whatever sector of the world you find yourself in and then achieving enlightenment by realizing where everyone else is in the world. The piece then shifts to state that Americans as humans must believe that our lives and ideas are no more important than an uneducated immigrant or homeless person on the street. If we do not believe in that equality, she says then we might as well do away with our precious democracy.
The
language of this essay is at a very high level. It paints vivid images and
clearly displays that she is a fantastic and capable writer. In a round-a-bout
way she talks about politics amid philosophy but some deciphering is required
to understand the political aspects of the piece. In deciphering lies both the
chance for the reader to reach the wrong conclusion or the viewer, learning for
themselves in a moment of discovery, to come to a realization themselves. Annie
Dillard wrote this essay to create an introspection in the reader that pushes
them to look at where they fall in the fabric of the world.
This
introspective quality creates questions of belief, live choices, and afterlife.
Throughout she asks rhythmically “Then what?” which unsettles the reader and
makes them guess. When she
concludes the essay with the ending of a peaceful and worthwhile life, the
essay clearly appears to be winding down, and then she says “Then what?”. With
that question it hurls the reader back from a moment of completeness into self
scrutiny and leaves them there.
By citing many
examples at each turn she does her best to make her piece more universal to a
reader of any potential background. I believe that it’s a step in the right
direction for her point but the work is clearly for an English reading audience
who can keep up with her vocabulary and thus it makes the gesture a way for
“us” to understand “them” rather than putting the piece on an equal plane.
Given the general madness in my life as I attempt to go to college and hold together relationships and make art and sleep and so many more things my time for contemplation about where I fit into the world has vastly diminished. That said this essay was an enlightening read that inspired me to think about things that have been hiding in a metaphoric cabinet in the back of my mind. I deeply enjoy Annie Dillard’s poetry and her prose because of the beautiful language and its insight creating quality. The essay reinforces democracy and individuality and so I think that everyone in our country should read it. These ideas are tied so closely to what the United States of America stands for but has a genius way of pointing out the disparity between what it stands for and what it effectively can be. Her words are clear invitation to think for yourself and reevaluate the things that you take for granted, to become a more conscious human being living a human life. She says indirectly that it isn’t the qualities of her words in this essay that will mean something to you; what will mean something are the words you come up with in response to questioning. “What then?”
Given the general madness in my life as I attempt to go to college and hold together relationships and make art and sleep and so many more things my time for contemplation about where I fit into the world has vastly diminished. That said this essay was an enlightening read that inspired me to think about things that have been hiding in a metaphoric cabinet in the back of my mind. I deeply enjoy Annie Dillard’s poetry and her prose because of the beautiful language and its insight creating quality. The essay reinforces democracy and individuality and so I think that everyone in our country should read it. These ideas are tied so closely to what the United States of America stands for but has a genius way of pointing out the disparity between what it stands for and what it effectively can be. Her words are clear invitation to think for yourself and reevaluate the things that you take for granted, to become a more conscious human being living a human life. She says indirectly that it isn’t the qualities of her words in this essay that will mean something to you; what will mean something are the words you come up with in response to questioning. “What then?”
Argumentative
Essay
Artists
throughout the ages have used a variety of media to create work. With the
advent of computers came new possibilities of digital media. Though newer, digital
art media and techniques hold just as much value as traditional media.
Traditional art media has been used for longer and is thus associated with a
long line of successful works and workers to which it is simple to ascribe a
great cultural value. Digital art has not had a chance to become revered. Even
after computers were created there were many things produced in the unrefined
years of the medium that critics were quick to establish as stunts rather than
serious art. It took time for computers to become refined enough to offer the
range of options a traditional medium can.
Many people see
things created by using a computer as somehow less than traditional pieces, as easier.
I would argue that this is not the case. Computers offer up completely new ways
of making things that use a concept, such as drawing, for a jumping off point
and then build a new system in which the artist must learn to create through
exploration. Digital art programs like Adobe Photoshop are built to include
tool names and ideas like a canvas from traditional art but ask anyone and they
will tell you that the brush tool is very different from wielding a paintbrush
in the physical realm. The key word in that sentence is different. The process
of creating something digitally has different limits and advantages than does a
traditional or classical medium. It is illogical and unjust to presume to
decide arbitrarily which one is the laughable “better” overall.
It is perfectly acceptable to have an opinion that a certain technique or subject is better rendered in either a traditional or digital medium just as it is perfectly acceptable to make a decision to paint something in acrylic rather than drawing it in charcoal. The problem lies not in the comparison of the two but rather in the absolute level of comparison. I have yet to hear an artist say that charcoal is better than painting; but frequently people ask me if something has been altered digitally and respond with disdain if it has. Yet every artistic rendering of a subject somehow alters the subject. Men are not still and solid like stone statues and the people in photographs aren’t two dimensional in real life. Putting an image of a person down in a painting and making the composition warmer is an inarguable artistic decision but adding yellow and orange tones to a photograph is looked upon by some as a deceit.
Neither traditional nor digital media can trump the other as they both do different things and have different merits and failings. Moreover to have such disdain for a medium oversteps the bounds of personal opinion and crosses over into the dangerous realm of judging others. Creation is a highly personal experience that artists display for those around them. The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is based upon the idea that an artist can create art in any medium and that act of creation will expand the thinking of that artist and that of the viewers who see the work. This is a well rounded and unlimited way of thinking that allows for the artists studying to branch out and find new ways to discover by valuing all media as separate and of equal possible value. A photograph can be just as perfect as a charcoal drawing as a digital manipulation as a sculpture and it is in this enlightened way of thinking that we move forward. As digital technologies continue to advance we should hold tight to our traditional ways of making so that they do not slip away but neither should we look down our noses at new opportunities that lie before us.
It is perfectly acceptable to have an opinion that a certain technique or subject is better rendered in either a traditional or digital medium just as it is perfectly acceptable to make a decision to paint something in acrylic rather than drawing it in charcoal. The problem lies not in the comparison of the two but rather in the absolute level of comparison. I have yet to hear an artist say that charcoal is better than painting; but frequently people ask me if something has been altered digitally and respond with disdain if it has. Yet every artistic rendering of a subject somehow alters the subject. Men are not still and solid like stone statues and the people in photographs aren’t two dimensional in real life. Putting an image of a person down in a painting and making the composition warmer is an inarguable artistic decision but adding yellow and orange tones to a photograph is looked upon by some as a deceit.
Neither traditional nor digital media can trump the other as they both do different things and have different merits and failings. Moreover to have such disdain for a medium oversteps the bounds of personal opinion and crosses over into the dangerous realm of judging others. Creation is a highly personal experience that artists display for those around them. The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is based upon the idea that an artist can create art in any medium and that act of creation will expand the thinking of that artist and that of the viewers who see the work. This is a well rounded and unlimited way of thinking that allows for the artists studying to branch out and find new ways to discover by valuing all media as separate and of equal possible value. A photograph can be just as perfect as a charcoal drawing as a digital manipulation as a sculpture and it is in this enlightened way of thinking that we move forward. As digital technologies continue to advance we should hold tight to our traditional ways of making so that they do not slip away but neither should we look down our noses at new opportunities that lie before us.
