favorites

Class, Mon, 11/04

Let’s go around the room, making an effort to highlight as many different authors—both professional and in this class—as we can. Read the passage you admire, remind us where it comes from, and tells us what strikes you about it.

Revised Schedule

Of Interest

Christinane Amanpour interviews Tara Westover (3/04/2018)

To Do

Wed, 11/06, Fri, 11/08, and Mon, 11/11: No class meetings! (I will be at a conference.) Spend this time developing your good first draft into an amazing second draft. I will email you a response to your Post-Workshop Memo near the end of next week.
Tues, 11/12, 5:30 pm, Mitchell Hall: Please join me in listening to Tara Westover speak.
Wed, 11/13, class: We will discuss Westover and your work on your projects.
Fri, 11/15, class: Bring your all-but-final draft of your project to class. We will work on it.

Some of Ashley’s Favorite Quotations

“And you look at the things they can do with a piece of ordinary cloth, and the things they fashion out of cheap, vulgarly colored (to you) twine, the way they squat down over a hole they have made in the ground, the hole itself is something to marvel at, and since you are being an ugly person this ugly but joyful thought will swell inside you: their ancestors were not clever in the way yours were and not ruthless in the way yours were, for then would it not be you who would be in harmony with nature and backwards in that charming way? An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have paused cannot stand you…”

Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”

“As we step further and further into our adulthood and closer to the practices that elicit opportunity we are understanding that unfortunately the structures that rule the ‘real world’ remain unchanged, they just transpire on a more discrete level. Older generations might mark us as oversensitive yet we see it as a fight that we did not choose to take part in. Within the generation that is currently blossoming are various new identities and ideals that are unconcerned about the feuds and tensions of the past, it is frustrating to have to continue cleaning up when we do not feel associated with these evils. We are much more concerned with innovation and creation especially while we have all kinds of readily available technology and networks that were unavailable before.”

Anthony Ozuna-Peña, “The Big Uneasy” Response – October 2, 2019

Homework, Mon, 11/04: Favorites

I’m beginning to suspect that I was not very clear in explaining what I’d like you to do in preparation for class tomorrow. So please let me try again!

Could you please locate two brief quotations, each 100 words or less, that you particularly admire, and post them to the course website? One of these quotations should come from a published piece that we’ve read together (e.g. Lu, Mellix, Anzaldua, etc.), the other should come from a piece that someone in this class has written.

And so, for example, I admire this sentence from Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place”:

“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being”.
Kincaid, “A Small Place”, p. 16

And I was very taken last week by this response by Anthony to a comment I made on the site:

“I think it goes back to the significance of the body to an African American person in this country. During slavery especially. The African American relates so well with Bruce Lee’s Kung-fu because the level of integrity and discipline that he shows in his fighting and resistance. It is something intrinsic and powerful that can never be taken from his body, nor exploited. Bruce Lee has complete control over his physical and spiritual actions and that is something that anyone that has belonged to or belongs to a caste system yearns for and resonates with.”
Anthony O-P, “Comment on Wing Chun & the West“, 10/18/2019

That’s all you need: two quotations, and readiness to talk about what you admire about them tomorrow. See you then!