The Heart Wants

I enjoyed that in our reading from this week we saw both a positive and negative commentary of President Obama. And though one was before he was actually elected president, I think it served as a good contrast to the recent piece from National Review.

Matt Taibi's "Obama's Moment" uses the larger frame of a love story to characterize his commentary on America's relationship with Barack Obama. This metaphor allows him to bring in all the cheesy stereotypes we associate on film, in real life, and in romance novels, in our understanding of some of Taibi's critiques of the 'relationship.' For instance, love often blinds us to logic and makes us require much less out of our partners than otherwise:

"When I suggest that his comment was vague, he shrugs. 'Yeah, but it's good vague.'"

The relationship metaphor also allows us to understand the intensity and great moments of triumph that are experienced by the Obama campaign as winning America over. Taibi explains how even when the media claimed Obama was an unlikely candidate, America hoisted him to the forefront:

"...now that he's got the numbers and the momentum, even the most hardened political cynic has to ask--why not this guy?"

And that question certainly can't sound unfamiliar to daters.

What I like most about Taibi's commentary is that he weaves in the positive strides Obama is making at this point in his campaign, along with some of the critiques that could easily be stirred. This way, the reader has a full picture and is more likely to take seriously Taibi's positive conclusion, knowing that he recognizes the flaws. In fact, the conclusion is grounded in flaws, acknowledging that components of Obama's appeal are grandiose, but

"Maybe it's OK because... sometimes it's about us, what we want and what we want to believe."

 In love and politics, sometimes the heart just wants what the heart wants.

Specialist Kors

In his "Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington," Joshua Kors uses an informative tone to uncover the unjustice of soldier's disability. I actually found the language of Kors piece to be more riddled with jargon and statistics than some of the others so far. This is surely because his topic lended to the importance of such information, so it is not without cause. And I found that his explanations allowed me to feel like I gained knowledge after reading the piece, rather than being bogged down my facts I couldn't make sense of.

One part of the informative tone that really stuck with me was actually the title. My gut instinct was that the title sounded much like one of a news article that might appear in a newspaper. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with the publication The Nation, but at least in comparison to other feature articles, "Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington" is straightforward and hints at the government frame of the feature.

Something else special about Kors's piece for me was the effectiveness of his section breaks. Since they were quotes or phrases contained in the passage below, they were recognizable as I continued to read and I appreciate that relevance. As I've previously mentioned, many author's are so "inventive" with their section break titles that it's more work to figure out what they meant than to just continue reading.

Intimidation Factor

This week, I really enjoyed the features that we had to read, though they really only struck up fear in me for my own article. I understand I have to remind myself that these are award-winning writers and that these pieces are compiled in this anthology because of their nominations, but they're still the present examples we have--and they're great pieces of writing!

I worry for my own feature that my topic is not relevant or interesting; that no one will really care to read about calendars and how their use has evolved over time. I'm not even sure I can do a good job answering that question.

But hopefully I can still learn from the examples. One thing I really liked about Packer's "Betrayed" was how he sectioned the story into pieces; oftentimes I ignore the divisions the author's create because it takes more mental energy to figure out what they're symbolizing than to just read without an interpretation. But Packer allowed the breaks to still be part of a greater scheme of chronological organization. There was no point in the article during which I felt I had lost the transition from the last point to the current one; everything made thematic sense. There are definitely features we have read where I felt that lacking.

What I enjoyed about Laskas's "Underworld" was the descriptive nature she gave to the piece, intimately describing the characters, the surroundings of the city, the environment of the coal mine and the feel of rushing through the tracks on your back. Since Laskas was obviously new to the idea, she wrote about it as such and allowed the reader to experience those novelties with her. I also thought, throughout my reading of the article, how interesting it was to see the industry from a woman's perspective. I know this doesn't have much to do with her writing, necessarily, but I think it was a brave and creative choice on her part to approach a subject that is typically male-dominated in both participation and interest.

That's another element of style I think we as writers can add to our pieces--the choice of our subjects and how we portay them.

Tears for Truth

Why do I want to cry after every feature article we read?

The Write Angels

Of the features we've been asked to read, I really enjoyed Paige Williams's "You've Got Thousands of Angels Around You." It touched me emotinally--as I'm sure it did many of my classmates--but more than that, I was struck by how personal Williams voice was. There were many moments throughout the piece that I stopped myself to remember I was reading a nonfiction feature by a journalist rather than prose constructed by an artful author. The first time I physically stopped for these thoughts to cross my mind was on page 163 when Wililams is describing the asylum lawyer Sue Colussy:

And she wasn't even Catholic. She wasn't even particularly-what was the term? Warm and fuzzy. But so what? Just because she wasn't the type to sit you down and hand you a lollipop didn't mean Sue Colussy wasn't your truest ally or your best hope.

I also liked how Williams included lots of dialogue so that the reader was able to feel as though she personally knew the people in the story, and thus these people--who were really participants in a feature--became characters of her prose.

Williams also employs creative narrative styles. For instance, there are two examples on page 171:

Okay. One word and everything changed.
     Let's do this.
     Okay.
     Or was it more than one word?
     Look, I've got this kid . . .
     Reid, you speak French, don't you?
     Let's do this.
     Okay.

And also:

Here is your room, here is your bathroom, here is your closet.

Williams writes as though she is just regurgiating the voiceover of Cynthia's first tour through the house. Williams change in use of a narrative voice and first and third person is very effective and powerful in making the reader pay attention the story as well as feel involved.

Review Anxiety

As I went to write our first piece, a review, for our Writing for Publication class, all the sample articles we'd been assigned to read were streaming through my head, making me only more nervous of the standards I had to live up to.

Some of the prominent and imitation-worthy components I remember include the appropriate level of background information offered by the "Project Runway" review from The New York Times. As a former religious addict of the show on its original network Bravo, I was curious as to why it was constantly being advertised on a different network, Lifetime. I appreciated that the review of the upcoming season not only offered generic background for those unfamiliar with the show, but also addressed more specific questions that could be offered by a seasoned watcher.

With the dfw.com review of Fort Worth's best burger, I loved the playful style and theme of the review, framed around the NBA playoffs model of the Final Four. Seguing in and out of descriptive style and themed metaphor was definitely an impressive feat and one intimidating for a first-time review-writer like myself. But I was at least offered solace by the fact that, as a reader, there were moments that I felt lost between the transition from metaphor to actual facts about each visit to the burger joints; I found myself re-reading at times to ensure I could match up eats with their respective locations. At the least, this review's organization was not ideal.

Though its length was far out of the bounds offered by our assignment, Carson's review of the film The War intrigued me because of how adept the author was at weaving in and out of personal experience among his critical claims about the film. He was able to acknowledge the films strengths, juxtaposed with its negatives--including film-genre conventions, typical behaviors of the director, and criticisms of generations on either side of the experience [of WWII]. It was this personal touch paired with solid information and subjective claims that I really wanted to emulate.

An Introduction

"Introduction" seems to be one of the few words we use in everyday language that appropriately serves its purposes, since through a "Hi, my name is..." we can never really gain full insight into a person. Introductions touch on the big things in our lives, whereas our identity is really founded in the little ones.

Some big things: I'm a senior Writing and Psychology student at TCU. My "home" is just a stone's throw away on the other side of Fort Worth. I've always been a psychology major but I switched my English major to writing after I started taking a few classes and kept feeling like something was missing; I realized that I was doing an awful lot of reading and analysis but the satisfaction of my own creative endeavors wasn't there. My first "writing" class was The Essay and it completely transformed my opinion of what the TCU English department had to offer me :)

After graduation, I hope to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology, working with children in the field of neuropsychology. My hope is that writing will fall somewhere into the nooks and crannies of that career, but regardless, I'm building my love of it by studying it now. I enjoy writing all kinds of pieces, but probably non-fiction best.

I also love listening to music. And collecting it, too. I keep all my old CDs (i.e. S Club 7, Bewitched, Britney from the "...Baby One More Time" days) and, this summer, I embarked upon a project of cataloguing all my music into my recently purchased 1TB hard drive. I could only be so lucky to fill half of it with great music over my lifetime.