Quakenbos 566 In-Class Writing

The Ideal Woman

Long legs and blonde hair,
Never rip, Never tear,
She's plastered on ads,
All new styles, all new fads,
She's loudly quiet,
Never cheats on a diet,
She's business savvy,
The same color skin,
As caramel taffy,
She knows how to sing,
Read, write and direct,
Everything she does,
It's always correct.
She gives to the poor,
When they knock on her door,
And money to foundations,
And art organizations,
She knows her Chablis,
Keeps a daily diary,
Wakes up daily at five,
Drinks coffee to stay alive,
She's an ardent lover,
Always hugs her mother,
Knows chic French phrases,
Vacation in sunny places,
She'd never be violent,
But she's never stay silent,
She's far too busy,
For all the noise in the city,
And retires away,
To a spa hideaway,
All my friends want to be her,
Please tell me if you ever see her,
This woman Aphrodite kissed,
With perfect abs and perfect lips,
She must be out there,
(Not that I really care),
Do you think she has Facebook?
I think I might have to look,
For this glowing femme,
This dream of women and men.
Perhaps she's on television,
Or maybe it's a premonition,
Where photoshop and makeup fall short,
Therein lies the far resort,
Where the ideal woman resides,
Amid a generation full of,
Fake bodies and lies.

Clay Tablet post

So the moral of the story is...saved posts do not equal publish posts. Saved posts remain in cyberspace limbo. This was supposed to have been published like two weeks ago. So here it is anyways.

On February 8, 2011 a class set out to imagine the world from the eyes of an ancient Sumerian. What we received was one dowel, one large clump of clay, a stylus, and a mission. My group, which consisted of Gilles and Jackie and myself, had the task of writing a very long Latin phrase about Caesar onto a very small, fragile clay block. In order to attempt this task we had to make a few primary considerations as the medium with which we were working. In my younger days as a high school art student I had dealt with clay, kilning and scoring of clay and ceramics. Jackie and Gilles mainly dealt with the rolling out of the clay, although I did help them by telling them to soften the clay by playing around with it in their hands (to add heat and increase viscosity). The canvas we ended up with was vertical, the perfect thickness and looked a lot like a scroll. I was chosen to be the scribe based on my neatness of handwriting derived from a quick glance at my notes. I knew I would have to make some sort of organizational decisions about how to write that much onto a small clay tablet. I sketched straight lines across the tablet in order to maintain clarity and order and started to write in my regular hand. I found that this irritated the clay and instead opted for block lettering which seemed to be more legible even in a very small clay-ey font. I had to be very careful to spell everything correctly and make sure I had enough room for each word and that each word looked and was spaced similarly.

We finished the task pretty quickly, and soon enough people were peeking over our shoulders to see what we had done. It wasn't a highly creative work, but it was legible and it was useful as a tool. Other people in the class took this to be more of an artistic pursuit, but my group just set out to make a legible and useful manuscript. I am glad to not have to write on clay tablets and instead use computers and pen and paper but the experience made me think more about writing in the process, and even language itself. Although I have only taken one Latin class when I was about 8, I could decipher the root words of the “to go” verb in Latin from the Spanish verb for “to go.” This is the same concept that helped me with knowing how to manipulate clay: drawing on past experiences to create new boundaries and ideas through that experience.

In general technology works in the same way. If we can’t seem to make rounded letters work in a certain medium we work with the tools we are given to develop a better way, like block letters. In the same way, new media is not a disintegration of older literacy mores, but rather the standing top of the technology iceberg.

Gee Discourses- Pictures of Non-Human and Human Elements

Images-

For class on Thursday we were asked to present pictures that represented our ideas of a quote from "Living Through Discourses," "Meaningful coordinations of human and non-human elements, besides people themselves, the human elements of coordinations include people's ways of thinking, acting, feeling, moving, dressing, speaking, gesturing, believing and valuing. Non-human elements of coordination include: tools, objects, institutions, networks, places, vehicles, machines, physical spaces, buildings. Within such coordinations we humans become recognizable to ourselves and others in meaningful and distinct ways." Using this quote I used pictures that I already had archived from different albums on Facebook. I don't really have a very good camera so I thought it best to use pictures that were better quality. The first picture I used was of the "Walter J. Sondheim" statue outside of the building where we have class. One day I decided it would be really funny to put my tam on his head and my clutch in his hand and take a picture (who knows...it was a crazy day). I thought this picture most fit with this quote because despite the fact that the statue is really just a hunk of bronze, we humans gave him a face and features similar to humans to humanize him. When I saw him I wanted to make him even more in my image and give him a jaunty little hat and purse. This is human elements meeting non-human elements.
The second picture I used was of me waving to the camera, this idea fits within the "gesturing" part of the quote. Although a raised hand could mean many things, humans give it a human meaning.
The third picture I used was of a light I found at "Tutti Frutti" which despite being un-human looks like some sort of cellular or multi-cellular being when presented by itself. I thought it was an interesting non-human element.
The fourth picture I used was of a picture of the National Botanical gardens with a shadow of myself taking a picture strewn across the flowers. I though that this not only fit with the media related aspects of this class but also with the non-human, human elements. Is a shadow human or non-human??