Towle House

I Actually Like Summer in Indiana...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:56:05 -0400

…which is basically happening right now: hot and humid. I forgot how reckless I feel during Indiana summers. I’m one of those people who feels more possibility when facing open fields than I do facing a city skyline. I am very dedicated to my small-town posturing. I have the urge to drive long distances on country roads with the windows down and music blaring. The new album from The National is out today; they only make for good driving music 50% of the time. I haven’t listened to this new album enough to decide how I feel about it yet. Except for the song “Sea of Love,” which I already kind of adore.

Things feel bleak and open-ended at the same time. I’m applying for jobs all up and down the Eastern seaboard. And a few here in Indiana. It’s weird having no idea where I’m going to be living three months from now.

I’ve also been watching ASMR videos. They are strange but do the job: relax me and make me complacent. I’m trying to write about them and finding it difficult. There is something to the materiality of ASMR sounds that needs to be interrogated, but possibly I’m in too deep to be the interrogator.

Everything is feeling very tenuous. Which is, if anything, making everything I read more poignant and overwhelming.

Gatsby, a Cream Sweater

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:21:41 -0400

Gatsby, a Cream Sweater:

duckbeater:

BASICALLY WE LIKED IT!

Evan has feelings:

I think too of the way the characters’ faces are often fuzzy for their nimbédness; I don’t know if this is a product of translating from 3D to 2D, or a consequence of the filming procedures required for this complicated digitization; or someone on the lens-side dicking about; or if the glowing skin of these gorgeous creatures was really too much for my eye to accept. In any event, the contrast between crisp, cool character presentation and gauzy, blown-out un-seeing, was a rhythm I became attuned to throughout the spectacle, during cross-cutting, within the same scene, and seemed apiece with the characters’ mercurial, mercenary natures. Yourself and the other ladies were much taken with the “cream sweater” Gatsby dons in the middle of the flick. Fleshly, woolen, gorgeous—Leo DiCaprio does strike me as so much comelier in these scenes; indeed, he is more comely in the cream sweater than in any scenes he has ever done in any other movie. (And he was quite nubile in The Beach, where he was sun-dappled and harassed on a beach for the film’s duration.) But surely this comeliness owes something to the texture of the lens, the way the focus caresses Gatsby, draws us to the softness of the cream sweater and then swats us away, how the depth of focus draws our cheek to his breast (and his curves, his manliness in the cream sweater—such refinement, and yet such strength) and then pushes us out of doors. His golden skin. Glossed. Then fuzzed. I am getting a little hot now—a lot hot now—thinking about the cream sweater.

Beth has feelings:

Here’s where I take a moment and talk about the deeply personal way that I read this book and how I think Luhrmann or someone else might read it differently. The movie is very interested in the tragedy of the love story. This is clearly what Luhrmann is into, what he takes away from the book. And that’s fine. I have absolutely no interest in the love story, by the end. For me, the ultimate melodrama of the book, its real feelings of defeat and triumph and terror, come in the way Nick filters his experiences. The end of the book is defeated and, in my opinion, the most beautiful final pages of any book in the literary canon. Because I over-identify with Nick as a Midwesterner and snob and someone who feels very much defined by socioeconomic class structure, I have to keep imagining what happens after that final line. And for me, that means this man has to go back to the Midwest, carrying around an experience he can never fully explain or share. I don’t think he’s marked by the tragedy of Gatsby. He’s actually marked by loneliness. I think, in the end, the movie doesn’t understand the total loneliness of this book. It maybe gets Gatsby’s loneliness (and makes Daisy lonely despite the fact that she is basically a non-person in the book), but it ignores Nick’s. He’s in a sanatorium, telling this story to a psychologist, being encouraged to write it down. In the book, there’s the feeling that he’ll never get to tell this story, not really. Not to anyone willing to listen anyway. The movie misses a chance to bring that feeling of total loneliness upon the audience. I am crushed by the loneliness of everyone in the book; in the movie, not so much.

Come explore more of our Midwestern feelings at Actuary Lit!

Evan and I wrote about The Great Gatsby over at Actuary.

I’m reading John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:43:00 -0400

I’m reading John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. It is full of all sorts of revelatory ideas about the failure of pure communication and how all media (including and especially writing) is a tragic attempt to constantly speak with another figure who may as well be dead. Despite my love of everything in this book, the writing is pretty straight-forward. And then suddenly, here in the middle of a section about the Postal Services’ Office of Dead Letters, we get this lovely paragraph. Peters gets poetic and consequently I’ve been walking around half-devastated all evening.

P.S. This means I probably should re-read Bartleby, unfortunately.

My Only Ghost Story, and It's Not a Good One

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:48:00 -0500

I’m reading Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters, an account of several prominent 19th-century scientists and their obsession with psychical research. It’s not so much about ghosts as it is about mediums and telepathy, but combined with my recent re-reading of Brenda Coultas’s ghost stories in The Marvelous Bones of Time, it’s got me thinking a lot about ghosts.

I’m not sure I actually believe in ghosts, although I like my world mostly mysterious and can certainly point to places that make me feel strange things. I’ve only had one first-hand ghost-like experience, and while I cannot claim that it was, in fact, a ghost, it still happened. So let me tell a super brief story about the time I saw a possible ghost.

The summer after I graduated college, I stuck around campus to work in the library. Mostly, I was putting off the inevitable, disappointing move back into my parent’s house for a few months. The campus was mostly deserted, although two of my closest friends were both working there that summer, too. My friend Amy was, like me, putting off adulthood by spending her summer in the music school library. Keely, meanwhile, began an actual career in the school’s admission office. It was a weird summer, a kind of last hurrah in which I spent half my time in absolute rapture and the other half in absolute despair. Mostly, I read books and drank a lot of cherry pop (with actual cherry syrup in it!) at the local ice cream parlor.

Anyway, during what turned out to be the hottest weekend of an otherwise mild summer, Amy, Keely, and I decided to go camping. DePauw has its own nature park: a sprawling, beautiful woods and prairies area situated around an abandoned quarry. If you look down from the high edge of the quarry, you can actually see the remains of the road taken by the crew trucks beneath all the water and new-ish plant life. In the last week of June 2009, DePauw sponsored a camp-out for the few remaining scragglers left on campus. The park staff provided everything - tents, lanterns, food, scavenger hunts. We only had to bring the sleeping bags, bug spray, and a personal stash of grape pop and Oreos.

This story isn’t about camping, though. It’s a ghost story.

The evening of the camping trip, Amy, Keely, and I were lounging around the porch of the visitor’s center, a lovely covered patio full of rocking chairs and benches. It was incredibly hot out, and later that night, a huge storm would hit just south of us. In fact, we had been at the visitor’s center to use its bathrooms (the only respectable ones in the park) and check the weather report via sketchy Wi-Fi. The sun was setting; the porch sat on a squat hill, so we were kind of looking down at trees and bushes, but not by much of an advantage. The camping area was a little ways down the grassy path, probably a quarter mile or less. It was far enough that we felt all alone, anyway.

There is nothing particularly creepy about the DePauw Nature Park. I always feel a bit eerie around areas of abandoned production (quarries, factories, et cetera), but that didn’t make it inherently strange. Also, Greencastle, Indiana, has always struck me as a mysterious place of limestone and water and trains, all brimming with promise of unknowable things. And yet, all of us felt a bit on edge for some reason. The wood furniture and columns creaked loudly around us; the humidity made our skin prickle. Let me set the scene: Amy was sitting in a rocker toward the back of the porch, closest to the empty ranger’s office. Keely and I were sitting opposite of her, Keely lying on a bench, me tucked up in a rocker. Keely had her digital camera on and was lazily pointing it in our directions, although she never did take more than a couple pictures.

The sun was setting, the sky just on the edge of getting dark. Keely had her camera pointed in Amy’s direction, although she wasn’t paying attention to it. We were all talking about something stupid. At one point, I looked at Keely’s camera screen and said, “Hey, what’s that? Keely, what IS that?”

For on Keely’s camera screen was Amy, in her rocking chair. And next to her was a white mass, people-sized although not necessarily people-shaped. More like a person wearing a sheet. A Halloween costume. Keely ignored my questions, and Amy hadn’t heard my urgent whisperings. Finally, Keely looked down at her camera screen. We both kind of shouted - neither of us is capable of screaming, really - and took off running. Poor Amy, not aware of her invisible new neighbor, followed us a second or two later. We all kind of collapsed in the grass, only thirty feet or so from the visitor center porch. “What happened?” Amy asked.

We tried to explain it to her, and poor Amy was jealous she missed it herself. I’m not sure if we actually saw what we saw, or if it was some kind of mass hysteria writ small. Keely and I like to say that is was something wrong with the camera, that because we both saw it, it certainly just had to be some kind of weird light anomaly or something. Mostly, we just felt stupid for yelling and running off like a couple of cliched girls.

But that person-sized lump of white light sticks with me as the only moment in my life that I can point to and say “maybe.”

Winter Break, So Far

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 19:55:11 -0500

Down to the last week of winter break. I have mostly wasted it through sleeping, watching movies, and petting my cat Winchester, who has taken up a recent habit of waking up from his naps feeling very affectionate and sitting in my lap, which is not a trait he’s known for. I have barely touched my thesis, which is due in about a month and a half. It’s falling apart, if I’m being honest. It’s getting close to the end and unraveling the closer it gets. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little I actually enjoy writing lately. There’s a part of me that thinks if I just gave into the fact that I can enjoy reading without having to create books myself, I would be a much better, much happier person. But I’ve wasted a lot of years writing at this point. So it feels like a real wash.

I always get the blues in the winter, like most of my fellow Hoosiers. Winter break is unproductive because I’m so restless, maybe. I have so many things I want to do that instead I just end up reading a book or asking friends to lunch. I am incredibly lazy when left to my own devices. School starting again will be my saving grace, although I am dreading this semester for some unknown reason.

Part of the problem could be the sudden explosion of engagement announcements showing up in my Facebook Newsfeed. In the last six months, at least 15 facebook friends and two very close real-life friends have gotten engaged. Last week, I helped my best friend begin looking at wedding dresses and reception halls. I’m her maid-of-honor, and I already feel a duty to be both nurturing/upstanding AND miserable through the entire process. A rom-com maid-of-honor. I told my mom it was going to be a long 2013 if this engagement process kept pace. She asked if I really wanted to be engaged or married that badly. To be honest: definitely not. I have absolutely no interest in being married right now. I think what I’m envious of is the promise of eventual stability. Being engaged is making a step toward a kind of stability that is completely foreign to me as I prepare to graduate in five months, with absolutely no job prospects and, to be truthful, no real interest in any career field. In the summer of 2014, when both of my engaged friends have their weddings, I have no idea where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing or who I’ll know. That is terrifying to me. I don’t take well to uncertainties.

I warned my best friend that I will be crying like a baby at her wedding, even if I am standing in the front of the church (even stranger’s weddings make me cry, I told her). After our brief excursion into wedding planning, we saw Les Miserables. Despite knowing it was manipulating me, I felt very moved by the whole thing. I cried twice, during Anne Hathaway’s big song and then again at the super-saccharine finale. My friend said she would have probably cried if she hadn’t been in public. I’m not sure how she can turn it off like that, to be honest. If I’m going to cry, nothing’s going to stop me. In the end, I loved Les Miserables. I loved that it made me cry. I might try reading Hugo’s novel.

When I put together my New Year’s resolutions for 2013, I almost added “Stop reading books so emotionally” to the list. Besides the fact that I can’t really change my brain chemistry enough to actually do that, I realize it’s a stupid concept in the first place. I like reading books with all my nerves turned inside-out. I like feeling like a cat’s whiskers constantly rubbing up against walls. I’m re-reading The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s a YA novel I loved when I listened to it on audio back in November. There’s a friendship between two boarding-school teenage boys, Adam and Gansey, that rips me apart in this book (which is, technically, the first in an eventual series of four). Late in the book, the two boys - wealthy, loyal Gansey and poor, proud Adam - get in a verbal fight in a hospital parking lot. I can barely read it because it makes me hurt so much, the way I feel so attached to both these kids and how I understand where they’re both coming from. This fictional friendship gets at issues of class and money that make me remember all too painfully how angry I was as a teenager, resenting money even while all I wanted was to have lots of it. I guess I still feel this way, seeing as how dismayed I am over future job prospects and how badly I just want to have the money that will allow me to pay the bill for car repairs on my own.

About Gansey and Adam: I worry about what will happen to them as the series continues. I’m pretty sure they’re not both going to make it out alive, or at least, not whole.

Ten Resolutions for 2013

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:39:30 -0500

Well, 2012 is coming to a close. I can’t say it was a particularly good year. School was fine, and nothing majorly disastrous happened. But personally, it was one of the most unfulfilling years I can remember. I’m hoping for a better 2013. In that spirit, here’s my most pressing resolutions for the new year. Some of these are very personal, but I’m putting them out there in the internet in hopes of actually sticking to them this year.

1. Lose 10 more pounds. Every year, I vow to lose more weight. And last year, I lost almost 15 pounds without even really trying. To be honest, I’d be happy to lose just another 5, which would put me down to what I weighed my freshman year of college. But here’s hoping to another 5 for shits and giggles.

2. Be more charitable. Chalk it up to a working for the Notre Dame Writing Center, which includes community service as part of its mission, but this last year has taught me how important it is to me to be a valuable, open-minded member of a community. This year, I hope to be giving of my time and money.

3. Show my appreciation more often. I’ve always tried to show my appreciation to those who’ve helped me, but I could always be better at it. I should take more time out of my schedule to thank others, both those close and far. I’m also vowing to actually donate a little money to my favorite podcasts this year, as I totally freeloaded off them last year, despite the fact that they single-handedly keep me sane.

4. Stop falling for guys just because they’re nice to me. This one speaks for itself and has been a problem for me my whole life. Technically, this goes hand in hand with my next resolution.

5. Work on my self-esteem issues. I struggle to overcome my super-low self-esteem almost everyday, but my problems with depression (see below) this year have really made me realize that I need to be conscious about this problem and how many times I have let it undermine personal and professional goals.

6. Stop letting depressive moods have reign. This was a rough year, mentally. And I think it’s time to stop being miserable but never doing anything about it. It’s time to learn how to manage my moods a bit better. Just as importantly, I need to be better at realizing when I can’t rely solely on myself and seeking out help when things get bad. It’s time to get on with my life.

7. Enjoy my last semester as an MFA student. This one’s a lot more positive! I will admit that my MFA experience has been, frankly, underwhelming. There is a pretty good chance that when I graduate this year, I will be saying goodbye to creative writing as a field of study/interest. But I’m not as sad about that fact as I would have been a year or two ago. Instead, I just want to enjoy the last five months of taking classes, hanging out with other writers, and soaking in all the free criticism and editing. I will always write poems and fiction for fun, even if I decide not to pursue it at any professional level.

8. Finally watch Breaking Bad. I can’t believe I’ve put it off this long. Time for this nonsense to end. This shall be the year of my Aaron Paul obsession!

9. Read more Dostoevsky. I read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as a teenager, and they went right over my head. I’m older, wiser, and better-versed in Russian literature, so it’s time for me to read more Dostoevsky. I’m especially eager to finally tackle The Idiot or (if I’m feeling super-ambitious) The Demons (aka The Possessed). For years, I’ve been calling myself a Tolstoy Girl. Let’s put that to the test.

10. Be a better friend. I think I say this every year. But every year, there’s room for improvement. I can do much better at staying in touch, making time, and being more supportive. And on the reverse, it’s time for me to start expecting the same from my friends in return.

Research Proposal: Can writing centers serve as points of intervention for first-generation college students?

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:34:00 -0500

I wrote this research proposal for my Writing Center Theory and Practice class. I hope to turn it into a full-blown project next semester:

Being a first-generation student means crossing boundaries. When I left for college, I did not realize what an impact my first-generation status would have on my life for the next four years (not to mention the impact it would have on my graduate career). Suddenly, I was an outsider. My continuing-generation peers had access to a language and set of expectations that I did not have. Unlike them, I did not know how to play the role of a college student, how to model myself according to the expectations and unsaid rules of academic life. It was a new world. I am not alone in having had this experience. Research shows us that first-generation students have a tougher time adjusting to college life than continuing-generation students. Many studies claim they have higher drop-out rates, lower GPAs, and less self-esteem than their peers. There are many reasons for these problems: less familial or financial support, issues with academic preparedness, and problems with self-efficacy and study skills. Several researchers have pointed out the ways in which collaborative learning environments or writing teachers can help first-generation students adjust to and succeed in college. However, there is little research being done in the way of peer tutoring in writing. Can writing centers serve as a point of intervention in the often-stressful lives of first-generation students?

With the rate of first-generation students enrolled in college increasing every year, more and more attention is being paid to the ways they operate within academia. Most of the research has focused on their lack of academic preparedness, the hurdles inherent in not having grown up in households that promote collegiate perspectives, and the few resources available specifically for first-generation students. Some research also shows the ways in which low GPAs and low self-esteem can combine to make college untenable for many first-generation students. However, there is not as much information about what the actual college experience is like for the first-generation students who do stay in school. In her excellent article, “Academic Literacy Perceptions and Performance: Comparing First-Generation and Continuing-Generation College Students,” Ann M. Penrose states:

“First-generation students differ little from their [continuing-generation] peers in initial expectations for success or in performance in college. Where the two groups diverge is in the experiences they have as college students – their comfort level or quality of life, in this case intellectual and social life in the academic community. In other words, what distinguishes FG from CG students is not whether they can succeed but the cost of their success.” (Penrose 447)

The haunting final sentence here echoes many of the concerns facing those who study first-generation students right now. With so much research already supporting the fact that first-generations students struggle, the task is to understand the exact ways in which they struggle. The current scholarship in the field attempts to reckon with this problem. We know first-generation students have problems. The question is how do we now make their lives easier in practice and not just in theory?

Several researchers and authors attempt to lay out a game plan to help first-generation students through campus support. One way to do this, many scholars agree, is through collaborative learning efforts. Jeff Davis, in his book The First-Generation Student Experience, is a major proponent of study groups meant to not only teach better study skills to first-generation students but to also provide them with a social outlet that lets them model themselves on their non-first-generation peers. The idea is that first-generation students seek models of behavior that they believe are beneficial to continuing-generation students (Davis 42). Peter Collier and David Morgan agree that behavior modeling and the teaching of study skills could help first generation students, as “university success requires mastery of the ‘college student’ role” (Collier 425).

To take the importance of study groups one step further, I propose there are benefits to collaborative learning that are particularly relevant to first-generation students. Part of this is certainly due to the first-generation student’s desire to model oneself appropriately to university behavior, examples best given through observing others (Davis 42); but it is also due to the fact that first-generation students may actually be more open to community-based learning based on their backgrounds (which are usually, though not always, working-class or low-income). A recent psychology study shows that one of the disadvantages faced by first-generation students lies in the promotion of “independence” as an important value by American universities. Continuing-generation studies, who usually grow up in middle-class families, are taught that independence is an important value, with time given over to individual hobbies or talents for the children in the family. Meanwhile, working-class, first-generation students are more likely to have grown up in households extolling the virtues of “interdependence” (Stephens). Therefore, “first-generation students are likely to experience the university culture’s focus on independence as a cultural mismatch – as relatively uncomfortable and a clear divergence from their previous experiences” (Stephens). In light of this concept, collaborative learning may benefit first-generation students in ways previously ignored. Mentoring, social interaction, and skills-learning are all important to first-generation students, and a collaborative learning environment may help them succeed because they are already attuned to its operations and advantages.

Along with collaborative learning, some research argues that first-generation students might benefit from careful attention from writing teachers. Ann Penrose, in particular, notes that one of the most difficult aspects of college a student most overcome is the change in discourse. First-generation students are especially vulnerable to learning a new, academic discourse. “Because literary practices enact the values and customs of a community, they represent a critical site of vulnerability for those who are uncertain of their membership. It is in written texts that newcomer’s outside status is most clearly and tangibly exposed” (Penrose 457). Penrose goes on to explain that because first-generation students are more aware of the differences between the way they communicate at home and the way they communicate in college, they see the distance between discourses as being much larger than their continuing-generation peers. Therefore, “writing teachers and researchers need to continue to explore pedagogies that will concentrate their efforts not just on validating personal identity or on demystifying the conventions of academic communities but also on helping students forge identities as members of those communities” (Penrose 459). Helping first-generation students gain access to the discourse involved in academia can play a major role in their acclimation to college overall.

So far, research supports the need for writing support and collaborative learning groups for first-generation students. Reading this work makes me wonder if there is a way that writing centers can bridge the gap between these two concepts in order to provide a model of writing and learning in a college setting that will especially benefit first-generation students. The collegiate experience expands far beyond the classroom and interactions with faculty members. Many universities sponsor orientation or mentor groups for first-generation students in their freshman year. However, there is a vital need for support systems that extend through a student’s entire college career. Writing centers might be a successful model for support: teaching important skills, providing peer interaction, and helping first-generation students break through the barriers of academic discourse. With so much research and anecdotal evidence showing that the socially-fostered (and often negative or doubting) mindsets of first-generation students may be the real culprits in their struggles with academia, it is necessary to help them adjust to the operations and unseen rules of the academy.

Peer tutoring, such as our work here at the University of Notre Dame Writing Center, allows students to interact on multiple levels. They are learning writing skills and consulting on specific problems in writing, of course. But they are also communicating and interacting with students who have been successful at entering the halls of academic discourse. Peer tutoring allows first-generation students access to the modeling Jeff Davis prescribes (see above) while taking off the pressure involved in institutional organizations and faculty interactions. Better yet, writing centers are open-access. They welcome students from every year of study and discipline. They can come and go as frequently as seniors as they can as freshman. At a time when many colleges are forced to slash budgets for institutional support of marginalized students, writing centers may be a cost-effective way at providing students with the kind of support that is needed for all four years or more of undergraduate study (and, depending on funding, during all the years of graduate study), while requiring only a handful of faculty or staff members to oversee it. I am not suggesting that writing centers are cheap or easy to run, but they serve several important purposes on campus at once (skills-based tutoring, social interaction, mentoring/positive student reinforcement, etc.), allowing them to serve as points of intervention across several key components of college acclimation.

This research proposal provides an argument for the need for research into the effectiveness of writing centers in helping first-generation students adjust in college. Because I am personally invested in this project as both a writing center tutor and a first-generation student, I want to continue my research in this area of study that has largely been ignored by scholars thus far. There is quite a bit of research about the benefits of peer study groups and writing teachers, but how can we combine these two areas in a way that will allow writing centers to become more than just depositories for writing knowledge? By continuing my research of academic and psychological studies related to first-generation students and by using anecdotal or survey evidence from first-generation students and writing tutors, I hope to make an argument for the ways in which a university writing center can serve as an intervening agent in the academic and campus lives of first-generation students. I realize the research may not always go where I expect it to go, and I know that heartbreak can often lie in the path of studying the things about which we most care. But I am willing to take that risk in pursuing this project.

Works Cited:

Collier, Peter J. and David L. Morgan. “ ‘Is that Paper Really Due Today?’: Differences in First-Generation and Traditional College Students’ Understandings of Faculty Expectations.” Higher Education 55.4 (2008): 425-446. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2012

Davis, Jeff. The First Generation Student Experience: Implications for Campus Practice and Strategies for Improving Persistence and Success. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2010. Digital.

Penrose, Ann M. “Academic Literacy Perceptions and Performance: Comparing First-Generation and Continuing-Generation College Students.” Research in the Teaching of English 36.4 (2002): 437-461. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2012.

Stephens, Nicole M., et al. “Unseen Disadvantage: How American Universities’ Focus on Independence Undermines the Academic Performance of First-Generation College Students.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102.6 (2012): 1178-1197. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.

Evan does this adorable thing where he posts photos of current...

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 19:37:49 -0500

Evan does this adorable thing where he posts photos of current research, often with witty commentary from Evan himself. So here is my version of such a thing, from Deborah Kaplan’s essay “‘Why would any woman want to read such stories?’: The Distinctions Between Genre Romances and Slash Fiction.” Here, she compared Stargate: Atlantis slash fic with m/m romance novels. At the end, she makes a statement that, perhaps (un)fortunately, applies to me, both as a romance reader and as an occasional slash partaker.

Witty comment: She is not writing about Wincest, but she totally could be.

Digitial Humanities, Literary Studies, and Popular Romance

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:58:06 -0500

In my digital humanities graduate seminar, my classmates and I spend a lot of time talking about “the corpus,” in particular a collection of one-thousand-something American novels published between 1851-1875 that my professor uses for his own scholarly work. While discussing the usefulness (and occasional un-usefulness) of topic modeling on Monday, we had a kind of crisis moment in regards to literary canon. We hate it, we love it, we can’t figure out how to divorce ourselves from it. Digital humanities, with its quantitative approach to qualitative subject matter, seems like a way to get out of the clutches of the dead white man canon. But can we really go around and just dig out books with titles like The Spirit Rapper (literally, this is a book that exists in this corpus) and suddenly assume that they have any kind of cultural bearing? Probably not.

But neither can we assume that these books don’t have cultural bearing. As one of my classmates pointed out, Moby Dick is canonized because of its exceptionalism, because it survives outside of what might be considered mainstream at the time. These mid-19th-century American novels, full as they are of sentiment and religious angst and slave plantations, may be mundane in style and topic, but isn’t that in itself interesting? Is literary “trash,” the popular if easily-forgotten flotsam of a particular time and culture, any less important than its more spectacular counterparts? I don’t think it is. If anything, a whole bunch of ”bad” books written on a similar topic in a relatively small smattering of years can tell us more about society within a given period than any Melville or Hawthorne novel. Digital humanities may not have set out to suddenly save a bunch of books from the black hole of criticism; rather, DH is interested in trends and scales and visualizations of texts. But there is something incredibly appealing to me about its recovery methods. And like most things in my life, it all comes back to romance novels.

It’s not that romance is entirely ignored by academic/literary institutions (lovely journals like THIS exist). But it’s ignored by about 99.3% of it. Romance, remember, is the single highest-selling genre in all of publishing. When the market tanked in 2008, romance was the only publishing area to actually MAKE money. Romance is popular, and it is social. The online romance-reading community is one of the most fervent (and, interestingly, one of the most accepting/kind) fan demographics out there in cyberland. And yet when a literary canon for the 2010s is established fifty years or so from now, you won’t see a single romance title on it. I guarantee it. People might still be making Fifty Shades of Grey jokes (and admittedly it’s earned that right), but that’s about it. So imagine my excitement over the possibility of what digital humanities might uncover when putting together a corpus of American novels from 2000-2025. Won’t it be funny to see Nora Roberts and Loretta Chase standing right next to Jonathan Franzen or Dave Eggers (or whatever else the hip literati kids are reading these days)? Maybe funny’s not the right word there. Won’t it be earned? Won’t it be representitive of actual socio-literary trends?

It is not that I want to stand on a soapbox here and say that digitial humanities is going to force us to suddenly start studying romance novels. I can almost guarantee that won’t happen. But I do think the huge scale of published work that digital humanities scholars work with is capable of showing that literature, politics, and social concerns go beyond whatever book makes the front of the NYT Book Review. If I topic-model a corpus of 21st-century American texts on my holographic spaceship computer in 2120, I will be amazed to see the huge number of books about women’s sexual lives that make up this corpus. (Side note: I like to imagine the words in that exact topic key. I imagine it will look a lot like: “BDSM cock virgin plunder,” etc). I’ll see that a book like Fifty Shades of Grey existed and was insanely popular AT THE EXACT SAME TIME in which a bunch of Republicans lost election based on their ignorant ideas about, yep, women’s sexual lives! This is great. This is thrilling. This makes me excited to be an active reader of a genre that represents so intensely the ever-shifting, ever-challenging ideas about women, women’s bodies, and what women do with said bodies.

So yeah. Digital humanities might just go hand-in-hand with the study of popular romance in some way. Or at the very least, it might help make up for the fact that I spent an entire, sad week this last summer reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

Rejected Titles for My Poetry Manifesto

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 21:08:56 -0400

Poetry Is Not a Romance Novel: Language Unserviced by Plot

Poetry Is Not an Episode of Justified: The Barrier between Language and Medium

Poetry Is Not a Penis: Gender and Object

Poetry Is Not a Marriage: The Lack of Compromise between Image and Form

Poetry Is Not a Sufjan Stevens Song: Deconstructing Sentimentality

Poetry Is Not a Backstreet Boy: Demythologizing the Young Male Genius

Poetry Is Not an Ice-Cream Sundae: The Need for Substance

Poetry Is Not a Protein Shake: The Lack of Need for Substance

Poetry Is Not an Ancestry.com Search: Removing the Anxiety of Influence

Poetry Is Not a Harry Potter Book: The Impossibility of Narrative

Poetry Is Not Jensen Ackles: The Problem with Beauty

Poetry Is Not Donald Trump: The Importance of Cutting Excess

Poetry Is Not a Phone Call to Your Mom: Removing Communication from the Equation

The Art of the Kidney Stone

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:39:23 -0400

Poets Olivia Cronk and Feng Chen discussed their work today with the poetry MFAs, and at one point, they spoke about “feminine” writing - how they had to defeat their own sexist attitudes toward women and women’s poetry before they could write the work they really wanted to write. Also, Feng Chen spoke about the way illness and problems with the body influences her writing. This got me thinking about my own work - both creative and academic, and how I can pinpoint the exact time in my life where I began to embrace writing about the body and the feminine, about a time when the significance of those facts became clear to me.

A few years ago, I developed a kidney stone that took two months to destroy. It’s a long story, involving lots of emergency room visits and two out-patient surgeries. Never had I felt so simultaneously attached and detached from my own body. Here it was betraying me, and yet I felt so physically aware - the pain a constant reminder of the material parts of me, and how a tiny rock of calcium and acid could fuck up everything. I knew when an attack was imminent - how the pain grasped my thigh, then my side, then flashed across my back. Even during the days-long, sometimes weeks-long, space between attacks, I could feel the ache, as if my kidney and its attendant tubing were stuck cogs. My left kidney was always a dull throb. Some people call kidney stone pain “stabbing,” but to me it always felt like stuck machinery: the body as malfunctioning factory. I became completely silent during the attacks; all I could do was curl up and try to keep from vomiting.

Once the kidney stone went away, it still stuck around. I wrote poems about it, including one in which it asked me to nurse it. Because there’s something strangely similar about kidney stones and babies. People always compare kidney stone pain to that of childbirth, and one of my emergency room nurses, who had had multiple children and multiple kidney stones, told me she’d “rather have another baby than pass another stone.” For the first time, I was aware of exactly what my body could do - how it could hurt but also heal, how the pain could ground me in my body but remove me from my interiority. Kidney stone pain takes you outside of your head, removes you from thought or memory. It forces you to be carnate. It makes you think about your body, about what it’s capable of producing, about what little control you really have over that production. Again: factory.

Bodies have become incredibly important to my poetry - everywhere you go there’s a body to trip over or bury or unbury. Bodies used and being used. Sometimes it’s carnal, sometimes it’s dead flesh. Sometimes it’s men, sometimes it’s women. In fact, more and more, it’s women, a fact that I link to the conciousness the kidney stone awoke in me about bodily production and reproduction and how the body can be controlled but also lose control. It’s the possibility of the body, its capabilities and its limits, that have fascinated me these last few years. And it’s not just in my creative work; the last two major papers I wrote exclusively involved bodies and the control of those bodies (in one, the representations of the 18th-century female reproductive body as monstrous in the gaze of men; in the other, how the male body becomes an ideological artifact in film). Bodies are everywhere for me these days.

My kidney stone was the single most physically painful experience of my life, but the way it forced me into an awareness of my own body has also made it one of my more important artistic experiences.

I am ready for a The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter film now.

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:01:00 -0400

You already know how excited I am about the upcoming Baz Luhrmann Great Gatsby film. Well, now I am ready to admit that I am also super-excited to see Joe Wright’s new adaptation of Anna Karenina. I’ve been avoiding this thing for awhile but after hearing some of the TIFF buzz about it, I knew I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I love Tolstoy almost as much as I love Fitzgerald, and he’s another writer to whom the movies have done a great disservice. It looks like Wright (who just so happened to direct Atonement, a movie I adore) and screenwriter Tom Stoppard (Tom Stoppard, you guys!) will be doing some really interesting things with staging and the concept of performance in this movie, which is fantastic. I am all about these risks people have been taking with “important literature” lately. I don’t know why audiences get so caught up in the “faithfulness” of books-becoming-films. If we can find new and interesting ways to stage and perform Shakespeare, if we can constantly rework ancient mythology, why can’t we do the same for well-known, well-loved novels? This is a thing I wholly support.

P.S. Despite how fabulous the Anna Karenina trailer looks, I doubt the movie will feature my favorite scene in the whole novel: that little moment when Levin hears his baby son sneeze for the first time. I love that single paragraph so much I could marry it.

On Sunshine

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:02:35 -0400

Last week, I watched a 2007 movie directed by Danny Boyle called Sunshine. It’s about a group of scientists on a space ship headed to the sun. The sun is dying and the space ship is carrying a giant nuclear bomb that is meant to reignite the sun and save Earth. Unfortunately, they run into a few problems just as they get close to their end goal. And unfortunately, this movie does the same thing.

For the first hour of Sunshine, I was completely enthralled. I can’t always concentrate when watching movies at home; I play with my phone, read emails, drink too much wine. So I know something’s hooked me when all I’m doing is just watching the movie (the only other movie that did this for me in the last six months or so was Zodiac, which is fantastic and might just edge out The Social Network as my favorite David Fincher film). The first hour of Sunshine is a slow burn, and a gorgeous one at that. The use of darkness and light, music that feels telling but never overwhelming, the tension that comes from the simple, cold, unforgiving setting of space. The characters are quietly imploding, mirroring the sun itself. The movie’s early death scenes are all brilliant, and they feel vital to this story about what happens when you spend more than a year in a tight space with multiple strangers, surrounded by quiet darkness. The performances are very good, too. Chris Evans and Rose Byrne - two actors I associate with pretty faces and a kind of earnestness that borders on irritating - did surprsing, understated work. I think this might actually be Evans’s best role. And Cillian Murphy as the physicist protagonist is especially great.

Space is inherently terrifying, at least to me. It is vast and powerful and kind of beautiful, but it is also incredibly claustrophobic. In order to survive in it, you’re stuck in a tiny spacecraft with people who are as nerve-wracked and homesick as you are. The sun is so very far away, and people are so very hard to understand. Because space is inherently terrifying, there is no need to add horror to the mix. The horror is there in the huge, black emptiness. It’s always on the edge, and that’s what makes this type of science fiction so engaging: you’re constantly having to guess what is happening out there because no one really knows. Nature is the scariest killer, and space is nature x 1,000. For the first two-thirds of its running time, Sunshine gets this. It gets that space and the human mind are both capable of a kind of emptiness that ends up filled with imagined horrors. These astronauts/scientists are all fucked just because they’re up there. When the sun begins to rot at their brains, it’s no surprise they’re more than willing to succumb to that bright light.

So when the first hour is up and the movie becomes a generic horror film, it feels like the worst kind of cinematic cop-out. I can’t remember feeling this devastated by a narrative turn ever. I felt betrayed by Boyle and the film’s writer, Alex Garland. The movie is a science-fiction retelling of the Icarus myth, and unfortunately, the filmmakers took up the myth themselves. This movie - which I loved and burned for, which sucked me in and made me hurt, which made my stomach twist in on itself - went up in flames. I wanted cry, it made me feel so bad.

I don’t have an easy time removing myself from art. When I like something, I throw myself all the way into it. I make myself sick with it. So when something comes so close to being the kind of art that does that to me, and then fails so spectacularly, it feels personal. Sunshine’s inability to live up to its own promise has completely warped my brain. 65% of my thinking time in these five days since I watched it have been dedicated to thinking about how much I equally love and hate this film. It’s a generic sci-fi space thriller. I never should have gotten so attached in the first place. I’m not going to stop thinking about it anytime soon, either. Sunshine is so close to being the kind of movie I love - taut, beautifully-shot, tense as hell (again, see Zodiac). Knowing everyone in the movie is doomed is half the fun. Knowing the movie is doomed is no fun at all. And yet here I am, talking and thinking about this unheralded film. Its failure is my new obsession.

Bad News on the Gatsby Front, Kind Of

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 21:08:00 -0400

A couple months ago, I passionately defended Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming The Great Gatsby. Originally, the movie was supposed to come out on Christmas of this year, but the studio has now decided it would make a good summer movie instead. This means it won’t come out until the summer of 2013. I have mixed feelings about this. I am insanely excited to see this movie, despite knowing I probably won’t like it. So I’m sad to hear I have to wait six more months or so for it. That being said, I’ve long argued thatThe Great Gatsbyis a book meant to be read during the summer - when everything is hot and sticky and a little too close to your heart. So it makes sense to release this in the summer, I think. Some are saying that this means the studio doesn’t trust it as an award contender, so pushing it out of awards season won’t call so much attention to its lack of, well, attention. I don’t think it was ever going to be an award contender to begin with. I want this movie to be big, over-the-top, and fun, while still hitting all the emotional marks of the book. If it’s full of Oscar-“worthy” speechifying and drama, then I want no part of it. I’m asking a lot, but if there was ever a piece of source material up to the task, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is it.

In the meantime, the wait will probably kill me.

Short Reviews of Some CDs Stacked Next to My Stereo: Vol. VI

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:56:00 -0400

It’s been two months since I’ve done one of these, but lately I’ve been listening to some really good stuff, so I figured I’d give it another good. Here’s some skimpy reviews.

Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. Let me just jump on the bandwagon here and say that this album is AMAZING. I haven’t been this obsessed with a single album since Wye Oak’s Civilian back in December, and I might actually like this one more. It’s all about the lyrics here, the lyrics and the way Apple presents them. It’s a music-lover’s album, where fairly intense things are said with a musicality that seems honest to the material and the artist. Sometimes that musicality is atonal and strange, but it’s almost always beautiful, too. When I listen to The Idler Wheel from beginning to end, I feel a little bit gutted by the end. It’s like reading a really good book, one that is equally intellectually and emotionally satisfying. I can’t complain about a single song here, and picking favorites is really hard, although I would probably call out “Every Single Night” (seriously, if my life could be put into song lyrics, “I just want to feel everything” would be the refrain, especially the way Apple sings it) and “Jonathan,” which has all that great “capsized ship” stuff going on in it. Seriously, I just straight-up love this CD. I wish I could eat it.

Punch Brothers, Who’s Feeling Young Now? This is the CD I’m playing on heavy repeat right now. I had never heard of Punch Brothers before hearing their lovely song “Dark Days” on the Hunger Games soundtrack a few months ago. After hearing that song play in my car again the other day, I decided to give their most recent album a try. No surprise, I love it. I really only like fiddling/folk/country type of music in moderation, but this one has a really lively, modern sound to it that I like. In the end, I can only judge music based on how it makes me feel. And this just makes me happy. It’s smart and strange enough to make my brain happy. But it’s also melodic and feels like it was made with love, making my heart and tapping toes happy. As soon as I heard “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” I knew I was a goner. And then “Hundred Dollars” came around and sealed the deal. Check this one out, everybody. Especially if you appreciate good musicianship and songs that are sung with real conviction.

Blog Round-Up: July 13-26, 2012

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:08:52 -0400

I manage so many blogs now that I think it will be easier if I link to all of my various goings-on in the blogosphere with a somewhat regular round-up of my posts. I hope you enjoy some of the links to my other work.

On MFA Pop, I handed out free, unwanted advice to incoming MFA students.

At Not Your Mama’s Bookshelf, I’ve been sampling some great YA fiction, superhero fiction, and lots of poetry.

And if you look below here at Towle House, you will see me re-experience both baton twirling and L.A. Confidential.

I Watched L.A. Confidential Again

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:03:00 -0400

When I was in high school, L.A. Confidential was my favorite movie. I saw it on basic cable one night around Christmas, four or five years after it had originally been released in theaters. I then used my disposable first-job income to buy a copy of the DVD. I wasn’t a normal teenager, obviously. I saw rom-coms at the theater with my friends, I watched broad comedies and hid from horror movies at sleepovers. But at home, I was surrounded with all my beloved DVDs. One post-Christmas, I can remember using my gift money to buy the following films in one go: MASH, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (another favorite movie which over-affected me as an adolescent, probably). This is all beside the point. The point is that I loved L.A. Confidential but couldn’t say why. When I got to college, I took a disastrous detour into the world of screenwriting. In our first workshop class, we went around the room and gave the name of one movie we liked. I said L.A. Confidential and immediately regretted it. Everyone was slavishly offering these artsy little indie films to the professor, and I had dropped the ball. When asked why, I said I liked how stylized it was. Which was true! To this day, film is the only medium where I can honestly say I’ll take style over substance.

I hadn’t watched L.A. Confidential in years before watching it again last night. Of course, it’s still awesome. I love it from beginning to end. I love Bud White, Ed Exley, and Jack Vincennes equally, something I cannot say about any other multiple-protagonist film. I love that they all have a crisis of conscience at some point in their investigations. I love the scene where Exley shoots the guy in the elevator and all we see is his face as the elevator opens back up. I love the way everything is slightly yellowed at the edges, as if they movie was in a toaster a moment too long. I love the score. I love the short-sleeve dress shirts and too-short ties. I LOVE the shot of Bud White turning around in the car to wave goodbye to Exley at the end of the film.

So yeah, L.A. Confidential is a really good movie. It’s stylish as hell, pays tribute to the films that have come before it (I just recently watched Chinatown and saw a lot in common here), has a terrific cast. I picked up James Ellroy’s original novel several years ago and never got past the first 20 pages. I liked the movie too much to pay witness to any other version of it. It’s probably not my favorite movie anymore, but it’s still pretty high up there on the list. And I can definitely say it played a major influence in the life of teenage Beth.

P.S. It’s also the ONLY movie in which I like Russell Crowe. And he might actually be my favorite thing about the whole film (although Guy Pearce is pretty great, too).

P.P.S. The screenwriting workshop story has a somewhat happy ending. At the end of the semester, we had to do a script break-down of any movie of our choice, then do a presentation in front of the class where we analyzed a single scene of said movie. I picked The Philadelphia Story and received mad props from my professor afterwards. If there is one thing I can do, it’s a line-by-line narrative breakdown of a wedding climax in old Cary Grant films.

Here Are the Books I Voted for on NPR's "Best-Ever Teen Novels" Feature

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 19:20:00 -0400

I love teen/YA books as much as I love any other genre. They are my crack, the books I am most likely to read over and over again, even now that I’m an “adult.” NPR has asked readers to vote for their ten favorite teen books in a new online poll. Here were the 10 I picked, along with quick reasons why:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Because it is one of the most brutally honest books I’ve ever read. It’s a brave book, bravely told.

The Book Thief,by Markus Zusak. Because it makes me cry harder than just about any other book out there in the world. It’s strange and beautiful and treats every single character with love and respect.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Because I was one of those 15-year-olds who read it and can never quite go back to the life I had before I read it.

The Giver, by Lois Lowry. Because I haven’t been able to read it again since I was twelve, so traumatized was I by the first time the little boy experiences pain.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Because it’s entertaining as hell. And because it hits a sweet spot of what it means to be both politically idealistic and politically cynical as a teenager.

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. Because my actual favorite teen book of all time, S.E. Hinton’sTex, wasn’t on the list. Despite all its melodrama,The Outsidersstill feels genuine in its exploration of teenage emotions.

A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeleine L’Engle. Because I actually squealed when I saw this book on the list. Middle-school Beth was shocked by how casually the book dealt with sex and relationships. But it had dolphins and a dreamy boy who loved dolphins in it, so win-win-win.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Because: duh.

Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. Because it makes me bawl my damn eyes out every time. It’s one of the first books I can remember crying over that wasn’t strictly about death but rather about the bittersweet intersection of love and loss.

Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley. Because it holds such affection for human beings, for what they are capable of doing and being. Because it has zombies and fake book titles and Sufjan Stevens in it. And because Lucas Cader is the world’s best BFF.

Some Thoughts on the Baton Twirling

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 15:18:02 -0400

So, it was mostly chaos yesterday at the AYOP event. Girls in sparkly costumes everywhere. Amazing little portable dressing tents lined up in all the walkways. Team names like Utopia, the Stepperettes, Julie’s Silver Something-or-other. It made me remember our main rivals in the twirling world when I was a member of the now-defunct Sparklettes: Daphne’s Dolls. They won everything. I remember one year they wore little sexy cowboy costumes and did some sort of country-western routine.

Anyway, we eventually found the Show Twirl competition, which took place in a dumpy auxiliary gym in the basement of the Joyce Center. Here, girls (and one boy) used props, multiple batons, and kicky music themes. Some were terrible. Some were great dancers but not particularly giften twirlers. Some were amazing twirlers but had terrible footwork. It was all very fascinating. One girl in the age-18 category did a fascinating jungle-themed routine that seemed to get inside the minds of the rest of the contestants, who all followed with badly-conceived, badly-performed routines, despite the fact that she wasn’t a necessarily gifted twirler. The one male twirler, competing in the age-17 category, was an insanely talented twirler, doing moves that no one else was trying, rolling the batons across his body in intriguing ways. And no props, which was refreshing.

So overall, it was weird and quiet. Evan and I were the only non-family spectators at the Show Twirl event, which made us feel a bit pervy and exclusive at the same time.

Duck Beater: BOOKED IT: BETH, A FORMER "SPARKLETTE" (YOUTH ON PARADE BATON TWIRLER), WILL ACCOMPANY ME THIS EVENING FOR RAW BATON...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:59:53 -0400

Duck Beater: BOOKED IT: BETH, A FORMER "SPARKLETTE" (YOUTH ON PARADE BATON TWIRLER), WILL ACCOMPANY ME THIS EVENING FOR RAW BATON...:

Yes, this evening Evan and I will be witnessing a real one-of-a-kind event. It should be amazing. I am hoping to feel so overcome by the experience that I immediately go out, buy a baton, and attempt to reclaim my title as “Most Improved.” YOLO, etc.

duckbeater:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a go. We’re meeting for wine at her APT at 4, and then marching over for the Show Twirl events at 6.

Beth, conceiver and executrix of Towle House, a blog of substantial literary/television cross-talk and emotional self-portraiture, and also a fine poet here with…