5th Week-Reading Response

First off, the essays that we read, I enjoyed and think that I was able to discern some things that could help my writing. With my own writing, it seems like a lot of times, I fill it with superfluous detail and I often try, willingly or perhaps not so much, to emulate the progression of thoughts in my mind through my writing style. This sometimes creates really long sentences and makes it easier to confuse the reader. I felt that the essays managed to show a few characteristics that have helped my writing such as my lack of reliance on dialogue while also containing information that could be useful to improving my writing and moving from a “telling rather than letting the reader see it” kind of mentality in my writing.
I was not much of a fan of “First Family of Astoria”, as many people seem to concur. I never really felt like I gained any entrance into the scenes described or felt any affinity for the characters. From what I know of Astoria from New York Magazine or the Times, it is a really fascinating place and at the cross-section of Manhattan and Brooklyn and I felt this quality could perhaps have been exploited more. Trillin seemed to be putting the family in contrast to the neighborhood but I was never really sure if I got the whole thing?

Reading Response on Orlean

I had a bit of trouble with Orlean's piece on "The American Man at Age Ten". First off, the structure of it sort of threw me and I was wondering where exactly, she was aiming this piece. Was it a magazine profile type of piece or some kind of sociological study wannabe? It felt sort of contrived to me and I wondered if she was trying to make some kind of statement on the socialization of males through video games and candy and if so, what were they exactly? Also, of course all boys are not like this and I know, I certainely was different. She had an immense amount of detail, however, and really knew how to showcase it, though I never understood if she was actually doing anything with it.

Revised Outline

Complication: Joel always procrastinates.
Development:
1)Joel makes plans.
2)Joel underdevelops plans.
3)Joel takes off.
Resolution: Joel continues to procrastinate.

First Piece Final

Catching the 6:45
I breathe harder and harder as I run down the avenue clutching my well-worn leather band, straps held together by copious amounts of packaging tape and curse myself for procrastinating as much as I do. This needed to change and what better time than study abroad to do it.
My friend Rachel and I had been discussing a trip to Barcelona for a while and we decided to finally go the weekend before Halloween. Rachel, who was studying in Milan, would meet me at the airport and we managed to find two flights that would arrive within fifteen minutes of each other. We were understandably pumped. Spain wouldn’t be able to handle this. However, before I could even make it to Spain, I had to make it to the airport.
Looking for flights from London to Barcelona on the internet, I decided to set a few criteria which I would work by: I would find the cheapest flight that I could and I would try to stay with EasyJet which I had always heard great things about. I soon found a roundtrip flight for 27 pounds, which was a fantastic deal. However, there was one drawback which was that take-off was at 6:45 A.M. and therefore I would have to arrive at this Luton airport at around 5:00 A.M. or at least 5:45 A.M. I may be many things, but one of them is certainly not an early morning person. My consternation was ample but supplanted by the fact that I would be going to Barcelona and it was costing me very little. Now where exactly was Luton Airport? It says ‘London Luton Airport’ so it obviously must be in London but London is a gigantic city and it could be on the other side of town. I decided that maybe a half hour or forty minutes before the time that I wanted to arrive at the airport would be an appropriate time to leave. Big mistake.
I had decided to just stay up the whole night because I knew that there was no way that I would be able to wake up at 4:00 A.M. and be ready to leave for the airport so at about 1:00 that morning. I would simply lie about and listen to Sam Cooke with my flat mates while drinking wine but then I decided that maybe I should look and find out precisely where Luton airport was exactly. This was a miraculous compulsion for reasons that will become evident soon and its sheer existence serves as proof that if there is a God, then sometimes he does look out for me. I quickly discovered that Luton was bloody nearly two hours away from my flat and actually was in an eponymous town that could scarcely be called a “suburb” of London. My horror was further heightened as I realized that this gave me only about twenty minutes to pack before I needed to run my procrastinating scrawny self out the door and to the airport before I missed my flight.
I threw myself into packing as quickly as I could, throwing clothes and toiletries into my bag and feeling elated that at least I was just going for a long weekend instead of a long trip. I discovered to my ever-increasing horror that I needed to take a special train to Luton and that I could only get it from a certain Blackfriars station which sounded as if it were the last place in the world that I would want to be at 3:30 in the morning. Also, if I was to catch this train in time to make my flight, I needed to get the nightbus that would be arriving at the nearest stop in three minutes or else I would have to wait nearly an hour and would have no chance of catching my flight. I proceeded to hurry as fast as I possibly could out of my flat, though not before seeing one of my kitchenmates from K, Georgia, arriving home for the night and drunkenly mumbling something at me that I could not understand but took as her wishing me “Godspeed”. I flew down the street, running side by side with the double-decker for about a block and barely making it on.
I rode the bus for about a half hour, filled with a strange calm that registered oddly with me even at the time and praying that my neurotic fear of a double-decker tipping over as it takes a corner too fast would not occur tonight. I proceeded to get off the bus when I heard “Blackfriars” announced over the loud speaker but soon find out that I have mistakenly exited at the bridge that apparently shares a name with the train station. I stop and turn with a horrified look to see the bus drive nodding in what seems to be a peculiarly maniacal fashion and speed off. I begin to sprint as fast as I can across this bridge in the middle of the night, seeing as I only have minutes to make the train. I arrive at the station and find out that my credit card will not work in the machine but finally manage to make a debit card work. The train has now arrived and I essentially leap over the barricades, launch past (and slightly over) a family with two small children and throw myself onto the train. The remainder of my journey to the airport happily transpired without any incident but as I arrived at the main Barcelona airport and called my friend Rachel to ask where she was, I quickly found out that she landed at the smaller airport that was an hour and a half away from the city and the cycle began anew. One would think that I would have learned something about procrastination from all of this but, hey, hindsight and success make it seem less stressful than before and it makes it all much more exciting.

Profile Pitch

I am interested in doing my profile about the local downtown hotspot The Union. I fully believe that the Union has managed through their long-standing association with Western Michigan University to able to connect the downtown area and much of Kalamazoo with the college campus atmosphere and to present many of their best artists. Many of Western’s best singers and bands and also their jazz troupe the Gold Company hold regular performances in this restaurant and bar. They are Kalamazoo’s only entertainment venue that features college acts in an official role which differentiates it from places such as the Strutt. They also attract local and touring bands such as Funktion, that promise a good time. Even the name of the place highlights this college connection and I would like to explore that connection in my piece and how The Union positively serves the community by presenting the collegiate artists and connecting them to the community at large.
I have spoken to the manager already who thought it would be a great idea for a piece and was very willing to help. She gave me the email of one of the higher-ups but he has not responded yet to me. I have been a long-time patron and I have always found it to be a refreshing alternative to much of the “Scene” around Kalamazoo. I have had meals during the middle of the day with no entertainment, gone to the bar at night and also attended concerts that were held there. I even monitored the guests there once for an anthropology project that extensively detailed the people who frequent The Union. I think each of these makes me a viable candidate to write a piece about the venue. The Union takes a town that may easily be seen divided between its university self and the regular town that co-exists sometimes uneasily next to it and presents a place for a type of dialogue, expressed through the arts and alcohol. My piece will explore this.

Reading Response for Franklin

I was apprehensive immediately reading Franklin since I had always been hesitant to really follow anyone else’s advice about altering my writing style as I had always felt this was something that should be unique to each person and left to them to finesse and manipulate over time. Perhaps this view was wrong but Franklin’s book ended up not being as worthless or boring as I had initially worried. I thought some of his theories could be helpful to one’s writing though not entirely necessary. I’ve always been the type who tries to write very intuively: just sitting down and typing, not really any brainstorming or anything yet his formulation of an outline did not sound as anathema as they often seem to me. It was more like something I could use, “The conflict has to fit with the ending, make sense”.

I feel that he also put maybe too much emphasis sometimes on the story as opposed to the writer. Why the story takes developments and goes beyond sometimes what the writer can even imagine- the writer is always behind it and inevitably, in control. Much of the time, I enjoy the search for the story as opposed to the story seeking me out and while as much as I might like to think of myself as some of conduit, we all know that inspiration is not constantly striking us. I think it might be interesting to apply his outline to my piece and see how it fits, though I’m a little worried that all of my writing would look pretty shoddy under Franklin’s constructs. Franklin’s book can be useful as advice for another writer but I think to take it as some kind of authorial Scripture would be taking it a bit too far.

My thoughts on the writing process

I had a hard time writing this assignment and when I had finally pinpointed what it was that I wanted to write on, it wasn’t too bad. Actually, I soon discovered that I was then about four hundred words over the limit. There we go again. I became more stresses as I debated that maybe mine was not going to be profound enough and that I had perhaps written too flippant of a piece but I decided not to worry about it. Looking at my piece now and comparing it to what my classmates have written, I am not that pleased with it. I knew it needed work after I finished my initial writing of it but after cutting out about three hundred words, I decided that since it was a draft, I would let it alone and see what my peers had to say about what I had already done. My SIP was lurking at me anyway. Now, I think that I want to summarize less and get more of myself as a character rather than say “Then this and then this and I was like ‘oh no!’”. I want to make it more literary and less child-like.

Response to Marina's Piece

Wow, that woman sounds awful. I think this was a great topic for you to write about. You can tell that it is something that is still clearly on your mind and you captured the turning point in Simone and your relationship. In fact, I even got angry along with you especially as you detailed your attempts to learn the language and culture and to befriend your host mother. Your use of French in the piece lends it a verisimilitude that it probably wouldn’t have without it and details such as your description of her dog bring to my mind, a scene that is just so ineffably and stereotypically French. One thing that could maybe help your piece is a little bit is to expand upon the device of you being felt that you were being treated as an elementary schooler. You could maybe add a little bit more to the end of the first paragraph or just draw a few more comparisons. I definitely think it works, however. Also maybe, draw out longer, what led up to your eruption rather than “finally, I erupted”. Overall, really well done! It’s nice to be back in America sometimes.

Response to Claire's Piece

Great piece, Claire! This is something I’ve been dealing with my mom and I’m glad that your parents are seemingly dealing with it better than my mom. As to your actual piece, I think you did a great job illustrating the development of what could probably be called forming your intellectual autonomy? You’re always going to be influenced by your Roman Catholic upbringing but you’re not going to make decisions that won’t be directly influenced by those beliefs. Firstly, this piece is really timely in lieu of all soul searching done by Catholics these days because of the issues seen in the press and also you are able to illustrate the difference between an American Catholic and these European, often, “Catholics”. I find that fascinating because it is so often, we are seen as the ones who have the problems, especially by the Church. The way that you opened with your Victorian class and continued with your reading of Camus’ absurdist novella was also quite ingenious as you were able to then frame yourself within a continuum that has occurred periodically over centuries. This takes it beyond the purely personal and helps to show you as part of a larger group of people struggling with these issues. Again, great job.

Response to Munirah's piece

First off, class at seven? That’s disgusting. Your piece, however, is not. I feel like when your description of what it is like to be young and playing a sport while your parents cheer on you regardless of what you do, is very incisive and the comment about how the look of the uniforms was most important is something that resonated with me strongly as it reminded me of how my friends and I used to dirty up our baseball uniforms before the game so as to look more intimidating and like the great players we watched. One question I have is, what exactly is the focus of the piece? Your perfectionism and your love of basketball both come through very strongly in it and I was just trying to figure out if they go together, which it seems that they do, or if one is supposed to come out more strongly in the piece. Regardless, you really manage to tie these things all up and compare them quite well to how you operate at Kalamazoo College which is also a small place and obviously very competitive. This piece is something that deals with emotions and feelings that all of us have experienced and I think you really hit on something here. Good job!

Response to Anna's Piece

Wow, this was a really moving piece. While, this is clearly a work of journalism, I found myself becoming very involved in the story of Eva and your retelling of the story. Your use of details is great, especially in the third-to-last paragraph where details such as “A5272” and “flesh-colored bra and underwear” really gave me a visceral impression of the scene and it was almost like I had been there myself. The opening of your piece is good in the way that we are thrown into this story just as you, yourself, were thrown into the role.
Another good thing about your piece is that you really succeeded in getting it to flow and in a manner that isn’t totally linear which I really admired and might try emulating myself. The one paragraph has a great use of repetition of the word “how” and that illustrates the terrible monotony of nearly unfathomable horrors that Eva had visited on her and also serves to highlight her ability to survive all of them. The penultimate paragraph where, on stage, you internalize Eva’s struggles is also very powerful and well-written. Overall, this is a really great piece. Good job!

Draft of Personal Essay

Catching the 6:45
Flying by oneself for the very first time can be a daunting experience for anyone but when you can make the situation: flying by yourself for the first time and it is in a foreign country and in the middle of the night, the magnitude expands drastically. Sure, I had flown without my parents before but it had always been for school trips or with friends, never me simply getting on an airplane and jetting away. I had been fine on the seemingly interminable transatlantic flight that took me from Detroit to London but I was not as apprehensive as perhaps I should have been regarding the numerous smaller trips that I was planning to take.
My friend Rachel and I had been discussing a trip to Barcelona for a while and we decided to finally go the weekend before Halloween. Rachel, who was studying in Milan, would meet me at the airport and we managed to find two flights that would arrive within fifteen minutes of each other and we were understandably pumped. Spain wouldn’t be able to handle this. Firstly, however, before I could even make it to Spain, I had to make it to the airport.
Looking for flights from London to Barcelona on the internet, I decided to set a few criteria which I would work by: I would find the cheapest flight that I could and I would try to stay with EasyJet which I had always heard great things about. I soon found a roundtrip flight for 27 pounds, which was a fantastic deal. However, there was one drawback which was that take-off was at 6:45 and therefore I would have to arrive at this Luton airport at around 5:00 or at least 5:45. I may be many things but one of them is certainly not an early morning person and my consternation was ample but supplanted by the fact that I would be going to Barcelona and it was costing me very little. Now where exactly was Luton Airport? It says ‘London Luton Airport’ so it obviously must be in London but London is a gigantic city and it could be on the side of town. I decided that maybe a half hour or forty minutes before the time that I wanted to arrive at the airport would be an appropriate time to leave. Big mistake.
I had decided to just stay up the whole night because I knew that there was no way that I would be able to wake up at 4:00 and be ready to leave for the airport so at about 1:00 that morning, I decided that maybe I should look and find out exactly where Luton airport was exactly. This was a miraculous compulsion for reasons that will become evident soon and its sheer existence serves as proof that is there is a God, then sometimes he does look out for me. I quickly discovered that Luton was actually nearly two hours away from my flat and actually was in an eponymous town that could scarcely be called a “suburb” of London. My horror was further heightened as I realized that this gave me only about twenty minutes to pack before I needed to run my procrastinating scrawny self out the door and to the airport before I missed my flight.
I threw myself into packing as quickly as I could, throwing clothes and toiletries into my bag and feeling ecstatic that at least I was just going for a long weekend instead of a long trip. I discovered that to my ever-increasing horror that I needed to take a special train to Luton and that I could only get it from a certain Blackfriars station which sounded as if it were the last place in the world that I would want to be at 3:30 in the morning. Also, if I was to catch this train in time to make my flight, I needed to get the nightbus that would be arriving at the nearest stop in three minutes or else I would have to wait nearly an hour and would have no chance of catching my flight. I proceeded to hurry as fast as I possibly could out of my flat though not before seeing one of my kitchenmates from K, Georgia, arriving home for the night and drunkenly mumbling something at me that I could not understand but took as her wishing me “Godspeed” and as I flew down the street, running side by side with the double-decker for about a block and barely making it on.
I ride the bus for about a half four, filled with a strange calm that registered oddly with me even at the time. I proceeded to get off the bus when I heard “Blackfriars” announced over the loud speaker but soon find out that I have mistakenly exited at the bridge that apparently shares a name with the train station and begin to sprint as fast as I can across this bridge in the middle of the night, seeing as I only have minutes to make the train. I arrive at the station and find out that my credit card will not work in the machine but finally manage to make a debit card work. The train has now arrived and I essentially leap over the barricades and throw myself onto the train. The remainder of my journey to the airport happily transpired without any incident but as I arrived at the main Barcelona airport and called my friend Rachel to ask where she was, I quickly found out that she landed at the smaller airport that was an hour and a half away from the city and the cycle began anew. One would think that I would have learned something about procrastination from all of this but, hey, hindsight and success make it seem less stressful than before and it makes it all much more exciting.