In Praise of Ander Monson.

This essay made me LOL. Literally. In the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It was pretty embarrassring, but it was also proof that this essay is good. It was mostly the snide side arrow notes that got me, but the text itself had its moments, too. Sometimes I found myself getting lost on the [...]

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I liked Moore

When I started reading Moore’s piece, I thought I was reading a piece defending fathers. I thought Moore was making an argument that they’re undervalued, that they’re important caregivers, too. The first two paragraphs latch onto Tim Allen and his missing father, and Moore follows this with a fact about how male carp are vital [...]

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In Praise of Moore

I really enjoyed “Son of Mr. Green Jeans.”  In my opinion, the essay’s greatest strength is the way in which it manages to be both profound and irreverent.  Rather than wallowing in self-pity about his relationship with his alcoholic father, the essay contains a playful tone which runs throughout the piece.  By including subjects like [...]

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In Praise of Moore

I enjoyed Moore’s piece.  It certainly displayed well the role of absentee/obsolete/missing fathers (like Tim Allen’s story, his subsequent Esquire interview, and Moore’s own life) in the characters he presents.  I liked the use of the alphabetically ordered glossary as a formal device; as Simon points out, it’s a great way to allow a multitude [...]

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In Praise of Ander Monson

Perhaps I should be praising Monson for the broad risks he takes in his form. The footnotes, the arrows, that whole page of “Me”, his use of font sizes, arrangement of text…all that jazz. Really though, I want to praise him for using the language of today. Perhaps it’s only me, but does it seem [...]

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In praise of Moore

Moore does a little thing here which could have easily been labeled as a gimmick and tossed aside. He arranges his entire essay by the alphabet. Each letter corresponds to a different word, phrase, or name, and is then followed by a paragraph relevant to the subject. He succeeds in my opinion because, unlike the [...]

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In Praise of Monson (somewhat grudgingly)

I have to admit, I didn’t really like this essay that much. All the little sidenotes were too cutesy for me (my high school English teacher always used to say, “If it’s in a footnote, why not just put it in the paper itself? If you can’t put it in the paper, then it’s not [...]

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In Praise of Monson

            If nothing else, Ander Monson’s essay can be said to be very unique and risky.  Well, perhaps not risky in the traditional sense, because it was originally posted on his website, a website maintained by a published author because people who enjoy his work want to learn about him on [...]

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Brave, brave man

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but here it is anyways: I’m very interested in how a male gynecologist handles the delicate task of examining a woman’s reproductive system. Now, understandably they’re professionals, and they do this every day. It’s the patients that must be more anxious, coming into an enclosed room and spreading their legs [...]

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The Three Dancers

I grew up admiring art. My mother took classes at the Minneapolis Art Institute and lugged posters and recreations of artwork to my elementary school to teach us everything she had learned. Once, she brought in a dead fish, slathered it in paint, then slapped it down on construction paper for her discussion of Paul [...]

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Meetings

I’ve never taken much stock in a person’s profession defining them. So it’s hard for me to pick a type of person I want to interview; what people do has never directly correlated into who they are for me. Or at least, not the most interesting bits of who they are. If I had the opportunity to [...]

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Self-Control

If there is one thing I am lacking, it is self-control. I have an addictive personality. I watch one television show and I am hooked and end up renting every season of the show ever and watching them late into the night. I crave weird food like sushi all the time, and if I have [...]

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psychiatrists and rape counselors

So, I’m guessing someone in our class is actually a psych major. I may be deathly afraid of you, heads up.
Growing up I had a few best friends, two of which were the daughters of psychiatrists. One of them introduced me to psychedelics at a young age, passed notes to me in between class on [...]

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The Blue Religion

I’ve always been interested in The Blue Religion. In Los Angeles, or where I live, it’s impossible to go a day without seeing an LAPD squad car or hearing its sirens. It’s rare  to go a night with out hearing el moscarron, helicopter, or seeing it beam its light down onto the streets in search [...]

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The money man

To add to the ranks of people who we could never actually interview, the person that I’m most curious about is Bill Gates. I have to admit that a lot of this curiosity stems from growing up in Seattle–you can take boat tours where you cruise right past his giant estate, and he’s always in the [...]

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What kind of a man is a priest?

The trouble with my fascination with the lifestyle of priests is that, if I were to interview one, all the stuff I’m curious about would sound offensive in the form of a question. I want to learn about a specific type of preist, the Catholic type, which is the one, I think, that cannot marry [...]

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Perez Hilton

Choosing just one person that I am curious about is incredibly hard for me. I’m kind of generally curious about people how aren’t me, mostly because I think I am incredibly boring.  This means that I spend a lot of time following the lives of famous people on-line, because that information is there. Lately though [...]

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The Playboy Professor

I’ll admit I’m not taking a particularly huge leap of faith when I choose this guy–maybe “Harvard Works Because We Do” will inspire me to think beyond the ivory towers–but I’ve been interested in the history of Medill Professor David Standish’s life ever since he came to talk to us in class.
When he lectured us [...]

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Whose Life I’m curious about, even if I can’t use them for this project

If I don’t want to be laughed at, I should probably say that the person whose life I am really curious about is J.K.Rowling’s, since she has basically achieve the pinnacle of success in the career that I hope to have for myself one day and it would only be logical for me to be [...]

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