Hey,

So I decided to make my lyric essay interactive.  I went and posted it in seven sections on the ground right in front of the rock.  It starts closest to the rock and goes in a circle basically, but you can start anywhere, really.  They’re numbered.  Anyway I just wanted to let you know in case you wanted to read it.  I watched it secretly for about an hour; maybe two people found it and stopped to read.  I guess people don’t read flyers very often.  It’s supposed to rain tomorrow so I figured I’d give you a heads-up.

See you tomorrow,

Tom

I recently took a guy as a date to a formal event who was 6′3, blonde and had all the trappings of a jock. When I described him to my mother over the phone her first response was “he doesn’t sound like your type.” My best friend abroad had a similar reaction via gchat. When this type came up in conversation with said young man he immediately bristled that I had “pegged” him and I found myself backtracking quickly over the need to qualify him as an archetype.

Still, I can’t say I disagreed with my mother or my friend and their “not your type” comments. After all, I am the first person to point out my rather strong affinity for Jewish men (strange seeing as I am Irish with a large, Catholic extended family). But these two reactions got me thinking about the “type” label. People love throwing this around. I have heard girls wax poetic at length about what their “type” is, but is this the ideal that we shoot for in a long-term mate or is it merely something we put up on a pedestal so that, even when we know we are settling we can justify our momentary deviation with a quick “Oh well I know, totally not my type or anything but for right now….”

I want to make a list of types. This will be from a female perspective so it will be about male prototypes, some cliche, some popularized by movies, fiction, television and music. I think I will weave leave room for a section entitled “My type” but this essay is intended to hit upon at least five of the most popularized types of men. I think this essay will determine whether or not typecasting is a fruitful exercise, or whether it is more fiction than fact. All the most prevalent types are in my head at this point, I need to come up with appropriate monikers for each of them and see how many hold up to the real-world example test.

I’ve said this before — I’m really, really bad at pre-planning my essays. This lyric essay thing is even more daunting because I have to consider TWO things: subject matter AND form.

Just about the only thing on my mind these days is my pending doom (graduation). I want to use this essay to explore my education: what the hell have I been up to for the past 10 quarters? Where do I go from here? What did $175,000 buy me?

In terms of form, I’m looking through past papers I’ve written over the past 3.33 years. I’m going to include a small excerpt from them (maybe one class per quarter?) and then try to connect it to larger ideas – although I confess I have no idea what those larger ideas are as of yet. I’m going to play it by ear and see how it turns out; knowing me I will probably toss around a dozen more ideas before I finally get down to it. I’m hoping that the form will inspire some sort of epiphany. We’ll see.

A few days ago my acting class was instructed to exit the classroom and go observe people, in assigned environments, and then come back for the second hour of class to assume the identity of these people. We had to each find a person who “did” or “did not” belong. I found myself in a library, fixated on a father and his young, illiterate son. The toddler kept throwing books on the ground, yet he knew he must be quite. The father, although getting frustrated remained gentle, but authoritative.

We returned, and as I let the presentations wash over me, I found myself most interested in people who were in close proximity to each other. Did the interact and how? If not, why? What was the nature of their relationship?

Two unemployed mothers sat at a coffee shop, bragging and lamenting about their daughter’s teenage habits. Sometimes their only goal was to one-up each other. Who had the better daughter? Yet, part of me knew that they lived for these Tuesday mornings. Some non-spousal adult interaction. Is that what all parents are doomed to be to other parents? One-uppers. Does this change when their child leaves them?

My mother always sent out mass emails to our friends and family when I accomplished something. I would always ask her not to, but she would anyway. Then someone, who I hadn’t seen in months, would come over the house and congratulate me. I wouldn’t know why. Then I’d ask. They’d tell me. I’d blush, and after thanking them, give my mother the stare of death. She didn’t even “one-up” she just set the bar. It’s as if she was inviting someone to one-up her. Did she not have any friends to have coffee with on a Tuesday morning, or did she just have a job?

I want to examine people, as the exit and enter into the lives of strangers, acquaintances, friends, and lovers. I want to observe these people and see what happens. Essentially, I want to sit around and people watch until I can eavesdrop no more. Until I have something interesting to say or extrapolate. Maybe something not so interesting. Maybe just a series of related observations about interpersonal relationships.

I spent this past summer in rehab. Food rehab, as the patients liked to call it. It was 8 weeks of intensive inpatient care in an eating disorder treatment center set in Wickenburg, AZ, population 6,423. The town’s only defining feature was the center. It was literally in the middle of nowhere.

The center was set up like a southwestern ranch. We got to do equine therapy and all of the staff wore cowboy boots.  I was there during monsoon season so about once every two weeks the sky would crack open and rain would pour heavily for a few hours and then the flowers would bloom. Patients used the sharp pricks of cacti to hurt themselves. It was really bizarre.

I’m not quite sure what exactly I have to say about this experience or how I plan on turning it into a lyric essay, but I think there is something to be said. I imagine I’ll start off with the facts of the place- the mission statement, the statistics, etc. Then I will turn it into something more personal, something more experienced focused and meditative. I may even start the essay prior to getting there, maybe while on the plane, and detail my journey through. Or I may just start writing and see where it goes, which has always seemed to be the best way for me to do these things.

This will sound crazy. It may be, but I like it, and I am unafraid to try and fail (this is what school is about yes?)

I have two things I would like to discuss. That have literally always been related in my mind, and I have never really had any reason to associate them beyond them being inherently linked in my reasoning and thought process.

The two things are burning buildings and houses, which I have seen a rather large number of and arguments.

After arguments I often feel the house, or building I am in, is set ablaze. Quite literally it has been.

A toaster caught on fire once in the middle of a battle. Catching to a roll of paper, and almost to the walls.

The building outside burning down, the man who owned it was a pen-sales man, collecting insurance.  A burning liar. All his nice pens were gone.

Arguments often feel like running out of a burning house, or running into one. There is a reason phoenix’s rise out of the ashes.

Chasing after my girlfriend in socks only to continue an argument not to stop her from it—and the important feeling of embers starting to burn that lead to arguments.

The signs of fire, the smell of smoke are no different than the starts of arguments the simple signs you ought to see and sometimes miss. Falling asleep under the wrong conditions leads to deadly blazes in each case.

The tired ashes left behind of each.

The monk who set himself ablaze. Don’t say that was not an argument, that may be the most still argument I have ever witnessed.

Burning above the hills of our home. Sitting on the roof of our house with a hose to stop embers from landing and burning our house down. The lack of the arrival of the embers, a fearful defensive measure, that did nothing but for all we know the house would have burned had I not sat there.

This is an extremely tentative topic choice, but as of now I’m considering writing about my relationship with religion. This was sparked by the class where we read one of my blog posts out loud and everyone seemed fixed on my statement that I am a Christian. I didn’t intend for the statement to have too deep of a meaning, but everyone’s attention still seemed to be turned to it. And that got me thinking about my religious experiences. I consider myself a Christian, but I come from a fairly diverse religious background: my dad comes from a wholly Catholic family and my mom’s family has traces of Buddhism and Christianity. Some highlights of what I will focus on in the paper:

- When I was little, my mom told me about God and Jesus and all that, instilling in me the basic beliefs of Christianity. I prayed before every meal and before bed, but mostly because I wanted to go to Heaven and I wanted my parents to go with me, and I thought that was the only way I could make all of this happen.

- From 2nd grade to 6th grade, I lived in California, during which I started going to church. During this time, I considered myself very religious and could not imagine not going to church on Sundays. When I moved to Florida in the middle of my 6th grade year, I first stopped going because we couldn’t find a church. As I matured, I stopped thinking about it because I came to dislike the institutionalization of religion that the church had become. 

- Somewhere during my earlier years in California, my dad informed me that he didn’t believe in God. He saw the Bible as a good book of values, but nothing beyond that. This horrified me to no end and I spent the next week or so asking God to forgive my dad in all of my prayers.

- The summer before my senior year of high school, I met the first girl I fell in love with. She was the first girl whose parents I met as a boyfriend, so I was understandably pretty nervous. I thought everything went well, but apparently it didn’t. My ex later informed me that her parents didn’t like me for several reasons, highlighted by the fact that, as a half-Korean, I wasn’t Korean enough, and that I wasn’t a good person because I didn’t go to church. Although I don’t go to church, I still consider myself a faithful Christian, so this was pretty hurtful to me, and made me think about why so many people place an irrationally large emphasis on religion.

I’m sure there will be many more things I will write about that relates to the topic, but these are the highlights, so I guess I’ll just see where it goes with this foundation.

First off, I should say that last time I closed the course packet, I had pretty much written off the lyric essay as a worthwhile genre of writing. I thought that despite sporting a host of interesting facts and anecdotes, Son of Mr. Green Jeans, was somewhat dated and had to reach in some areas to achieve the A-Z configuration—which I thought a bit too reminiscent of elementary school English projects to take seriously anyway. It is a valid essay, though, and one for which I have little literary critique. The Atlantic Man—as I said earlier I hated—is what really turned me off, I think.

Both of the works I read today, however, were pleasant. Tisanes was not a completely straightforward read—it required a second or third examination in places, but it was also not indecipherable. I am still unsatisfied with my inability to resolve the ultimate meaning from the fragments but at least it piques my interest. The Pain Scale though, is pretty fantastic. It manages to do what the others have, in large part failed to do. Not only is it interesting and identifiable, it reads painlessly (haha) without bluntly giving itself away—I ponder it because I need to.

The wiggle room in the lyric essay seems to have two extremes—the somewhat cheesy collection of anecdotes and facts arranged by some periodic function and the clunky, metaphor laden compilation of vague self-indulgent bullshit that no one really wants to decipher and probably wasn’t actually intended to mean anything anyway. But… a middle ground of the two seems to yield something pretty pleasant.

All of this is probably boring chatter to you, but to me it’s an attempt to get my head around an unfamiliar genre—a necessary step to writing anything within it.

The most appealing idea I have so far is to write about physical appearances from different viewpoints and examine what they might mean. Presumably to imply something poignant about the human condition? This is something that everybody cares about in some form or another, and who knows, it might even get a little scandalous. It will probably include:

• A dichotomy between my mother—who is not a vain person—and her sensitivity about her completely acceptable nose
• The way my views of my own appearance have changed over the years, culminating in my gym attendance from last summer on to the present
• A good friend of mine is 20 and balding… I have a few good anecdotes about that from the female point of view
• Another good friend is worried about her weight constantly—I may not write about that for fear of a potentially grisly death… We’ll see
• The fraternity—and by extension—male mob viewpoint
• Maybe explore that thing about girls liking confident bad boys that we were talking about in class—I have stories
• The human biological impetus
• Perhaps some research littered in there?

I’m trying to arrange this according to a periodic scheme as well. I’d rather not write it here so I don’t plant it in anyone else’s mind—those conventions seem somewhat hard to come by. I definitely welcome suggestions that people have conceived but aren’t planning on using however :D

In high school, I used to write those kinds of wordy essays that only I would think were beautiful and everyone else would stop listening to by the third sentence. That’s because I was all about flow—my writing flowed wonderfully. In retrospect it also sucked ass at everything else. I didn’t think about content, really, until I came to college. So I need to be careful not to approach the irrelevant without losing the ‘lyric’ part of the essay. That said, I’ll have to throw in some healthy metaphorical mumbo-jumbo—I promise it will ALL have a purpose—and voila, a lyric essay.

Chris ‘The Atlantic Man might just be a 10 on the scale’ Garcia

I’m tentatively writing my lyric essay about some facts I like to say.  When certain things are mentioned in conversation, and especially when I’m drunk, I usually have some piece of trivia that I can add.  In this way,  I suppose the essay will be similar to “Son of Mr. Green Jeans”, in that it goes through some facts, all loosely connected on the same topic (I have yet to select a topic; Professor Bresland suggested “invention/creation”).  In the essay, I won’t just state the facts, but also go into detail about other things surrounding that fact, like why it might come up or what it means or something.   Here are some of the facts:

• You know the drummer from ZZ Top?  The only one who didn’t sport a glorious beard?  His name is Frank Beard.
• Cats have two sets of vocal chords: one for meowing, another for purring.
• Henry Ford invented charcoal briquettes.  He sold the patent to his brother-in-law, E.G. Kingsford.
• Thomas Edison proposed to his second wife by tapping Morse Code on her hand while they were in a coach going to the theater.  They often secretly communicated like this; onlookers just thought they were holding hands.
• Mosquitos are attracted to people who have just eaten a banana.
• Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times.
• Dostoevsky was a gambler.  One day, riddled in debt and needing an advance on his next novella, he made a deal with his publisher to complete it in 30 days, or else surrender the rights and profits to all his work in the following nine years.  To complete the task, he employed a stenographer to take his dictation — who he quickly fell in love with.  Through the course of the 30 days, he described a main character’s feelings and emotions for a woman in the story, who resembled the stenographer in many ways.  (The woman in the story, however, rejects the main character’s advances, in a similar way that Dostoevsky’s former love interest did).  After it was published in the nick of time, he married the stenographer.  The novella was called The Gambler.

Come to think of it, the most interesting facts are about writers and inventors, so I guess it’ll be about that.

I read “Son of Mr. Green Jones” and wondered about Moore’s method.

Here, he strings together 26 bits of loosely related motifs about fatherhood, with each piece leading to the next and linking back to the last effortlessly. The result is a substantial, interlocking matrix of observations on the subject of fathers and, often times, their failures.

I want to learn to write like this. Every nonfiction writer seems to have a method, and I’m still reaching for mine. When reading, sometimes my highlighter becomes a convenient tool, imbuing delicately powerful phrases with color and therefore elevating to the status of remembrance. Other times, I stop what I’m reading and lunge for a pen and my journal, copying down an interesting fact or poetic line with an eye for exactitude. Sometimes, I store these bits and pieces digitally, e-mailing myself or using Microsoft Word to record a jewel of a sentence as I stumble upon it.

It seems like Moore spent years researching this piece, so varied are his facts on fatherhood — from the ecstasy of new fatherhood for a penguin to the effects of television’s Leave it to Beaver to the behavior of the Y chromosome. I wonder how he prepared for this piece.

There are people today who watch recordings of Michael Jackson’s last dress rehearsal with almost a religious fervor. They seek meaning in Jackson’s every glance — he way he engages with the mirror, how he drops his dead down for a particular dance move, his method of preparing for the concert stage. They are looking for the genius in his practice. In this way, I would love a glimpse of Moore’s notes for this piece — every rejected sentence, every motif that didn’t make it to the printed page. Maybe this transparency wouldn’t ruin the allure of good writing. But as a fellow writer, I long to know what went on behind the scenes.