#in class exercise

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Rebecca (semicolons): Fitzgerald Imitation

At sundown a family boarded the train with matching Montreal shirts and with a good deal of anxiety found four seats near each other, and with a shuffling bustle sat down. Once they sat the compartment was quiet again. Businesswoman checked their phones for last minute work emails and and breaking news; vacant youth stared, xanned out, into space; the train continued the same loop it had made for a decade.

I felt pretty good about this exercise. Imitations are always one of my favorite exercises (I should do them more often, on my time. They are a great way to practice writing and a great way to really understand writing you love). I’m not thrilled about outcome of the exercise, but I enjoyed doing it, and I need to be better about realizing that most of the output of writing exercises will not be, in and of itself, good writing, but it is part of the process towards good writing. I’m sorry my writing is so bad. I like semicolons. I think they are fun. I think they keep sentences from being too choppy, or childlike. They allow a sentence to contain more than one full idea at a time. This allows for the possibility of more sophisticated thought. Not to be a snob. Semicolons allow for nuanced thinking in writing in a way that periods don’t. Additionally, semicolons make writing prettier (ie semicolons allow writing to have a deeper more complex aesthetic palette; the complexity and depth of the aesthetic palette opens up the possibility for a deeper and more complex emotional palette. The aesthetic qualities of the writing, directly and indirectly, effect the “intellectual” qualities of a work; even if one believes that the primary purpose of writing is to convey information, semicolons provide a great aid.  Semicolons allow multiple ideas to exist in the same sentence; a sentence with multiple ideas is often more nuanced.)  Writing that avoids semicolons sounds choppy. I like semicolons.

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Dr Stover (mood with punctuation)

Mood 1- Edgy, Nervous, Potentially Violent 

The sound of grinding teeth. Uninterrupted and louder than it ever should be.

(That’s all I got for this one. In class these were combined into one flowing sentence, but I am going to make the call and say that they are much more on the edge when they’re broken up and choppy. I’m not sure how I was going to develop this idea. I had a couple of false starts before landing on these sentences. For example . 

Pacing: “do you think we should go back to the bank”

“why would we go back to the bank?”

This attempt is closer to stage directions than typical prose. 

Ironically, while writing this prompt I got ~nervous~ and didn’t write much.)

Mood 2: Calm, Peaceful, Meditative 

We sat in the fading sunlight. Dead leaves scraped against the asphalt and were carried off by the wind to be hidden until spring.

(I relied more heavily on image to convey calm and peace than on punctuation use. I wrote a few drafts of this sentence in class. One of the drafts attempted to contain every image in one unbroken sentence. Longer sentences seem to lend themselves well to calmness [that being said, my first attempt at a nervous, edgy sentence was a run on]. The Virginia Woolf sentence we analyzed in class is a great example of the potential for serenity in longer, unbroken, sentences. There is something about the period, I think, that makes a person a little nervous. There is something about stopping a sentence and starting a new one that puts one on edge. The flow is interrupted. Of course, that being said my first impulse for both the nervous sentence and the calm sentence was a run on [neither sentence finished as a run on]. I relied more on image to set the tone than punctuation, which was not the assignment.

Mood 3: Joyful, exuberant, energetic 

The bonfire jumped about playfully we through a football to each other in loose spirals. I threw it over Danika’s head and she ran after it.

(I’m not a fan of this sentence AT ALL. It is way too laconic for the prompt. The images are lazy and the punctuation does nothing to encourage joy or energy. I’m not really sure what I was doing here. In general, joy is one of the moods I have the most difficulty capturing. Please don’t read into this.)

In general, I’m really disappointed with my sentences in this exercise. Capturing mood through punctuation is very interesting to me, and I will continue to work on it. I would love to be able to capture anxiety or anger or joy through commas. That is the sort of subtle color that mood to be conveyed with being heavy handed. It is subtle technique and I am going to work to improve at it. (Please do not misunderstand me, I am trying to be very good at writing, please don’t let my ironic distancing fool you. In this moment my writing is especially sloppy.)

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Lauren (commas)

The prompt sentence I choose: “the house stood abandoned... the moon shone brightly.”

-The house, the one at the end of the culdesac, had been abandoned for decades. (Clarity)

- The house was abandoned, but as kids, we would tell each other stories about vagrants and escaped criminals that camped out there, whether or not we believed it. (Connect)

-We always said we would break into the house one Halloween, but we never did. (Pause)

-When I used to walk by it every day on the way to school it would make my heart race with fear, now I drive past it on my way to work and feel just a dull twinge of nostalgia. It seems so much smaller than it did. (Passage of time)

I completely forgot to include the moon in this exercise. The goal of the exercise was to build a series of sentences around the prompt sentence. The exercise was supposed to include the four types of comma usage: clarity, connecting two or more ideas, a pause, and the passage of time. The sentences I came up with to fit those categories are clunky. 

Normally I feel like I have a pretty good feel for comma usage and a good ear for pauses, but I feel thrown off. I never quite got a handle on this exercise. I don’t quite understand the difference between the comma used for clarification and the comma used for connection. Usually, the two are distinct from each other and I am to tell which is which, but sometimes they blur together. My impulse is to say that when they blur it is less important to be able to identify the specific action is being used for, because the comma’s use is fluid and the descriptors are added after the fact. 

I am sorry if this is not clear. I had more difficulty with this exercise than I expected, and still understand the comma better by ear and feel than I do by grammatical rule.

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Modifiers Last Friday Night (Kira)

Last Friday night, upon entering my father’s Uptown studio, I felt the horror of realization. Dark, almost black, navy blue sheets were nailed over the large sunrise-facing windows and canvases were strewn across the stale room. His technique, skilled depiction of sunset and sunrise, midnights and golden hours, had deteriorated to that of a child.  On each canvas was repeated the same unending, circling shape in reds and yellows. I was scared he had stared too long into the sun and lost his mind.

without modifiers

Last friday night I felt the horror. Sheets were nailed over the windows and canvases were strewn across the room. His technique had deteriorated. On each canvas was the same shape. I was scared he had lost his mind.

(So this paragraph doesn’t really make sense? The father is introduced in a modifier, so without that modifier he is only a pronoun with no antecendent. I think I’ve taken out things that aren’t modifiers?

isolated position: i still don’t really understand what this means

inverted position: nor this really

catalog- “unending, circling shape”( my original draft included “round” for the sake of having another modifier in the catalog, but it added nothing to the sentence, even in the exercise form. If I wasn’t writing for the specifications i may have written “unending circle”, making “circle” the noun and removing “shape”, which would maybe remove unnecessary words.

“dark, almost black, navy blue” “dark, almost black, navy blue” (can a word modfiy an adjective? if that is the case “almost black” modifies “dark” “dark” and “navy”   modify “blue” and blue modifies “sheets”. Or do they all modify sheets?)

specificity- “uptown” “large- sunrise facing”  

contrast:

In doing this assignment I made the mistake of confusing modifiers with descriptive words, which had a big effect on how the exercise turned out. I like the paragraph it produced, but it is not quite what the assignment was asking for. I don’t entirely understand modifiers. I thought I did until I tried to identify the modifiers in this paragraph.

I’m going to try to write one long sentence with modifiers and see if it works any better (i do like the above paragraph though)

My dad, who made a comfortable living selling paintings of sunsets and sunrises to rich, tasteless retirees had lost his mind, probably because he stared into the sun for too long: I could tell by sheets nailed over his windows and the canvases strewn across his studio, which all had the same thick circular brushstrokes of a child.

This sentence is more straightforward in its modifiers, though I find it less engaging then the earlier paragraph (though I do appreciate the bluntness of this sentence. My dad had lost his mind: I could tell by the sheets nailed over his window is almost comically straightforward.)

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Adverb, Adjective, Adverb, Adjective

Stoically cultured, classically occult: A stodgy coven refuses to change with the times.

Fancifully composed, faithfully composted: The rubbish from a fancy dinner party for environmentally-conscious socialites in Brookline, MA is disposed of organically.

Ruggedly strong, roughly strewn: A handsome mixed martial artist with big muscles and poor technique has just lost a fight to a smaller, more talented opponent.

Carefully elided, casually alluded: There is some force that goes unnamed yet is referred to by everything.

editing notes 11/30

  I just want to say I really like these.

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Turning Prose To Poetry

The repertoire of rhetorical  figures, of verbal patterns, that she describes was developed by Greek rhetoric as Greece moved from an oral culture, based on a memorized poetic cultural record, to a written cultural record. (Lanham 192)

                                            The 

                                         repitoire 

                                                        of                          

rhetorical                                                       figures, of

verbal                                              patterns                   

                                                                       that      she       describes                

                    was  developed        

                                                                                                             by

                                                                                                            Greek

                                                                                                             rhetoric

as 

      Greece 

                                                                                                moved

from an oral culture

                                 based

                                            on a 

                                                    memorized 

                                                                       poetic 

                                                                                   cultural

                                                                                                record

                                                       to

                                         a written cultural record. 

The assignment was to turn a piece of prose from the textbook into a piece of “poetry” using nothing but line breaks and spacing. I love concrete poetry, so I enjoyed this assignment. The prose passage was picked at random from Lanham’s textbook and the one I selected seems especially ill suited for turning into poetry. It is especially dry and ungainly. The passage had particularly unpoetic breath, and I get winded/ trip on my tongue actually reading it aloud. I choose much of the spacing and line break based on indeterminate feeling, not any for any good reason. I wrote it the way I did mostly because I think it looks nice this way; I have little to back it up beyond that. I like the way that “by Greek rhetoric” forms a column at the right hand side of the textbox and I like the staircase in the last line. I like the way these shapes look. I could make up a way the form mimics the text but I would mostly be bullshitting. I like the white space in the center of the “poem”. I really like the way this exercise looks.  I’m sorry I can’t explain it better.                                                                                                                                                                      

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In Class Exercise: Giving Meaning To Jargon (EMBARRASSING!!)

FUNCTIONAL MONITORED OPTIONS- 911

It works. It works but there is always someone watching. Always watching. Always someone. It works exactly as it's supposed to work, never any less, but never any more.  The choices aren’t really choices; they’re preselected selections on a drop down menu that get sent back to some data center for some intern to look over and devise new strategies to keep the lack of choice unnoticed. I’m sorry to act so paranoid, but this was just the combination of numbers I was given. This whole conversation is shaped by the numbers I choose. We can’t talk here. Someone is watching.      ;)

~~~~~                             ~~~~~~~                          ~~~~~~~~

This was an in-class writing exercise inspired by an exercise in Style: An Anti-Texbook, the aim of which is to build meaningful sentences out of obscurant jargon words, chosen by selecting numbers at random (I choose 911in honor of the holiday.) My selection produced the phrase “functional monitored options”. My first instinct was to write “It works” in response to functional, but after that i was stuck for a moment. I decided to center the exercise around “monitored” because it is the word that seemed to have the most color and connotation behind it. i focused on the paranoid color of the word and allowed its paranoic energy color the other two words of the phrase, which didn’t have much flavor themselves, but easily absorbed the meanings of the other words. the exercise was useful in showing the way that some words determine the tone of the sentence while some words are easily influenced by the tone setting word and change their texture. I am of course not thrilled with the writing produced by the exercise, but I got something out of the process.

[occultportfolio]

In Class Exercise: Short Sentences Stretched (VERY LONG !EXERCISE!NOT GOOD! INTENTIONALLY BAD! EMBARRASSING!!!)

The goal is to drag out a short sentence for as long as possible, to the breaking point of coherence, while still retaining true sentence structure.

I love fall.

Becomes

I, who, it should be said, is the son of a mother and Father I love dearly, and who normally thinks mostly of birth and death in the shades of history and loose thought that one's embarrassing mind reaches when for too long it has been allowed freely and without consequence, stepped out outside and took a deep breath the newly crispened air of mid September and let myself think another kind of thought, a simpler kind of thought more attuned to the feeling of the breath in my bod: in the fresh air I realized that it is the air of this post-summer season in which I am most fully at peace with the intractable act of living.

~~~                                                                      ~~~~

This was a fun exercise. I had a lot of fun stretching out the sentence to it’s breaking point, without having to pay any attention to whether it was “good” writing or not. Knowing that the sentence was supposed to be bad freed me from the nagging self criticism that sometimes causes me to abandon a sentence before I’m even halfway through. In this way the exercise was freeing. Of course I am still deeply embarrassed by the final product and hope this sentence is never seen by anyone, but I had a fun time making this mess.