Blog Paper

Ever since childhood, reading has been a huge part of my life.  In school our teachers most often taught “classic” literature, that is to say, literature written at least half a century before I was born.  In grade school we were force fed The Joy Luck Club and The Pearl when all we really wanted to do was go to recess.  In high school our teachers also felt the need to expose us to all the classic literature that, as one teacher told us, “You will definitely read in college.”  (So far I have yet to read a novel in college that I read in high school.)  We sped through the usual reads—Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness—and discussed the usual topics. In grade school we were all about the “I feel,” “I think” writing, but once I hit high school we were violently dragged away from that.  Freshman year was the first time I learned about the “no I” rule in papers because (and here I quote a few of my teachers), “the reader does not care about your opinion.”  Needless to say, we quickly went away from the text-self stage. 

For my four years of high school we focused mostly on the text-text stage and a little bit on the text-world stage.  One of my classes, American literature, was especially text-text because it was a combined class with American history.  We studied texts from different historical periods and how they related to each other and movements at the time.  In another class we studied Heart of Darkness and its movie adaptation Apocalypse Now.  My senior year our teacher tried to enhance our learning by teaching us about critical lenses and interpreting texts through Marxist, feminist, and sociocultural lenses.  College has offered me more of the “classic” literature that I was used to, but I felt I was getting more out of it than I was as an eighth grader struggling through A Tale of Two Cities.  Through some of my non-literature classes I started to read more non-fiction works.  In my sociology class we took on a text-world view.  Most, if not all, of the essays and articles we read could easily be related to the society we live in today.  We often discussed the psychological, political, economic, and even religious discourses that connected to the works we read.

            Another thing that I think helped me become a stronger reader was my exposure to a wide variety of films and music.  Thanks to friends and family I’ve seen many different films that vary in language, genre, and year.  I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with a variety of Milwaukee actors, writers, and directors.  It was one of these writers that suggested I watch the old 50s Batman TV show, and this is when I first learned what camp was.  Music has also had a big impact on my life (especially in writing) and on my understanding of reading and storytelling.  Even if I was not forced to write an analysis paper on every movie I watched or song I listened to, I was adding to my internal arsenal of literary works.

I never really had a problem with studying only “classic” literature, but because that was all we read in school, I was more likely to read “contemporary” literature in my free time. Despite reading more contemporary literature on my own, I have to admit I probably did not show any advanced reading development.  Most of my personal reading rarely gets past a text-self stage because I’m reading solely for entertainment. 

When we first got this assignment I was sure that my present reading stage was somewhere between text-text and text-world.  Upon looking at my blog entries for this class, I realize that I am more text-self to text-text.  My first entries were mostly text-text due to the fact that I am still a bit conditioned to follow the “no I” rule my high school teachers instilled in me.  My second blog post was on City of Glass and how “despite not being your average detective story, Paul Auster’s City of Glass features many ‘clichés’ of detective stories.”  I went on to compare different aspects of the story, including character traits and plot details, to stereotypes and conventions from mystery novels: “Although Quinn has a passive and slightly nervous personality, as Auster, he becomes the traditional smooth-talking, self-assured detective. He is confident and levelheaded. He tracks his mark, keeps detailed notes, and even assumes different ‘disguises’ with ease, just as any other typical detective would.”  However broad the genre I compared the story to, the blog is your basic text-text analysis.

After we read Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet and wrote our mini screenplays, I started to fall back into the text-self stage.  My September 18^th blog was a reflection on the screenplay writing process.  I included a lot of personal opinions on our completed work—“I’m happy with how the final draft turned out…”—and some notes on how our group worked together—“…the hardest part of writing was just coming to an agreement within our group.”  In other parts of the blog I discussed the adaptation process, comparing the original text to our version, but it was mostly in terms of what we liked and decided to keep so I think that still fits into the text-self stage.  For example, I wrote, “We also expanded on the argument between Matthew and Denise to give them each more lines.  We felt the original dialogue was missing just a bit more explanatory detail so that’s what we added.”  While a comparison to the original text, it does not have the depth that I think a text-text stage would require.  In my second and last Lethem-based blog I completely fell back into the text-self stage with comments like, “So many times I’ve read amazing books only to see them slaughtered in movie format. And this makes me think, how is that book’s author handing this? If it were me, I would be horrified.”  The rest of the blog features much of the same subjectivity.

My most recent blog on October 2^nd does not fall easily into any specific stage, but probably could have if I had expanded on certain topics.  The text-self aspects are most obvious: “I must admit that Maus was one of the most interesting pieces of literature I’ve read all year.”  The first paragraph continues along those lines, detailing my interest in the book and my questions about the author’s choices.  I then go on to list four reasons I came up with for the author choosing to use animal characters instead of human characters.  The speculations are mostly at the text-text stage.  I make direct reference to other texts—“…another one that came to mind when I read it was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien.  The story features the good and struggling mice and the dangerous and deadly cat…” I also reference events from history—“Mice are also often used in experiments which could touch on the Nazi experiments performed on Jews.”—and bring up norms of the present day: “Nowadays people have become incredibly desensitized to human death.  But what about animal deaths?  Ever notice how people can watch a whole movie of people brutally murdering other people and not even blink?  And yet the dog dies and everyone is appalled…Perhaps the reason for making the characters animals was to play into that sympathy most people have.”  Both the historical and present day references fall into the text-text category.  Perhaps if I put more detail into the ideas, for example, expanding on society’s numbness to violence in the media, then the blog could have moved into text-world territory.  I did not, however, so this blog, like most of my work so far this semester, floats in the text-self/text-text range.

Upon realization that I am not as far into the reading stages as I thought, I really want to start working at a text-world stage.  I think that something that will really help me achieve this goal is to start narrowing down my topics.  Instead of discussing many points under one topic, I can choose one point in particular and explore it on a deeper level.  My Pulp Fiction blog is a good example.  I make very brief references to the board games Life and Operation and how they relate to the overdose scene in which they are placed.  But I really don’t go the extra mile in the blog.  I could easily have gone into more detail about how this juxtaposition makes comment about our present day society, or how drugs have become “games” in modern life.  I think the reason I haven’t reached the text-world stage is because in my mind working at such a level requires more resources and analysis than I feel I can put into a one or two paragraph blog.  But perhaps this assumption is just in my mind and I need to learn how to not over-analyze my work.  Or meta-analyze.  (Are those different things?)  Regardless, it all comes down to motivation.  I know I’m capable of reading and writing at a text-world stage, I just have to push myself to work harder.