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so there was a paper assigned for my writing class. The umbrella topic was vague and mysterious. Now it wasn't as bad as my art appreciation teacher who would only narrow the topic by a time period, a half dozen art styles and then tell us to write about something we could sink our teeth into, but it was close. The choices were the culture of memory and forgetting (a concept she never really explained), travel writing and the influences of a journey upon us/how it changed us, and experiences of the sacred or profane which could deal with deeply spiritual moments or hypothetical ghost stories. She also told us that we had to have a 1-2 page narrative intro.
So I was at first considering doing the memory and forgetting thing. I had been thinking about revisionist history and its issues in education, how people can selectively forget things or alter them to suit their own purposes rather than altering the portrayal of things to be more accepting of multiple angles, think how people tend to forget that we trained a lot of these people in the middle east to fight Russia for us and cut them loose rather than how Custer is portrayed less as a tragic hero than as a bigot warmonger now. Intro was going to be one of my dad's stories about 'Nam and how certain aspects would change in different tellings. I went to clear the topic and was told it wasn't specific enough, that I needed to focus in on one topic in history and how it was being affected by this. I was going more for the impact of this on education rather than a history term paper, and with only three weeks to research it I didn't feel like something that in depth.
Topic two: I had kicked around the travel writing thing. I've taken a number of neat trips to places. Gone across the country as a kid, done some bus travel in my adult life by myself. Can remember at least somewhat the details of some of these trips and how they impacted me. Then came the sticky point of what the hell do I cite in that kind of paper as we are required to have four sources. I mean what, do I cite the city of Fort Collins or CSU's website when talking about how I visited this place and saw such and such building? Bleh, forget that.
Topic three: I was looking at the sacred/profane thingy, I've taken a couple of philosophy classes now, I could bullshit my way through a good paper here and have sources, but I just wasn't feeling it. So then I was thinking about ghost stories, possibly something like a comparative analysis of vampires in different cultures as several non-european cultures have their own take on blood sucking monsters and it might be interesting to look at. Karon suggested this might be a little too broad and thought I should possibly focus on vampires in literature and the change from blood-sucking monster of the night to pleather wearing rockstar. This seemed interesting so I ran with it, the downside of course being that I have to write a one to two page vampire fic intro. I spent a page and a half of setting the scene and only had the vamp show up in the last paragraph in which I went choose your own adventure at the end listing my options in the last moments as it advanced on me as bluffing about the amount of garlic I ate for dinner, grabbing up the tree limb I had tripped over and trying to hit the heart or complimenting the vamp's band and asking for tickets to the next show. So far I haven't written much of the body of the work yet, but some of my research has been interesting.
More to the point is an idea I have had while writing. Karon had pointed out that Dracula as written by Stoker was sorta about the fears of England and Western European society about the influences of eastern turkish peoples upon their good christian folk. Vampires in myth are sorta symbolic of humanity's irrational fear of the dark and things that avoid the light. Being a visual species that ties up so much of what we are in what we see, vampires embodied what we didn't a monster of the black that comes out to feed on us triggering all those primitive fear responses, so what then the importance of pleather wearing rockers. The outrage in some of the articles about modern authors of subverting a classic horror monster into a metrosexual if not ambiguously gay antihero. Then it sorta clicked in my head and that change makes sense on a certain level. If vampires are our big invented boogeyman that stalks our nightmares and represents our societal fears. First it was just a monster of the night that feeds on blood, then it becomes representative of this foreign decadence upon protestant Europe, now could it be representative of modern society's fear of homosexuality? Sorta an interesting thought in the least.
Need to do more research and writing tonight/tomorrow. Two and a half pages of draft needs to double. Unfortunately now I need to study some for my economics test I'm gonna fail in three hours.
Also in case you were worried, no I wasn't up all night on two pages of draft. I went to bed around 9, got up at 4, hammered out my intro by five and then futzed on the internets for the last hour.
So I was at first considering doing the memory and forgetting thing. I had been thinking about revisionist history and its issues in education, how people can selectively forget things or alter them to suit their own purposes rather than altering the portrayal of things to be more accepting of multiple angles, think how people tend to forget that we trained a lot of these people in the middle east to fight Russia for us and cut them loose rather than how Custer is portrayed less as a tragic hero than as a bigot warmonger now. Intro was going to be one of my dad's stories about 'Nam and how certain aspects would change in different tellings. I went to clear the topic and was told it wasn't specific enough, that I needed to focus in on one topic in history and how it was being affected by this. I was going more for the impact of this on education rather than a history term paper, and with only three weeks to research it I didn't feel like something that in depth.
Topic two: I had kicked around the travel writing thing. I've taken a number of neat trips to places. Gone across the country as a kid, done some bus travel in my adult life by myself. Can remember at least somewhat the details of some of these trips and how they impacted me. Then came the sticky point of what the hell do I cite in that kind of paper as we are required to have four sources. I mean what, do I cite the city of Fort Collins or CSU's website when talking about how I visited this place and saw such and such building? Bleh, forget that.
Topic three: I was looking at the sacred/profane thingy, I've taken a couple of philosophy classes now, I could bullshit my way through a good paper here and have sources, but I just wasn't feeling it. So then I was thinking about ghost stories, possibly something like a comparative analysis of vampires in different cultures as several non-european cultures have their own take on blood sucking monsters and it might be interesting to look at. Karon suggested this might be a little too broad and thought I should possibly focus on vampires in literature and the change from blood-sucking monster of the night to pleather wearing rockstar. This seemed interesting so I ran with it, the downside of course being that I have to write a one to two page vampire fic intro. I spent a page and a half of setting the scene and only had the vamp show up in the last paragraph in which I went choose your own adventure at the end listing my options in the last moments as it advanced on me as bluffing about the amount of garlic I ate for dinner, grabbing up the tree limb I had tripped over and trying to hit the heart or complimenting the vamp's band and asking for tickets to the next show. So far I haven't written much of the body of the work yet, but some of my research has been interesting.
More to the point is an idea I have had while writing. Karon had pointed out that Dracula as written by Stoker was sorta about the fears of England and Western European society about the influences of eastern turkish peoples upon their good christian folk. Vampires in myth are sorta symbolic of humanity's irrational fear of the dark and things that avoid the light. Being a visual species that ties up so much of what we are in what we see, vampires embodied what we didn't a monster of the black that comes out to feed on us triggering all those primitive fear responses, so what then the importance of pleather wearing rockers. The outrage in some of the articles about modern authors of subverting a classic horror monster into a metrosexual if not ambiguously gay antihero. Then it sorta clicked in my head and that change makes sense on a certain level. If vampires are our big invented boogeyman that stalks our nightmares and represents our societal fears. First it was just a monster of the night that feeds on blood, then it becomes representative of this foreign decadence upon protestant Europe, now could it be representative of modern society's fear of homosexuality? Sorta an interesting thought in the least.
Need to do more research and writing tonight/tomorrow. Two and a half pages of draft needs to double. Unfortunately now I need to study some for my economics test I'm gonna fail in three hours.
Also in case you were worried, no I wasn't up all night on two pages of draft. I went to bed around 9, got up at 4, hammered out my intro by five and then futzed on the internets for the last hour.
