The video essay “Dust Off” effectively made me very uncomfortable, which was my first reaction and feeling while watching it. While the music influenced this, it was hugely the visuals as well, which I admit I didn’t quite understand why some were used at certain times.

The third part stood out to me most at 4:00 with the jellyfish. This part was on a boy who died of erotic asphyxiation, and the underwater shots made me think of suffocation and darkness. The content of what she was talking about was eerie enough, but the visuals showed another side to what she was saying–how the boy felt. She didn’t say what it felt like when he died, or how he was feeling–just the facts of how it all went down. The underwater visuals showed a suffocating and trapped feeling, the jellyfish signaling your brain to think of “danger” in something that looks creepy and unsafe and that can hurt you.

That followed by the ending scene (which was used as the same clip to open the video essay) really brought the entire video full circle. It shows three toddler swings in the park–one for each boy who died. They’re covered in snow. Without having to say it, these swings make the viewer think of childhood and innocence. Without needing to say it, the viewer is made to understand that the boys who died were just children. The swings in the snow show the loss of innocence and death, often associated with snow and winter.

The video essay uses visuals to show what isn’t being said, and to give the viewer a feeling while listening to her words. The feeling is uncomfortable and strange, making the viewer uneasy to show what isn’t being said. What’s being said are facts–the visuals and music show the real feelings of these stories, just how messed up and uncomfortable and tragic they really are.

When watching the video essays, the way the essays actually sounded didn’t differ to me greatly from the audio essays–perhaps because in a way it’s still an audio essay which is being said orally, but this time videos can be added to enhance the words this time around. “Grandpa” used home videos in its essay, showcasing the idea of family and the family the speaker never knew. The only thing different from this pattern was the beginning clip, where everyone is sitting at the table and fully painted. The speaker is blue, while everyone else is red–this visual is used to help show how the speaker feels he doesn’t really belong in either ethnic identity and the alienation he feels in his own family.

In “That Kind of Daughter”, very abstract and unconventional images were used. Truthfully, I found this video a bit dull from the monotone voice combined with the little variety of images, but the impact these visuals had was still interesting, especially at 3:09 when the speaker keeps rearranging the pieces to make different kinds of men. This visual was able to give a new meaning to what was being said, showing the different men that the speaker had just blown through in her sleeping and how similar they all were by being made of the same exact parts.

“Mangoes” was my favorite, and I found the visual variety in it to be very enhancing to what was being said. At interview was weaved throughout the essay, like at 1:30, where the landlord talks about how “gay” it is for men to wear baby holders. Using the interview helped bring in tonal changes and different perspectives to what the reader was saying, using someone else’s words to progress his own essay. This contrasted with the many videos of his baby helped show the two sides of his essay, from being “gay” and not being present as a father to how close he was with his son. In all of these essays, the videos helped enhance what was being said by giving visualizations that could often show double meanings to the words being said.

Since my essay is about the world and adventure video games impact for me, I’ve decided that mostly using game soundtracks would be best to convey that sense of adventure and excitement. For one scene, the scene with my father, I thought about using a track from the game he was playing–the very first game I saw and played myself. To convey the idea of a distant memory, I thought of having the music fade in halfway through the scene, and keep it at a very quiet level, maybe even with some kind of faraway or static filter over it. The 8-bit feel of the music also gives the sense of this being a memory from the past, and something digital and other wordly.

And then, since the main focus of the essay is on the specific games of the Pokemon series, I thought of using music from the games to help convey the feelings I feel when playing said games. I thought of the first track I would use to be the opening track of the game, which starts off with little instruments but then suddenly builds, to really give a feeling to diving into adventure and exploring this other world. In “Using Music: The Kitchen Sisters”, it’s emphasized to use music that may not necessarily have lyrics unless you’re making a specific point or using it for a pause in your speaking. The music should never be distracting or drown out the voice, but instead enhance what is being said. They also suggested to cut music up, loop it, have it pause, etc. I’d like to do this with my own music, having it stop at certain points to emphasize my words, or having certain parts on repeat that could help enhance whatever it is I’m saying. I’m not totally sure how I’m going to work in music yet, but after reading all of this, I’m excited to experiment!

In “Reading on Air”, Kern talks in detail about speaking in contrast to writing essay–the difference for example between saying news on the radio as oppose to reading it in a newspaper. What was stressed most was to sound conversational–that many people on radio or what not don’t even use scripts at all. He says, “You are not giving a lecture; in fact, as far as the listener is concerned, you’re not even reading a script. You’re just talking” (133). He suggests for one to speak as if they were holding a photo, to imagine talking to a family member or a close friend. That there’s an importance of establishing a sense of familiarity between the speaker and the listener.

When listening to both of the audio essays, I felt one succeeded in this more than the other. In “Ugly Pew”, I didn’t get the sense of conversation that Kern spoke of. He opened up with many adjectives and long sentences, and at times I felt like I was being read an essay than being spoken to. He says, “The soft hands of mothers and their babies and the chubby hands of those babies teething the wood of the pews,” (1:45). The sentence is is descriptive and uses too many adjectives, and while it paints a picture, I feel like I’m reading something rather than hearing someone simply speak to me.

This contrasts to me from “I’m White and Mennonite”, where the speaker felt like someone familiar, like she was just talking and not reading. She says, “Patrice beat boxed me into a corner, and we started making out. We made out in his bed, his roommates bed, my bed, the stairwell, empty shower stalls…” (8:35). She’s not overly descriptive, and she talks as if she’s just talking to her friend.

That’s what I feel like I need to work on in my essay: to be able to talk to someone as if they’re just a friend, as if I’m not reading from a script at all.

In Writing for Broadcast, Kern talks about the difference between essay in writing and essay in radio, and the differences the two have and the proper way to deliver something orally as oppose to delivering it through writing. He emphasizes to “write the way you speak”, saying that, “when you are on the air, you are communicating with one person at a time” (27). In The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto, when first reading it, it’s actually hard to read at all. It starts with, “about two years ago ellie and I decided we needed a new mattress          or maybe ellie decided it         because i didn’t pay much attention to the problem (113). The lack of capitalization, punctuation, and odd gaps in sentences makes it jarring for our mind to read. But when I read it out loud, it sounded natural, like the way someone would tell their friend a story. The gaps were pauses in speech, pauses of thought. Capitalization and the sort didn’t matter when it was said aloud. Antin’s piece is not meant to be read, but to be spoken, to be listened to.

And to capture that way of real life speech, Kern offers some rules and guidelines. He says again and again to keep things simple, from the adjectives you use to sentence structure. He says, “Keep Sentences short… The desire to pack information often results in sentences larded with clauses that separate the subject and the verb” (33). Basically, what he’s saying is that when someone is listening to something, they can only hear something once, unlike reading where you can go back and reread things if there was something you missed. You need to keep your sentences simple so listeners will be able to follow the flow of the story without any confusion. Antin certainly compliments this use of simplicity and short sentences, his story very choppy in writing. One such instance is, “she said no     so i said forget custom made         custom made is for people who are geniuses” (119). The sentences are choppy and not at all how you should ever write, but this is exactly how people speak when they are telling a story, and that’s what must be conveyed here.

One thing that stood out to me instantly when hearing the audio essays was the fact that there was music in the background. In “The Bitter Fruits of Wakefulness,” a piano piece played in the background to capture the somber mood of the essay. But what really made it effective was not only the use of music, but the absence of that music. At 42:00, the music stops. This is the moment when Lovell saw the mother and the father having sex. Listening to the music the entire time, it’s become noise, familiar. When it drops, you feel an uneasiness, and emptiness, and you can only hear the words Lovell says, and those words feel have more impact because of the silence they’re said on. This strategy is effective to show which moment left Lovell with such uneasiness and left such a mark on him.

Another tactic in an oral essay is the use of dialogue. In writing, how dialogue is said and the voice each character has is left entirely up to the imagination of the reader. With audio, every little tone can be heard in speech, hearing two different voices interact, hearing the casualness of how they speak. It feels like an actual conversation, and by hearing it, you believe it, you become a part of it. In “NRA vs. NEA”, at 10:25, Vowell shows us a conversation between herself and her father. With the sound of the car in the background, it feels as if you are right in the car with them as they speak with one another. The laughter in their voice, the pauses, everything that’s so natural that cannot be captured perfectly in just writing. Also in this essay, there are pauses between scenes, where only music plays. One such time is at 10:15. A pause cannot be done in writing in this way. A reader can read through a line break as fast as they’d like. But in audio, they are forced to only know what is told to them, and must wait when there are pauses. At this pause, only music plays, showing the transition of a scene and using the upbeat music to set the mood.

There are just some things that cannot be captured in writing. Music, the sound of canons, or feeling the timidness in someone’s voice–these are things that sometimes can only be perfectly portrayed through audio, letting the listener in through completely new senses.

In “The Self on the Shield”, Levine discuses how an essay is a gateway into a person, that you should leave the essay “feeling as if you have met someone” and that “the worst thing an essayist can do is fail to make an impression” (159). It should feel as if you are confronting a person when reading an essay, that someone is standing before you and they have imprinted something within you. An essay is something personal, something that takes facts or abstracts and turns it into something only the author of the essay can share. They want to say something, even if they don’t know what that something quite is–and that’s what makes an essay and essay.

And in “The Empathy Exams”, that’s exactly what Jamison does. The essay combines fiction and fact, Jamison playing a medical actor. She plays a fictional role, and students see her as that fictional role, even though she’s a completely different person outside of all of that. She writes the essay a bit scattered, the format effective and interesting with using “Case Summary” and a section that has crossed out bits, “Patient is here for an abortion for a surgery to burn the bad parts of her heart for a medication to fix her heart because the surgery failed” (23). This writing style shows her inner thoughts throughout the official medical statement without even having to state her medical thoughts, the strikes showing what she would want omitted or what she can’t say.

Using both the case summaries and the medical listings of her actual medical history back to back show the contrast between fiction and reality, showing what she pretends to have and what she actually has, an interesting combo that really lets the reader get inside of Jamison’s head. When I read this essay, I feel like I met Jamison, like Jamison had left some kind of mark, like she had something to say based on everything she had been through.

An essay can be everything and anything–as the preface to the Collected Essays puts it, “The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best of one, not two, but of all three worlds in which it’s possible for the essay to exist” (90). These three worlds are “the personal and the autobiographical”, “the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular”, and “the abstract universal” (88). In Delft, Albert Goldbarth certainly does not slack in covering all three of these poles.

First is “the personal and autobiographical”. Albert keeps referring to a woman named Cynthia, saying lines such as, “So, here: Cynthia and myself” (256). Although the story talks little of Cynthia compared to what else it covers, it’s there, and Albert uses fleas in a way to relate it back to himself and to Cynthia.

Second is “the objective, the factual, and the concrete-particular”. One section of the essay that caught my particular interest was when it switched from the abstract and mess of metaphors to sudden hard facts, changing the writing style of the essay. Albert goes into telling us facts about the flea, such as, “Fact: It’s not the piercing that causes the itch, but the enzymes in the flea’s saliva, which enters the wound in a forceful injection and keeps the blood from coagulating” (266) and begins to say at the end of many facts, “And they still scratched” (266).

And last is “the abstract universe”, which is what most of the essay consists of, starting the essay with, “He commeth unto his kingdom now. Yea, he commeth unto the greased posed-open body of his beloved, Cornelia nee Sawlmius, where she beckons from the alcove-bed” (253). Albert uses this different writing style to describe something that seems completely unrelated to anything, but in reality is just about sex, possibly his own sex.

And Albert was able to use all of these styles and connect them together that made his whole essay work. He used abstract imagery, analogies, and facts to relate to his own sex life and to the general topic of it. By using different writing styles, he can more effectively bring together a larger topic while still being specific, and capturing the interest of readers by using variety.

From “The Art of the Essayist”, Benson describes what he thinks the true purpose of an essay is–for it not to be informative or factual but for it to be something personal, something people can relate to in their everyday lives that can be provocative. To acknowledge differences in people, why those differences might exist, and to simply get the reader to relate and ponder. He says the author of an essay must, “care more about the inconsistency of humanity than about its dignity; and he must study more what people actually think about rather than what they ought to think about” (41).

In “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, she uses her essay to do just that. The essay has the interesting choice of starting with the description of a clown painting, despite the essay being about a total eclipse. She writes, “It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget… I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember–but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel” (97). Instead of making some kind of thesis or main point to start out the essay, the author instead hones in on a single moment in her memory. She provokes the thought of memory, and why one would remember a clown paining better than most things despite its meaning being absolutely insignificant to you. As Benson said this is “what people actually think about rather than what they ought to think about” (41).

Dillard ends her essay with, “From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home” (109). After an entire essay conveying a short story of the total eclipse and the horrific impact it had in that one moment, the essay doesn’t end with anything profound or deep, the character in the story hasn’t changed at all in the end. Despite the impact of the moment, she goes home as if it never happened, forgotten, the way any reader can relate to. As a reader, it provokes thought in the impact of such moments, and why we simply let them go, and why instead we remember clown paintings.

In “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay,” the author attempts to pin down the definition of what a true essay is while debunking myths and negativity around the subject. When reading “On Keeping a Notebook,” my first thought was that this didn’t sound like an essay at all. When I think essay, I think 5 sentence paragraphs, opening and closing sentences, a thesis and an argument. I think of school and head aches and literature and word count. “On Keeping a Notebook” wasn’t that at all–it was something much more personal, something much more loose and free. I read it as smoothly as a short story you couldn’t put down.

“Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay” shot my perception of the essay right between the eyes. There were some essayists who were even against the idea of a school essay being called as such. In the reading, the author wrote, “There are experiences, then, which cannot be expressed by any gesture and which long for expression. From all that has been said you will know what experiences I mean and what kind they are, as an immediate reality, as spontaneous principle for existence” (Didion 12). 

And that’s exactly what “On Keeping a Notebook” was to me. It wasn’t an argument, it wasn’t making any real point or trying to say something particularly incredible. It was just a lazy momentum of someone’s life, of random pieces that could be remembered but could never be used. This is what an essay truly is: something personal, something that’s written because someone feels that they have something to say, something that cannot be expressed or said in any other way. An essay is the only place you could drone on, a place to put down your thoughts, a place to remember, a place to discover. 

My perception of the essay has been broken, and replaced and born as something new and limitless.