Life Writing – UMass Boston Blog by Patricia Polednia

My Final Idea about Essays

I never thought about the gender of essays. I always used the neutral terms like the essay, an essay or according to the author’s essay… But this is exactly what Cynthia Ozick is doing in her essay “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body”. Ozick is using the female possessive pronoun she in order to refer to the literary art form: “[…] I confess I have been trying all along, in a subliminal way, to speak of the essay as if it- or she- were a character in a novel or a play; moody, fickle, given on a whim to changing her clothes, or the subject; sometimes obstinate, with a mind of her own; or hazy and light; never predictable” (168).
I think Ozick is using this controversial gender topic in order to emphasize the basic component of the essay, which is the self sensation and reflection of the insight (of the author?) You can basically write about anything and anybody, the content has no limitations. Just like many authors we’ve read before, Ozick states the closest thing to essay writing is poetry, “The mind meanders, slipping from one impression to another, from reality to memory to dreamscape and black again” (166).
I think this sentence is a very good summary of our essay assignments during the semester. We started with writing a textual essay and evolved a particular idea into an audio one. Now, we have to make the next step and create a video essay. But this is easier said than done. You start your essay with a personal story and reflect on that in order to go on. But after working with your topic for a certain amount of time, you as the author who has experienced all this stuff, are blind to new openings or possibilities to develop your essay. This is why I really enjoyed the writing group discussions. You need a second or a third objective voice to be able to reflect and develop to the next step. The others have different associations with my topic, for example I believe I was the only one who had negative associations with ducks. This is the reason why I changed my subject of the video essay to disgust and feel much more confident. Ozick is right, I feel like a poet writing about my personal experiences and adapting them into different kind of art forms.

I think she will be my masterpiece.

At the end, it’s all about connecting with each other

November 23, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 18 Comments

This week is about editing our video essays. It was a long and difficult journey to figure out how I should adapt my audio essay to a video one. I don’t want to screw this one up like I did with my audio essay. As a student you have a lot of pressure with Thanksgiving and the finals coming, so I need to prepare very well. But this is nothing in contrast to Penny Lane’s situation in 2010. She has made a video essay for her wedding. As a present for her husband Brain. With all the wedding guests watching it at the party. The essay is called The Voyager and shows the two Voyager space probe launched into the orbit in 1977, just one year before her birth. Lane combines her ideas of love and marriage with the historical NASA event, the love story of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and the dramatic explosion of the rocket in 1986. She uses the harsh contrast of cordial love and innovative technology to explain her view about commitment and relationships in nowadays society.
In the Atlantic interview, Lane said that the video is a meditation on the nature of love in an uncertain universe. The Voyager storyline or rather the golden record function’s is to connect irrational hope and cold hard reason in a metaphorical way. I really needed this information, because I was very confused why Lane combines her personal love story with the Voyager plot while watching the video. At first, I thought that Carl and Ann may be her parents and she is telling the audience the story of her love relationship, which just happens to be close to the Voyager event. She was born in 1978, so the math is right. I finally understand her point when she is talking about marriage while walking with her boyfriend on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
According to the Atlantic, Lane wants to explore the mature and intelligent vision of love with this film. But I really liked her last words, just before the song The Book of Life began (by the way very corny…). She said that we have to risk and open ourselves to connect with others, even if there’s the possibility of disaster. Nobody believed that the two Voyager missals would last that long, since they were supposed to last only two years! I enjoyed this positive look ahead, after the confusing beginning.

Visual Language in Combination with Powerful Images

November 14, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 34 Comments

This week is about the very powerful language and images of the video essay. It is important to have a great balance between the spoken word, the soundtrack and the visual footage you use in an essay. You don’t want to bore your audience by showing them a picture of a duck accompanied by duck quacking. You have to find a way to tell your narrative along with powerful images.
Lisa Purpura uses a very strong visual language and metaphors in her essay called “Autopsy Report” from 2006. I honestly didn’t get why we should read this essay, when we talk about video essays. But as I was reading her poetical piece of writing, I pictured her detailed descriptions of the dead human body in my mind, comparing the mass of internal organs with the piled up groceries in the supermarket. I don’t know if I actually want to see what Purpura is describing, but her way of storytelling and use of language is very effective for the reader’s imagination.
One of my favorite video essays so far is Biss & Bresland’s “Dust Off”. I am fascinated by their use of powerful footage of the beautiful sensations of nature to visualize a very sad topic, the death of three young men in the pursuit of pleasure. In the first part, Theo dies because he inhales some toxic gas from the chemistry laboratory, which was supposed to make him high. Bliss and Bresland use the image of a snow storm to picture his story. The second part is about Curt, who dies in a car accident caused by speed driving. The directors depict the blue horizon/sky, showing the sun and the cloud of smoke from a rocket. The third and last part displays jellyfishes while talking about Elijah, who died of self-strangulation trying to have a more intense orgasm. There is no camera movement, the depicting objects move in slow motion. In addition to the great idea to actually NOT show what they are talking about, I also liked the recurring theme of the swing. Bliss and Bresland use a swing with three seats as a metaphor for the three dead boys at the beginning and the end. This video is epic! I think I am going to use their technique in my own essay…

After the Written and the Audio, now the Video Essay

November 10, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 89 Comments

In her article “On the Form of the Video Essay” (2012), Marilyn Freeman tries to define the artistic form of the video essay. I call it an article because it really doesn’t seem to be an essay, in my opinion, due to its descriptive style and the simple fact that it’s published in a literary magazine. According to Freeman, a video essay can be funny, reflective, subjective, autobiographic, poetic, and interdisciplinary as well as the audio essay messes with audience’s expectations of a non-fiction film. This definition could also match to a classic mainstream Hollywood movie, so what makes the video essay so special?
Freeman explains the video essay as follows: “Which brings us to odd juxtapositions and the poetic nature of the video essay. Like the literary side of its family, the video essay invites nonlinear, associative thought and digression. It doesn’t try to argue, persuade or solve problems […] it resides in the liminal space between sound and image […] By contrast, the video essay aims to move audiences deeper. It disrupts the smooth impenetrable surface of standard cinema with unexpected couplings of sound and image. Those couplings open up the video essay to interpretation and invite in audiences to co-create meaning” The video essay has no linear plot, no conflict or desire to persuade the audience, in contrast to the Hollywood movie. Instead, it wants the audience to actively engage in the process of watching, making sense of the sounds they hear and images they see on screen.
This sounds very abstract and postmodern to me, which is confirmed by the seven video essays Freeman set next to her article. There are all short movies with different approaches. Many directors used home footage and letters on screen to make to visualize their essay. Others used abstract or rather random images accompanying their voice. The one that stick out to me the most is Radtke’s “That kind of Daughter”; she used black and white animation to picture her essay on screen. Just as the written or audio essay, the Freeman’s definition of the video essay is not definite, but rather woolly.

Informing or Entertaining?

October 20, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 639 Comments

In the last couple of weeks, we discussed the theory of essay writing. We tried to define and pinpoint the ambiguous term essay by reading a lot of different essays. Today, we are at a certain level of fairly understanding what an essay could be, as we had to hand in our textual essays. Instead of writing an essay to read it, we are now trying to write essay in order to record the piece of writing to be able to hear it. The switch from the visual to the sense of hearing seems to be much harder than I expected, even though I already have some experience in writing news for the radio.

In relation to the reading by Jonathan Kern “Writing for Broadcast” and “Reading on the Air”, I noticed a significant contradiction: there is a big difference whether you write objective news as a journalist to inform people, or if your write subjective fiction in order to entertain your audience. The first is a serious profession to spread the truth all over the world, whereas the latter is rather a way of storytelling. I mean, I get the idea that you have to write short and declarative sentences for the audio essay, like a radio journalist do. But I already noticed in the former readings that many authors blurred the lines between those two domains. But for me, a possible future journalist, this distinction is crucial. And in my opinion, we are supposed to write a creative and entertaining audio essay, experimenting with the different kind of writing for a listening audience. The purpose is a completely different one: our audience will not be driving a car or prepare breakfast while listening to our essay. They will listen carefully to our words, trying to escape the harsh reality and enjoy our piece of art.

However, one very important feature of writing for broadcast which struck me several years ago, and has made me realize that I want to write for radio or television, is the completely different approach or rather style of writing. Kern phrases it as follows “Good broadcast writing often requires us to unlearn many of the ways we learned to write classes or in graduate school” (2008:29). Seriously, I remember the moment very clearly my professor told us something similar in one of my journalistic classes. It was like an epiphanic realization: I want to become an editor in a radio or television news station, so I never have to write term papers again! True to the motto keep it short and simple.

The Twisted Path through the Forest

September 28, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 18 Comments

“The writing of an essay is like finding one’s way through a forest without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you are seeking. You sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs you in a new direction, and then off you go, dodging and circling, lured on by the songs of unfamiliar birds […]” (Sanders: 131).

In his short piece of writing called “The Singular First Person”, Scott Russell Sanders explains that the essay is a record of individual mind, in a world we are overwhelmed with mass data and information. But the essay “remains stubbornly concrete and particular” (Sanders: 130) to one topic, reflecting the author’s worries and feelings. The style of writing is a bit confusing (for the reader), like finding an unknown path in the woods as suggested in the quotation above. I think Sanders draws a good picture with his forest metaphor, suggesting that even the author doesn’t know how the essay will look like in the end. You come up with new ideas while writing, that may lead you away from your original idea. This actually just happened to me as I was writing my essay for this class. I was sitting on a bench in Boston Common, watching and eavesdropping on the people around me. My original idea was to listen to people phone conversations and imagine what the answer would be on the other side on the phone. At the end of the day, I made some notes about different people not using their phone, but sitting next to me on the bench, again observing the squirrels, ducks and swans in front of us.

I guess you cannot really pinpoint the one and only way to structure your essay. Every author has his or her own style of writing. In her essay “The Empathy Exams”, Leslie Jamison begins with a description of her work as a Medical actor in the hospital, followed by the case summary of one of her roles, Stephanie Phillips. Next, she explains in detail how the simulated exams take place, how she has to stick to the script and that she might write an essay about that someday, telling the reader that she is a writer on a Meta-level. Jamison continues to define the term “empathy”, and after the case summary of her second role as Leslie Jamison is presented to us. This is of course not a fictions role for the med students, but actually part of her biography: she once had an abortion, and didn’t fell supported enough by her boyfriend Dave. Also her failed surgery to correct her tachycardia is mentioned in her case summary. Altogether, she wants to feel empathy from the people surrounding her, from her mother, boyfriend and doctors. She even steals her brother’s disease, pretending her left side of her face is paralyzed. She is not satisfied and feels sorry for herself, but realizes that she wants to write an essay about her lesson. Jamison uses her work as an actor to reflect on her feelings and to write about her disappointment.

About Scaffolds, Delft and Red Shoes

September 21, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 14 Comments

Another week has passed with readings about essays. I have to admit that I still cannot really understand why the D’Agata readings are supposed to be essays. My confusion might be related to the very broad and vague definition of the term essay. According to Adorno, the essay does not obey and rules of theory and conceptual method. It consists of the intellectual experience of the author and his personal memory, and has a high level of abstraction as well as a wide field of subjects to write about. In contrast to Adorno’s explanation what an essay is not, Huxley distinctly states what he thinks an essay is: “[…] the essay is a literary device foe saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay.” (Huxley: 88). This is the first definition which resembles my idea of what an essay should look like. He also goes a step further and divides the essay into three poles: the personal (autobiographical), objective (factual) and universal (abstract). To distinguish these three types and therefore the purpose of writing the essay makes sense to me. It’s also rational to claim that “the most richly satisfying essay” (Huxley: 90) is a mixture of all three poles. I can work with that.

In my opinion, the essays from D’Agata’s anthology experiment with the open form of the essay, in order to express the author’s emotions connected to a certain event of his or her past. The language is very poetic and the writing seems more like a piece of art than an essay. The purpose of these writings is to express one topic or idea in many different formal concepts; starting from one point (usually the title) and elaborating on the idea to anything the author associates with that topic. Goldbarth writes about Delft and everyone and everything he relates with the city, in this case Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Vermeer (as well as fleas, sex and the plague). Griffin writes about red shoes her grandmother gave to her, which turns out to be a lie. Intertwined with the memory of her past is the discourse about gender differences, sexuality and child abuse; everything the author experienced in her childhood. Mitchell, for example, chooses numbered paragraphs to tell her story about scaffolds, but she quickly evolves her subjects to the idea of falling of a building, and later to the Mount Vesuvius discourse. Besides talking about her journey through Italy, she talks about the creative process of producing art and the power of dreaming and imagination. All these subjects doesn’t seem to relate to each other at first, but you could clearly see Mitchells chain of thoughts while reading the story. Her essay is a travel journal, consisting of her personal memories (observation of scaffold in Italy), reference to historical facts (volcano eruption) and high amount of abstract ideas, relating in the broad sense with the main idea of scaffolding.

While writing this blog post, I just realize that this is exactly what Huxley said. But you get so much information and details in these essays (fiction, truth, memory) that I am starting to wonder if it is really the best to mix all three poles, for the sake of the reader’s comprehension.

My first Blog Post about Essays

September 15, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 78 Comments

What exactly are essays? I always thought the academic essay is a shorter form of a term paper; analyzing a topic or question within a strict structure: introduction, main part and conclusion. The more I think about it I realize that I have actually never written a simple essay, neither in school nor at university. I always have to write long paper about 20 pages, a torture for me because I am more of a “keep it short and simple” type. So when I decided to attend this multimedia essay course, I thought “Great, writing papers about 8-10 pages is fun!” But this class, or rather the literature we have to read, totally changed my (actually nonexistent) knowledge about essays. It starts with the topic. According to Smith, Benson and Murdoch, the essay is a very personal piece of writing about the author’s thoughts and believes. They write about simple stuff from everyday life, or as Smith phrase it: “The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world’s amanuensis.” (Klaus, Stuckey-French: 26).

It is interesting that apparently the aim or function of an essay is not to inform, but rather to entertain the reader; “[…] the charm of the familiar essayist depends upon his power of giving the sense of good-humored […] personality and establishing a sort of pleasant friendship with his reader. One does not go to an essayist with the desire for information […]” (ibid: 40). Smith, Benson and Murdoch compare the essay even to poetry: “The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry; it is intensely personal” (ibid: 66). As a matter of fact, Murdoch states that the essay might replace the novel as the most popular form of writing in the future.

One the one hand, the authors mentioned above say that essays reflect the personal likes and dislikes of the writer. On the other hand, they also compare the essay to poetry and the novel, therefore to fictive writing. But they do not mention whether the essay should represent the true biography or a fictional story of the author, a credible diary or a fictive short story.

The only ones who actually use the format of an essay in order to remember the past (whether true or fiction) are Didion, Dillard and Wallace. Their essays consist of diary-like entries, which should probably emphasize their credibility. But in my opinion, their essays seem pretty much like fictive short stories, due to their poetic language (use of anaphora, rhetoric question) and non-chronological narrative time.

I am really excited what future readings will add to the vague definition or explanation of the essay.

Hello world!

September 8, 2015 / patriciapolednia001 / 9 Comments

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