I remember. Do you remember? I remember that feeling of lying in the middle of my sandbox. I had my Matchbox cars and my Tonka trucks. I remember the scratchies, that feeling of dry sand scraping across my elbows and knees as I built my roads with a front-end loader and crashed through them with my dump truck. During summer, the sun baked the sand into a hard, crisp surface. I would race my little red dragster up and down the hills, around corners with the tires screeching and flying out of control. Crash! Oooohhh! I moaned as I staggered out of the car, dazed and broken. My imagination would run wild at the scene of destruction: the blood, the guts! Eeewww! I remember the coarse sand in my hair, tickling my skin, as I rolled around in fits of laughter. I knew I would have to start again. I would race to the other side of the sandbox, I needed road equipment. I need to fix my sand and get back to driving. I parked my little red dragster by my dump truck. Hello, up there! My dragster would bellow up to the of the Tonka dump truck. And I would scream in laughter as the dump truck would pretend he didn’t see the little car and run right over him.
I remember how perspective changes things as you get older. I am now the tiny red car or a full-sized white pick-up truck as the case may be, parking and driving next to haul trucks that can hold 400 tons of material (that’s bigger than your house). The sand’s texture has changed, not only in feeling but it name. Now it’s ore. Driving on the same gritty dirt roads as these behemoths can leave a dry, flat taste in your mouth. I started laughing again, much quieter now, as I thought back to the ways I tortured that poor little dragster.
15 February, 2008
Seafood Festival- Real-world Grammar
I have read an advertisment about eating seafood. It was filled with facts but didn't mention the menu or the days of the special. The sentenced were written with appalingly bad grammar. This advertisment is so disconjointed it hurt my eyes to read it. It is a list of tidbits or facts but with no real point. How do I know if the seafood is fresh? And what do flamingo's ahve to do with it?
I have to assume there is a method to the madness and a team of advertisers got together to make this ad. At least one of them had to have had an english class at some point. It seems to me they choose to dumb down their language, maybe to pull in a crowd of lesser educated people. I am not sure but I think I am missing part of the ad. I will not eat there and I am so confused.
I have to assume there is a method to the madness and a team of advertisers got together to make this ad. At least one of them had to have had an english class at some point. It seems to me they choose to dumb down their language, maybe to pull in a crowd of lesser educated people. I am not sure but I think I am missing part of the ad. I will not eat there and I am so confused.
Ann Dillard Discussion Questions
1. To get in the writing groove Dillard talks about slowly titrating caffiene into herself, a measured amount at a specific rate to keep her up and motivated but not so much to be completely out of control. I would perfer to do just the opposite. I am a very anxious person with a brain that runs 900 miles a minute. For me to get into the writing mode I need something to calm me down. A nice shot of vodka would probably do the trick. As for my own rituals... I don't have a long enough attention span to create a ritual.
2. Bearing walls are in the eye of the creator. I think we both invent our own walls and we have to write for society if we want to sell our work and that will create many walls. Bearing walls are what keep the roof from crashing in, so I have always had a hard time tearing them down. I find doing to many rewrites discouraging and confusing. At some point I feel it would be better just to trash the whole thing and start all over. It wasn't good enough the first time and it probably won't be great after 20 rewrites.
3. Metaphors are very difficult for me to write as I tend to be a serious straight shooter; sometimes to straight. Metaphors sound great and all but you need to use them with some degree of decorum. Dillard's entire book was one metaphor after another. Don't get me wrong...She writes well and it was entertaining but I could only read in small doses. I kept asking myself when she was going to get to the point. In this day and age we are under the time crunch. We all have so much to do and so little time to do it.
Metaphors are useful, they complete the image. Paint it in our minds: if you will. But to use a metaphor for my own writing style would probably just end up a similie.
4. Writing is putting ideas on paper. It comes out in black and white. I don't understand the mystisism that Dillard say goes with her writing expierence. You don't pull out the magic hat, set it on your head and have word flow to paper. There are no voodoo rituals that will increase the amount of time spent in front of a computer. Every brain is just a little bit different but they basically work the same: synopsis fire and 'things' happen. Some people have a proclivitly towards certain types of 'things' and writing may be one of them. But to say writing is mystical makes me feel that maybe Dillard didn't believe in herself and her hard work.
5. I found Dillard to be very entertaining as a writer. She took situations to such an extreme you can't help be wonder how far she will go next. I think Dillard was vague when she wrote about writing because there really is no concrete way to write. Talent is a vague concept and not very definable either. There are rules with the English language: period's, comma's, paragraph's...but how do you describe a smell or a feeling with rules?
2. Bearing walls are in the eye of the creator. I think we both invent our own walls and we have to write for society if we want to sell our work and that will create many walls. Bearing walls are what keep the roof from crashing in, so I have always had a hard time tearing them down. I find doing to many rewrites discouraging and confusing. At some point I feel it would be better just to trash the whole thing and start all over. It wasn't good enough the first time and it probably won't be great after 20 rewrites.
3. Metaphors are very difficult for me to write as I tend to be a serious straight shooter; sometimes to straight. Metaphors sound great and all but you need to use them with some degree of decorum. Dillard's entire book was one metaphor after another. Don't get me wrong...She writes well and it was entertaining but I could only read in small doses. I kept asking myself when she was going to get to the point. In this day and age we are under the time crunch. We all have so much to do and so little time to do it.
Metaphors are useful, they complete the image. Paint it in our minds: if you will. But to use a metaphor for my own writing style would probably just end up a similie.
4. Writing is putting ideas on paper. It comes out in black and white. I don't understand the mystisism that Dillard say goes with her writing expierence. You don't pull out the magic hat, set it on your head and have word flow to paper. There are no voodoo rituals that will increase the amount of time spent in front of a computer. Every brain is just a little bit different but they basically work the same: synopsis fire and 'things' happen. Some people have a proclivitly towards certain types of 'things' and writing may be one of them. But to say writing is mystical makes me feel that maybe Dillard didn't believe in herself and her hard work.
5. I found Dillard to be very entertaining as a writer. She took situations to such an extreme you can't help be wonder how far she will go next. I think Dillard was vague when she wrote about writing because there really is no concrete way to write. Talent is a vague concept and not very definable either. There are rules with the English language: period's, comma's, paragraph's...but how do you describe a smell or a feeling with rules?
03 February, 2008
Me!
This blog is for my writing class but I found it to be pretty boring to look at. I finally got around to changing the template and I added a few pictures to make it more me. Hope that is ok.
Anonymity
Gratefully both Franklin and Douglass wrote with their own names but there were times when a writer either needs to protect themselves or new they wouldn’t get the respect they need to publish their works.
Women during the … centuries, oh, wait, up to about 1960 (and still do, I’m sure) had a difficult time getting books published unless they were romance novels. Now people use Pen names when they want to try a new genre or are trying to break into the business and have been rejected with their own name to many times.
Franklin and Douglass chose to use their own names probably for different reasons. Franklin was a well respected man. He was involved with the making of the government and was President of Pennsylvania. On the other hand; Douglass’ original last name was Bailey (although I can’t find when the change took place), he may have changed his name after so many people said that writing like his couldn’t have been written by a slave with no education.
If I were to write something I would write it in my own name. No one knows me and just by that I would still have some anonymity. I think, sometimes it in nice to share with others while still keeping the secret safe.
Women during the … centuries, oh, wait, up to about 1960 (and still do, I’m sure) had a difficult time getting books published unless they were romance novels. Now people use Pen names when they want to try a new genre or are trying to break into the business and have been rejected with their own name to many times.
Franklin and Douglass chose to use their own names probably for different reasons. Franklin was a well respected man. He was involved with the making of the government and was President of Pennsylvania. On the other hand; Douglass’ original last name was Bailey (although I can’t find when the change took place), he may have changed his name after so many people said that writing like his couldn’t have been written by a slave with no education.
If I were to write something I would write it in my own name. No one knows me and just by that I would still have some anonymity. I think, sometimes it in nice to share with others while still keeping the secret safe.
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