I suppose that my main takeaway from the course would be what I learned from reading the James Baldwin lecture and letter: the importance of writing with specific audiences in mind, and how to choose which audience to address with purpose. In the letter, the intimacy and familiarity with which he writes allows him to examine the more personal nature of racism. Meanwhile, the lecture, which he begins by appealing to authority, and then expanding more broadly on the systemic issues of racism. The attention paid to the audience is a crucial part of writing with the desire to create social change. 

My question would be, related to the Layli Long Soldier reading, would be how to translate the takeaways of this class into official writing. While there could never have been an apology on behalf of the federal government that would have fully healed the wounds of history, how could documents like it, moving forward, make strides towards better and more effective writing?

Puppetry, as Schumann describes it, is the purest embodiment of “show, don’t tell” of the art forms we’ve studied this quarter, by quite a wide margin. As he writes, “the puppets themselves are mutes,” which means that their appearances and actions convey information while they themselves do not. The differential between, as he describes it, “legitimate theater” and “puppet theater,” however, means that puppetry is not taken seriously as an art form, but it allows puppetry to embrace a rule as a more activist form of expression, the role that it takes in Schumann’s writing. Similarly to the Verfremdungseffekt mentioned by Brecht, the distance from more commonly viewed art forms provided by poetry allows us to ingest its message more effectively.

The relative lack of spoken language in puppetry mentioned by Brecht and practiced by Bread and Puppet Theater allows for a much more form of communication than other theater: through motion and image more than through dialogue. For instance, in Bread and Puppet, around the 40 minute mark, although both characters (I forget their names, but they represent capitalism and communal living) are speaking, far more information is conveyed through their appearances and the non-speaking characters’ movements than through their dialogue, which is mostly throwaway jokes.

In order to slightly alter the viewpoint of my project on nuance in political discourse, I decided to specifically focus on one phenomenon I’ve noticed online recently, the increase in people using the phrases “beyond a doubt,” “without a doubt,” etc. I decided to show this phenomenon with a looping PowerPoint, showing the participation in this trend by people on all sides of the spectrum. It was challenging to fit the entire tweet in the frame at times, but I realized sometimes it wasn’t actually important to the point I was trying to make. As you might’ve guessed, the last tweet is the one that triggered the project, and as such appears longer and in full at the end of the loop.

beyond a doubt

Throughout The Undying, Anne Boyer focuses in great detail on the idea of “appearance.” This is only logical, due to the traditional image of “breast cancer” we have in our minds. When my mom’s best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mind immediately constructed a picture of her without hair and at what would have been an unhealthy weight. She never actually lost her hair, but the image I simply created persists in my mind to this day. 

Writing on page 112, after she undergoes surgery, Boyer writes, “We looked at what we could see, one of us in horror, me in harsh, curious insistence.” Her friend’s reaction to the image of Boyer’s operated-upon body is one of horror mixed with sympathy, a common reaction to visible symptoms of serious diseases, but hers is one of curiosity – to her, it is her body, not ugly or beautiful, just hers.

When she writes about the exhaustion incurred by her disease on pages 250-251, she discusses this phenomenon from a slightly different angle. By getting out of bed, getting dressed, and going about their daily business every day, a sick person, to a certain extent, presents an air of normal appearances, but are sick on the inside. While this is nearly the inverse of the example above, it is yet another way that appearances subvert the reality of illness.

This discussion of appearances is crucial in striving to make a better world. We live in a world where most will eagerly give up their seat on the train for someone who is visibly pregnant or ailing, but might not for someone who puts on the appearance of normalcy, even if they are suffering behind that mask. Inversely,  it’s just as possible for a person who is not suffering but for whatever reason has the appearance of a suffering person, and to be treated with deference they don’t need (which can be hurtful). 

We base so much of the actions we take throughout the day, and when it comes to illness and disability, this can be seriously harmful and impactful. This, among many, many other reasons, is why this memoir is so powerful and important.

Alfred Stieglitz said that “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” Perhaps fittingly, the Wikipedia blurb that appears with a Google search of his name credits to him the status of “photography (as) an accepted art form.” To put it another photographs capture an image of the moment, but do not capture the image of the moment; the subtle reality captured by the photographer may be the reality they experience, but it is not reality. 

Pete Souza, the chief White House photographer under Barack Obama, gave us an insight into this phenomenon, publishing photo after photo on Instagram, Flickr, and now in print in multiple books. Shealah Craighead, the Trump administration’s chief photographer, however, has posted very few of her photos, the majority of which are published in a single 50-photo “First Fifty Days” album on the President’s Facebook.

My eyes are immediately drawn to two pictures on Souza’s Instagram page and two pictures on Trump’s Facebook. Peculiarly, all four are photos of hands.

The hands, arms, and torsos of President Obama and Representative John Lewis form an M of skin, gray, and pinstriped navy, the elder hand grasped by the younger. There are several stories told here, with all of them simultaneously true. The owner of the older hand seems to lean on the younger as he marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, following the steps he took five decades ago. At the same instant, in the same photo, however, the younger hand meaningfully grasps the elder. Physically holding onto courage, onto good trouble, onto the aging emblem of Civil Rights.

Two hands reach for Clark Reynolds, both just barely in contact with his child-size necktie at the moment the photographer’s mirror flipped up to expose the sensor of his camera for mere milliseconds. The longer you look, the more details you notice. Clark’s dress shirt, despite his rather sharp outfit (for a toddler), hangs low out the bottom of his suit jacket, suggesting that he’s been standing and fidgeting behind the rope line for quite some time. The president’s head, smiling and out of focus, takes up the majority of the top of the frame as he leans over to adjust the young man’s tie. A smiling moment amidst the world’s most stressful job, brought about by an unsmiling child standing before him, seemingly unaware of just how cool this is. Only another picture in this post shows the wonder he felt, perhaps one of the most famous pictures of the eight years Obama served. A woman’s hand stretches from behind the president to assist him in his task, only revealed by the caption as belonging to first lady Michelle Obama. Finally, your eyes follow the tie down from the First Lady’s hand to the President’s. You notice the final touch, that Clark’s tie, tucked into his suit jacket, wraps around the rope line in front of him, a comedic touch that only a caring parent would think to add.

Representative Greg Walden’s hands sit atop a piece of paper, one holding a pen, one holding down the page as if it could blow away. In front of him sits a placard with his name and title on it. That is all. No nuance, no story.

The second picture, to be blunt, is a bad picture. The president’s frame fills the leftmost two thirds of the frame, and his hand signs a massive scrawled signature on a campaign hat. That is all. No nuance, no story.

This piece of writing may seem like a review of photography, but it is not. It is a critique of the way this White House operates. Rather than the approach that Pete Souza took, of capturing complicated, nuanced, images, including moments of disagreement and weakness, there is an utter lack of that in any feed associated with the current president. His feed today features mostly signs that read his own name and staged pictures of himself and his family. The nuances of the White House documentary photography of yesteryear appears to have faded away. Here’s hoping that’s temporary.

Process notes

It was pretty difficult to decide what to write about, as my subject is not one that is routinely documented in the sciences, other than how much certain claims about topics like global warming or the efficacy of vaccinations can be. Instead, I decided to talk about something adjacent – we often consider things like photography and videography to be objective, and at times photographers and videographers strive to be exactly that. However, inherent in any photo or video is both a story (what was going on) and an intention (what the photographer or videographer intended to convey). One thing I think we can all agree on is the general lack of nuance coming from the Trump administration, and I think this is a good way of examining it. All the photos published have a purpose, the vast majority of which have the purpose of making President Trump look presidential, a complex word I talked about early in the quarter as it related to exactitude. The pictures of President Obama, on the other hand, are highly nuanced and complex, showing courage, emotion, and weakness through their composition.

In order to show this, I focused on four pictures where at least a significant portion of the picture is someone’s hand or hands, and went from there. As much as possible I tried to avoid making this an art review, and talk about how I personally experienced the photos, but I feel like I slipped too much into art critique. When I revise this for my portfolio, I’ll be sure to address that.

Baldwin’s language in his letter “My Dungeon Shook,” to vastly oversimplify, works. However, I contend this is mainly because it was presented as an intimate piece of writing, in which the specific wording and tone as read have significant meanings that may be lost if they were in a traditional argumentative essay or spoken. Lines like “you must survive because I love you,” “these men are your brothers,” and several other instances of using the second person singular are effective in imparting emotion, where a formal argument would fall short.

The main difference in how Baldwin presents himself between the two pieces is in his claim to authority. In “My Dungeon Shook,” he explicitly writes “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine,” a sharp contrast to his arguments in his “A Talk to Teachers.” While he does acknowledge, “I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself,” he generally makes more of an appeal to authority, mainly based off of his own experiences, saying things like “I was a street boy, so I know,” a nontraditional appeal to authority, but one all the same. This makes perfect sense given the format; he is attempting to convince his audience of something, so some measure of authority is necessary, while in the letter it is not.

Dearest friend,

I write to you as I stare into my own eyes which stare back at me from set deep within my phone. The dark screen, which soon will grow darker from disuse, reflects my furrowed brow back at me, as if to say, “and what will you do about it?” The simple and mildly confrontational intimation of skepticism asks of me, as well, “why do you care?”

The simple answer is, I do not know. I don’t fully comprehend why the outright shunning of reason I see before me makes me want to abandon the thing I love. Because, dear friend, as you know, I, in words I’d hoped I’d never utter, love politics. I grew up in the nation’s capital, with parents whose working lives revolved around the decisions of people elected by lands I and they would never visit. “To hell with Tocqueville,” I would have said had I known his name, “let’s let my mom, Obama, and Jon Stewart make all the decisions forever, ‘Democracy’ be damned.” 

In the ninth grade I suppose I first brushed with politics, printing 60-odd t-shirts emblazoned with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE” to sell at school and raise money for the family of Eric Garner. I received payment for less than half, and, with my parents picking up the balance, I raised zero dollars and zero cents. Perhaps consequently, through the eleventh grade I dreamed of being a physicist, about as far as possible from the worlds of policy, politics, and people I now seek out.

The next year, on the day a student killed ten at Santa Fe High School, plastic cuffs left a serial number imprinted in the flesh of my wrist, after I broke the law against obstructing the halls (literally) of Congress. My new friend James, whom I had never met before that day and have never seen in person since, posed a question as we threw my unlaced shoe back and forth across the concrete cell to pass the time. “So, what made you want to do this?”

I do not remember what I said that day, but I know now what the honest answer would have been: “because I can.” While this may come off the the boisterous response of someone justifying his actions, I mean this quite differently. I was able to take this step because, for me, it was not a big deal. I was far less likely than many of my peers to be seen as “resisting arrest” by the Capitol Police for shifting my shoulder from an uncomfortable position. I’d called my mom and received her blessing and support, which even James had failed to procure before entering the Longworth House Office Building. I was of an age where this would not go on my record, and am of a class where it would not have mattered even if it had. Thus, I did it, simply put, because I could.

When I walked out of “jail,” as my parents now generously refer to it (it was three cells in the back of the DC police’s Sixth District Station), I was not instantaneously a politico. But, as my views developed, as I volunteered for and worked on campaigns, as I was exposed to the people at this school and elsewhere who have shaped my political ideals, I developed a true love for what I believe politics can be.

I, in my seemingly endless gullibility, open Twitter or turn on the news everyday, hoping beyond hope to see whatever idealized version of politics I’ve propped up in my mind as ideal, a combination of direct action (see above for my one claim to authority on this subject) and good faith, evidence-based discourse (I’d assume from my upbringing as the child of two lawyers, sent to the rather discourse-heavy University of Chicago).

The beauty of a mirror is that what you see is not actually the mirror itself, but the light you project towards it. The beauty of my darkened phone screen is that it shows me what I myself project towards the dimmed Twitter feed or CNN home page: an expectation of a combination of nuance, civilization, and passion I know I know won’t come.

It pains me to admit this, but I do not know what to do about this. I do not foresee the problem getting better anytime soon, and I hope my expectations of what we can be never lessen.

As we inch forward through 2020, I wish you luck, my friend. Perhaps you see it differently than I do? If you do, I beg of you, please advise me of your techniques.

Sincerely yours,

Daniel Green

I need to do better. I begin this way to demonstrate that I know the fallibility of my own viewpoints and origins thereof on this issue, but I contend that regardless of these problems, it is an issue well worth examining. The issue I wish to raise today is that of nuance. Now, my rather cautious and, some might say, nuanced, introduction of this issue may seem ironic, but it is for good reason that I bring it up in this manner – the issue of nuance is nuanced.

This needs explanation, and perhaps some more background. I base this lecture not on a single incident of, as someone on Twitter put it, “a single BernieBro was mean to me online and now I’ve changed my entire political beliefs.” Rather, I sat down to write this because of the modern atmosphere that has ruined a thing I love. For reasons inexplicable in a lecture of this length, I went from caring about individual issues but rather apathetic about electoral politics to a Politico newsletter subscriber in about 18 months. Simply put, I love politics because of what it can be. 

I will not sully my reputation by saying that politics is or should be just polite, civilized discourse; far from it. I developed my love for politics through passionate direct action – organizing and attending rallies and marches outside the Capitol, which sits mere miles from my childhood home, being arrested in House office buildings… Even before I turned 4, my parents took me to the March for Women’s Lives. Passion, dedication, and critique are the key building blocks of politics, along with nuance.

Here lies the problem. In early 2017, the Washington Post ran reports that Fireball sales had spiked in the DC area with the arrival of Trump staffers. As ridiculous as this may seem, I don’t doubt it. A cheap, easily-consumed way of getting drunk fast? To me, that sounds like a drink of choice for young Republicans just moving to town, as well as for the overwhelmingly Democratic population of DC, drinking to forget their woes. Since the election of 2016, we have seen, I’m sure you’ll agree, a total breakdown of nuanced political conversation in the Democratic Party, in the country at large, and in our own communities, accelerated by the Fireball craving-inducing time in which we live. 

As I’ve mentioned. I believe in the necessity of passion and pointed critique for effective politics. These things convince people. But, when strangers, friends, or even family members routinely dismiss one another as “communists,” “imperialists,” “anti-semites,” “BernieBros,” or, my favorite pejorative, “dividers,” we get nowhere. 

I know that I’m coming from a place of privilege – my race, gender, health, and religion mean that my political goals are not as urgent as others’. “Can’t we all just get along” isn’t the right question to pose, because the answer is no; some of these answers are truly life or death. But I know one thing. Name calling doesn’t work, and it may only serve to dissuade otherwise passionate allies from enthusiastically joining your cause.

Process Notes:

I think for the duration of this class, I’ve felt slightly self-conscious about my selected topic. My classmates have picked specific, tangible problems, while mine is far less impactful on everyday life. Thus, I wrote these pieces to explain, I guess, why I actually care about this. I set out to write this not knowing what would come out, and the letter above is a lightly edited stream-of-consciousness piece that I believe resembles what an actual letter (or email or text) I would write on this topic would look like. I wrote the letter first and the lecture second, which is the opposite order from the order in which I did the readings for this week, which made the process of transforming slightly different, but I focused on two things. First was tone and style. In the lecture, I made an effort to both transform the informal tone into a slightly more formal and intellectual one, while maintaining enough of a natural flow that it could be read aloud. Second was my rhetorical techniques. Rather than leaning on the anecdotal reasoning I have for caring in the letter, in the lecture I stick to more universal claims, with one more universally understandable anecdote thrown in in order to keep the audience’s attention. Finally, I attempt to end each with a sort of call to action, discouraged as I may be: in the letter I ask for advice on how to deal with this phenomenon (under the assumption that this was actually a letter, it additionally fulfills the suggestion of leaving a question to which the recipient can respond to continue conversation), and in the lecture I appeal to the public’s better nature, do eschew this brand of name-calling politics.

The reading from this week that most spoke to me was Walt Whitman’s “Starting From Paumanok.” The title itself is a fairly radical statement – it even would be one today for a white poet – commanding the reader to start in our exploration of America from a Native American viewpoint, the name of Whitman’s home of Long Island in the Native language of Renneiu. The most striking part of the poem to me is his use of Native location names in sections 1, 3, 14, and 16 in order to show the version of America he attempts to convey. In doing so, he reminds the reader of the roots of everywhere he goes; this defamiliarizing of common words and names is a way of writing with purpose that I believe is extremely effective in order to encourage social change, especially in poetry.

    This use of commonly recognized words to invoke a different meaning is also present in Whereas by Layli Long Soldier. The use of the phrase “if they are hungry, let them eat grass” by Andrew Myrick, conveyed by the poet on page 53, invokes the story of Marie Antoinette and causes a sense of the evil, uncaring overlord

Week 6 Writing and Reading

Note: my piece is posted as a pdf in order to conserve formatting, especially strikethrough. This piece is entitled “Code of Conduct.”

I took two years of photography classes in high school and I still get out and shoot as much as possible, so this is something I’ve actually thought about a lot, especially in the realms of street photography and documentary photography. Growing up in DC and now living in Chicago, I’ve lived very comfortably while being in very close proximity to, as this prompt says, “deplorable circumstances.” One thing I’ve always found intriguing is people’s abilities to try to make the best of bad situations: how people decorate totally run-down houses, people’s panhandling strategies, and the way homeless people interact with people who ignore them (much like Mikey’s writing assignment last week). Additionally, both of these cities have very large non-white populations in segregated areas,and a topic that has interested me is attempting to capture white people’s reactions to non-white people in “white areas” and vice versa.

Shooting in either of these scenarios can create a high degree of tension between the photographer and the subject, something Agee addresses in great detail. I have felt uncomfortable at times, often pointing my camera towards people in situations I will never experience. However, a photographer must juxtapose this dynamic with the dynamic that legendary photographer Edward Steichen explained, that “a portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” In order to successfully create a photograph, a photographer must simultaneously engage with the scene he or she wishes to capture and avoid interfering in the scene. Agee addresses this dynamic on page 31, writing about Evans’ subjects “I had been sick in the knowledge that they were here at our demand… in a perversion of self-torture… I gave their leader fifty cents… and said I was sorry we had held them up and that I hoped they would not be late; and he thanked me for them in a dead voice, not looking me in the eye, and they walked away.” This dynamic is crucial: you can either take snapshots in passing and feel like an invader, or work with the subject, in which case you might severely inconvenience them or make their lives more difficult. Agee does a very good job addressing this.