To Be In A Time of Good; Or To Be In a Time of Evil; Or To Be In A Time of Evil

To wake up at 6:10 to lug a cooler of water and Coke Zero to the bus to be kind. To leave to be in Iowa by 9:30.

To plan to sleep on the bus, only to find it impossible as the bus bounces along the not-quite-smooth highways across the state as my heart beats along with the bus. To find myself, instead, scrolling through the four social media I check, rotating from one to the other to the other to the other.

To find hope in this hopeless and pointless perusal, to find myself smiling as I remember “Big Structural Bailey,” and to prehydrate; to find myself parched while speaking to caucusgoers would mean a lack of preparation on my part.

To converse cordially with the canvassers around me: to remark on their and my candidates’ chances, to ridicule others, and to agree: we’re all here for the right reasons.

To mock “Vote Blue No Matter Who!” but to know that all of us, at least, will follow the maxim to the letter.

To settle in to my seat, to ride two hours more, to be in it for the long haul. To be in this for the long haul.

To wake up at 6:10 to lug a cooler of water and Coke Zero to the bus to be kind. To leave to be in Iowa by 9:30.

To plan to sleep on the bus, only to find it impossible as the bus bounces along the not-quite-smooth highways across the state as your heart beats along with the bus. To find yourself, instead, scrolling through the four social media you check, rotating from one to the other to the other to the other.

To find motivation in this pointed perusal, to smirkingly recall “Big Structural Bailey,” and to prehydrate; to find yourself parched while speaking to caucusgoers would mean a lack of preparation on your part.

To tensely plan with the canvassers around you: to remark on your candidate’s chance, to ridicule others, and to think you’re here for the right reasons.

To mock “Vote Blue No Matter Who!”

To settle in to your seat, to ride two hours more, to be in it for the long haul.

To wake up at 6:10 to lug a cooler of water and Coke Zero to the bus. To leave to be in Iowa by 9:30.

To plan to sleep on the bus, only to find it impossible as the bus bounces along the not-quite-smooth highways across the corrupt state. To find yourself, instead, scrolling through the four social media bubbles you inhabit, rotating from one to the other to the other to the other.

To sink your hope into this hopeless and pointless perusal and to drink water; to find yourself parched while speaking to caucusgoers would be pretty dumb on your part.

To ignore the canvassers around you: to remark on your candidates’ ridiculous chances, to ridicule others.

To mock “Vote Blue No Matter Who!”

To settle in to your seat, to ride two hours more, to be in it for the long haul.

Process Notes:

I decided to focus on what was essentially a moment in time, sitting on the bus this past Sunday on my way to Iowa to canvass for Elizabeth Warren. What was so significant about this moment, to me, was the fact that I was travelling there with people from the Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Bennet campaigns, and we were friendly and cordial the whole time. In a world so devoid of nuance that I selected its absence as my subject for this class, every conversation I had was full of it – people were willing to acknowledge our chosen candidates’ flaws and their opponents’ strengths. For this reason, I chose to write about this moment from my perspective. That is the first version, the real version, the “this is a ‘Time of Good’” version. The following two are from the perspective of a Democrat who hates other candidates, and the second is from the perspective of Republicans who hates all Democrats. I tried to keep as much of the language as possible the same, but changing enough to change both the tone and the message.

Keene’s vocabulary and tone in Gloss, or, The Strange History Of Our Lady of the Sorrows most closely reminds me at first of the language used by older textbooks I’ve read on specific topics, which fits well the source he draws from, which appears to be an historical account of Catholics in Early America (strangely, I could not find any record of this book online). However, with closer reading of the opening paragraphs of Keene’s imposition, it becomes clear that, while the sentence structure and vocabulary carries that same formulation as the text it is amending, the focus is very different. The focus on the characters and aspects of everyday life draws the spotlight to Carmel, as opposed to what one might call the “bigger picture.”

As he proceeds throughout the piece, the piece becomes more narrative and less informative in tone, but still includes some aspects of the more informative style. For instance, Keene writes on page 120, “She slid the book, under the bed, and — Some time later, she felt something tugging at her hand and foot.” This sentence, while conveying information included in narrative but not in informational accounts, still uses a slightly stilted tone. The abrupt “Some time later…” transition and the lack of adjectives and adverbs contribute to the deviation from a standard narrative style.

From: Hardman, John. “The Great Depression and the New Deal.” Ethics of Development in a Global Environment (EDGE), Stanford University, 26 July 1999, web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/soc_sec/hgreat.htm.

The following passage is taken from a web post written by a Stanford student about the Great Depression and the New Deal. While it is not a professional history, it is representative of common misconceptions about the New Deal and its effects on different groups of people. Footnotes are not allowed in this text editor, so I’ve added them as italicized parentheticals.

Blacks in the Depression and the New Deal

The Great Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of black Americans (This is true). African Americans were the first people to be fired from their jobs as they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs blacks often received substantially less aid than whites (yup), and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks from their soup kitchens. It was an extremely poor and desperate time for most African Americans (mmhmm).

The black American’s economic struggles sparked major political developments among the blacks. Beginning in 1929, the St. Louis Urban League launched a national “jobs for Negroes” movement by boycotting chain stores that had mostly black customers but hired only white employees. Efforts to unify black organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937.

The Roosevelt Administration’s accessibility to black leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened black support for the Democratic party Roosevelt bad many black leaders, members of a so-called “black Cabinet,” were served as advisers to him. Among them were the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as the National Youth Administration’s director of Negro affairs; William H. Hastie, who in l937 became the first black federal judge; Eugene K. Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League; Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier; and the economist Robert C Weaver.4

Blacks benefited greatly from New Deal programs though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to black families ( I need to tell you the story of how I “benefited greatly from New Deal programs.” Two years ago, I lost my job at the meatpacking plant. It wasn’t a fun job; I’ve seen my coworkers and friends lose fingers to the spinning saws, and I myself have a scar running from the tip of my elbow down and around to the base of my thumb, ripped open by a jagged shard of leg bone three months after I started work. When I lost my job, I didn’t panic. I’d seen in the Defender that the economy was in a downturn, but at that point I think we all thought that it would be over soon. It’s lasted so much longer than any of us expected. We’ve found ways to turn salt pork, beans, and the occasional chicken foot into email, but it honestly doesn’t resemble what we used to eat. No matter, Alma doesn’t seem to remember what we used to eat, and my wife and I would eat stones to keep a roof over our heads.
I saw my buddy Frank from the plant the other day. I was in line at the government office down on Michigan, hoping beyond hope that I’d get enough to make it through the week. Frank was taking the streetcar East to the lake from the white neighborhood he lives in, but when he saw me he got off and we got to talking.He told me what he’s been up to and my mind was blown. Two weeks after being laid off, he found a job on a WPA construction project digging a tunnel along State under the Loop for a subway. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody in my neighborhood had even heard of such a thing. From what he said, I guess they have some Blacks on the job, but they’re the kind of people who lived up North before the crash, who used to work in the skyscrapers downtown. Nobody from my neighborhood was working there. There’s no end in sight for me. But at least Frank’s doing well.). The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled black youths to continue their education. The Work Projects Administration gave jobs to many blacks, and its Federal Writers Project supported the work of many authors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Waters Turpin, and Melvin B. Tolson.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); established in the mid-1930s, organized large numbers of black workers into labor unions for the first time. By 1940, there were more than 200,000 blacks in the CIO, many of them officers of union locals.

Process Notes:

I originally set out to write about the debate over past political debates, looking for descriptions of the New Deal debate, but I found this. In a class entitled Introduction to Black Chicago, we just learned about Black Chicagoans during the Depression. Although the City of Chicago did benefit greatly from New Deal programs, Black Chicagoans were generally excluded from reaping most of the benefits. I decided to write about the daily life of one of those Chicagoans, how the Depression was experienced by different people, and how he would have learned this in an extremely segregated city.

    When I read the first few pages of Sabrina, I did not know what to expect. I have read only three other graphic novels of the non-superhero variety: Fun Home, Persepolis, and Strange Fruit. While the three of these varied greatly in content and style, the two areas in which Sabrina is immediately different are pacing and artistic detail. 

    Beginning with the latter, the artistic style of Nick Drnaso is immediately striking; he uses dull tones, generic faces and bodies, and few background details. This is very effective in accomplishing two tasks: focusing attention on the characters and dialogue, and creating contrast when the artistic style changes, most notably when, in dream sequences, the page becomes black, with people and objects outlined in various bright colors. Because the artwork is so simplistic, it focuses attention on where there are details: for example, a change in the angle of the line that illustrates a character’s mouth is the only change between two panels, drawing attention to that character’s change in emotion between panels.

    The second area of difference is the pacing. Seemingly every page includes blank panels, signifying pauses in conversation. This use of blank panels is absolutely crucial in conveying emotion; where another book might simply use an ellipse in the dialogue in order to convey a pause, a blank panel is significantly more effective in signifying a pause, especially in conversations where Teddy’s trauma is a factor.

https://twitter.com/QueenInYeIIow/status/1219081537976709121 (Tweeted by @QueenInYellow 8:17 PM,  Jan 19, 2020)

https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1219015376530485249 (Tweeted 3:54 PM, Jan 19, 2020, Retweeted by @QueenInYellow about 5-6 hours later)

One day, sometime in the last half-decade or so, I woke up and the world was binary. Let me clarify. I did not, as characters of varied science fictions do, open my eyes and see strings of 0s and 1s. Rather, each object in my room had a value associated with it: “good” or “bad.” It wasn’t an instinct or even really a word assigned to it, but rather, I just knew that everything in my room was either good or bad. I had been out late the night before, so my reflection was bad. The picture with my parents, perched on the edge of my dresser, was good. The weekend before, I had finally pulled the trigger and bought the dark green comforter I’d had my eye on for a while, but up until today, I’d been unsure whether it went with the color of my room and my bed. But now I was sure. It didn’t. It was bad.

Life is easier when you’re sure of things. Actually, scratch that. “Sure” is the wrong word. “Sure” implies that the people around me could have other opinions. As I mentioned above, it wasn’t like that; I knew what was good and what was bad.

People have asked me what it was like to lose friends because of this change. I tell them that I didn’t. From the moment I heard Jeff say that “we might not get Medicare-for-all on day one, even in a Sanders presidency,” I knew that he was no longer my friend. Six days later, I was talking to my mom on the phone when she said “it’s sad, but I just feel like Biden might be the only one who can beat Trump,” and I haven’t spoken to her since. I’d say that I feel good about my decisions, but no part of that sentence would be true. I don’t feel good; I know that my actions were good. I made no decision to leave these people behind; rather, it was the only action I could take. 

Since that day, I have, however, gained a community. It turns out there are millions of us who know absolute good from absolute bad. Additionally, I have learned that there are tens of millions of others who believe they know good from bad. Unfortunately for them, I know that every single one of their opinions is wrong and bad.

My daily routine consists of two things. First I go to work, where I do public relations and social media strategy for ExxonMobil. When I get home, I go straight to Twitter so I can make sure other people know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m providing a service, educating people who don’t know better that their opinions are wrong and that that makes them bad people.

Unfortunately for them, once they’re wrong once, they’re wrong forever. I honestly do not know when politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, actors and activists like Bradley Whitford and Alyssa Milano, or reporters like Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow first became bad, but I do know that I have never seen them say anything good.

I guess that’s just the way it is now.

Working Notes

The two tweets linked above seemingly contradict each other, one criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren for not creating conflict with former Vice President Joe Biden, and one making fun of her for criticizing him. The only commonalities are that they were tweeted/retweeted by the same account, less than a couple hours apart, and that they are both critical of Senator Warren. I decided to attempt to tell the story of how a person gets to the point of critiquing opposite stances by the same person. By caricaturing the idea that someone knows pure right from pure wrong, I attempted to create the logical leaps that would lead to this cognitive dissonance. By ending with “I guess that’s just the way it is now,” I connect this phenomenon from the individual person to the societal level.

Version 1

As I stand in the diminutive rectangular prism, showered by water from the sprayer directly overhead, I tear myself away from pondering the questions of today and tomorrow and, for the first time, actually take the time to see.

In front of and below my eyes, the metallic snake sprouts from the wall, an oval of dulled chrome, distorting my reflection to the point of unrecognizability. From there, the silvered snake creeps skyward, to a point mere inches above my head, where it forms a handle, a white dulled by hourly use for several years. The handle enlarges and comes to a head, as it were, poked under the chin with dozens of holes, from which the water sprays. The rain from this oblong cloud cascades down atop me and streams to my feet, where it briefly pauses, as if to say goodbye, before it slides down, into the bowels of the building, through the city, and into the Lake.

This box that encapsulates me, the box where I find clarity, is barely broad enough for my elbows, let alone a single splayed arm. Below me, the floor. Mostly white, with some stains of a questionable light brown. The drain, a reflection of the head above, another metallic sieve through which the water cascades. A lone hair or two rest on its edge, perhaps mine, perhaps some past occupant’s. To my back, front, and left, the walls. Walls of tiles of a white I do not recognize. I hope that, when I was five or six, the tiles shone with the brilliance of the white marble they were meant to emulate. However, today, discolored by thousands of gallons of water and thousands of hours of cleaning, the white is unrecognizably flat, the same color as the grayed grout that binds this box together. To my right, the ivory curtain hangs, folds, and billows like a wave of cream, frozen in time. Above me, the ceiling. The singular source of light comes streaming from the center, a sun in a sepia photograph, in the center of the taupe sky.

I close my eyes, stick my head under the water, and return to my pondering.

Version 2 

Awoken from stasis by the sound of a handle twisting, I find myself propelled into the chrome tube by pressure I provided last week. I’ve taken this journey a billion times, a single minuscule particle working with those around me to accomplish the task. I snake toward the sky before quickly being ejected from the mouth of the tube. To me, the cavern I shoot through is gaping, but when I turn back and admire my provenance, I recognize it as but one of dozens of such origins, littered across the surface of an oval high above me.

I crash headlong into the skin of he who turned the handle, and stream down until I reach the splotched floor. I flow towards the metallic grate in the center, and hesitate for one last moment on its edge, peering up and taking in my surroundings. Far above, a sun shines from set deep within a milky white ceiling. Looming on three sides are pearly tiles and grayed grout stretching upwards into oblivion. On the fourth, I get a fleeting glimpse of the outside world under a rippling facade, stretching forever upwards until it, too, meets the sepia sky above.

Process Notes

This was my second go at this assignment, as you’ll know if you saw the old one. I chose to write about the shower, because it is where I do some of my best thinking, including about the issue I’ll be tackling this quarter, and including the moment of inspiration that led me to write about the shower itself, as it turns out. I wrote it out in the order I did for a couple conscious reasons. The first paragraph follows the path of the water from the moment it enters the shower to the moment it leaves the shower in order to add vibrancy to the scene. This is necessary because nobody really experiences a shower without the water, so I figured it was necessary to add its presence. The second paragraph forms the shower itself, hopefully exhibiting the baseline experience of the dormitory shower: a slightly gross, whitish small rectangular prism. By describing the four walls, the floor, and the ceiling, I try to emphasize both what an occupant sees (the gross off-white color) and what an occupant feels (confinement).

In my second version, I address the idea that water is necessary for the existence of the shower as we experience by examining the shower from the perspective of a water molecule.

To me, these readings address two very different, although perhaps complementary topics that require distinction. In my 10th grade chemistry class, we spent a while discussing the difference between accuracy and precision. Of the two major texts we read, Lippman addresses accuracy and Calvino addresses precision (as is the first word of his lecture). While these terms are often conflated, they have notably distinct meanings here. Calvino’s lecture delves into description of the world around us, largely the natural world, and, in his word, “exactitude.” The first thing to note is that he abstains from addressing the accuracy of description, rather addressing the precision of description of the world around us, using the ancient Egyptian word Maat to exemplify what precision means. Maat represented a mythical feather that was weighed against souls. What is interesting to me in Calvino’s use of Maat in this context is that it does not exactly line up with his use of “exactitude” later on. The line in this lecture that most intrigued me is his quote of Hofmannsthal, “Depth must be hidden. Where? on the surface” (p. 93), especially as it related to precision and Maat. The idea that there is information hidden on the surface requires precision. For example, in a purely technical sense, the more information is embedded in a small area, the more precise the instrument required to extract that information. However, on the topic of Maat, the relation is less clear. There is no depth hidden on the surface of that mythical feather, so it appears there are two slightly different meanings of precision and exactitude at play here: the amount of information carried (such as the Maat and to a certain extent Hofmannsthal’s theory) and the precision of information conveyed.

The way this plays out in writing perhaps makes this make more sense when exemplified: a well-placed adjective can be either. A word like vermilion embodies the latter form of precision, specifying exactly what shade of red an object is. A word like “presidential,” for instance, can embody the former, conveying lots of information, but only if used correctly and precisely.