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Short Assignment 3: Audience

A while back, I really hated the idea that I had to choose some kind of audience when I write. I remember talking with my mother in the car, and asking her how I would advertise my work, and I got really irritable when she told me I needed to “choose an audience” more than once. I was mad about it because I wanted my work to be viewed by everyone. I wanted anyone to be able to see and understand the words I was trying to say, until I learned that just recently, unless you have some kind of audience, or genre in mind, it would get increasingly difficult for anyone to even look my way. Like if I held up a sign at a convention that said “writer’s group,” and no one would care to see what was at my booth. But if I held up a sign that said “lovecraftian,” or even “horror writing booth,” it would be able to turn some heads at least 5% more easily. Apparently, you have to choose who you’re trying to speak to if you want your words to be found, even if they might not be exactly who they’re intended for. 

I believe that Livington was trying to speak to those who doubt themselves and or have been told that they won’t succeed. I could see that Livingston is a very confident person, and it shows in the enthusiasm in his voice and the rhythm of his words. In a way, he reminded me of that older kid from the Sandlot, the one who encourages Smalls to play baseball. All Smalls needed was someone to believe in him, and give him a chance at baseballs. As soon as he had enough confidence, he was able to play as good as anyone else on his team, and that’s what Livingston reminds me of. He mentions a similar thing happening to him when his teacher gave him a chance to write and address speeches.

“I was in the 7th grade, when Ms. Parker told me, “Donovan, we can put your excess energy to good use!” And she introduced me to the sound of my own voice. She gave me a stage. A platform. She told me that our stories are ladders That make it easier for us to touch the stars. So climb and grab them. Keep climbing. Grab them. Spill your emotions in the big dipper and pour out your soul. Light up the world with your luminous allure.”

A lot of the times, it takes someone’s own self-doubt to become their downfall, and for those who had trouble taking up a baseball glove, THAT’S who Livingston chose for his audience.

Anzaldua’s piece, I believe, was aimed more at those who’s first language wasn’t English, or who have possibly been bullied for that reason. Though it doesn’t specifically need to be about only her language; it could range from anyone Spanish to Chinese, Korean, Hindi etc. And I think she tries to connect to these people by talking about moments in her life when she’s been unjustly punished for speaking her home-language.

“I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess - that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the comer of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. "If you want to be American, speak 'American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong."

People sometimes write to connect with those outside their range of touch, and when read about similar situations to your own, you feel like you’re not alone out there.

In terms of if my view has changed after reading these pieces of work, I’ll have to say yes, and no. It is important to know who you’re talking to in order to have your message reach SOMEONE, but there are some exceptions to this rule, especially if you’re writing something experimental or new. Sometimes when you don’t write specifically for anyone, they can be anyone, it’s just harder to find those people because everyone wants some form of direction, and no one wants to waste their time in case they read something that might mean nothing to them. Writing for no one is hard, but it can work sometimes, I believe. 

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Short Assignment 2 Pt. 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1u4ka8T8-Q Amazing Spider-Man 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc Steve Jobs 2015

As I read/listened to the commencement speeches, I entered it with an, honestly, unfair sense of pessimism and an “oh no, not again” kind of attitude because I feel like they were going to be cliched. And they honestly were a little, but something really did surprise me about them. I felt like all of them were just going to talk about the “future” and “hope” like it’s all going to be great; that the world after college will be easy and stress-free, but as I listened, the “future” was referred in a sort of translucent sense. Something you can look past in order to see something else. Every speech had their own theme. For Spider-Man’s, it was about becoming the thing that people believe in. For Collins’, it felt sort of self-aware. But all had something to say about the future. And yes, of course they would; all commencement addresses are there to say “there’s another step in your life coming up,” but it felt like there was another message in there. Something that goes past the superficial-ness in order to say what the writer really wants to tell us. It’s like if someone told them, “hey you have to write something about the future. It’s absolutely required. I don’t care how you do it.” And, yes, the writers did that, but only as a tool to give a better, maybe even more personal message. 

It reminds me of Kubrick's adaptation of the Shining. He took the outline and characters of the book, but changed the message. Whereas the book was about the fear of hurting your own family, the movie was playing more on the fear of the lack of understanding. These writers may have done a similar thing.

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Short Assignment 2 Pt. 1

“Genre” is used for categorizing a type of written work. This can apply to books, but it can also be used for movies and video games. Usually when people are looking for a specific thing, but don’t know the name of it, they’ll search for it in the genre that best fits it, though they may not perfectly match the category due to it belonging in more than one. Say if you were looking for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, you will probably look for it in the “fantasy” genre. If you’re looking for Star Wars, you’ll find it in sci-fi/sci-fantasy. If you are looking for Alice and Wonderland... Good luck?

Usually when writer’s intentionally base their work on a certain genre, they’re trying to appeal to a certain audience, though more often than not, at least in the stuff I like, writer’s only use the term “genre” so that they can hook “people;” Just people. Not a specific audience, but something that multiple different personalities can enjoy. You could say that when you put something in a genre it doesn’t belong to, and present it to the public that it DOES belong, it would be false advertising. That’s true, maybe, but a good kind of false advertising. In October 2019, Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix came out in theaters, and beforehand it was advertised as a comic book film about the character with the same name; Joker, not Phoenix.  And from what I heard, it was a hit, but had nothing to do with the comic book rendition of the character. It was story about mental-illness, depression, loneliness, but not in the mind of the Clown-Prince of Crime, but in the mind of a normal, broken man with a gun.

The film makes a statement about how one person, regardless of what their mental state is in, can have a dangerous effect on society and the media after being belittled and even tortured by the higher class. All this person needed was a gun, face paint, and one shooting on TV, and everyone living in a similar situation as him see this person as someone deserving of worship, that they’re this big wise leader who will help them rise up against the spoiled, rich higher ups that have wronged them, but he’s just some guy; he didn’t even know what he was doing, and accepted the praise for his own pride.

That’s an important message, saying that when people are misguided, they can cause chaos, but no one wants to see a movie about that because it’s different and controversial. So, what are you going to do? Slap the name Joker on it so that the audience can say, “This is gonna be a comic-book film. This is a genre I’m interested in, so this must be worth seeing.” If it wasn’t for that categorizing, no one would want to see it.

In Wring in the Works, I read this passage:

“When left to our devices, you make the choice of genre by analyzing a rhetorical situation. Each of the elements -genre, purpose, audience, voice, design- are interrelated. If you care a great deal of the purpose of eating local and organic food, for example, and you want to write about that topic, you have to decide what you are trying to accomplish. If it is to persuade others to your way of thinking, you have to figure out your audience. Whom do you want to persuade? If your intended audience is the fast-food loving college student, then how do you want to best reach that audience? What kind of evidence do you have to amass? What kind of voice will help change the students’ minds? What is the best genre for your purpose and your audience. There is no one answer.”

When you have a message that you wish to convey, it’s important to find out who you’re talking to. I like to think that in terms of Joker, some grew up reading about the character, normal children, normal people, and saw him as this big-symbol of what not to do; who you’re not supposed to become. In the books he’s worshiped by criminals and other villains for murder and chaos, and they see him as a genius who knows every step of his own plan. Those kids are all grown up now. The writers knew this and decided that in this movie, the Joker is just a man. Anyone could do what he did if they had a gun, and anyone lost can see those people as something that they’re not. So, Joker is a comic book film, for anyone who doesn’t know what real evil looks like, what the evil of the adult world looks like.

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Short Assignment 1 Pt. 2

Regarding the commencement address by Billy Collins.

Do you have moments in your life where someone tall, old, and seemingly smarter than you because they’re elderly and more word-magical make you die inside by saying something that they somehow knew could hurt you the most, but put it in real nice-sounding words?

If I hit the most honest part of me, (which also happens to be the grossest) the only bit that I can say “spoke to me” the most was when Collins talked about that bit about the lanyard. And as it spoke to me, it also beat me with a chair, kick me while I was on the ground, spat on me, and forced me to watch that scene in Bambi where the mother gets shot on loop about thirty-thousand times… while playing When She Loved Me by Randy Newman.

What made it worse was that whole speech before about the future, saying how it doesn’t exist; reminding me that I CAN, probably, in this moment, do something to fix all the damage I’ve done over the years to that woman and finally repay with some kind of lanyard. I can’t do that; I don’t know how, or even if I want to. 

My eyes began to sting by the time I read this part:

“I had never seen anyone use a lanyard, or wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, set cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor.”

See, the funny thing is that this works, and it carries most of the factors I love in writing, and because of that, it makes it all the more painful. It’s personal, there’s heart, and it may even be symbolic. Maybe the lanyard is just a term for all the great things he did for her, all the things he repaid her for; maybe the “counselor” helped them with something that needed to be fixed. I’m not sure; I don’t know if I’d ask him. Because in knowing and listening to someone who had gotten even with their mother while I don’t know if I can makes me feel more alone.

But it’s perfect, I guess. It’s perfect because it makes me feel something. It both relates to me, and reminds me of how gross I am. It's perfect writing when you feel it in your chest, and those words know who you are in a way that no one else does.

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Short Assignment 1 Pt. 1

My name is Luke Callina. I’m an amateur writer who's been working on their first book for about four to five years, now. I made a stupid pen name for myself when I was ten, Redhat Luke. And I like mayonnaise on hot dogs.

I was told to talk about “where I’ve been,” but I wasn’t sure if they were asking about where I’ve been in terms of education, like what schools I’ve been to etc, or if they literally meant where I’ve been physically before coming to BCC. 

If it’s the former: I was/currently still kind of a home school student. When I was younger, the teachers put me on the side of the class in grade school due to them not wanting to deal with a kid on the autism spectrum, or a kid that would draw death-related things, and they wouldn’t let me learn anything that most kids would, so most of my education had to be taught back at my home in Somerset. Social isolation galore! I didn’t like it.

If it's the latter: I’ve just been at my house, alone, writing, contemplating useless things. I did go to the Providence Place Mall a few days ago, I guess. Wish I lived in providence, if I’m honest. After all, it is home to my favorite writer, H.P. Lovecraft. He was a horror/sci-fi writer terrified of anything that wasn’t white and snobby. Not the best guy, really, but I still read his stuff. He’s dead now. 

Isn’t it kind of funny how you can take terrible people like him, learn that they’re dead, and that somehow makes it feel as though they were less of a person, and more of a fictional character? Usually with characters, you tend to make up things about who they were because, of course, you can’t actually talk to them. You make up these little head-cannons about things that aren’t actually a part of them, because you want to feel like they’re someone you know.

The same rules apply to the people who inspire you, whether they are dead or not. Though, in terms of Lovecraft, if he were still alive, I wouldn’t even touch his stuff, I don’t think. After all, you wouldn’t look at Hitler’s paintings and feel comfortable about admiring them; and a lot of me still doesn’t with Lovecraft. If a writer dies, and had nothing left of them but words on paper or a screen, you can imagine whatever significance you want out of their work. And being a loner kid, terrified of the adult world and being controlled by things I didn’t understand, a lot of his writing spoke to me. Like all the things I was afraid of turned to fiction, and I felt that someone, even if they were dead, knew exactly how I felt.

In Lovecraft’s short story, The Call of Cthulhu, the opening statement turned into my favorite quote. Not only inspiring to me in terms of writing, but also in terms of how I feel about the world.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance, in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.The sciences each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful image therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation, or flea from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

This man was just writing a horror story, and this one line was the best way he could convey the fears of things you can’t understand or comprehend. Things that make you feel as though if you take one wrong step, you could lose everything or die. People and relationships were like that to me. I’ve been in too many situations where I’ve been hurt, manipulated and controlled. And to those people, I can’t forgive them. 

Too scared of that happening to me again, I hid in my house, away from people, and even ignored and hurt most of my family. So, you can imagine me reading that opening, and seeing that someone put how I felt into words. 

That’s my goal as a writer; to convey my feelings in a way that suits me, through fiction or not. Because no matter how I put the way I feel in front of a person, they can’t ever hear it. It’s like I’m speaking a language no one gets. It sucks enough living in a world where no one understands you, and it’s absolute hell living in a world where no one gets you, either.

P.S. I was also told to give five or more key that define interesting writing for me. So…

1. For me, there has to have some form of “heart” in it for me to really enjoy or stay interested in what I’m reading. Usually, it’s difficult for me to enjoy someone’s writing when there isn’t any passion in the works. And the reason for that is because when the thought that something was made is purely meant to have you give the author money, it feels empty. And that’s really difficult when nowadays everything is produced to make some form of money. 

2. Usually when I read a nonfiction piece, I like for there to be an “exaggeration” factor to it. Not to the point where it’s full on lying, but to the point where something is so ridiculous it’s impossible to believe it, but the core of the piece is still realistic. For example: I’ll take about a million pictures of a document I need, due to the fact that there’s a monster in my room whose sole existence is to take them from me.

3. I’m a large fan of “symbolism.” Poems and riddles are usually what I like most that carry this factor, though sometimes non-fictional stories also carry it. For example: Maus, a novel by Art Spiegel writes his family’s story of when they suffered in Nazi concentration camps. He intentionally depicts the Nazi soldiers as cats, and the Jews as rats. Symbolism lets readers use their imagination and look for meaning even when it may not be there. I think people often look too deeply in written works, (me included) and though we can be annoying about it if we try milking a yellow rose dry of whatever fake meaning it might have, there’s massive level of fun readers like us have when symbolism is involved. And it makes us re-read what’s on the paper.

4. If something has a “personal” quality to someone’s work, it’s more engaging to read. I really enjoy writers who take things that they’ve either learned from their life, and translate it onto a page. I often hear that there should be ‘morals’ when you in the things that you read, but usually these morals are things that don’t apply to everyone. The answer isn’t always ‘be good to others,’ or ‘tell her how you feel.’ I love when writers put their personal morals in the works, things that they themselves would do, rather than something politically correct and said by anyone too scared to go into deeper detail.

5. “Growth” is very important to me when I’m reading something. I enjoy looking at someone’s current work, and going back to see what they were like before. It gives me a little hope when my work’s complete garbage, as well. It makes me tell myself, ‘hey, you can always fix yourself when given the chance.”

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