Tag: composition

Intellectual Browsing in the Library / Reading Groups

Intellectual Browsing in the Library

(reading groups next class)

Why Bother With This?

  1. I hope you can make one or more of the following discoveries:  information you didn’t know, a journal that interests you, or a topic that seizes you with desire for reading and writing.
  2. To experience how reading can serve as a catalyst for writing and thinking.
  3. Get introduced to your fellow writer and thinker’s work.
  4. You might begin to see how a personal blog, the NY Post, People Magazine, and the New England Journal of Medicine differ.  Who wrote these texts?
  5. To get acquainted with what I consider an exciting and intellectually stimulating place.

The Activity:  (take notes in your daybook)

  1. Walk over to the library with someone you don’t know very well, and chat with them about their intellectual interests.  What might they write about?  What is their major?  What are they really interested in?  Note your partner’s name and write down some of what they say to you.
  2. On the third floor of the library, you’ll see the most recent copies of publications St. John’s subscribes to.  I want you to GO SLOW and read the names of the journals and pause to flip through some of the pages.  These journals may first appear boring but end up being interesting.  When people miss the point of this activity, they go fast and just try to get it done.  Stay away from what you’d consider intellectually easy (for example, Sports Illustrated) and move toward something you’d say is more complex.  In your daybook, write down the names of three journals that look interesting to you.
  3. Next to the names of the three journals you’ve written down, choose 1 article from each journal that you might want to read.  Copy down the title of the article, the author’s name, and the page numbers that the article appears on.  For example, pgs. 13-43.
  4. Read at least 6 pages of an article.  If the article isn’t 6 pages in length, then read an additional article.  Copy down lines from the article that you find interesting.
  5. Using money on your Storm Card, photocopy at least one page of the article for reading groups next time.
  6. Be sure to note all the bibliographic information from the article you choose to read:  Author/s, Article Title, Journal Title, Volume, Issue, Date Published, Pages.

Homework

  1. For this week or next week, do a Reading For Writing (RFW) entry on your blog over the article you found in the library.  See the syllabus for a full description, but this means you’ll choose golden lines from the article.  Type up those lines in bold, and then free write after the quote sharing whatever the writing gets you to thinking about.
  2. Somewhere in the piece, tell us about who you visited with on the walk to the third floor.
  3. Be sure to use the “son of citation” website (or something like it) to give the full MLA works cited entry at the bottom of your post.
  4. Copy and paste that works cited entry into your “Reading Bibliography” tab on your blog.
  5. Print out a copy of the entry for reading groups next Wednesday.
  6. Be sure to bring your writing and the photocopied page to class next week.

Get the handout at TheTorg.Com

Prof. Torg’s take on Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

If you have a Facebook page, own one of the latest cell phones, blog, or tweet, then you ought to at least check out chapter 13 in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.  In the following quote from the last chapter, a once big-time music executive laments about the state of the business.  Feel free to substitute ART in the place of MUSIC.  Here’s Bennie:

“The problem is,” Bennie went on, “it’s not about sound anymore.  It’s not about music.  It’s about reach.  That’s the bitter pill I had to swallow” (page 312).

Whose taste in art is for sale?

So when Bennie says “reach,” he’s talking Tweets, he’s talking Facebook Friends, and he’s talking hits on somebody’s blog.  The last chapter takes place in the future—and she could just almost be talking about right now—we all have to wonder if a book or album or any kind of art is really good or it’s just being promoted very well.  What is the Tweeter getting paid to say that this new artist is the next Bob Dylan?  What perks or gifts have been sent the book blogger’s way?  I just attended a BEA blogging panel where there was talk of ethics in the blogging world.

It may or may not have occurred to you that a novel can pay-off in various ways:  you can be made to feel as if you get to know the characters like people, the text can make you think, cause you to believe you are getting smarter, or make you bawl your eyes out or want to break stuff.  Another pleasing feature of a text can be the language, the words the writer chooses and the ways that the writer puts the words together in the form of sentences.  Egan’s text has that feature.  There are sentences beyond this one that would make for better examples of word choice but there are some original choices here—prewallet, overhandled, Sow’s Ear—and the clever detail of the guy who drinks flakes of gold.  An expensive habit, especially these days when an ounce of the stuff would cost over $1500.  This quote comes from the first story (notice also that it is a long sentence, not an always easy thing to pull off) when Sasha remembers stealing a wallet from a woman in the restroom while she was on a date.  We’ll also hear about Bennie here and we get to see him in the stories that follow.  He’s worth meeting.  Now here’s Egan’s sentence:

“Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening:  lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticides in his armpits.”

I tore that brown thing out on the side and used it as a bookmark.

This is a novel-in-stories, and I loved the first two.  I moved very logically with Sasha the kleptomaniac to her once boss Bennie in the second story who drinks the gold flakes and picks up his son from a previous marriage.  Most of the characters in the book are connected to the music business.  Egan almost lost me on the third story which takes place on an African Safari.  I felt internally frustrated as I was reading and trying to link each new story to the ones which had come before it.  On page eighty-seven, I wrote in the margins:  “I don’t know what the hell is going on or where I am.”

I gave up on trying to connect the stories and just tried to live in each one as a separate world.  I’d say this reading tactic helped, but really I think what happened is the stories got more interesting.  There were many good stories in a row and then on page two hundred and eight, I knew right where I was.  The stories were puzzling together.  I could see where all the pieces might go.  And then Chapter 12 is a Power-Point slide journal.  I don’t generally go for the story that could be called gimmicky.

I was just at a Writers Conference at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and most of the table moaned when I held up the book and showed off some of the slides.  One student is doing an MFA graphic novel thesis.  Suddenly, she was more interested in the book, and another guy at the table said, “I’ll never read a story like that.”

Fine, readers have their tastes I guess.  For me, Egan and The Goon Squad had won me over by the time the Power Point came up.  By the fifth slide I was laughing and my wife was wondering what was up.  It’s great the way I was taught by the text how to read it.  I say Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is one you ought to read if you’ve got grown up and thinking tastes in reading.  I do.

Citation Information:

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit From the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books,    2011. Print.

Drop me a note if you want:

william.torgerson (at) gmail.com

To Marry or Not? Finding Answers in Suicide Hill

It may or may not be obvious that stories can come from all sorts of places and get written for all sorts of reasons.  Take for example “Suicide Hill.”  It was the first story I ever mentally composed, (as opposed to writing it on paper or typing it on a computer) and I “wrote” it by saying it silently over and over again to myself as I proctored an end-of-course language arts test to middle school students in North Carolina.  The story was partly written out of boredom (what else to do?) but also for a more practical reason:  I had decided I wanted to earn a graduate degree in creative writing, and I needed a story to turn in as a writing sample.

William Torgerson, Bill, Torg, St. John's University, Cherokee McGhee Press
My Mental Setting for Suicide Hill: Crown Hill Cemetery in Winamac, Indiana

Back then–this was around the year 2000–the only other text I had written was a messed-up manuscript that represented one year’s worth of writing where each morning before school I typed up 800 words of whatever I could remember about getting divorced.  It was in fact the very manuscript that clued me in that I needed some help learning to write.  I didn’t really even know what getting help might mean back then, (now it means I had to learn how to read like a writer) but I’d read John Irving somewhere saying something about how Kurt Vonnegut had saved him a lot of time. (Vonnegut, I proudly remind you, is a fellow native of Indiana.)

According to Irving, Vonnegut had been able to teach him something that sped up the process of learning to write.  Perhaps even more importantly, I was beginning to believe that writing was something that could be learned sort of in the same way I’d learned to shoot a basketball:  with some of the right fundamentals, a lot of desire, and an enormous amount of regular practice.

Can you learn to write in the same way you can learn to play ball? Here I am in my younger days.

Next came the question that pops up every year or so for me:  what to write?  Back when I’d earned an MA in English Education, I participated in something The National Writing Project calls the summer institute.  Doing that, I’d prepared a teaching demonstration (think writing teachers writing together) that had emerged from my reading of Stephen King’s On Writing.  I had potential writers survey their life for details looking for subject matter they could bring into a story.  I applied that lesson to my own thinking and what I began to consider was that I was in a relationship that was teetering toward marriage, this even though I’d promised myself to never marry again.  Back then, I was in a relationship great enough that it was challenging my old promise to myself to keep to myself.  In writing “Suicide Hill,” I wanted to write a story that would tell me how to live my life.  It worked, but not in the way that I expected it to.

My Personal Notes for Class With Links: Thur. 1/20/2011

Lesson Plans / Jan. 20, 2010 / First Day

Prof. Bill Torgerson

English Composition

The Metaphor

  • Don’t know what to write
  • Gap between speaker and audience
  • Energy
  • The notion of a larger conversation, also the professional conversation

Take everybody through the big idea as written on the syllabus

Emphasize:  WHAT DO YOU WANT TO INVESTIGATE?

We will build on what has been done before.  My expectations for your work will have evolved from the work that was done before.  What I’m asking you to do this semester will be at least slightly different from what I asked of the students last semester.

Writing territories:

Blog:

Scholarly Personal Narrative:

Documentary Film:

http://proftorg.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/prof-torgs-reccomended-documentaries/

Watch some student films on my computer

Final Portfolio:

http://suchissally.wordpress.com/

http://crista16.wordpress.com

For Mon. 1/24:

  • Buy a composition journal for daily note taking.  We’ll call this a Daybook because Prof. Torg really admired this guy named Donald Murray who used that term.
  • Click here to be taken to the course website:  http://stjohns.campusguides.com/content.php?pid=175144
  • Go to the “Click Here for Student Blogs” tab.  Click on Prof. Torg’s blog (it’s first) and read his “Dear Swimmers in Language” letter that explains this course.  Once you get your blog set up, write us a note to launch your blog and introduce yourself to us.
  • On the course website, click on the “Sample Work/Tutorial Videos” tab and watch Prof. Torgerson’s video titled “Getting Started with a WordPress Blog.”
  • Set up a WordPress Blog.  Email Professor Torgerson your link.  If your blog is to be private, add him as a reader.  Use this format:  LAST NAME, FIRST NAME (CLASS TIME)
  • Return to Prof. Torg’s blog and find the post entitled “Writing Territories.”  Copy and paste the prompts into your own new blog post.  Respond to the prompts by making lists after each prompt.  At the end of your lists, choose something from your list to write about.  Tell us a story from that item on your list or tell us about one of those items on your list.  The total word count should be 400 words.  If you find yourself short, go back to your “writing territories” list and write about something in addition to what you’ve already written.

Music and Movies Book Group at Barnes and Noble:  I do a book group the third Monday night of each month.  On the night of Monday, Feb. 21st, we’re going to discuss Chuck Klosterman’s book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

Time permitting:  Form a group of five.  Learn each other’s names.  What have people in your history said about how to write?  In other words, list 5 rules for writing that you’ve heard someone say or that you’ve learned for yourself.  Finally, come up with a definition for good writing.

NCTE asks, “What are some of the most important changes you have seen in teaching and literacy education?”

Not so long ago, I was very content as my students and I wrote together with pens on paper in what Donald Murray called the daybook.  If some of my administrators hadn’t encouraged me to integrate technology, I don’t know if I ever would have tried to weave it into our writing.  The students and I are still after intellectual seeds on paper, but we’re all also typing up our drafts into blogs, customizing the looks of the virtual pages we publish, and we have much easier access to each other’s work.  Students who used to write just for the teacher now write for an authentic audience:  at least their classmates or if they choose, for thousands on public blogs or in their Facebook posts.   It used to look like the world was gravitating towards a seat on the couch watching television or playing video games, and now many of my students are daily, sometimes obsessive, writers.  I’m excited and also anxious about what all this will mean for literacy.