750-MRE for Monday

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Bryan

Welcome back to sunny Indianapolis, spring breakers. We’re going to get right back into the multigenre swing of things with an essay on mooning by Daniel Nester, author of HOW TO BE INAPPROPRIATE.

In class on Monday, we’re going to break into small groups. Each small group will be responsible for one of the following question sets. You can use your 750 to prepare for Monday’s class, or you can use it to keep working on your MRE. Your call. Here are the questions:

1. Craft: what might you steal from this essay?

2. Unity: what connective tissues hold this thing together? How does the writer manage transitions?

3. Comedy & Gravity: what are the sources of humor in this piece? What gives this piece gravity? How does the writer balance the two?

4. Exposition: how does the writer work in exposition? What makes the exposition different from what you might find in a dictionary—in other words, how does he process the information to make it his own?

5. Approach: what types of sources did the writer use? What approaches did he take to research? What angles did he take on the topic?

6. Openings & Endings: What’s the logic behind the beginning and end of this essay? Why open and end this way? What can we take from this? In other words, how might this essay inform the opening and ending of your piece?

Oh, and here’s some bonus Nester that might inform your own research and writing. This is from an interview he did with Bookslut:

Q: Why mooning, a short cultural history? And in the acknowledgments, you thank Operation Moon. How’d that work? How’d you choose your team? What was the editing process? Where there any close contender variations that didn’t make the final cut. Like, say, “Boon”: Somebody mooning while simultaneously booing, e.g., a referee, a local politician, that guy from Creed.

A: The initial impulse to write about mooning came from reading, rather randomly, an article on JSTOR, a scholarly database. I forget what I was researching, but when I came across Jeffrey S. Ravel “The Coachman’s Bare Rump: An Eighteenth-Century French Cover-up” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, Winter 2007: 279-308), an account of how, on on January 21, 1763, a coachman for a French nobleman mooned the audience after an opera performance, I just got lost in the whole mooning business. And I liked the idea of an essay being a collection of Real Knowledge, the whole notion of authorship really being that of a collector of other’s thoughts, not just personal musing yadda yadda yadda. I knew there were several nicknames for varieties of mooning — the pressed ham, for example, or the plumber’s crack — I sent out an email asking for different kinds of moons. I got a whole bunch from several corners of my life. Some passed along the email to people whom they knew would have names for different moons. Thank god for email, no matter what that John Freeman says. I wanted to give them all credit, so Team Moon it is!

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52 Responses to 750-MRE for Monday

  19. Sydnee Willoughby says:
    March 21, 2011 at 9:14 am

    ttp://750words.com/entries/share/640051

    Reply
  36. elliot says:
    March 20, 2011 at 10:30 pm

    http://750words.com/entries/share/639207

    i really missed you over break!!!

    Reply
  45. Bria Valdez says:
    March 20, 2011 at 1:47 am

    http://750words.com/entries/share/637664

    I had some saving issues. That’s why my timing is so off. It really took me about a half hour to write the whole thing.

    Reply
  50. Stephen Lucas says:
    March 18, 2011 at 1:04 am

    wow already, when did you write this? Geez on top of things are we

    Reply

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