Seriously Funny              

Hey there, student. Welcome to the course blog. This is where you’ll find everything you need for the course (everything, that is, except your grades, which can be found on Moodle).

As you snoop around and get familiar with the blog, pay special attention to the assignment schedule. That tells you what’s due by what date. I don’t give reminders about assignments in class; it’s your responsibility to inform yourself, so you probably want to get in a daily habit of checking the blog and the assignment schedule.

You don’t have to pay attention to the posts below this one (though you’re welcome to read them if you want). They’re just leftovers from last semester.

Happy snooping!

No 750 for this one. Instead, I’ll just ask you to carefully annotate the story and bring it to class. In class, we’ll do the “passing notes” exercise in which you write on some prompts, then pass your paper to a classmate, who will respond to your comments. So it’s like we’ll be doing the 750 in class, except in an interactive fashion.

Here’s a preview of the “passing notes” prompts, in case you’re interested:

What’s this story ultimately about? Under the bawdy humor, what’s the seriousness or sadness? What does the main character really want (besides Cameron Diaz) Point to evidence in the text.

Aja Gabel wrote a review of this story for Short Story Month 2011. In the review, she points to the passage where “Cameron Diaz tells a story of Marilyn Monroe hiding her celebrity in plain sight, and then, simply by changing the way she walks, reveals herself. Cameron says, ‘See, she changed who she was inside.’” Later in the review, Gabel claims that “Cameron Diaz and I are in Love” is “either the story of a man changing who he is inside or not changing who he is inside, (but) at least the imaginary landscape of his attempt to try.”

Does the main character change who he is inside? In what ways is he successful (or unsuccesful)?

In her review, Gabel calls the story “sexy exciting but earnest, clever and funny but meaningful, brave and bawdy but universal.”
In what ways is this story universal? What does it suggest about the human condition—or—How is the main character like any of us?

Objective: The idea here is to create an orientation guide for students who are new to my class. This isn’t an evaluation or a product review, but a guide designed to set a noob’s expectations and teach them how to be successful in this class.

This will be a wiki page strapped onto the class blog. For this assignment (if you choose to do it; remember, you don’t have to), you can sign up to be a site manager to set up all the categories, an editor, or a writer for the wiki.

Here’s the link to the sign-up sheet. Only sign up in the boxes that are outlined. You have many choices. There are more than eighty boxes here. If you sign up as an editor for a category, and no one signs up as a writer, guess what? You’re the writer.

The glossary entries will be short, so if you want to do these, you can sign up for multiple entries.

This whole project should take a couple hours of your time. Do it well, do it right, but don’t do it for a really long time.

Due dates:

Site manager: 4/16

Writers: 4/20

Editors: 4/27

Deliverable:

After you finish, write up a short summary of your contribution. Detail what you did, and show me the text you wrote/edited. I’ll verify your claims by checking the wiki’s dashboard. Keep in mind that this write-up will be a type of persuasive essay, so make sure you back up your claims with evidence. Turn this in with your final portfolio. 

Grading:

You can earn 1, 3, or 5 points on this assignment. 5 points will be for taking a lead role and/or making an exemplary contribution. 3 points will be for making a significant contribution. 1 point will be for giving it a shot and not screwing up the wiki.

Let me know if you have any questions!

What annoys you and why?

What if you encapsulated this annoyance in a person? What would that person say to you?

What would you like to say back to that person?

The idea here is to dramatize your annoyance, to make it manifest in a person and a scene. Concrete situations are almost always easier to understand (and funnier) than abstract stuff.

: : :

Say the unsayables. What are the things you think, but don’t say in polite company?

Look at your downdraft through the following lenses. The deliverable for each lens is italicized.

Lens One: Coding for Exposition

Remember that this multigenre research essay is a cultural history of your practice or artifact. As such, it should contain a lot of Real Information. It shouldn’t, however, be a clip-and-paste collage of stuff you’ve found in your research. Think about how you’re incorporating facts into the story of your thinking about your subject. Think about how you’re making exposition your own. Then get out two different colored highlighters and color code your essay.

Color 1. Highlight information that illuminates the history of your subject.

Color 2. Highlight other Real Information about your subject.  

Lens Two: Felt Sense
“(The term) calls forth images, words, ideas, and vague fuzzy feelings that are anchored in the writer’s body.  What is elicited, then, is not solely a product of mind, but of a mind alive in a living, sensing body.”—Sondra Perl

Felt sense is about what you feel when you pay close attention to the words you’ve put on the page; felt sense links the body to the mind.  If your writing is on the right track, it will feel right and satisfying. But if the words or the structure or your argument feels wrong when you re-read your essay, you’ll need to make changes to fit your emerging sense of what will work.

Read your draft slowly and carefully, paying attention to what you’re feeling:
-Where you get bored or start to drift.
-Where you get tangled up in a sentence, or have to slow down or re-read for clarity
-Where things seem a little obvious, or outlandish, or otherwise off.

Make notes in the margins about what you’re feeling.

A final note: Revising means re-seeing

Remember that moving from downdraft to updraft isn’t just a matter of proofreading or “fixing” things. Look to take another major leap on EVERY level of the essay—from ideas to narrative design to polished prose. Toward this end, remember to re-write your essay instead of attempting to edit it on the computer screen, which leads to small, safe changes.