During the last half year — but particularly this summer — I’ve been writing scripts for political video essays. This July, I released a video called Left or Right, which aimed to be simultaneously a non-partisan introduction to the left-right spectrum for the apolitical and a reexamination and clarification of information already subconsciously known by politically minded individuals. Obviously, this presented a glaring issue: how could one possibly define terms as broad as “left-wing” and “right-wing” without using terms that the apolitical wouldn’t know?
So when I listened to the explanatory comma podcast, I was able to personally relate to parts of it. For example, I couldn’t make political jokes because a large part of my audience will not understand it. So the levity that I love in YouTube videos, even in informative or educational videos, was lost at the expense of trying to appeal to the most uneducated viewer. Like what was said in the podcast, you can’t just stick an explanatory comma in the middle of the punchline.
But another problem, which I didn’t feel was properly addressed in the podcast, is that an explanatory comma can oversimplify some concepts. For example, how do I explain what capitalism is in a sentence fragment? This concept is incredibly important to have some level of understanding of when discussing the economic right, so I need to be able to discuss it. Ultimately, to avoid misrepresenting this concept, I left out an explanatory comma, relying on the audience to have some level of familiarity with this term prior to watching my video. This likely isolated a part of my audience, but it was necessary in order to keep the flow of the script and avoid misinforming my audience.
I was thinking about possibly using a video called Pronouns by ContraPoints, or Natalie Wynn, for a non-literary text in my investigation. In the video, Wynn analyzes Ben Shapiro’s argument that the usage of “he” or “she” should be dictated by the chromosomal set of the person being referred to. In the first half of the video, Wynn uses both a descriptive argument and prescriptive argument to justify calling a trans woman “she”. Wynn recounts her own experiences as a transwoman, and how, without explicitly saying she uses “she/her” pronouns, most people refer to her as a woman anyways in regular communication. That is because, for social contexts, ciswomen and transwomen are women all the same. She justifies this claim by presenting conservative commentator and fellow transwoman Blaire White’s analogy of adoptive parents. Adoptive parents may not be a parent in the biological sense, but they fulfill the social role of a parent, and there is a legal reason to consider them as a parent. At the PTA meeting, adoptive parents would not be referred to as strangers or friends of the child, but as the parents, even though the adoptive parents and the child are not genetically related. Similarly, being a woman, in a social sense, does not mean having XX chromosomes or a specific set of sex characteristics, but having the appearance, gestures, and aura typically associated with women and femininity.
While we were doing the group Brainstorm activity for Persepolis, I noticed something about Margi’s transformation. Throughout the book, her beliefs shift radically in religion and politics, but her intensity for these subjects never changes. In other words, she is always very passionate about whatever she believes in at that moment. This makes me wonder if enthusiasm is an intrinsic quality of a person more than a rational reaction to a particular circumstance. For example, we treat voter apathy as a matter of a lack of education, which may contribute to this problem to a certain extent, but we refuse to acknowledge that many people are unable or unwilling to personally invest themselves into any greater cause, by nature of their personality. So I view Margi’s “transformation” actually as more of an expression of her stagnant identity, manipulated by external factors like the state of the country or her family.
As I said before, I’m thinking about analyzing Pronouns by Contrapoints for my HL essay. Although there are many angles that I could analyze the text through, I was going to focus on how Wynn uses communication. While attempting to gather a plan for how I would analyze such a video, I realized that, in order to understand Wynn’s theory of gender, and also to understand how she uses characters to communicate with her audience, we have to look at another one of her videos The Aesthetic. In this video, Wynn uses a dialogue to debate, in her words, “What matters more—the way things are or the way things look?”. The two characters, Tabby and Justine, who although don’t fully represent Wynn by themselves, come together to try and form some sort of consensus. Wynn dropped out of her doctorate program for philosophy, so her videos were likely inspired by ancient philosophy, where the dialogue was an extremely popular form. Today, it is not as common, and so this method of communication confused many. Additionally, there wasn’t a clear consensus formed at the end, leaving it to the audience to decide if either side won. Many people were angry because they assumed that Justine was meant to be the winner of the debate, even though many viewers disagreed with her ideas. Because she was more snappy and portrayed herself in a much more flattering way, she was identified as the winner despite many of her ideas not holding up to debate. Ironically, Justine’s position was that rationality doesn’t matter as much as appearance.
I wanted to discuss how Elena’s and Lila’s attempts to achieve success diverge throughout the book, and how this impacts their emotions towards one another. Elena obviously believes that through education, one can achieve financial success and escape a lower class. Lila, although resistant to the idea that she should just marry someone for money, also rejects the idea that education is her only way out; she doubles down on her shoe designs and other “practical” means of accumulating wealth. Each character felt some level of jealousy and anger towards one another because of their diverging paths (depending on the point of the book, of course). The vehicle of how I would communicate some of these ideas would be through notes, written by Lila and Elena individually, after each of them confessed their sins to the priest. This vehicle would provide each character not only with their perspective, but a platform to be honest about their feelings towards one another.
A moment that I thought could work well for reflection in this setting is when Elena is angry she has to get glasses. The glasses are really a symbol for Elena for how she feels lost in the future, while Lila seems bold and confident about the future, and this angers her. Elena says “I was blind, she a falcon; I had an opaque pupil, she narrowed her eyes, with darting glances that saw more; I clung to her arm, among the shadows, she guided me with a stern gaze” (Ferrante 257). Confession is a perfect place for Elena to address these feelings honestly and express some level of guilt for being angry at Lila.
Since I was going to write two confessions from both Lila and Elena, I thought I would try to select events that both experienced to compare and contrast their emotions surrounding their experiences together. One of these events is going to be at the end of Childhood, specifically Chapter 16, when Lila convinces Elena to skip school and travel to the ocean with her. Elena is upset after this event because they were caught and she was punished by her parents. Elena also believed that Lila intended for this to happen, and that she hoped that Elena’s parents wouldn’t let her go to middle school. I assume that Elena just projected her insecurities or fears onto Lila, and that Lila wouldn’t actually want for that to happen. Perhaps Lila feels guilty herself about Elena getting punished after her efforts to get Elena to become more adventurous.
I am still at a loss of what other event to do. I think I would like to do another event later in the book where Lila’s actions result in Elena being punished or hurt in some way, and analyze their reactions after that. However, I cannot think of another event to consider. I want to make sure I have two events that work well with one another before diving headfirst into writing a draft.
Wikipedia short summary: Before reading these poems, I anticipate that Mark Doty will write mainly about loss. His experience seeing someone he loved fall to AIDS as well as the short description of “Dog Days” leads me to believe that the idea of loss is important to Doty. However, when Louise Erdrich said of Dog Days that it “is not a dark book. It is illuminated from within by gorgeous wonder,” this makes me wonder if these ideas will be disguised by more lighthearted subject matter, like animals. The quote could also mean that although the subject matter is dark, the insights it provides are illuminating. I also wonder if his sexuality will be a subject of his poetry, especially because he grew up during a time where not only was non-heterosexuality much less accepted, but where HIV — unfortunately nicknamed the “gay plague” — destroyed LGBTQ communities.
Turtle, Swan: We discussed in class to take poems at face value at first and not to think that everything is a symbol for some big idea, so I tried doing that with this poem. However, I have to believe that the turtle, the swan, and their deaths are used as a parallel for people who contract HIV. For one, lines 70-74 abruptly mention a disease that affects “some man’s lover” “every week”. The stain of the turtle on the road will fade and disappear in the same way that Doty describes “the wasting” and “the disappearance” in lines 73 & 74. The parallel is furthered even further when the color of the eyes of the man’s date are described as “polished tortoise” (84) and the arms (presumably) of the man’s date are described as “white and muscular wings that rise and ripple beneath or above me” like a swan (81-82).
No: I find it interesting that Mark Doty also used a turtle in this poem, written approximately six years after “Turtle, Swan”. But I think it is used for a different purpose. Doty compares the turtle in this poem to God on line 8, and refers to the word “no” as “his prayer, the single word of the shell” on lines 31-32. My first question was how a turtle is anything like a god. But I don’t think the turtle is supposed to be God but perhaps the control over the turtle is to show stability and power. In lines 3-7, the speaker says how the children holding the turtle want the adults in the dining hall “to feel the power they have when they hold a house in their own hands”. The adults see the house, but the household, the actual turtle head itself, is hidden and can not be pried out by the children. So the connection to God is that the children cannot bring themselves stability on their own, God (or the universe if you aren’t religious) has to let them have stability. And the lesson that Doty is trying to teach us, and the lesson that the children are supposed to have learned in the poem, that the universe often says no and there is nothing you can do about it.
Difference: To be honest, I have no idea what this poem is supposed to be about. I guess it is discussing the various forms that jellyfish can take different forms depending on the beholder. And I assume that beholder is what the speaker refers to as “the mouth” on line 57. But I assume there is a larger idea that I am missing. Or maybe not, since poems don’t have to be about topics that are traditionally considered significant, but I assume that you selected these poems to be about some global issues. I also cannot figure out what the title of the poem is supposed to refer to. My best guess is that it refers to the differences in perceptions of these jellyfish.
Brilliance: This poem tells the story of a man, who is dying of an unknown illness (possibly HIV), wanting everything to be “squared away” (8) for the time he dies. However, his companion, Maggie, encourages him to get a goldfish so that he has something to love before he dies. The man agrees, even though he knows that the goldfish will most likely outlive him. If he had died of HIV, maybe this sent him on a journey where he was afraid to love anymore due to the nature of the transmission of the disease. The speaker refers to a story at lines 39 to 46 about a “Zen master” who let go of all Earthly possessions, but was brought back at the thought of who would care for the deer he used to feed at the park. This is a direct parallel to the goldish and the man mentioned in the poem. I think Doty is trying to refute this idea that love or being attached to things is a bad thing, an idea especially permeated in religions like Buddhism.
A Display of Mackerel: The speaker describes something as mundane as a display of mackerel as beautiful, and this struck me as odd. I think the speaker is trying to portray this idea that beauty can only come from connectedness, which requires the loss of individuality, which requires death. He pretty much explicitly says this at the end: “to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming” (50-51). Maybe Doty is trying to criticize this idea, because to me it seems ridiculous. To describe dead fish as “happy” (49) seems to me to be an insane proposition. But the speaker asks the audience directly, “would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost?” implying that individuality is a poor choice in the long run. Or perhaps the poem isn’t even trying to give us any advice on any choice, since the speaker seems to also imply that ‘the long run’ is actually just death, which is something that none of us can avoid (except some species of jellyfish). Because once we are dead, we return to nature and our individuality is lost.