Katie's English 340 Blog

We all just want to be listened to

2008-04-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

This project took a long time to finally turn into something tangible. However, I think that in searching for this project I actually discovered a lot more than can necessarily be gathered from the final product. Of course, this is not actually a final product, but more a glimpse of one point along my exploration of how to frame listening. After thinking of listening as an art and something that could be learned or refined, I found myself wondering about the different ways of listening. It occurred to me that to truly listen might mean to truly understand which is quite a powerful idea. Maybe if we could learn to listen in new ways we could understand in new ways as well. So I set about thinking about the ways we traditionally frame listening--the sense of hearing, auditory sensations, talking--and I decided I would need a new frame. Traditionally, we listen to spoken words, but in my project below I attempt to listen to written words. Instead of utilizing the sense of hearing with sound, I utilize the sense of sight with images. Another key aspect of this framing is that it breaks away from the idea that we must listen to one thing at a time and in a chronological order. Here, the images work together all at the same time and come together to create one simultaneous and possibly continuous understanding. This image is only the very first attempt to explore a new way of framing listening and I believe there are endless more possibilities. For my first (and fairly amateur photoshop) attempt I decided to use images of passages from my own personal journals. I choose passages that I found particularly telling about myself so that the project was framed as a way of listening to and understanding a person, in this case, me. The overall idea then is that there is a way of listening to this image, and, by listening to it, there is a way to understand it and to understand something about the person behind it.

2008-04-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

Listening for my project...

I've always liked simple words with complex meanings.

2008-03-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

I wonder to what extend I can listen when no one is talking. There is so much more to listen to...

I'm thinking that listening is much more than just the sense of sound. Hearing can be fairly passive, but I believe that listening is (or should be?) active. Interesting--can someone listen with all their senses? Listen to what they see and taste and smell and touch and also what they hear?

When we were talking about pop-up books in class Prof. Moss used the phrase, "A more dimensioned reality." I like that idea. Can we learn to listen in a more dimensioned reality?

Focusing in on listening to images and specifically photographs... We talked about these photo projects in class, and I find them incredibly compelling.
What the World Eats
Material World

End thoughts for this blog: (Copied right out of my class notes so they are nice and vague and jumbled)
Super interesting idea- Is appreciating poetry for its beauty different than trying to understand it? In order to experience the beauty we have to listen to the poem (by listen here I mean really listen, not just hear the words) but it seems that in this act we are also always searching for meaning. To identify something as beautiful, don't we have to understand some part of it? Wouldn't we have had to listen to its essence?

2008-03-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

Listening... sometimes it seems infinitely complex, but sometimes, well sometimes, it seems so simple. Today it seems as though it should be simple. Ask, "How are you?" Listen to the answer.

Oh, so when you said family tree you really meant origami.

2008-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

Take a sheet of paper. Fold it. Unfold it. Can you ever make these folds go away?

It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to erase a fold. Even if you rip or tear at them they will not go away, they will just become torn. It seems to me that the memory of folds works much the same way with people. Maybe once we have been folded or imprinted a certain way it is difficult to undo... can it ever be undone completely? This relates well to the idea of listening and understanding since you would need to understand one's memory folds in order to try and understand them. Could we also listen to these folds?

*I am afraid of what I cannot unlearn*

We have two strands of beads. I am holding one and someone else is holding the other. Prof. Moss asks if the two strands can come together. Someone answers, "No, I don't think it is that easy. They are each separate circles with no spaces to join. They are far apart and they are held by different people with different intentions." But we do bring the two strands of beads together, at least for a little while. There is an apparent connection, but it is all about perception. Are the two strands really joined? (If two people are married 30 years are they happy?)

Maybe if we listen we can bring two separate strands together. Maybe if we listen we will discover the places or fleeting moments where the two are connected. Maybe if we listen we will find all the places the two will never meet.

The bringing together of two unlike things may be a way to create a new form of understanding.
Here is an example of death and beauty.

American Beauty (the ending)

2008-03-03T20:34:00.001-08:00

The Art of Listening

2008-02-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

My excitement comes in letting my ideas flow freely... My frustration comes in try to force these ideas to fit the frame of this blog--in trying to frame myself. So what follows here is a map (as my Proforker calls it) of how I arrived at the question that follows in bold. Beyond that are the ways in which I have begun to experience its answer.

Here is the original poem where I started this exploration:

STYLE
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero's fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his walking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
Moreover, they are not deformed by style,
That fire that eats what it illuminates.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Themes about life, even nothingness, are inherently limited if you write them down, they may be better understood if you never try to articulate them.

If you stick only to what you know, if you limit the story to what you know, will you ever really understand anything?

Can life be understood if you never try articulating it, if you write a book about nothing, if you never write a book about nothing?

The imagined works.

Maybe all of the ideas are not meant to fit together, or maybe they each fit together at a different time.

How do we frame the act of asking and answering questions? Do we listen to real things or things that don't exist?

Our frame is a need for answers.

We search for understanding (in reading poems, in listening to people, in telling stories), through the frame of needing answers, but would we understand more if we could create a frame that let us experience understanding without actively searching for it?

"Once for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly
made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to
than any man I have ever known. 'You like to tell true stories, don't you?'
he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'

Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why
don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

'Only then will you understand what happened and why.'"

-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

The lecture was on the writing of Primo Levi which describes his time in Auschwitz. My professor began discussing a point he called the art of listening. He then went on to explain the two problems we have with listening: 1. There is the danger of premature understanding. In an attempt to reach out, we end up reaching over. 2. We listen only to the point of finding a tag where we can tell our own story.

How do we truly listen, truly understand?

*For some reason I couldn't get the original version of Listening to transfer from Word with the right format. This version has the right format but is hard to read... I'm working on getting both to work together.

2008-02-17T20:37:00.000-08:00

I think that many times our rectangular frame through which we view the world is happiness. Someone said to me yesterday, "Isn't it better to always be happy?" or no, maybe it was a statement, "It is better to always be happy." I don't like this frame. Even in my quest for happiness I have a deep notion that there is much more to life--that the truest beauty is always found in the midst of the deepest sadness and despair. How can beauty and happiness ever be separated from the ugliness and pain that are assumed to be their opposites?

Symmetry

2008-02-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

"What if I'd been born fifty years before you
In a house on a street where you lived?
Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?"
-"The Luckiest" by Ben Folds

It makes sense that one would find Van Gogh's Sunflowers in an electron microscope image of Spanish moss, and it makes even more beautifully awful sense that Starry Night is found in the microscope image of melanoma. It makes sense that all of life would be symmetrical because it is all the same--all one.

The powerful video by Samuel Beckett, Come and Go, took this idea of the symmetry of life and related it, for me, to the allness of life.

The opening quote is from one of my favorite songs. I think it perfectly portrays this idea of allness through the greatest symmetry in life--love.
The Luckiest

Symmetry

The urge, to sit directly,

perfectly in the center of my bed

knees hugged to my chest.

Smoothing the sheets out from me—

slowly, precisely

with the palm of my hands.

This is how you make

the world go quiet.

An image, of a small boy

with little hands clasped over his ears,

rocking back and forth,

slowly.

They say he’s autistic.

He just wants the world to quiet down

a little bit.

2008-02-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

We discussed falsity today in class and it made me think of a controversy that took place over James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces. Read about it here. I really liked this book when I read it, and I couldn't believe when all of these issues arose with it. I don't believe that you should lie and say that details are factual when they aren't, but I also strongly believe in literature as art. Falsity is part of art. The exploration of truth is part of art. The blurring of this boundary might be what makes art wonderful. What was important in this novel was the emotions presented and the feelings created, not about dates and facts. It is often necessary to create details or images or experiences in order to give a reader the "truth" about life, the truth of the emotion. Creativity should never be stifled with the regulation that stories must be told exactly as they happened. Who is to say exactly how an event happened anyway?

...and if one door opens to another door closed...

2008-01-28T16:18:00.000-08:00

In a wonderful way I find myself overwhelmed with the ideas in 340--so many thoughts coming in every direction and I want to be able to grasp them all at the same time. I read about Zeno's paradoxes (refer to First Fork's blog) and I laughed and said, "Yea, sure why not 'all is one.'" I like that because then all these thoughts are one.

I think with art, like with life, we have to find our own doors and windows in. I think they exist where we want to find them. In fact, they only exist at all if we want to find them. It is like they say--that art is truly a unique experience for each person. Maybe we will only experience any piece within our realm of possibility, in the ways that are possible for us. So then if I am the maker, I may try to provide windows, but you will only see into them if you are looking. If you open it up and come in, then it has become a door.

I like the idea of the piece of creation itself as the door or window--it is letting someone experience it as a way to see something, or a way to feel something, or a window/door in to the maker herself.

I found my own door into this song (I didn't write these words, but used them in my creation)...

This is also something that is not a new creation today, but I think when I wrote this poem I wanted someone to read it and find their own door in.

One Two Step

A wild Thursday night party,

she’s dancing, belting out the lyrics

to Ciara’s “One Two Step.”

Wearing her russet boots, the tall ones

that give her 5’2” a little dominance.

Sweaty bodies push up against her

in the teeny room, but the lights are off

and everyone’s been drinking

so no one seems to mind.

Some guy in his standard,

slightly flamboyant, fraternity boy

button down comes up behind her

putting his hands on her waist.

His bucking bronco dancing needs a harness

but she laughs it off.

Breathing Natty Light down her neck, creating

his own beat he pulls her closer, forcing

his right hand beneath her pale blue rhinestone belt.

Clutching at the inseam of her American Eagle jeans

as his right hand prowls her abdomen,

grabbing her breasts.

Suddenly he is not just some guy,

he is that one.

He is every man we will never trust.

She’s stumbling over the futon

and tearing out the front door

as his friends, in matching collared shirts,

shout taunts. The narrow path worn through

the trees on the side of the house

is melted snow, refrozen, uneven

and her 3” Steve Maddens trip her repetitively

as her fair blond curls beat the back of her neck.

Reaching the pavement she slows down,

staggering, she throws her head back

to the navy 1 a.m. sky, then reels

forward and catches her sobbing

in her freshly nail polished hands,

collapsing onto the stone base

of a bare church fountain.

Huddled against the freezing granite

she is fourteen again,

belt hanging,

ripped from it’s buckle.

2008-01-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

This officially marks my first post in a blog... ever. Should we toast to this or something? So, after I decided to get over my irrational fear of blogging and chuckled about being able to call myself a "blogger," I started thinking about surfaces. And then I immediately thought about buffalo. You'd actually be surprised to know how many things in life bring me back to buffalo. I will explain... but first...

My skin is my main surface. Not only is it what everyone sees when they see me, but it is what I see when I look at myself. It literally holds me together. People often talk about "looking beneath the surface," but this is meant in a figurative way. What about literally, in a physical way? I've seen what is beneath my surface, beneath my skin, and it is fat, muscle, bone, and blood. Let me tell you that there is a long, motionless, silent period between the moment that skin (surface) is punctured and the blood begins to flow. And in that period... I literally looked into myself--into the hole in my arm and under my surface.

It was a buffalo's (yes, a real, live buffalo) horn that went into my arm in a crazy, freak accident. Nine stitches fixed my surface, but what was underneath took much longer to heal.

Picture of me about one minute before that buffalo behind me decided to battle. I lost.

Here's the buffalo.