Interface Impressions

The Entertainment narrative template we are following is based on the archetypal pattern of the hero's quest, which expresses in turn an ancient ritual of initiation-- the achievement of individual identity.

Our assignment: create a webpage documenting a tv show (or book or movie) from our childhood that struck a certain chord of resonance with us. Assess our first thoughts-- then watch it again-- and record new thoughts.

I was a very impressionable child. I have these seemingly important tidbits of tons of things that just float around in the "important from childhood" section in my brain. I'm sure we all are, and I'm looking forward to this section of the mystory. I don't exactly know how to present it yet.

Impersonation as a starting point for understanding images/imaging. By capturing the essence of a person or a production, you can easily recognize the image that is being given by the object.

We won't be performing an impersonation of the person, but we will use gestures to write their icon.

The Bordovitz example shows us how this can be achieved-- he weaves, quite well, the news report of Evel Knievel's failed jump over a canyon with the news report of his father's death. He ties the angry fans in with the desolation in himself. He sees a tragic situation in his own life shown through a cultural device. He uses this as a tool to describe his own feelings and thoughts. While most readers wouldn't be able to understand exactly his emotions of being diagnosed with HIV, we are able to see the frustration, the almost win, the sadness, the feeling of failure associated with his realization.

The other two examples act the same, showing frustration, anxiety, hopefulness, and calm. They tie in tangible examples that serve as tools to describe their emotions.

"Write a structural self portrait, using the given circumstances of a character in a story as a figurative analogy for your given circumstances in your lifeworld." In other words, describe your life and feelings and circumstances through another story.

1993: dealing with computers will become less like operating a device and more like conversing with another person.

At least for me, this is true. Working with the internet and other programs on my computer is almost second-nature to me by this point. I spend so much time on my computer that I am infinitely comfortable working within its capabilities. We should use this fluidity to apply to our educational experience; to move freely between programs (metaphors, stories, and diversions) to create an end product (describe something).

Seances?

"Noticing and documenting the problems causing the dramatic conflict in your Family and Entertainment stories anticipate your work with problems in your Career field and in your Community as a consultant." It is our job to be able to explain our conflicts and our stresses through metaphors and diversions, to make our emotions and our responses more clear to those around us. By being able to explain an issue that has been around us for years, we can explain anything, right? These all help us find our wide image, which is supposed to help us become true electrate egents (is that redundant?). By understanding ourselves, we can understand the learning model, and apply it to our lives.

thin blue line/cosmogram

thin blue line_significant places in my life linked by a blue line.

location: italy

discovery: many of the most significant and beautiful places I found in Italy occurred along a single line. only with the addition of the two places further north did I begin to find shapes. the most meaningful shape I found was an open book; signifying the learning and sketching I did in these places and how they have become pages in my book of experience???

cosmogram_significant places in my hometown linked by lines and circles.

discovery: while i always thought the significant places in my hometown were in a circular path, the most significant reached out from my home to create a star pattern. the river and the rhythm of the hills compliment the reaching lines of the drawing. the text compliments my justification for choosing those specific places.

Cosmogram

Xanadu: referring to the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; his dream/poem/recollection that was interrupted-- and lost forever-- the everlasting land of the ends of our lost trails of thought-- the ideal place for all information to reside-- the epitome of the creative process.

Mapping the Diegesis

diegesis: "the imaginary space and time of the world created in the poem"/film/medium

Xanadu: a "hybrid place" composed of elements from "exotic sites of otherness"--use of "exotic as the emblem of curiosity and imagination"

Four exotic sites: Zanadu/Mongolia; holy caves of ice/Kashmir/India; Mount Abora/Ethiopia; underwater caves/fountains/Gainesville, Florida.

A fact certainly only the closest followers of Coleridge's poem and residents/fans of Gainesville, Florida would know. Ulmer is locating the "uncanny moments" when he experienced a sense of destiny or a life path/direction.

Chora (Sacred Space)

Three kinds of space or place, according to the Greeks:

Topos: the abstract quality of place as a container

Chora: the scared nature of specific places

Kenon: the "nothing" (why is there something rather than nothing?)

Ulmer: choragraphy: a "hyper-rhetoric_ that chora is used, rather than topos, as a metaphor for the places of invention. As in, our thoughts now exist in the web and the electric pieces of the world, in our minds, our feelings in memories. These are not held within any object or a container, but within the emotions and sensations associated with the event.

Home and Family

Narrative

Our search for a wide image has a narrative structure-- we are in a process of identity formation, both within ourselves and as a collective.

The paragraph about Giddens makes perfect sense. We tend to describe ourselves using the same stories every time, which creates a single-lane, one way road with no side streets. That is, we are stereotyping ourselves as much as we do other people.

My name is Allender, I am a fourth year architecture major from West Virginia, I am minoring in English because I like to write. I am the Vice President of Membership for the American Institute of Architecture Students here at Clemson, as well as a member of the Gamma Phi Beta Sorority, and various honors organizations. I lived in Italy for a semester last year studying architecture, and I hope to attend graduate school next fall for Architecture.

or...

My name is Allender, I grew up in rural West Virginia. I once rebuilt a Volkswagen Beetle and nearly cut my thumb off with a table saw this summer. Working on a house renovation with my dad, I have built nearly an entire house. I have knowledge not only of construction but also in plumbing and electrical circuits. This summer I worked as a shuttle van driver for a golf course and also as a cashier at a gas station. I spend a lot of time outdoors and I can't imagine myself settling down anywhere but in the mountains.

It makes a difference. Both statements are 100% true, yet I can alter them to make myself seem to be a different person. In one, I am a focused, determined, and hopefully well-rounded student. In the other, I am the quintessential mountain girl. I know I could create at least 3 more personal identities about myself. The main thing is, according to Giddens, that the "sense of self-identity is... held to weather major tensions or transitions in the social environments within which the person moves." (72)

I like how Ulmer equates this journey to the progression of a play, movie, or even book-- this whole thing is a process that we can't rush. We wouldn't want Harry Potter to defeat Voldemort right in front of the Mirror of Erised?

Home(Page)Sick

We are within a circular journey-- quite like Odysseus (Ulysses), to name one-- a long, circular journey centered around one thing- the self- and it begins at home. (Freud: Tell me about your mother; Michael Jackson/Lindsay Lohan: I have daddy issues; the story of the prodigal son) This is all rooted in our culture/popcycle/whatever you will call it.

However, as the main part of this circular journey, we will alienate ourselves. It is within the struggle of life to have moments where we are thoroughly lost. The Romantics showed this well: the modern struggle is that of "fragmentation, dissociation, estrangement, or alienation." (75) Think Heathcliff. Okay, so we're not all that miserable, but we all have times where we fall away from the feeling of home. We all enter a state of homesickness, which is one of the many driving senses of pathos in our lives.

This Romantic (in the sense of Romanticism) sense of pathos in our popcycle has turned us away from showing emotion-- the suffering that comes out of literate emotion is too severe. The electrate form of emotion is something more natural, more balanced. The problem is that we have not brought human emotions into our form of education. I would honestly feel maybe just a little uncomfortable if Miss Havisham came into this classroom wearing her 20 year old wedding gown, but teaching emotion as part of inspiration or a piece of the human experience is quite worthy. Electrate emotion is not the Miss Havisham type of emotion-- it is the emotion that creates a link between the present and our past-- the mundane included.

Mood and atmosphere are part of our normal experience. Right now I am in the library. It is quiet but not silent, and bustling as I am on the main floor. People are focusing on work-- or maybe on Facebook. My mood is a strange simultaneous sense of urgency to finish this homework so I can eat lunch before my class in an hour and a half, but also the knowledge that I won't finish this assignment before I need to go eat so there is a sort of lazy "just shut the computer and get a sandwich" driving force right now. In five minutes, I will most likely be in a different atmosphere with a similar mood. This is not interesting to anyone, because we all experience this same sort of emotion and atmosphere, but it is an inherent and largely unrecorded part (at least until we used Facebook statuses) of the human experience.

Mystory

The mystory allows us "to locate [our] position in the popcycle of [our] epoch." That is, it allows us to discover the pieces of our culture and place that affect us.

Frederic Jameson on Allegory-- Historical writings, like the Bible, have a twofold effect: First, a retelling of events both in the sense of collective and individual, and second, an allegorical reading that affects the psychology of the reader. The allegory affects this psychology in a way that it affects the morals of the reader or actually affects the emotions or actions of the reader.

Allegory Popcycle

Literal/School/Historical FACT/Community History

Allegory/Entertainment/imitation through media/cultural mythology

Moral/Family/Biography/habits and customs/upbringing

Anagogy/Career/THE WORLD VIEW EMBODIED WITHIN SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE within a career field

We should be able to use "proportional analogies" to find the position in our mystory that is allegorical, or can be described by an allegory within, the popcycle in which we have been living in.

(James Joyce)

Each discourse of the mystory is "organized around the discovery, definition, and (sometimes) solution of exemplary problems." (83) We have to find these identifications in our popcycle to find our wide image.

(Frederick Douglass)

Both ox stories provide a learning experience. Life gives us challenges that only we can attempt; we will not always have guidance. Douglass nearly died learning how to overcome the oxen, and the boy in the Zen story labored hard. The boy in the story reached some sort of self-actualization, and Douglass became one of the most famous abolitionists in his time. This comes to show that the small, seemingly mundane story can be used as a parable for simple learning experiences and appreciation for hard work.

Family Discourse

We enter into an ongoing narrative within our own families, as a character in the story of those who bring us up. Our parents are the ones that instill the cultural and social expectations within our popcycle. According to Ulmer, some of our strongest memories from childhood are those moments where we recognize we have to alter our personalities to fit in within our popcycle.\

We are less interested in drama or idea, and more interested in mood and atmosphere, which can be seen in the Douglass/Zen parable. They describe a feeling or a mundane event that create a mood or atmosphere that means something else.

At the same time, we have narratives or anecdotes that create the scene of a bold memory of our lives. Like Jerry Garcia's parrot story, our lives are filled with these small, seemingly insignificant stories that end up being pieces of our overarching life story.