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essay

Defining Moments

Remember Jordan sneakers?

There used to be this thing called the defining moments package. It came with 2 pairs of Jordan shoes, the 6’s and the 7’s, I think in special colors. Every pair came with a postcard that details a defining moment made by Michael Jordan in those particular shoes.

I never bought the package because it came out to something like a 1,000.00. Anyways this isn’t about Michael Jordan, or his line of sneakers. This is about defining moments, defining moments I’ve seen made in both television and film.

Originally, I wanted to make a listicle out of this idea of defining moments I’ve seen more recently, but that just goes to show me how rare defining moments are in the media, so I don’t have a lot. I keep going on and on about defining moments like you know what they are, which you probably do. But just in case you don’t, I’m going to do my best to define it.

When I think of defining moments I think of Colin Farrell’s character in that movie Lobster. The way you see him by the end is different from the way you see him at the beginning. He’s no longer the tenant to a hotel that’s about to turn him into a lobster for not being married. But someone who overcame that struggle triumphantly. A hero was created there in that defining moment.

I think that’s really hard for a writer to do every time they sit down to write. Most of the time the writer is just the hero and we either like what they have to say, or we don’t. It’s truly a phenomenon in pop-culture whenever this happens because it rarely ever happens. So when it does everyone feels it. You can tell by how often you see these characters on the internet and in real life. That’s why you’re not the only one that likes Parks and Recreation, or BoJack Horseman.

Maybe not BoJack so much, but Parks was everyone’s shit. No one had seen a cast of characters this good in years and we haven’t since it stopped airing. That profile shot of Leslie Knope sitting on a park bench with the guy that leaves by the end of season 1, makes you feel the same way you felt during that profile shot of BoJack sitting on the roof with Diane by the end of the same season.

It’s in these defining moments where you realize they’re not just characters to you anymore. Characters aren’t taken seriously. Even the serious one’s aren’t taken seriously up until this point, this defining moment. These defining moments are what makes them heroes in our minds. That’s making something human.

As writers we have to make something human

March 7, 2017 0 comment

Random

Creative-Nonfiction & Argument-Essays

written by Jesse Prado

As a Mass Comm major, under option II, production, I found myself writing creative-nonfiction a lot.

To explain the genre of creative-nonfiction to readers, I’m going to compare it to the genre of the argument-essay. However, the similarities between them almost stop at their pursuit of a topic.

According to the Thompson Writing Program of Duke University, the argument-essay “presents a central claim (or claims, depending on length and purpose) and supports the claim(s) using an argument based on evidence and warrants (http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/argument-essay.original.pdf),” while creative-nonfiction, “involves writing from personal experience and/or reporting on other peoples’ experiences (http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/creative-nonfiction-1.original.pdf).”

One of the first primary differences between these genres is the difference between their goals. The goal of creative-nonfiction is just writing, while the goal of an argument-essay is to assert a claim. Given the latter, there isn’t as much room for personal experience in an argument-essay as there is in creative-nonfiction.

Unless one makes a claim somewhere in their pursuit of writing creative-nonfiction, which would take research to acquire the evidence and merits it takes to make, all one needs to write creative-nonfiction is personal experience. It all comes down to this ratio between research and personal experience that determines what form creative-nonfiction is going to take.

“Creative nonfiction encompasses memoir writing, biography and autobiography, oral history, and inspired reportage on almost any subject (http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/creative-nonfiction-1.original.pdf).”

The credibility of creative-nonfiction depends upon how well it encompasses one of these genres. One genre it failed to mention was the essay. With this in mind, creative-nonfiction can be almost anything, including an argument-essay. That’s why I said in the beginning that the similarities between creative-nonfiction, and argument-essays “almost stop at their pursuit of a topic.” It all comes down to this ratio between research and personal experience.

If there is enough research throughout a piece of creative-nonfiction to assert a claim, it can pass for an argument-essay. However, that isn’t the goal of creative-nonfiction.

“Creative nonfiction doesn’t necessarily look like a thesis-driven essay—its edges are softer, its language perhaps more inviting and (of course) creative—but it’s still important to know where you’re going and to make sure that each stage of the essay helps you to get there (http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/creative-nonfiction-1.original.pdf).”

Other than writing about any given topic, there isn’t really a goal in mind when it comes to writing creative-nonfiction. But if done well enough a goal can be unintentionally attained, and whether/not a piece of creative-nonfiction has done this is usually determined afterwards by its readers.

This is why in retrospect I think I wrote a lot of creative-nonfiction as Mass Comm major

June 30, 2016 0 comment

Art Conversation Current Events Fiction Literary Scene Poetry Writing

Conflict Inside: a Work by Claudia Rankine. A close reading of Citizen under Franco Berardi’s scope

written by Marco Antonio Huerta

We are all witnessing the effects of capitalism over our present times in the forms of abstraction of work, the disembodiment of the conscience, and the dematerialization of the commodities. The Italian Marxist Franco “Bifo” Berardi attributes the origin of this great transformation through abstraction to the development of finance:

Finance is the most abstract level of economic symbolization. It is the culmination of a process of progressive abstraction that started with capitalist industrialization. Marx speaks of abstract labor in the sense of an increased distancing of human activity from its concrete usefulness. In his words, capitalism is the application of human skills as a means to obtain a more abstract goal: the accumulation of value^{^[i]}.

On this particular situation he states that the most important changes in societies due to the dematerialization and the general abstraction of the economic rules and procedures are the disembodiment of the “general intelligence”, a concept he uses sometimes in terms of a representation of the cognitive group of workers whose labor is now exploited; the deterritorialization of labor and productivity, that ignited a process of pulverization and precarization of work and worker; the end of growth as a concept related to the “increase of social happiness and satisfaction of the basic needs of people”, but instead the expansion of financial profits and the expansion of the global volume of exchange value. He talks about “the new alienation” occurring in the cognitive worker by precarization and the acceleration of the information flow and productivity. All of these transformations are symptoms of the general intelligence as disembodied, taken away from its own social and erotic body.

January 26, 2015 0 comment