Thesis

I finally finished a full draft. It's 2:00 in the am. As I'm sitting here at my desk this is about how I feel:

There's still a whole bunch of revising that I'm going to have to do once my committee gets a hold of it.

For now, I'm just gonna go do this:

The Naked Truth

So here's the deal. I try to post on my blog once a month at the very least. I shoot for twice, or three times (a lady?) where possible, but once a month is my lower limit. Unfortunately, this past month has been crazy busy for me as the majority of my writing brain has been dedicated to working on my thesis. Which I'm stoked about because it's awesome. But that leaves not much writing energy left for me to stand up on my soap box here at Yo Mama Llama, thus my lack of a post yet this month. It's been nagging at me, so tonight (in taking a break from revising the thesis) I've decided to post an essay that I wrote for my creative writing class last semester. I never really polished it so take it for what it is. It's about clothes and nakedness, but it's not scandalous so don't worry.

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” – Mark Twain

On Wednesday I wore a pair of dry-clean only brown slacks, a tan button-down shirt with a brown and blue paisley bow tie, and a pair of two-tone brown oxford shoes with my distressed leather messenger bag slung over my shoulder. I taught my freshman composition class, and then immediately afterward, while my grad student, faux-professorial juices were still flowing, I walked the halls of the humanities building for 25 minutes at a purposefully brisk rate,  counting how many professor types greeted me warmly and how many ignored me. 22 greetings, 3 ignores. The next day, Thursday, I wore a pair of faded blue jeans, a camo-green t shirt imprinted in black with the image of Charles Mingus and the stem of his upright bass, a pair of canvas sneakers and I had my red Camelbak backpack strapped to my back – complete with the chest strap buckled – and I walked the same halls for 25 minutes. 5 greetings, 14 ignores.

I’m gonna be honest here for a second and admit that I don’t really understand what Twain is saying in the epigraph I included here. It seemed like an appropriate quote for where I’m going with this, so I just went with it anyway. See, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes and how we are treated differently depending on what we’re wearing. The genesis here is that I’ve noticed that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – days during which I teach my freshman composition class and on which I dress in slacks and button-down shirts with a tie or a sport coat or a cardigan or vest of some sort – professors that I don’t know, from disciplines I’ve never studied, nod to me congenially and say hello, welcoming me to their hallways as one of their own. But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I’m t shirt-and-jeaning it up, these same professors will glance at me, and then with supreme indifference ignore my presence entirely. So it would seem that, as Twain says to start off his quote, clothes may in fact make the man. 

But let’s take a minute here to consider that second half about naked people having little or no influence in society. See, it doesn’t sit well with me. I realize that, it being Mark Twain, he’s likely just shooting for sarcasm and wit, but all the same, embedded in Twain’s wit are often found nuggets of social commentary and keen observations of the world, even when he’s at his most sardonic. So is he saying that we ignore naked people? Maybe he’s saying that we don’t see naked people as having any real power to effect change? I don’t know really, but looking at each of those possible explanations of what Twain might mean makes me less inclined believe any of them.First off there’s the idea that we ignore naked people. That’s just plain not true. When was the last time you saw a naked person walking down the street? Now unless you are from or frequent the Portland area (which is somewhat renowned for embracing and celebrating the nakedness of mankind, such an occurrence is likely burned forever in your mind, and it would require the magickiest of erasers to scrub it away. I remember distinctly as a teenager hearing on the news that a woman somewhere up north of Salt Lake was charged by the police with lewd and indecent behavior for taking care of her lawn and garden in a rather skimpy bikini. There was much debate as to whether or not such a charge was warranted because 1) she was on her own private property and 2) she wasn’t naked, but rather in a swimming suit, skimpy though it may have been. I bring this up not to advocate one side or the other of this issue, but rather to show that we don’t even ignore nearly naked people, let alone those who are out and about flashing their *ahem* selves about town. So no, I don’t think we do ignore naked people.

Next let’s consider the proposition that naked people have no power to effect change in the world. This idea is a bit more complex. While I think we can say that if a government official were to stand before Congress naked while trying to get some point across, he would definitely be noticed (as we just established), but he would likely be ineffective in getting his point across due to his being forcibly removed from out of the chamber. Interestingly, though showing off the spectacle of his own skin would be well outside the bounds of propriety, if that congressman were to use pictures of naked people, preferably from poverty-stricken parts of the world, those images, as long as they’re not perceived as overly manipulative, would likely prove a boost to his argument, a boost that pictures clothed individuals could only dream of.  We’ve all seen those issues of National Geographic (a magazine that a friend of mine once called “the poor man’s Playboy”) that seem to be chock full of naked people living in jungles across the world. There’s a reason photographers take those pictures and editors choose to include them in their articles. Those images make the readers feel something. And when readers feel something they’re more likely to go out and do something as a result of what they feel. So maybe naked people themselves can’t effect change, per se, but clothed people can use naked people to effect change, and that’s kind of the same thing.

Either way, with each of these considerations it’s clear that naked people do in fact have some influence on society. So why would Mark Twain say what he did? I mean, he was a smart guy, right? Wouldn’t he have seen the holes in his own argument? This is a question that bothers me, so I decided to look into it a little bit further. From what I’ve found, I have to say that I’m not totally sure that Mark Twain actually said what I’ve attributed to him. From what I’ve found, the earliest instance of the quote above being attributed to Twain comes from Merle Johnson’s More Maxims of Mark published in 1927, 17 years after Twain’s death. Johnson wrote a careful bibliography of Mark Twain’s works and published it the year Twain died, but no where can I find documented proof in any of his letters notebooks or published works that Twain said the words, “Clothes make the man, naked people have little or no influence on society.” That said, he is documented as having said other things similar in their content to the quote in question. The closest I’ve found is a quote that comes from one of Mark Twain’s notebooks and was published by Twain’s biographer Albert B. Paine in the book Mark Twain’s Notebook. It reads, “Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.” That hits on the “clothes make the man” bit, but not really the idea of the influence of naked people. Now that I’m finding that Mark Twain didn’t actually write the epigraph around which I’ve framed this whole essay, I’m starting to feel a little silly. It’s fun to argue with Mark Twain, but arguing with some nameless, faceless individual who was never of any consequence in the world just seems like a waste of time.

Then again, you could look at the situation and say that someone somewhere along the way decided that they had a cool turn of phrase about clothes and naked people and decided that in order for it to really gain traction among the populace they needed to clothe said phrase with Mark Twain’s name, thereby lending the phrase credibility that the originator’s own name couldn’t offer. So in that sense, the phrase, stripped naked, had no influence, but when clothed it did have influence in society, to the extent that I’m writing about it here today.

In talking about clothes and nakedness in the abstract I realize that I’ve been sitting here in my own clothes hypothesizing about these things, but there’s no authority like lived experience. So maybe what I really need to do now is strip down till I’m nekkers, as my Mark Twain-contemporary ancestors might have said, and go for a jaunt around the humanities building to see what kinds of reactions I stir among the professor types then. My guess is that there would be far fewer ignores. 

Finance Is for Cowards

I'm sitting here in the Tanner Building (the building which houses the business school here at BYU) polishing and revising a couple of essays that I wrote for my creative writing class. I'm sitting on a couch just outside of a classroom, typing away on my laptop. Every few minutes a different group of dressed-in-their-Sunday-best business students meets up on the couches around me, goes over the final presentation that they're about to give, and, when called, enter the classroom to present what I've gathered is their semester project for a supply chain business class.

It would seem that this is a senior course of sorts, because their conversations before entering the classroom, when not guided by the particulars of their presentations, invariably turn to the fact that most of them are graduating this week, and how excited they are to finally get out of school so that they can go out and make real money in the real world. You might think I'm exaggerating, but I've literally heard at least 6 different people say some variation of that phrase, all of them emphasizing the money they're going to be making. Mostly I'm envisioning this as their future:



They are a very self-assured, confident, and well-coiffed bunch.

One of these groups (the most recent one to enter the classroom to present their project) has apparently done some work with the Blue Line Deli here in the Tanner Building, and they have brought an employee of the Blue Line to testify as to the positive effects of the project. As they were waiting to go into the classroom, one of the students, looking rather like he'd taken Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his fashion icon of choice (i.e. he looked pretty sharp), was particularly effusive in his happiness that school was almost over and that he was going to go make good money with his finance degree. "Four days," he kept saying, "four days and I'll graduate and be done with school."

After talking about the job he had landed and other glorious aspects of the post-college future, the conversation turned, and the finance major asked the Blue Line employee (also a student, and conspicuously dressed in jeans, sneakers and a polo) what he was studying.

"I'm an animation major."

The finance major paused before responding.

This whole time I had been staring at fixedly at my computer, though I was paying much more attention to the conversation than I was my essay. As the conversation lulled briefly, waiting for some kind of response about the Blue Line worker's animation major, I glanced up at the finance major. As he began to speak, a hint of wistful regret washed over his face as he said, "That's such a cool major. I wish I'd had the guts to study something like that."

The other business students nodded in agreement. My guess is they were probably agreeing more with the sentiment that animation is cool and not the part about not having any guts, but who knows.

Unfortunately, before the conversation could really gain any traction exploring this new confession/admission/revelation of character, the group was called away to give their presentation. And now they've left me wondering about questions of motivation, happiness, and courage in choosing a career path.

They also left me wondering if that half-eaten bag of pretzels they left on the couch is fair game.

Play Ball

"It is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds, prison yards, in back alleys and farmers’ fields; by small boys and old men, raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed; the only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years; while they conquered a continent, warred with each other and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and with the meaning of freedom.

At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating, and has excluded as many as it has included. A profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American Odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers, and it reflects a host of age-old American tensions; between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.

It is a haunted game in which every player is measured with the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home."

--Geoffrey C. Ward, from Ken Burns' Baseball

Multi-tasking

I've learned something about myself today.

If I want to just keep track of scores, I can watch 4 basketball games at once:

But if I want to keep track of the play by play, I can only watch 2 games at once:

Here's where it got a little tricky. I wanted to be productive and grade papers while watching basketball, so, following the example of Katie Wade-Neser - my peer, my mentor, and my guide in all things worthwhile - with the aid of a laptop I tried watching 3 games and grading: 

But who was I kidding, I was just watching basketball. So I tried to watch just 2 games while grading:

It was a little bit better. But I was still just watching basketball and hardly grading at all. So I dropped it to one game and grading:

And honestly, I was able to grade quite well and relatively quickly, while still watching a great game. 

On a related note, it turns out that you only have a certain amount of time allotted to you to stream games live via the interwebs:

 Hopefully the IP addresses in the carrels reset overnight so I can start tomorrow fresh.

Merry March Madness!

Not Vicious but Mistaken

In the course of getting a Master's Degree in English I have taken several classes in which I have studied quite a bit of the work of Kenneth Burke. It would be futile to try and encapsulate his work here, so let me just say that he was brilliant. A genius really.

This is him:

via

(On an unrelated note, maybe I should grow out my mustache again so that when I'm defending my thesis I can channel his brilliance. I like that idea.)

In studying and writing about his work I've been struck by a lot of his ideas. (I'm particularly drawn to his ideas concerning identification and transcendence, but I'm not going to discuss them here. If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to chat with you about them in person.) But I think my favorite thing I've learned from Burke comes from book Attitudes Toward History:

"The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that undergirds great tragedy."

Reading this quote and thinking through it's implications frankly changed the whole way I view and think about others, and it gave me greater insight into how to actually go about Christ's commandment that we love one another. It seems like whenever I have a hard time loving someone, getting along with someone, or even just thinking kindly about someone it's because of some perceived slight or because that person engages in some action or behavior that rubs me the wrong way. Someone says something insensitive or treats me or others poorly, and my instinct is to ascribe a specific meaning to what was said or done. The problem is that the meaning I ascribe is the meaning that I would be communicating if I were the one saying insensitive things or treating others poorly. But that doesn't mean that that was the meaning that was meant to be communicated by the speaker or treater. So what I am viewing as vicious, may not have been intended to be vicious at all. There was just a disconnect in the communication. So the best we can do is to view that person as mistaken. But not mistaken in the sense that they are wrong, but rather mistaken in the sense that they are likely communicating something (viciousness) that they don't intend to communicate, and so the real intent of the message is lost along the way, leading to a mistaken interpretation of said communication.

...

I'm pretty sure that last paragraph made no sense. I feel like the more I try to explain what I understand by this passage of Burke's the more convoluted I'm making it. Let me try explaining with a story.

Last week I went out to eat with Ben, Melinda and Smed. We had just gone to a hockey game (I still don't understand what icing is, by the way), and it was a little late. Probably 10 pm or so. After we'd been served and were eating, the waitress came around and filled up everyone's glasses with water. Unfortunately, not everyone was drinking water; Ben was drinking Sprite. As she topped off Ben's glass he pointed to his cup and said, "That was Sprite." The waitress got an exhausted look on her face, apologized and took his cup away, and brought back a new one filled with Sprite. All was made right in the end.

Now, I'm sure you've all gone out to eat with people who, if kind of thing had happened to them, would have been thoroughly offended by this waitress's actions, perceiving them as vicious, and would have left a tip reflecting the displeasure felt. And, frankly, our societal mores, as they pertain to waiter behavior and tipping, would condone such lowering of the tip. The patron would be upset at having their drink watered down, the waiter would be upset at having gotten crappy tips, and everyone would go home angry. Now that's obviously a bit hyperbolic, but it illustrates the point that viewing people as vicious doesn't make anyone happy.

But that's not what happened with Ben. 

Ben saw the whole situation as an amusing misunderstanding, mentioned that it was late and the waitress was probably tired, and I'm guessing he remunerated her adequately with his tip. (If he didn't, I tipped her extra, just in case.) 

This is just one example, but I can think of many others. That dude who cut me off on the freeway probably wasn't trying to be a jerk, he wasn't being vicious, he probably just didn't see me or misjudged how fast I was going or maybe is just learning to drive and isn't very good yet (we've all been there before). There are numerous alternate ways of interpreting the situation than the one that leads to me writing him off as a vicious dirtbag who can't drive and then letting that bug me all day. Viewing people as vicious in this way is what makes us fight with one another over stupid problems and makes us unable to progress towards human enlightenment, however we want to define that.

According to Burke, humanity, with our imperfect language systems and inaccurate way of communicating with one another, can only progress so far as we are able to see past our miscommunications, seeing one another as mistaken, not as vicious. And he says that's the way we should view all of our interactions. And it's not just that we are occasionally mistaken, but necessarily mistaken. All of us, all the time. No matter how hard we try or how much study and effort we put into being clear and accurate communicators, we are inevitably going to be mistaken. Our symbol systems are imperfect, leading to imperfect communication. Every time we think we have some insight into how to perceive a situation or into something someone says or into something we see, we are also blinded to other interpretations of it. Look at Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, for example.

Claudio thinks he sees Hero being unfaithful to him. He sees her performing an act that is vile and base, so at their marriage he reacts to what he thought he saw in a manner that is also, though differently, vile and base. Going back to Burke, he perceived her actions as vicious, so he responded to them viciously, not realizing that he was mistaken. He did not see what he thought he saw. The "truth" that he'd witnessed wasn't the truth at all, but rather a ruse cooked up by Prince John as his cronies. Luckily Dogberry intervenes and ensures that everyone understands that all is a misunderstanding and it is made right in the end. Everyone gets married and is happy. Unfortunately, in a similar situation, there is no Dogberry in Othello, and the end result is the deaths of both Desdemona and Othello.

These examples are a bit extreme as they involve people dying because of misunderstandings, but in their extremity they highlight the danger in automatically viewing the world and the people in it as vicious. Setting aside for a moment the viciousness of Iago and Don John, let's suppose that Desdemona and Hero were guilty of the claims laid against them. For all Othello and Claudio knew, the claims were true, and they had no reason to suspect them, so through their eyes those claims were as good as true. That said, their reactions are utterly impermissible, per Burke, because they treat Desdemona and Hero as vicious. Othello and Claudio are willing to act in ways that result in the deaths of the women they purport to love, all because they viewed them as vicious.

So what would have happened if they'd viewed Hero and Desdemona as mistaken, and not vicious. Maybe Claudio and Hero wouldn't have been married, Othello and Desdemona might have gotten divorced, and all parties would continue their lives as they had. But maybe they would have worked through their issues. Maybe Othello could have talked to Hero and Desdemona, expressed their concerns over what they saw/heard/thought was reality, and then rather than sending them off like harlots, tried to work through the problems. If these women were guilty and repentant it could conceivably be a moment of forgiveness and change. If unrepentant, the relationships would likely be broken off and all parties would be sadder for it, but they would all get on with their lives productively. If, as was the case in both plays, the women were given the chance to explain what really happened, then all the death fiascoes could have been averted and everyone could go home happy. All if Claudio and Othello had seen fit to treat Hero and Desdemona as mistaken and not vicious.

I realize I'm imposing today's views of relationships and masculine ideals and the like onto Elizabethan theater, and maybe that's irresponsible of me, but I feel like Shakespeare gave us a good setting with which to work through Burke's ideas today, so I don't feel bad about it.

This idea I'm talking about is often described as "giving others the benefit of the doubt," but I like the words "vicious" and "mistaken" better as they give us specific strategies for how we can treat people. Someone we perceive as vicious we treat much differently than someone we perceive as mistaken, but the phrase "benefit of the doubt" is really ambiguous when you think about it. 

No matter what you call it though, I feel like this is something we should all aspire to.

The way I've written about this so far probably comes across as if shifting our ways of thinking to better reflect this ideal no big deal and it requires nothing more than making the decision to do it. It's not that easy. I think it's the kind of thing that requires a lifetime's dedication to really master, and heaven knows I'm far from incorporating it as well as I'd like. But it's something that I've found has helped direct my thoughts as I try to love and respect the people around me. Even and perhaps especially when they're bothersome.

I could continue talking about this as I have several other ideas concerning this topic, including what do we do about people who are, in fact, vicious, but I think I'll leave it here for now.

Nose-Picking

I'm taking a creative nonfiction writing class right now. It's hard. Mostly it's hard because I'm out of my comfort zone and I'm being forced to think about things and do things that I don't usually have to think or do. But I'm sure it's good for me. Builds character and all that.

Today in class we workshopped an essay that I'm currently working on. It's about nose-picking. The inspiration for this essay comes from a picture I took of my niece a couple of years ago wherein I caught her with her right index finger firmly entrenched in her left nostril.

Upon finding out on the facebook that I was writing this essay one of my sisters requested that I post the essay here on my blog. Because the essay isn't quite finished yet, a fact that was driven home to me today as my peers helped me see areas where I can improve and expand, I'm not going to do that.

However, I will post the first couple of paragraphs that I read aloud to my class today. They're not totally polished, but it gives you a taste.

~~~

I pick my nose. It’s true. Writing that down, I feel like I’m at some sort of Nose-Picker’s Anonymous meeting or something.

"Okay everyone, the first step to healing to acknowledge that you have a problem. So all together now..."

*Gestures wildly as if conducting a Gospel choir*

"I'm a nose-picker."

The real problem, though, is that I don’t really see it as a problem. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who will go out of his way to make a scene when picking. When I’m in public and the need arises, I pick and discard as discreetly and quickly as possible, and I wash my hands at the earliest possible opportunity. When I’m in polite company and I find obstructed my ability to breathe nasally, I excuse myself to the restroom and exercise the polite, tissue-aided pick my mother taught me. See, I may pick my nose, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have class about it.

That said, I will readily admit that when in the privacy of my own company there is little more satisfying than a deep cleanse. The pick that you have to go for with the gold-mining, brain-scratching eagerness usually reserved for the very young and the very old. The deep pick that’s crusty on the surface nearest the outside world, but that’s connected to enough of the still moist and mildly gelatinous buildup within that as you pick and it comes trailing out of your nose, it feels like it’s coming from a place deep enough on the inside that you question for a moment if you’re not pulling out something actually important. Like a tear duct. Or your brain stem. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as picking out that long, stringy glob of snot and feeling it tickle the top of your throat on its way out.

...

I realize that was a disgusting image, so I’ll give you a moment to stop retching before I continue.

...

~~~

There you go. I might post the rest of the essay someday. Or I might not. Who knows?