"Remember, a gun in the room means someone ought to be shot." (MS)
-- The best piece of advice I ever received.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Q for you all
So is anyone going to be severely offended if I only send my piece via email?
I'm a bit strapped for cash, I know it's only a few dollars but yeah....it's still tight.
None of you have to snail-mail me copies unless you're really keen on it.
Just do that lovely Word editing thing, Track Changes I believe - it makes everything nice and RED!
Okay, enough out of me for one day
I'm a bit strapped for cash, I know it's only a few dollars but yeah....it's still tight.
None of you have to snail-mail me copies unless you're really keen on it.
Just do that lovely Word editing thing, Track Changes I believe - it makes everything nice and RED!
Okay, enough out of me for one day
finally...
hey all,
i just emailed my piece.
i'm out of practice in this deadline thing....
my life is ambiguous and day-to-day
it's kind of amazing, but sorry to keep you all waiting.
i just emailed my piece.
i'm out of practice in this deadline thing....
my life is ambiguous and day-to-day
it's kind of amazing, but sorry to keep you all waiting.
Monday, November 10, 2008
For Jenny from Matt
Jenny -
Great to read this fun little piece. What's been said before all rings true, but could your essay lie in your final paragraph? Maybe I've been way too politically tuned these last few weeks, but perhaps you could follow the thread of the "strained mix of liberal and conservative political sentiments gleaned from the western and eastern halves" of Washington. This concept could be a book, but left as it is, this sentiment becomes an elephant of an idea reduced to just being mentioned in passing.
Remember, a gun in the room means someone ought to be shot.
I'll be sending an annotated copy of your piece, Jenny, in the mail soon. I've been out on the Kaibab Plateau with my students for the past week, and I might have found an essay out there, but it has put me a bit behind.
-Matt
Great to read this fun little piece. What's been said before all rings true, but could your essay lie in your final paragraph? Maybe I've been way too politically tuned these last few weeks, but perhaps you could follow the thread of the "strained mix of liberal and conservative political sentiments gleaned from the western and eastern halves" of Washington. This concept could be a book, but left as it is, this sentiment becomes an elephant of an idea reduced to just being mentioned in passing.
Remember, a gun in the room means someone ought to be shot.
I'll be sending an annotated copy of your piece, Jenny, in the mail soon. I've been out on the Kaibab Plateau with my students for the past week, and I might have found an essay out there, but it has put me a bit behind.
-Matt
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Unas sugerencias para tu ensayo, Jenny
Jenny! Here are some comments, and I emailed you your piece with a bunch more written all over it, MOB-style.
Oh my. How I enjoyed reading your writing again, as I sit here looking out over the Patagonian seas at the sunset. I felt as if we were back in DS’s classroom, snarfing our hippie goulash out of yogurt containers and gazing out at Ankeny while listening to DS orate. After reading this my writing and editing juices are definitely flowing again.
I really like your premise of combining the ecological concept of an ecotone with your personal reality of transition and having a ‘home in tension’ (one of my fave phrases of the piece). It’s original and daring and makes me think, which is precisely the purpose an essay should serve. I would love to see you develop the idea of an emotional/spiritual ecotone more, as you have barely brushed the surface, and as I think that is probably the most fascinating idea you present in the essay. You throw it in at the end, but I want you to throw it in at the beginning. (That should also help it feel less journal entry ish). Connected with that, I think a stronger sense of what you feel or felt when you are in the different ecosystems (eastside, Westside, middle), and a stronger sense of what they actually look like and function like (ecologically) would help. More definition of terms (aridity? That’s pretty broad, and relative, and doesn’t give me a visual picture) and description, too (I get the idea from this essay that the Westside is a homogeny of doug fir while the east is a homogeny of P-pine, and that’s obviously not true) would help round it out. And then more about what it means to feel at home somewhere or not to feel at home somewhere or to be completely torn between two places that you love equally.
Although I like the dichotomy of the two trees as synechdoche of the two places (whoa, I sound so pretentious), and I want it to work, I think it needs some polishing. Is this essay about trees, really? Right now I’m not very engaged with or interested in the trees as you present them. I don’t feel the same things you feel (well, in real life I do identify with your experience, but the essay doesn’t provoke those feelings). You might also try mentioning a few other plants common to both types of forests, besides trees. Sword fern, sagebrush….you know.
Actually, I think I’m more interested in how ecotones function than I am by either of these trees. Ecotones are so intriguing, and you only devote one paragraph to them. Might you go more in that direction? A thought--Because ecotones are places of such diversity and such fierce competition and uneasy coexistence (by the way, I would LOVE it if you got into the whys and wherefores of exactly how strange bedfellows can even live together in ecotones….it’s an ecologist’s wet dream), they are by definition places of rapid biological evolution, places where change occurs by the very nature of the place as a ‘home in tension.’ I hella, HELLA want you to explore this, ecologically and personally and metaphorically. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ready for milking. See me getting all biologically eroticized by the very idea?
Serious props.
Emily
Oh my. How I enjoyed reading your writing again, as I sit here looking out over the Patagonian seas at the sunset. I felt as if we were back in DS’s classroom, snarfing our hippie goulash out of yogurt containers and gazing out at Ankeny while listening to DS orate. After reading this my writing and editing juices are definitely flowing again.
I really like your premise of combining the ecological concept of an ecotone with your personal reality of transition and having a ‘home in tension’ (one of my fave phrases of the piece). It’s original and daring and makes me think, which is precisely the purpose an essay should serve. I would love to see you develop the idea of an emotional/spiritual ecotone more, as you have barely brushed the surface, and as I think that is probably the most fascinating idea you present in the essay. You throw it in at the end, but I want you to throw it in at the beginning. (That should also help it feel less journal entry ish). Connected with that, I think a stronger sense of what you feel or felt when you are in the different ecosystems (eastside, Westside, middle), and a stronger sense of what they actually look like and function like (ecologically) would help. More definition of terms (aridity? That’s pretty broad, and relative, and doesn’t give me a visual picture) and description, too (I get the idea from this essay that the Westside is a homogeny of doug fir while the east is a homogeny of P-pine, and that’s obviously not true) would help round it out. And then more about what it means to feel at home somewhere or not to feel at home somewhere or to be completely torn between two places that you love equally.
Although I like the dichotomy of the two trees as synechdoche of the two places (whoa, I sound so pretentious), and I want it to work, I think it needs some polishing. Is this essay about trees, really? Right now I’m not very engaged with or interested in the trees as you present them. I don’t feel the same things you feel (well, in real life I do identify with your experience, but the essay doesn’t provoke those feelings). You might also try mentioning a few other plants common to both types of forests, besides trees. Sword fern, sagebrush….you know.
Actually, I think I’m more interested in how ecotones function than I am by either of these trees. Ecotones are so intriguing, and you only devote one paragraph to them. Might you go more in that direction? A thought--Because ecotones are places of such diversity and such fierce competition and uneasy coexistence (by the way, I would LOVE it if you got into the whys and wherefores of exactly how strange bedfellows can even live together in ecotones….it’s an ecologist’s wet dream), they are by definition places of rapid biological evolution, places where change occurs by the very nature of the place as a ‘home in tension.’ I hella, HELLA want you to explore this, ecologically and personally and metaphorically. It’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ready for milking. See me getting all biologically eroticized by the very idea?
Serious props.
Emily
Comment on my essay!
Do it!
It may not be the best thing I've ever written, but it wants your criticism. Otherwise I may as well just write in my journal. And that would be lame.
It may not be the best thing I've ever written, but it wants your criticism. Otherwise I may as well just write in my journal. And that would be lame.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A parlaiment of owls? Whose idea was this anyway?
From where I sit, I can hear Otis the Western Screech Owl calling from his mew. Made the mistake yesterday of telling him about our experimental seminar and now I think he want in too.
Anyhow, Kudos to Jenny for getting us off to a good start! Here's what I think about "Ecotonality."
Thanks to the last two sentences on page 4, it does feel a bit like a "journal entry" to me too. A good one by any measure, but still I say cut the phony ending and give us another fifty pages on tension. Maybe it's just because I'm in a similar place myself, but the exploration of the Cascade ecotone as a metaphor for being an itinerant 20-something (or is it the other way around?) seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Now I want to know what the counterpart of biodiversity is and looks like in Jenny Gilbert's life.
Some of my favorite lines: "These trees were so normal it didn't even occur to me to know their names." - made me think about how, as a kid, I could navigate anywhere I wanted to go in town by landmarks and it wasn't until driver's ed. that I bothered to learn street names.
"Just as the sun cleared the horizon its rays hit the base of the tree and the yellow light reflecting off the red trunk illuminated the whole yard as if by a campfire." -Lovely
"...the mountains are cloaked in dark green Douglas-firs, the trees' stiff, pointy tops making the ridges look as if they were cut by pinking shears."- The image is very good and accurate. I couldn't help laughing, though, as I imagined God, the progenitor of all things, (including, of course, arts and crafts) trimming away at creation with the kind of serrated scissors that people like my sister use to give their scrap-books a lil' extra flare.
Anyhow, Kudos to Jenny for getting us off to a good start! Here's what I think about "Ecotonality."
Thanks to the last two sentences on page 4, it does feel a bit like a "journal entry" to me too. A good one by any measure, but still I say cut the phony ending and give us another fifty pages on tension. Maybe it's just because I'm in a similar place myself, but the exploration of the Cascade ecotone as a metaphor for being an itinerant 20-something (or is it the other way around?) seems like a worthwhile pursuit. Now I want to know what the counterpart of biodiversity is and looks like in Jenny Gilbert's life.
Some of my favorite lines: "These trees were so normal it didn't even occur to me to know their names." - made me think about how, as a kid, I could navigate anywhere I wanted to go in town by landmarks and it wasn't until driver's ed. that I bothered to learn street names.
"Just as the sun cleared the horizon its rays hit the base of the tree and the yellow light reflecting off the red trunk illuminated the whole yard as if by a campfire." -Lovely
"...the mountains are cloaked in dark green Douglas-firs, the trees' stiff, pointy tops making the ridges look as if they were cut by pinking shears."- The image is very good and accurate. I couldn't help laughing, though, as I imagined God, the progenitor of all things, (including, of course, arts and crafts) trimming away at creation with the kind of serrated scissors that people like my sister use to give their scrap-books a lil' extra flare.
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