I swung by Memorial Library to find my Halloween book on Tuesday, on my way to class. I remembered that that was the library it was in, though not the exact title or author. So in the lobby of Memorial, I did a search in the catalog for "halloween party night," which I remembered as being part of it. Bingo, the record popped up. I scribbled down the call number and checked the directory to the right of the elevators. (There's some new electronic directory thing in the lobby now, as well, but I don't actually know how to use it, so I just used the posted paper one.) I check my scribbled LoC call number against it, and - fifth floor. Screw taking that many stairs, my ankle's still busted. I get on the elevator and push five.
On the fifth floor itself, I know I need the north stacks - the fifth is one of the weird split-level floors in Memorial, where the North stacks are like a half-flight down from the South ones. There's a little map just at the entry to the stacks showing me where to go, and it doesn't take long for me to make my way to the back of the room. It took me a little longer to find the actual book, because it didn't have the full title printed on the spine, and I was sort of scanning them in a hurry. It's in the middle of a bunch of books that all look like they're about Halloween; my favorite title that I spot is, "Death Makes a Holiday."
I finally spot it, and take a quick picture on my phone of the shelves above and below it so I can get out of there. (After all, I'm not actually writing a paper on Halloween, so there's no reason for me to check the book out. Otherwise, I would probably check the table of contents and/or index to see if it looked useful for me.) The shelf below is easy to figure out - it's clearly a whole shelf of books on Christmas. I'm still not entirely sure, however, exactly what comes just before the Halloween books, because a whole bunch of them were written in languages I do not know. I picked up some titles in Spanish about festivals and at least one in English saying it was about Chinese New Year, so I'm guessing it was some sort of category of "Miscellaneous holidays." Looks like that's how LoC categorizes this stuff; if it were in a Dewey Decimal system catalog, the foreign language books would probably be in a different section. Trip done, I go forth in search of coffee.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Double Blog Assignment Post - for 11/17 and 11/19
For Tuesday, November 17th
We're reading/discussing both Naomi Shihab Nye's essay "To any Would-be Terrorists" and Aaron Devor's essay, "Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender" for Tuesday. Please respond to both, below:
Nye:
The Nye essay, as the introduction notes, was written largely in response to the events of September 11, 2001. It's now fourteen years later, and multiple terrorist attacks later, including the one this past weekend, in Paris. Now, the 9/11 and the Paris attacks are very dissimilar - the countries they occurred in and the groups committing them occupy very different cultural and political realities, but for obvious reasons, they're reminiscent of each other. Answer the question: What is the point of writing something like this? I mean that in two ways. Doesn't have to be a terribly long answer, just something to spur conversation on Tuesday.
(a) I mean this seriously: What argument is Nye actually putting forward, about what, and to whom?
(b) I mean this as a cry of frustration: In a world where people commit mass murder, what is the fucking point in writing something like this? Does it actually change anyone's mind, or spur them to thought, or action, or inaction? What possible effect could this short piece have on the world, if any? Is it worth writing, and reading, think-pieces like these?
Devor:
The Devor piece was incorporated in the reader largely because of the ideas it contains, but I'm more interested in the genre of what it is. I'm going to ask you to address both in this blog assignment. I'm not going to ask you to summarize it because, hilariously, when I looked it up online to double-check its publication history, I found another instructor doing basically the exact same blog assignments as me who'd already done that. So, instead, I'll ask you to pick one part of the article (a few sentences or a paragraph) that you either find very convincing or very unconvincing, and do the following three things with it:
(a) Quote it (including page number).
(b) Explain it - rephrase it in your own words, restating what you think Devor's point is in the passage. Pretend you're explaining it to, like . . . your mom.
(c) Address whether you find it convincing or unconvincing, and explain why, including any evidence (probably personal experience, given the nature of the topic) you have backing your position.
May want to put some work into this one; it could turn into an impressive entry to submit in your final portfolio if you, for example, totally blow at writing about fiction.
For Thursday, November 19th
FIELD TRIP, WOO!
Go to the library catalog at:
www.library.wisc.edu
Find a physical book relating to your topic. I don't care how recent or weird your topic is, there will be a book related to it in some way. If you're doing, say, "How did Freakfest get started?" a question I just made up . . . let's see, I play around with my search terms a little . . . and . . . viola!
Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
GT4965 R634 2002, Memorial Library
Okay, it's not the actual Freakfest, but I would say that a book like this would be useful back history for my project. See that last thing in the entry? That's it's Library of Congress call number, and the library where the book is located. Now, before Thursday, go find it, and write about finding it. You don't have to check it out, you just have to go physically locate it on the shelf, and do a short write-up about your trip to go find it.
That write-up will, first, have an entry just like the one above with its bibliographic info, a call number, and the library it's in. Then, include a description of your trip (Was it difficult/easy, when did you go, how did you locate the book, whatever. Just tell the story of your journey.) Then, you have to describe what books are above and below it on the neighboring shelves. Give either a summary of the topic(s) they appear to be on, or a title in each direction. I'll put up a model once I boogie down to Memorial and track down this Halloween book, but I haven't done it yet. I'm just telling you now so you have four days to do it.
And yes, if you already went and found books for your project, you kind of have to do it again (sorry, Hannah). Just to be able to do the "what's on the other shelves" thing. It might feel like busywork, but I promise it's not - it's a way to get you to think about what the LoC thinks is related to your topic.
We're reading/discussing both Naomi Shihab Nye's essay "To any Would-be Terrorists" and Aaron Devor's essay, "Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender" for Tuesday. Please respond to both, below:
Nye:
The Nye essay, as the introduction notes, was written largely in response to the events of September 11, 2001. It's now fourteen years later, and multiple terrorist attacks later, including the one this past weekend, in Paris. Now, the 9/11 and the Paris attacks are very dissimilar - the countries they occurred in and the groups committing them occupy very different cultural and political realities, but for obvious reasons, they're reminiscent of each other. Answer the question: What is the point of writing something like this? I mean that in two ways. Doesn't have to be a terribly long answer, just something to spur conversation on Tuesday.
(a) I mean this seriously: What argument is Nye actually putting forward, about what, and to whom?
(b) I mean this as a cry of frustration: In a world where people commit mass murder, what is the fucking point in writing something like this? Does it actually change anyone's mind, or spur them to thought, or action, or inaction? What possible effect could this short piece have on the world, if any? Is it worth writing, and reading, think-pieces like these?
Devor:
The Devor piece was incorporated in the reader largely because of the ideas it contains, but I'm more interested in the genre of what it is. I'm going to ask you to address both in this blog assignment. I'm not going to ask you to summarize it because, hilariously, when I looked it up online to double-check its publication history, I found another instructor doing basically the exact same blog assignments as me who'd already done that. So, instead, I'll ask you to pick one part of the article (a few sentences or a paragraph) that you either find very convincing or very unconvincing, and do the following three things with it:
(a) Quote it (including page number).
(b) Explain it - rephrase it in your own words, restating what you think Devor's point is in the passage. Pretend you're explaining it to, like . . . your mom.
(c) Address whether you find it convincing or unconvincing, and explain why, including any evidence (probably personal experience, given the nature of the topic) you have backing your position.
May want to put some work into this one; it could turn into an impressive entry to submit in your final portfolio if you, for example, totally blow at writing about fiction.
For Thursday, November 19th
FIELD TRIP, WOO!
Go to the library catalog at:
www.library.wisc.edu
Find a physical book relating to your topic. I don't care how recent or weird your topic is, there will be a book related to it in some way. If you're doing, say, "How did Freakfest get started?" a question I just made up . . . let's see, I play around with my search terms a little . . . and . . . viola!
Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
GT4965 R634 2002, Memorial Library
Okay, it's not the actual Freakfest, but I would say that a book like this would be useful back history for my project. See that last thing in the entry? That's it's Library of Congress call number, and the library where the book is located. Now, before Thursday, go find it, and write about finding it. You don't have to check it out, you just have to go physically locate it on the shelf, and do a short write-up about your trip to go find it.
That write-up will, first, have an entry just like the one above with its bibliographic info, a call number, and the library it's in. Then, include a description of your trip (Was it difficult/easy, when did you go, how did you locate the book, whatever. Just tell the story of your journey.) Then, you have to describe what books are above and below it on the neighboring shelves. Give either a summary of the topic(s) they appear to be on, or a title in each direction. I'll put up a model once I boogie down to Memorial and track down this Halloween book, but I haven't done it yet. I'm just telling you now so you have four days to do it.
And yes, if you already went and found books for your project, you kind of have to do it again (sorry, Hannah). Just to be able to do the "what's on the other shelves" thing. It might feel like busywork, but I promise it's not - it's a way to get you to think about what the LoC thinks is related to your topic.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Blog assignment for 11/11/15
I'm having some technical difficulties on my end with some stuff, but I wanted to get this out after my blog fail for yesterday. Your assignment for tomorrow:
Find two reputable sources that you think might be useful for your research paper. For each, give an MLA style bibliographic entry, then a quick explanation of what it is, how you found it, and why you think it will be useful. This is a quick and sloppy version of what's called an annotated bibliography. Here's one of mine:
Summerhayes, Catherine. The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt. Milano: Charta, 2007.
The dissertation chapter I'm working on includes talking about a movie called beDevil, which is honestly a very strange vignette film of ghost stories in Australia. Its director, Tracey Moffatt, is the only female Aboriginal director I know of, which is part of why it's important for my project. This is an actual book that I found in Memorial Library, and it's pretty great; it has a lot of her artwork and frame-by-frame shots of all of her movies up to 2007, talking about how they can be visually interpreted. The book is going to be very useful to help me analyze the film, as well as background information on Moffatt's biography and career prior to making beDevil. I'm going to have to be careful, however, to not rely on it entirely; I need to use the other books and articles I found to make sure I'm taking multiple viewpoints into account.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Ronson Wrap-Up
Well, this is it, folks. We finally say goodbye to So You've Been Publicly Shamed. (I'll probably at least refer to it as we complete the course, but we're done reading.) I always feel as though Ronson doesn't quite know how to end his books. He's a professional journalist, and I find the standalone articles he does for print and radio work to be excellent, but when it's a whole book, it's like he tries to smash so much stuff into it that ultimately he has no idea what his point was. He's very good at pointing at things and asking, "Isn't this super weird?" but sucks when explaining how we can or should react to it. The last sentence of this book is . . . okay, I guess, but it's not terribly revolutionary or enlightening.
So that's your job for the blog: Come up with two major responses to the book. They will be:
* First, a descriptive statement. What would you end up saying is the major point of the text? Pick one case or story Ronson tells, from anywhere in the book, that you think backs up your claim. (Difficulty: You can't use Lindsey Stone.)
* Second, a prescriptive statement. What do you think is the single most important thing people should do (or think, or not do) differently after reading this text? Why?
Post these, and scribble down enough of them on a sheet of paper (or print it out) so you remember what you said in class on Tuesday. I'll ask you to do a little more work with them then.
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