Month: May 2020

Picture this: You’re a college student going into your second semester of sophomore year. You’ve registered for a few different 300-level English classes, all fulfilling different requirements. You’re excited to take an English class where you don’t read all eighteenth-century literature, because how many of those texts can you actually read before it gets a little old? You look at the required materials for your Digital Humanities class and one of the books is titled “Walden.” You have no idea what this means… is it a person? place? idea? You soon find out that it is the name of a pond surrounding the home of where the author of the book lives in semi-isolation.

Going into ENGL 340 where much of the course’s focus is on Walden, I thought it was quite unrealistic to live in the woods in a small cabin, being almost completely self-sufficient. Picturing myself in this situation, I’m sure I would be able to manage growing and preparing food to keep me alive, and finding some activities to keep me entertained. However, knowing myself and I rely on socializing to keep me busy, I could only do this for so long before I would become bored and get in my own head from feeling overwhelmingly alone with my thoughts. Thankfully, this was something that someone else did and not me. To each their own, right?

The last day of class before Spring Break, I was feeling extremely unmotivated and was considering not going to class, but I chose to go anyway. Little did I know, that would be the last day of ENGL 340 I would go to, but not because of my own choices. I think a lot of my other peers in the class were feeling the same lack of motivation that I was, seeing how there were few students in attendance. Towards the end of class, I got Twitter notification on my phone with a headline somewhere along the lines of “Governor Cuomo says that all SUNY schools will learn remotely for the rest of the school year.” I kept this to myself as I was still in shock that this could actually be real. About a minute later, one of my classmates, Leila, announced to the class the same thing that I had just seen.

Everyone in the class started asking questions out loud like “Is this actually real?” or “I live in Long Island, how am I just supposed to pack up and leave?” At the time, we didn’t actually know if the school would send us all home. I had some hope that we might be able to stay in the dorms and do our work there and just not go to class. The entire rest of the day was chaotic. Staff members didn’t know what was going on and there were so many rumors going on, I didn’t know what to believe. As an RA myself, I had concerned residents asking me what was actually going on and what they were supposed to do. I had to tell them that I didn’t know myself and that we would have to wait to receive word from the school about the next steps.

Eventually, it seemed like the school had reached a settled plan that students could go home for Spring Break and return if they notified their Area or Residence Director that they planned on coming back. There were also the options to stay at school during the break and for the rest of the semester or to go home completely. I planned on either staying for break with my friends who lived far away and didn’t want to travel back and forth, or to go home and return to school after break. Either way, I was just relieved at the time that I wouldn’t have to live at home and I could come back to school and still spend time with my friends, even if we couldn’t attend classes or have a normal rest of the semester.

To my surprise, when I was home at the beginning of break, I received an email saying I had to return to school, gather my belongings, and move out of my dorm room completely. I immediately texted my friends wondering if they saw it, too. A few days later, I drove back to Geneseo, moved out of my room, and said goodbye to my few friends and fellow staff members in my building. I had no idea that my life for the next few months would turn into a living example of what I had read about in Walden.

I guess what I can say I learned from all this is to “never say never,” because truly anything can happen. Also, I think it’s an important lesson to not believe everything you hear, because the news makes mistakes, too and rumors can spread quickly, especially in a time like this. I never thought that such a unique situation as Thoreau’s would ever become a reality I would live myself, but now I can appreciate Walden in my own new way. In the end, being quarantined wasn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but it has had a significant impact on the way I view life and even the ‘humanities’ as we have talked about the various meanings of this concept in class. At then end of the day, I guess it’s pretty cool that I got to live out my own 2-month-long episode (and counting) of one of my favorite shows: The Twilight Zone !

I don’t know how I feel about the Amish. I don’t know if it’s fair to bring someone into that lifestyle without their consent. This might sound like a familiar dilemma to my classmates.

First, allow me to clarify that when I say “that lifestyle,” I do not  wish to insinuate I have anything close to first hand experience the way an actual Amish person or even one of their neighbors would have. I grew up among the comforts of suburbia and therefore my first-hand experience is limited to public markets and driving past buggies on back roads. My exposure and understanding of the Amish is product of my own community, which plays upon my reading of things independent of the thing which I’m trying to reach a judgement on. All said, I’m going to use this source mainly as my basis for talking about the Amish in this post.

Amish children are raised in a certain lifestyle all their life, one that is intentionally separated from the practices of the world at large. Sometime recently either in my notes or perhaps in class I spoke about the way cultures creates a homogenized opinion of something, and the larger the culture the greater potential for this general opinion to be established. (There’s probably a word for this, so Sociology students are invited to get at me. I think what I’m talking about is Freud’s superego but that kind of sounds wrong to me too…) Continue reading “The Amish and Community (an earlier post revised)”

By Anne Baranello

If you’re anyone who’s anyone, you’ve heard of TikTok – the social media app that consists of videos ranging from 15 seconds to a minute, using a rotation of sounds to go along with the videos. It’s slightly akin to the previously popular app Vine, which consisted of 6-second videos, forcing the users to be creative and resourceful with their content. 

Tiktok as a concept has garnered both criticism and acclaim for its concept – some feel that it is a cheap ripoff of Vine, and others (namely me) feel that TikTok is a new and improved version of Vine – the concepts are strikingly similar, and yet the content is so much more entertaining and creative. What I like about this app is that the videos are based around the sounds – and not the other way around. Users take edited sounds – say, an excerpt of a song, or the audio from a movie – and create videos with jokes or messages that take the sound out of its original context. There are obviously trends of which sounds are popular, which format of videos are popular, and which dances are all the rage, but users are constantly improving and advancing the trend – sometimes, a trend gets to the point where if you had no prior awareness and context of the trend itself and specific cultural knowledge, there’s no chance of you understanding it. But beneath the energetic dances and niche comedy, there’s a more conscious shift emerging. Tiktok is becoming a platform for social change – specifically feminism and the fight against misogyny. 

Its not a new thing – not for the last couple of centuries – that women have been becoming entirely more vocal about misogyny and it’s place in everyday life/conversation, and on the internet. The internet itself gives anyone with access a platform to vocalize their opinions, and oftentimes those opinions don’t fall in the favor of women, so instead of ‘canceling’ said person and moving on, Gen Z and Millenials on TikTok have begun calling these people out and using satirical phrases to shut them down. The most popular term/phrase is “wallet(s)” (referring to misogynistic, sexist, racist, privileged men). A comment calling out a misogynistic post would normally sound something like this “aw, is the wallet upset? go build me a coffee table, it’s what you do best”. Variations of ‘wallets’ is ‘toolboxes’, ‘hammer’, and so on. This phrase is used to combat the widespread trend of calling women “dishwashers” and comments such as “go make me a sandwich”. These posts are a kind of satirical misandry – the commenters don’t genuinely support misandry, but they’re giving misogynists a taste of their own medicine. There was no distinct post that began this trend – it began silently, started small, and then suddenly everyone (both female and male) began using these terms to call out latent and internalized misogyny found within Tiktok. I find this shift in the language of the internet so interesting because women/activists are no longer entertaining the misogyny by getting upset and giving the original poster a reaction. Instead, women are casually calling out misogyny in a manner that invalidates the opposing opinion, by turning the tables. This movement has even coined the phrase “ok wallet”, alluding to the infamous phrase “ok boomer”. It is used with the same dismissive manner and effectively disarms the original argument. Just as women have been objectified for centuries, women are now objectifying men.  

I personally am conflicted about this new movement. Part of me wants to shout, “Yes!!! Give them a taste of their own medicine! Fire back!” And another part of me doesn’t like the fact that this trend is almost condoning misandry – neither side is good. However, it’s refreshing to see people fighting back against the internalized misogyny that’s an intricate facet of our society.

As a result of ENGL 340 (as well as a course I have taken previously, ENGL 425: Recovering Marginalized Texts), I have realized that writing is a work in progress. As a writer myself, I am overly critical of myself. I write poems just to leave them in the notes app on my phone or in a notebook that sits on the shelf, gathering dust. I write my poetry all in one shot and I never really come back to it, but I have learned through this course that that is not how I should be writing. Even with my papers, (I shouldn’t, but) I write them all in one go, never making any additions or seeking out new information afterwards that will help my arguments. This is my biggest mistake as a writer and is probably why I am never fully satisfied with my writing.

In our work with fluid texts like Walden, I have realized how important it is review and edit what I have already written even if it is considered “complete.” This course has taught me that, technically, no body of writing should be called “complete” because it can always be better and it can always be altered. There are seven versions of Thoreau’s Walden that came before the final version that is so highly regarded by many, proving that greatness takes time. Though this course, I have also realized that this was the overall point of a course I took during Fall 2019 called Recovering Marginalized Texts. In that course, we learned about the expectations, strifes, and processes of an editor when recovering “lost” texts. The course highlighted the changes that these editors would make to these outdated texts to make them palatable for modern readers. More importantly, we explored why editors would make the decisions that they did while leaving other parts of the text as is. We even learned how to edit texts on our own, learning skills like being able to determine what background information was important to include. In a way, I feel that ENGL 340 and ENGL 425 oddly work hand in hand to highlight the importance of a fluid text as the many changes that occur emphasize writing as a process.

The difference between ENGL 340 and ENGL 425 is definitely the use of technology in ENGL 340 to make this process easier. Prior to taking this course, I had some experience with HTML and have always been interesting in coding as you can take some words with <> to make something amazing. I really enjoyed seeing the original manuscript for Walden as well as transcribing some of the text using metalanguage. In ENGL 425, we did some transcription, but had to write down the transcriptions by hand. I feel that using a TEI file is a more effective way to track the changes in a text that ends up being clear and descriptive. Although computing takes away a bit of the uncertainty and lack of guidelines that I crave, I think that it is a great way to visualize what makes a piece of writing as well as how it can be customized. For sure, I will use VS Code beyond this course to write notes and maybe even my poetry because I like the way I can easily format, edit, and publish my work that can be accessed from anywhere once published.

I feel that the sudden educational changes that we had to make campus-wide due to COVID-19 proves how technology = accessibility. Whereas my other professors had to scramble to convert their courses to an online-friendly version, the transition with ENGL 340 was the smoothest given that many of the tools and resources we use were already online. I feel like I am just rambling now, but I really want to emphasize that although I fell behind in this course, it was my absolute favorite from the beginning. It became apparent that combining English with technology made more sense than ever before. While other professors denied the legitimacy of online texts and computers in general, this course welcomes nontraditional methods. And for that I am grateful because, again, it taught me that writing is not set in stone (even if it is in print): a piece of writing can be revisited, revised, and rewritten again and again and again and there is nothing wrong with that.

In chapter 3 of The Information, Gleick discusses how during the 16th century, people had not come to a consensus on the spellings of words. He uses the example of a 1591 pamphlet where “the word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie…Others spelled it differently” (55). I found that although there were nine different spellings of one word, the author still spelled it with the letter ‘C’. To me, this begs the question: Who is to say that cony is not spelled with a ‘K’?

This led me to think about English as a discipline. I have always said that English is an easy subject because you can argue anything, as long as you have sufficient proof to convince your audience. As Gleick reminds us, historically, “language did not function as a storehouse of words, from which users could summon the correct items, preformed. On the contrary, words were fugitive, on the fly, expected to vanish again thereafter” (55). I feel that this version of language, that is temporary and ever-changing, lines up with my thoughts about English more than contemporary ideals. I think this way because whether you write a sentence that says “I buy a pair of pears every week,” but you wrote “I by a pear of pairs every weak” instead you still understand the message. At the same time, I found it surprising that there were not any grammar rules and regulations prior due to the fact that the numerous spellings of a single word could possibly be confused for completely different words. What comes to mind is the difference between “red” and “read” where the spelling could affect a reader’s understanding of the text. As time goes on, words become more permanent as stories are no longer shared solely orally.

Gleick asserts that “the availability – the solidity – of the printed book inspired a sense that the written word should be a certain way, that one form was right and others wrong” (55). I could not help but think about how the computer combines the uncertainty of words prior to print as well as the certainty that these grammar rules bring. What I mean is: digital texts are always subject to editing thus making them less certain, but many aspects of the computer prevent the same fluidity that oral tradition provides. For example, autocorrect will put that little squiggle under words that it does not recognize, signifying that it has been programmed to determine what is right from wrong. At the same time, the person who programmed the autocorrect had to spell all their tags correctly and make sure they are in the right place or the computer is literally unable to “read” it, thus incapable of carrying out the command. The difference between and could change the entirety of whatever you are working on. Meanwhile, if I spell something wrong in a paper, my professor will still understand what I meant I would just be incorrect.

There are definitely certain expectations in regards to spelling and grammar in any field. However, I feel that the difference is in the penalties for ignoring these ideals. In the humanities, communication is more based on the message rather than the details of the message. At the same time, computing is based on the details of the message, how the message will be conveyed. Due to these parameters, I think that the solidity of language is more important for computing as the use of incorrect spelling will greatly change the results of a project. Considering that, I believe the humanities is more fluid and forgiving (despite the adoption of these guidelines) because my message will be understood despite the misspellings.

A couple weeks ago Cassie wrote an interesting blog post about the importance of the visual. In addition to raising some very valid points, she credited a point that I had made in our small group discussion. I felt that it was important to provide some context and credit to the original research.

Maybe it’s my constant need for validation or maybe just the fact that people are constantly making me justify my degree in literature, but I like to bring up the fact that reading literature actually makes you a more empathetic person at pretty much every possible opportunity. That’s right, fellow book nerds, reading actually makes you a better person. Well, at least if you define better as more empathetic, which I do because we could really use some more empathy in the world right now.

Continue reading “It’s OK to be a Snob About Reading”

As we sit hunkered in our homes, losing track of the days, it might seem like this an awful and depressing time. You may be thinking “There’s only so much Netflix I can watch before I go insane.” As humans, we need to socialize and explore our surroundings.

As I was re-reading Walden thinking about what exactly it was I wanted to write about, I came across the chapter called “Solitude.” In paragraph 5, Thoreau discusses… well… the idea of solitude. The few lines that really stood out to me were when he states:

“How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?” (Walden, 16)

In these few lines, I was able to take away a bunch of ideas, especially while living in the world right now. What I was able to extract from these lines was not ideas about solitude and loneliness, but the opposite of that. No matter the distance between us, we should not lose our relationships with people. Although we are required to stay physically distant, our emotional connections should not suffer.

With everyone in a bad situation, there is always a bright side. To me, this bright side is that as a human race, it seems like we are closer than ever. All of us have been made to reflect on things we take for granted. In an effort to stay close and connected with the most important people in our lives, we have all come up with our own creative ways to express our love for one another.

For example, every Easter, my grandparents host brunch with everyone in the family. My grandfather makes a really amazing dish (S.O.S) that all the grandkids look forward to, my sister especially. They waited until the last possible second before cancelling it this year, in hopes that things might turn around. My grandpa, heartbroken about brunch being nonexistent this year, decided to make and deliver his S.O.S, in a safe and socially distant way. Even though we all weren’t together physically, my grandpa made Easter Sunday feel a little bit more normal than it would have been without the food. His effort to keep tradition alive by thinking outside of the box, inspired everyone to get into a Zoom call, while eating their S.O.S. For example, every Easter, my grandparents host brunch with everyone in the family. My grandfather makes a really amazing dish (S.O.S) that all the grandkids look forward to, my sister especially. They waited until the last possible second before cancelling it this year, in hopes that things might turn around. My grandpa, heartbroken about brunch being nonexistent this year, decided to make and deliver his S.O.S, in a safe and socially distant way. Even though we all weren’t together physically, my grandpa made Easter Sunday feel a little bit more normal than it would have been without the food. His effort to keep tradition alive by thinking outside of the box, inspired everyone to get into a Zoom call, while eating their S.O.S. In the Zoom call, me and my sister noticed the looks of sadness still on my grandparents face. So we decided to do something special for them. I wrote a parody of ABBA’s S.O.S song, and replaced the lyrics pertaining to our family’s S.OS. Together with my sister, we shot a music video and sent it to my grandparents. Hearing them laugh and making them happy meant the world to us.

Who knows how long this quarantine is going to last. This is not a time to shut yourself off from everyone. Stay connected, do whatever it takes to stay sane, while practicing social distancing of course. Stay safe everyone!