Anyway. This is a blog for a summer project for school. Who goes to school in summer? Exactly. When you think of summer you think of sitting on a dock by lake Washington, the sun warming the wood under your body and making red caves out of your closed eyeballs. Not essays. Essay and summer are not synonymous. Essay and mothballs may be.
But the truth is that I love essays, and whatever an essay may be, it is conveniently and frustratingly, vaguely defined. This is great for many reasons that will be explored in this 10-credit individual learning contract.
This contract is influenced by some elements included on this short list:
1.) A love for David Foster Wallace, though that love has passed, thanks for changing my life.
2.) The deflated, anxious feeling of having "graduated" some experience while only partially enjoying it. 2.A) a conversation with a 65 year old classmate while passing each other in the bathroom, that went like: When are you graduating? He says, I don't know, and I can't say I care, I'm just learning. The irony is that I haven't technically graduated. Technically. After the thunderous feeling of thousands of people simultaneously envisioning their future, the terror, the excitement, I sat and watched them take away chairs, and realized that my life wasn't going to change dramatically when I woke up the next morning. That being a decent human being is a lifelong process and a lot of times your efforts go unheard.
3.) A desire to always improve my methods of communication with other people, which includes writing.
4.) Anxiety (endless)
5.) strange new understanding of things outside of my own self-interests, like empathy and compassion, the ability to care genuinely for other human beings.
6.) hard realities: relationships ending too soon, people committing suicide, the loneliness of mental illness.
7.) a continuous search for meaning (deep!)
8.) an endless affinity for facts/knowledge. To peak under the hood and glimpse the mechanics of language. Tower of Babel.
These are a few reasons why a choose to read and write essays. Others have written essays for similar and completely different reasons. Some write political manifestos. Some write about the human eye ball. Some write about neocolonialism. Some write about their experience at pornography conventions. Some write about death.
For the vast array of reasons listed above , the essay is a wonderfully mailable format, that it seems, due to its undefinable nature, is the perfect platform in which to catch the messy, random, escapades of the human experience.
This contract can be split into two blocks:
1.) Reading and analyzing the work of others.
2.) Writing. Writing. And more writing. Living. Digesting. Essaying. Essaying? Essaying!
A weekly theme will be chosen to lend some structure to what could be considered by the outsider too vague and abstract an approach to too large a body of work. For example, in week one I will explore the history of the essay, with the help of a wonderful book by John D Agata, with material that dates back to 1500 B.C.E in Babylonia.
What is the essay? (And other questions without answers)
Why do people write them?
Why and how are they effective?
Lastly. Fun. Lets never forget fun. Without fun, anything risks becoming work. It's summer. Lets have a good time.
