A Final Goodbye

Here we go.  My last blog post.  And how fitting it is that my concluding post on this literacy adventure is about…well…blogs.  I have sincerely enjoyed working on this blog a couple of times a week, far more than I like writing academic papers.  What I think blog writing really helped with was developing my voice.  When I write an academic paper, I feel I am writing more what the teacher wants to read than what I truly want to write.  On the blog posts, like right now, I really feel as if I am really speaking through my words; they are my true thoughts on whatever I am writing about.

This was especially useful to me when we started to write our creative projects.  Because I had been using my own voice on the blog posts, I felt comfortable enough to write one of the main characters in first person.  I don’t think I would have been able to do this without the blog.  When reading different authors, there is always that unique thing deep down that singularly comes from the author.  This is voice.  The difference between blog writing and academic writing is that blogs initiate creativity, while research papers show knowledge.  A great fiction writer may not write a great history paper and the writer of the best college thesis of all time probably couldn’t write a successful novel.  Both have uses and both are valid.  For developing a writer’s creativity and voice though, blogging is certainly the way to go.

Now, as my blogging journey comes to an end, I have several people/things I wold like to thank.  First off, congratulations to myself, as I was somehow able to be disciplined enough to turn in all 25 posts on time.  Good job Jeff.  Next, I would like to thank my computer, which didn’t crash even once during our blogging time.  Well done.  Last, I want to thank all of my devoted readers, who sometimes would get interested enough to maybe read a part of one of my posts.  Thanks everyone.  With that in mind, I would like to declare The Book of Slade officially closed.

The Lads

Great friends can sometimes be hard to come by.  Throughout my middle and high school years, I am lucky enough to have developed a group of friends that I know will last a lifetime.  The six of us, the “lads” as we like to call ourselves, have gone through so many crazy experiences together that by now I think we know each other as well as we all know ourselves.  I’ll try to give a small glimpse of everybody so maybe you can understand our little group a bit better.  Let’s start from the right.

First there’s Gerald, or “Swagner” as he likes to go by.  This is one crazy mother fucker.  The best story I can think of to describe Gerald is that he once stole a Christmas tree at 3 o’clock in the mourning and proceeded to attack random people with it.  He’s a blast though.  Swagner is currently playing football at Wooster Poly Tech.

Next comes Curt.  Curt’s that guy who pretty much epitomizes preppy.  He wears Bermuda shorts, plays lacrosse, and pays extreme attention to his “flow.”  Curt’s been there from the beginning and is my regular drunk golfing buddy of mine.  Just kidding about the drunk part.  Or am I?  Anyway, Curt now attends Dartmouth and would consider himself one of those “Dartmouth bros.”

To the left of Curt is David, or “Gesch” as we call him because of his last name Geschwind.  I don’t think I’ve called him David since he first joined our school in sixth grade.  It took us about 2 months to figure out that we lived 2 minutes away from each other and had the exact same Chinese food order from our favorite restaurant Jade Billows.  From there it was destiny.  Gesch is currently starting for the Swarthmore college soccer team and is rockin’ it up in Philly.

Following in the line is Ben Citrin, or “Cit” as I refer to him.  Noticing a pattern here?  Cit’s just an awesome dude.  Don’t really know how else to explain it.  He’s always love Michigan and his persuasion is one the main reasons why I am in Ann Arbor today.  He would be here with me if he wasn’t playing soccer in college, so he’s back east in Bowdoin on the soccer team.  He still texts me every game day though with a version of “go blue.”

I’m next in line, but I hope everyone reading this already knows that so I’ll skip me.  After me is Zak.  We just call him Zak.  Zak was the one in high school with the girlfriend everyone hated.  We gave him shit about her down to the day they broke up about 1 month ago.  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  Zak’s great though, and his mom is just about the best cook in the world.  He’s currently attending Colombia and takin’ on NYC.

As different as we may be apart, collectively we make one group.  I can turn to or talk to any of these guys about anything and I know they will always have my back.  I consider each and every one of them my brother and fully expect our friendships to carry with us until the day we are gone.  I think the point I am trying to make here is that best friends are a special thing and should not be taken for granted.  I am lucky enough to have five of them.

That Damn Essay Again

Oh Groupthink…how great it is to write about you again.  It seems like yesterday I was sitting at my desk in July, agonizing about having to write an essay about you.  It seems somewhat ironic that here I sit in November, two weeks before the end of the semester, sitting in the same exact situation. 

One of the main things I noticed when re-reading the article were the similarities between the M.I.T. building and the L.H.S.P. program.  One of the main points of the program is to have students work together and live together.  I think they hope that by having students living here taking classes together, they will spontaneously run into each other and expand academic or social issues that they learned in class.  I don’t know how times I’ve randomly started talking about Salvage the Bones with somebody from class that I bumped into, but the two ideas I thought interestingly paralleled each other.

The first time I read the essay, I thought the narrative induced the reader to be somewhat confused as to what the main point of Lehrer was.  I do not think Lehrer himself is confused on the topic; I think he wants to convey how brainstorming is not as effective as the M.I.T. model of thinking.  However, after re-reading the essay, I still think he spends way too much time talking about why brainstorming is good.  Instead, he simply should have explained the basic foundation of brainstorming and possibly some detail about why people thought it was a good idea.  When he spends the first three pages of the article making the reader think his argument is favoring brainstorming, it is extremely confusing when he makes his dramatic statement that brainstorming “doesn’t work.”  Once again, I found Lehrer’s findings and argument to be interesting, but still do not think he presented them in a clear, logical way.

Splash

Splash welcoming me home

Before leaving for college, there were many things about home that I knew I would miss.  My family, my friends, my room, these were things that I expected to long for while away from home.  One thing that did not expect to miss so much was the new dog our family had just gotten a mere week before I left in August.  But, after one just one week of bonding with that 60 pound little ball of fur I could not help but miss her.

After the passing of our golden retriever of 10 years in February, Sammy, we decided to wait a while before getting our next dog.  However, when the opportunity arose to get a close relative of Sammy, a one and a half girl puppy named Splash, it seemed like too good of a situation to pass up.  Splash is a crazy dog.  She hasn’t quite figured out the notion of gravity yet, stumbling all over the place.  While I was home for thanksgiving, I witnessed Splash attempt to scratch her ear with her hind foot.  The only problem was that she was only halfway up the stairs.  She proceeded to stumble down the staircase.

Like her uncle Sammy and like the vast majority of golden retrievers, Splash is obsessed with food.  We’ve learned the hard way that you cannot leave any food on the counter, as she feasted on about half a turkey following our thanksgiving meal.  She is truly one of the sweetest dogs I have ever been around though, with her smiling face and wagging tail hanging over the gate whenever somebody walks through the door.  Even though I was only with her for a week before I left for college, she still gleams with excitement whenever I come home.  Being away I think makes me appreciate the time I have with her even more, even when she’s not exactly behaving.

A Lesson from Roth

The main thing that stuck out in my mind when listening to Phillip Roth’s interview was that he had not read Goodbye Columbus is over thirty years and barely remembers the details of the story.  He devotes this mainly to the reason that he would now think the novella was terrible.  This kind of made me pause and think.  The book that he is arguably most famous for, the book that won him the national book award in 1960, the book that was made into a major motion picture, is terrible?  How can this be?

He talks in the interview a lot about the development of voice and how it changes over a writer’s life.  One of my favorite parts of the interview was when he discussed never (and still not) having any idea how to start a novel.  This gives me and should give all of us some hope as most of us venture into our first creative project, as even the acclaimed Phillip Roth struggles with the notion of creating a story.  He also talked about how a writer’s voice can develop.  When he wrote Goodbye Columbus, he said that he was really just trying to develop his voice and figure out writing.  Even though his work was highly critically acclaimed and successful, he was not personally satisfied with the result and today would probably not consider it one of his ten best works.  This is another really interesting thing that I picked up from the interview: that the ultimate critic for a work is always the writer.  I loved when he said how sometimes a writer is working on sometimes and just thinks to himself, “wow, this is a piece of shit!” and completely stops the project.  I think what we can all learn from Roth’s interview is that writing is not a thing of perfection; it is something that can be changed and altered every day, with additions and cuts; it is a ever-changing project.