Time Beyond Doubt

Time beyond doubt 

living, energy rising

capture or kill

I didn’t have a physical newspaper or any way to print one out, but I did have the front page of tomorrow’s The Times and a small drawing tablet, so this is my blackout poem. Most of the scribbling is nonsensical, but I tried to draw arrows near “BEYOND” and “rising”, and I tried to draw a monocle around Rishi Sunak’s eye. I was listening to a fantasy audiobook as I did this, which likely influenced my choices, but I imagined a small, dystopian story around this poem about a machine putting down an uprising.

Assignment Bank 3 (Week Four):

Newspaper Blackout Poetry: 

This week I was asked to incorporate the character I created last week (The Jester) into one of the assignments I chose to complete. When I saw this assignment; I saw my opportunity. This assignment asked me to grab a marker, today’s morning edition, and start blacking out sections to create a new story.

The story I created depicts what lead to Jester’s creation. Sure the incident on the playground was a critical turning point in his life, but this story illustrates what developmentally got him to take a turn for the worse that day. The story is as follows:

“I drove to see a girl I used to know,
She never answered my calls,
I drank a couple beers,
I remember it was all different 14 years ago,
I drove to Falling Lane,
In the street was my brother and I,
I thought about the time there was a priest greeting a family,
I thought about the time him and I snuck up to the old man’s house,
We heard him before we scattered,
I thought about the man who was killed,
My mother told me that the complications killed him,
I stood on the steps,
My brother came home because his hear was diseased,
He struggled,
I was only ten and heartbreak was the way life was supposed to be.”

The Grey Warm Pearls Shone…

I finally got around to playing with Tom Woodward‘s Erasure Poetry SPLOT (smallest possible learning online tool?) on the VCU’s Artfulness site. I knew of the process of removing text from a page of text to create a tight, terse phrase or poem as Newspaper Blackout Poetry, and it was an early creative assignment for #ds106. But seeing the recent work Tom Woodward has done to wrap this exercise into a WordPress plugin was awesome. VCU’s Artfulness site has 3 different selections of text that you can blackout various words, sentences, etc. to make some poetry through editing. I tried the example “Biscuit,” which is a page from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Here is my final product online, and Im also including an image below if clicking strange links scares you ?

screenshot-2016-09-07-21-05-22

It’s immediately obvious I’m no Joyce, but what I loved about this exercise was how the process of going through a page of text word by word allowed me to isolate what I believed to be a water theme. The idea of pearls, waves, jets, waterproof, etc. I was also struck by the repetition of certain words and concepts again and again. In fact, my run at this process was an attempt to capture the text as if it was a series of waves endlessly, noiselessly washing over the reader. High brow, I know. But at the same time this tool immediately changed my approach to close reading of the page, not unlike how GIFs change my approach to close watching of a scene. It’s a powerful way to try an interpret a text, and leaves so much to the imagination—as great literature can.

As does this plugin! Amazing how Tom can do all this through a WordPress page, then capture it as an image or submit it to the site as part of a collection of poetry. This is a tool made for #ds106, and it really highlights beautifully the ethos behind creating small, simple tools for folks to explore an image, text, video, sound file, etc. Fine, fine work Mr. Woodward, I am remain a BIG FAN!

The new lack of creativity

My sentence with a deep take on creativity

Newspaper Blackout Poetry

For my last visual assignment of the week, I chose one called “Newspaper Blackout Poetry.” It was worth 3 points. Here’s the link to the assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/newspaper-blackout-poetry/

When I first saw this assignment, I knew I would want to complete it for this week. So, I picked up the New York Times from the lobby of my dorm. As I brought it back to my room, I realized that the print was extremely small! I went back and looked at the instructions for the assignment and thankfully saw that it was an option to make a picture out of the newspaper. Although my idea is pretty abstract, I think it could be seen in a lot of different views depending upon who is looking at it.

My original idea was to draw an arm filled with words that would tell some type of a story (kind of like a tattoo). But in this paper, there was a big article about Apple vs. Microsoft that caught my eye. There was a large chart on it that consisted of jagged lines. So, I drew the outline of an arm surrounding the blue data line. I kept one word from the title which was “Overtaking.” When I finished blocking everything else out I was very surprised to actually see something really cool. Since I had the background of knowing that this was an article about electronics and how two companies are growing and competing more than they ever have in history, my meaning behind this is probably very different than someone else’s.

I see what I created as a depiction of what is happening to our society. I see the data charts about growing electronics representing the veins in this arm. And as we all know, our veins are essential to our life. With a title like “Overtaking,” I can’t help but think that we as a society are now running off of technology like we cannot survive without it.

IMG_1218

Me and the TV

Someone asked for comments on this post – http://namackerfire.com/brainmagic/blog/2013/10/23/sound-of-the-hollyhocks-the-rocks-final-night/

I complied via blackout poetry.

Colour Between the Lines

Rewrite of a newspaper articleThe Newspaper Blackout Assignment suggests that you should “grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news”.  I decided to shake this up with a bit of colour.  The original article appeared in today’s Toronto Star “Edward Burtynsky’s bigger picture” (link will probably only work for a few days).  The result wasn’t exactly as I had envisioned.  A shorter article would have worked better as you will need to click on the image to actually read the words.

My Newspaper Poetry looks like the AIDS Quilt…

I did not think that my Newspaper Blackout Poetry assignment would be so challenging when I started it, but it was. I chose an editorial about Obama’s Inaugural Speech from the New York Times and managed to turn it into a poem about the history of the Gay Rights Movement.

I had to scan my piece into my Macbook in two parts due to the length before splicing them together in Photoshop, blending the scans as best I could and honestly, over all, I am happy with my result. I think that my poem has a message and meaning. It talks about something that I am passionate about as a Gender Studies major, which is nice.

Here is the text of the poem for those who cannot follow the scan.

Human Dignity

Stonewall.
poetry waiting
speech and music
bold
something to hear
progress
years spoke volumes
today
all of us
equal

blood

A Stonewall
A I D S

America
subjected to bullying
L.G.B.T dignity
denied

gay
Americans questioned their decisions
explicitly shocked about how
sex
was in news
coverage

drew attention

I want
I’m proud
minds open
laws change
But the “gay”
American ideal

reality
love must be equal
the right to marry
gay and lesbian don’t have that
we’re not honorable

Despite our strides
no
weddings
taxes
benefits

treats gays and lesbians differently
An inferior class

validate L.G.B.T

Human Dignity

Everybody Wants To Imagine

The assignment I chose is Newspaper Blackout Poetry. The activity calls for using a marker and a magazine to black out sections to create a new story. I truly underestimated the difficulty of this task. Firstly, being that I am at my girlfriend’s, the closest thing to a newspaper I could access was People Magazine. So I started off at a bit of a disadvantage. I sifted through numerous articles, and couldn’t come up with anything. The whole process took over an hour, but I finally came up with something semi-coherent. “Everybody wants to imagine”. I’ll leave you with that folks.

Blackout

 

Emily’s Laughter.

 

 

This was a miniature article making Emily have a twisted sense of humor. This assignment was pretty straight forward. You simply just needed a marker to blacken words from a newspaper article and create a new story with the words that are left unblackened.