My Way
Having just checked out everyone else's blogs, I am thinking of myself as Coyote or Raven. "Indeed am I called fool." Here I have been hobbled, in my own self-conceit and desire to look competent, by citations and that grand old undergraduate stylistic fluke, "Use the author's words to sound more authoritative." Like Coyote, I just keep trying to adapt, however. I am surrounded by a group of very earth-centered trees, and I just keep bumping into you all and hoping the intelligence will rub off eventually. Thus I declare myself the self-deprecating visage of the trickster.
This business of just going along with my own thoughts is very liberating. I think that perhaps I might leave my eyes in the tree for a while, but hopefully not too long. I think I would look really weird with one of Mike's and one of Kory's, no matter how nice it would be of them to loan them to me.
At what point does the process of imitation as flattery turn into new creation? How long does it take a new way of doing anything to become "my way," and not just a cheap facsimile? Well, I'm hoping it takes less than a semester.
posted by Brita Graham @ 12:18 PM
2 Comments:
At 2:34 PM,
Becker said…
Thinking about imitation/flattery as a creative process: I remember an episode of "The Real Ghostbusters" back in 80s. The ghostbusters had to go up against the "ghost" of Sherlock Holmes, but the problem was that Holmes was fictional character that should not have had a ghost. The explanation was that so many people around the world, for more than a century, wished it to be true. Gradually, all that wishing and "percieved reality" made a new reality. Now that I look back, it seems kind of deep for a cartoon.
At 1:53 AM,
Anonymous said…
Yup... pretty deep for a cartoon. But then again, the cartoon probably had better writers, or at least more informed writers.
So, when does the writer get afforded a sense of intelligence? Not as an undergrad, I think we can all agree on that. To some respect, I thing that filling out a grad school application and having it accepted is not unlike Hermes purposefully not eating the meat of sacrifice... both end up communicating that something more is wanted, a further pursuit is desired. Could we all have decent jobs with our undergrad degrees? Sure. I had a couple. But really they sucked. I hated every single morning.
Somehow entering grad school offers opportunities that are not extended to undergrads who, without that application process, we all were. Not only that but Dr. Karell became "Linda", Dr. Keehler became "Greg", Dr. Sexson is still Socrates, Dr. Beehler is now supposed to be "Mike" (though he is really still Dr. Beehler). Problematically, there is a boundary that is crossed, though most don't quite know that it was stepped over... was it even there?
There's a walk to walk and a talk to talk, but the creative combination of the two presents each of us as grad students: not quite academics, but here at MSU, we're given some of the properties of such.
A trickster is not so much the fool as he/she is one who fools, though sometimes the fooling has to begin within.
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