Author: Stina Perkins

Although I missed our class conversation yesterday, the topic of boilerplate language and clichés immediately piqued my interested— nothing aggravates me more than empty sentences or tired phrases (I’m talking to you, all University of Michigan promotional material that has ever existed ever).

Just like Bryan, Oliver, and Zach, I promptly thought of sports—a genre saturated with way too much clichéd commentary (whenever my mom turns on a Michigan football game a few minutes too, she rolls her eyes at ESPN’s “Talking Heads.”) It’s a shame, really: sports writing is spectacularly tangible, evocative, laden with emotions and analogies and turns of phrase. Sports interviews, regrettably, are not. At all.

Take, for example, the press conference. Regardless of team, regardless of context, regardless of the outcome, post-game press conferences manage to sound identical. In order to dodge controversy, avoid directing blame, and dodge making unfulfillable promises, coaches and players end up spewing a series of blanket responses that still, somehow, appease just about everyone.

I love Jim Harbaugh (almost) as much as the next Michigan student, but his press conferences are far from charismatic. The press conference below followed the team’s loss to MSU—decidedly the least mundane football game of the season (I’ll try not to remind everyone of the details)—yet still manages to follow the basic post-game formula:

“There’s so much good, you know, our guys that came played big in the big game and overcame so much. I mean, calls that were made and calls that weren’t made… They just kept fighting and overcame so much in the ball game and ultimately played winning football. And what do you say about the last play, you know, it was unfortunate. We didn’t get the result.”

So there you have it: some vague comment on “playing hard,” some mention of the result of the game, some statement on the referees. These responses are consensual—they don’t push any narratives or offer any new information—but we feast on this meaninglessness. The press conference is essentially a blank canvas, allowing us to project whatever feelings we have about the game onto the TV screen. They persuade us that our coach has everything under control, that we will turn ourselves around, that we will continue to win. The words are comforting in their predictability—everything a fan feels they need to hear.

Notably, Harbaugh is famous for challenging this press conference script when he was a quarterback at Michigan, single-handedly promising a victory against OSU: “We’re going to play in the Rose Bowl this year, I guarantee it. We’ll beat Ohio State and we’ll be in Pasadena on January 1st.”

Though he ultimately delivered on his promise, Harbaugh received considerable flack for making a statement this direct and tangible. Indeed, with the ease and proliferation of internet backlash, it’s really no wonder why today’s press conferences seem so substanceless. The fluff is a defense mechanism, protection against the media.

But I think there is a line to be drawn between the cyclical meaninglessness of press conferences and the abuse/reuse of sports clichés. Growing up a Michigan football fan and an avid cliché-hater, I felt myself cringe each time an ESPN announcer claimed that running back Mike Hart was the “heart and soul” of the Michigan offense. And I still shudder every time Rod and Mario (the commentators for Tiger’s baseball) call the high-and-inside pitch Miguel Cabrera’s “bread and butter.”

In this way, clichés are at once more specific and more ubiquitous than boilerplate language—they are, more often than not, ripped from the context of the game and applied more generally. Think how many times you’ve been told to “step up to the plate” in a group project, or that you’ve “dropped the ball” on applications, or that “in the long run,” your GPA won’t matter. In this way, tired sports phrases have seeped into the fabric of our everyday lives, infiltrating our idioms and colloquialisms.

I suppose all of this cynicism is just my attempt at illustrating the importance of looking beyond the empty post-game interview, beyond the banal sports cliché, and turning to the truly magnificent sports writing that exists in this world. (For sports fiction, I’d highly recommend Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding).

Go ahead: the ball’s in your court.

Like Lainey and Amanda, I think “strong” is perhaps the strongest (oops) example of a loose and cliched descriptor. “Your writing is really strong” is essentially the editor’s cop-out—instead of offering direct feedback (“your dialogue is sharp,” “your vocabulary is precise,” “your argument is lucid”), the reader avoids the task, choosing a word so overused that it shields itself from its own meaninglessness. There are other examples, of course:

Conversational: The word “conversational” describes writing that is neither strictly “academic” nor “creative” (whatever those binary designations mean)—writing that uses the second person, asks rhetorical questions, or is written for younger audiences. However, because very little non-fiction is actually written to reflect our day-to-day conversations, this descriptor carries with it layers of judgement: tied up in “conversational” is an implied lack of sophistication, the notion that “conversational” writing communicates simple ideas with simple vocabulary.

Poetic: On one level, this descriptor suggests some sort of relationship to poetic form—it’s used to describe prose that is lyrical, rhythmic, or decorated with metaphors. There’s certainly a level of nature imagery that goes along with this. Simultaneously, however, it could be used to conceal the judgement that a piece is too abstract. In this vein, “poetic” could actually be someone’s attempt to say: “this is entirely unintelligible.”

Critical: Much like the word analytical, “critical” is often used to connote some sort of sophistication, be it the specificity of content or the (perceived) complexity of language. In this way, “critical” identifies something that is markedly UNcreative, implying that writing a thesis isn’t in fact a creative act, that descriptive writing doesn’t belong in academia. Similarly, “critical” often becomes a means of assuming negativity—to students in particular, a “critical” article will spend pages and pages identifying problems and pointing out issues while failing to offer solutions.

I am not a special snowflake. Despite what adults—parents, teachers, coaches—may have told me as I traversed the self-esteem bolstering landscape of grade school, I am not special, not one-of-a-kind, not even remotely unique. Life will not open up, effortlessly, to meet my every naive desire: I won’t be swept off my feet by Prince Charming or write the next Harry Potter series or become President of the United States. The world is not my oyster—I can’t simply pry open the shell of the Earth, steal its pearls, and call them my own.

But if I’m not special, why would anyone care what I have to say?

In the last few weeks of high school, the best teacher I’ve ever known gave an address to all graduating seniors at our annual recognition night. “You are not all special snowflakes,” he began, and I heard the auditorium hold its collective breath—proud parents and shimmering students, wide-eyed and stunned.

The dissonance swallowed me, there in that auditorium. I was voluntarily attending this night precisely for recognition, to glide upon that stage to the sound of my own name, to hear my accomplishments read aloud, to receive a pin and a meaningful pat on the back. I told everyone I was attending just to hear my teacher speak, but this was only a half-truth: really, I wanted people to remind me that I was special.

And here was someone I deeply admired, telling me, point-blank, that I wasn’t.

As a high-achieving student, defined most explicitly by my GPA and test scores and essays, I was raised to believe I had this quantifiable uniqueness—one that would magically open doors and split oceans and catapult me to “success.” I don’t. But, like Orwell, I do have an ego (as much as I try to suppress it)—it’s a competitive one, one that seeks awards and praise and opportunity. I feed off affirmation; I drown in perfectionism. I write from this place, sometimes. But I am not special.

Yet I am the center of my universe. Everything I do revolves around me: I’ve only ever seen through my eyes, I’ve only ever thought through my brain. Everything I know is filtered through the catacombs of myself. I contain multitudes—and contradictions and experiences, but these themselves don’t make me special. Not in relation to everything and everyone and everyplace else.

How do I bridge the unfathomable distance between the universe within me and the universe that surrounds me?

I had most of these thoughts, sitting there in that auditorium that held its breath, as my favorite teacher spoke. I shifted uncomfortably and sweated (probably) and felt somewhat itchy—both physically and existentially—like I do when I’m unsure of myself.

But my teacher didn’t invalidate my notion of self. Rather, he redirected it. “You can’t be special to the whole world,” he said. “Instead, you can work, tirelessly, to light up the corner of your universe.” Indeed, I am the center of my universe—not the universe. The universe is big; my corner is small (miniscule). And don’t have to be special to light it up, brilliantly.

I guess all of this is a long way of saying: I am not special, but I do matter. And so my writing matters. Not to everyone, but to someone.

I write to find and explore and light up my corner of the universe—to traverse these spaces of overlap, the centers of proverbial venn diagrams that connect people and places and thoughts. I write to bridge the chasm between the world that lives inside of me and the world that I inhabit. I write for empathy, for aesthetic, to feel special but not to be special.

So why would anyone care what I have to say?

Maybe because that abstract “anyone” is no more of a special snowflake than I am.

Maybe because they live in my corner of the universe—or maybe because they don’t.

Maybe because they, like me, are wandering around between notions of self, searching my writing for spaces of overlap.

***

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” –David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

In a nutshell, my repurposing project is a part-narrative, part-theoretical, and part-argumentative essay that explores the relationship between hyperreality and cultural appropriation; essentially, I argue that cultural appropriation is a byproduct of a society that preferences representations/images/simulations over cultures (and I explore why, exactly, I find this so objectionable). Here are my remediation ideas, each with varying degrees of plausibility:

1. Photography project 1: Because my essay engages directly with the notion of a simulated reality (hyperreality), photography appears to be the perfect application. Photographs are, ultimately, simulations— representations of “truth” that are inevitably and irrevocably false (think: Ceci n’est pas une pipe). For the project, I image a photography series called something along the lines of “Out of Context.” This would work to artistically capture certain cultural texts, products, or ideas that have been purposefully divorced from their context (ie: a potted plant in a dumpster, McDonald’s french fries in a Taco Bell store, etc.). Alternatively, this photo series could depict people interacting with images and symbols as if they were in fact people as a way of commenting on our tendency to replace empathetic connection with material goods.

2. Photography project 2: Alternatively, I could create a documentary photography project that purposely emphasizes contradiction in hyperreal spaces. I would do so by combining a series of portraits (of my friends, my family, strangers, classmates, professors) that represent a sort of external, public “truth” with a series of written narratives that represent an internal, personal “truth”. I would match portrait to narrative, playing with the disconnect between appearance and words by emphasizing the dissonance between our internal and projected realities. In short, I would ensure that the image of the person doesn’t “properly” mirror their narrative; rather, these representations of personhood would be disjunct, seemingly fragmented. Through these contradictions, I would push my audience to think about hyperreality: which version of this person is the “true” (read original) person— the image or the story? Can they both be the “true” person? Can neither? Can the complexity of personhood be captured with images or words alone? Although this wouldn’t necessarily touch on the claims about cultural appropriation made in my repurposing paper, it would still do important work with hyperreality (the concept borrowed from my original philosophy paper).

3. A zine or series of zines: As a (relatively) crafty person who’s deeply passionate about independent publishing, I’m fascinated by zines— handmade, self-published miniature magazines typically featuring some combination of collage art, informal writing, and poetry. Here, I could see myself creating a zine explaining “How to Survive Hyperreality.” This zine would push me to represent my ideas graphically, exploring collage as a method of rhetoric and form (collage, not-so-coincidentally, is also an excellent method of simulating and fragmenting reality). Depending on how much we’re able to repurpose our writing in this project, I would want to rewrite portions of my essay to achieve a sort of artsy informality that better matches the zine vibe.

I check my email about sixty times per day. Subconsciously, I knew this—I knew my thumb has this impulse, this innate desire to click that damn email app—but it’s different now that I’ve kept track. It’s realer, more tangible: the cold, hard facts of my Email Addiction.

I honestly don’t know what I expect. I’m not waiting for anything, at least nothing life-altering, like college acceptance letters or job offers or lottery results. In fact, I’m a notoriously terrible emailer— even if I receive an email immediately, it takes me days (if not weeks) to actually conjure up the energy to respond. There’s simply no justification.

There are other habits, of course:

Friday: I spent the entire day on Google Documents. I’m honestly a little confused; I don’t remember actually accomplishing anything on Friday. It appears that’s the extent of Friday’s internet activity.

Saturday: My day was dedicated to Canvas, email (checking, not responding), and Netflix—your college student trifecta. Shocker.

Sunday: You might say I “branched out,” though even that assessment is generous. I scoured the internet for internship opportunities, downloaded applications, and jumped between REI, the Sierra Trading Post, and Bivouac websites for backpacking equipment— I’m participating in the New England Literature Program (NELP) this spring and the equipment list is a beast. There was certainly Facebook involved, for no particular reason.

But what concerns me most is not my limited use of the internet, or really even my email addiction. It’s when I use the internet— in the morning, late at night. Whenever I want to make my mind numb: bored enough to get out of bed in the morning or tired enough to fall asleep at night.

And I’m aware that, buried beneath mind-numbing facebook browsing and tweet reading and snapchat sending, the internet is expansive—limitless and thought provoking and content rich. I’m aware of this like I’m aware of adulthood: it’s a sort of detached awareness, a yeah but it doesn’t apply to me awareness.

Only it does apply to me. It’s out there, and it’s infinitely more compelling than my email. So why, exactly, do I now reach for my phone?

Old habits die hard.

I recently received Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me as a gift and read it, consumed it, in my room on Christmas Eve.

In the context of police brutality, the systemic destruction of black bodies, and #BlackLivesMatter activism, this book is unquestionably an important and necessary product of our cultural climate. But I bring up Coates’ memoir not to discuss the arguments he makes or the questions he poses (though these are certainly worthy points of discussion); rather, I bring up Coates’ memoir because it shifted the way I look at writing.

Between the World and Me demonstrates that good writing doesn’t act as a shield between Author and World, but rather a magnifying glass. And Coates uses this magnifying glass to lift the facade of his world and expose something raw underneath. He then consciously explores this rawness, weaving a narrative that provokes thought like a philosophical text yet turns pages like a mystery novel.

In a society riddled with conflict, we need this magnifying glass writing— code-switching nonfiction that is equal parts creative and critical, clever and insightful. We need writing that is vulnerable in its self-awareness and jolting in its honesty, that is uncomfortable and painful, careful yet unafraid. We need writing that elicits empathy and shifts public discourse.

I’m fascinated by writers who can connect the smallest, tangible details (like a birthmark or the pavement or candy corn) to larger, intangible societal implications (like genetics or industrialization or consumerism); I’m fascinated by writers who can poetically bridge the schism between micro and macro. Ultimately, creative nonfiction is the form of writing I want to challenge myself to produce, the form of writing I care most deeply about.