Creative Writing #2

Stream of Consciousness
• Technique that records multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence.
• Unbroken flow of thought and awareness of the waking mind
• Associative or sometimes dissociative leaps in syntax & punctuation that make prose difficult to follow, tracing fragmentary thoughts & sensory feelings.
• Thought processes are depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself)
• Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway
• Molly Bloom – Ulysses

Confessional Poetry
• “The Murderous Art”
o Many practicioners committed suicide: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, etc.
o Depression, Death, Trauma
• Not openly discussed in American poetry
• Self revelation (getting to know oneself)
• Goes beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment
o Difference between tradition and confessional
• QN: Does pain produce better artists?
• Writing as form of therapy
• Outlet for their demons
• Anne Sexton – Wanting to Die
• Schizophernia
• Writing and re-reading the work changes the cognitive processes with which one’s brain processes this information, offers perspective

Beat Generation
• “beatnik”
• non-conformity
• spontaneous creativity
• influence by spirituality: Zen Buddhism, etc.
• Artists/Writers: Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg,Jack Kerouae, Alan Ansen, William Burraugh, Gregory Corso
• Open form poetry against format poetry
• Questioning of traditional values
• Improvised spontaneity: Bop, Jazz: Charlie Parker, Dadaism, Surrealism
• Open emotion against modernist’s objectivity
• Challenge the limits of free expression
• Recreational drug use

Assignment 1: Self introduction with mug shot - 150-200 words
Assignment 2: Titanic Lifeboat (2nd lecture)

Choose one of these scenarios:

1. You are stuck with a doctor, a teacher, a politician, a mother and a farmer. Argue for why you, an artist, should be saved instead of them.
2. You are stuck in 3rd class with all other artists. Make a case for why you, as a video artist, should be saved over other artists.
   

August 14, Thursday
To Do: Buy mini-DV tapes, Proposal (due Monday), Upload photos to Flickr, Brew tea, Circle of fifths practice.