Newspaper passage (New York Times-Sunday May 27, 2001, Felicia R. Lee, Coping: Delta Deaths Still Echo on Upper West Side)

“Thirty-seven years is a long time. But, like the 1963 bombing of the church in Birmingham, Ala., in which four black girls were killed, a crime for which Thomas E. Blanton Jr. was sentenced this month to four life terms, the death of the three young men in Mississippi became a powerful metaphor for the anguish of that time.”

Question: What are the first words that come to mind when you hear bombing and Birmingham in the same sentence?

Answer: Death. Murder. Obstruction of Rights. Race. Fight.

Question: Knowing that the man who bombed the church in Birmingham received 4 life sentences, is this justice?

Answer: Is putting the man behind bars justice? Does putting him in jail bring the little girls back to life? I’m not sure if justice is fully served through a sentence. Perhaps closure for some, but I see it as a wound that cannot be healed.

Question: None of the men convicted of the Freedom Summer murders served more than 6 years in prison. Is that justice? Should they have spent longer?

Answer: I think what the men and women did in Freedom Summer was noble. They were fighting when others would not. It’s funny because my last response said that 4 life sentences still can’t fully account for justice, yet I wish the men convicted for the Freedom Summer murders would have received greater punishment. Maybe our concept of justice is skewed with our desire for closure. We think the greater the punishment the greater the chance for closure and thus justice. Perhaps we are all misled or unsure.

Ok from the interview I would then pull words to create some kind of word collage to represent a representation of Freedom Summer and the events or history surrounding it.

Rights…behind bars.

Murders justice?

Noble. Fight. Closure cannot be healed,

Punishment. Fight Death.

Convicted Freedom?

Freedom.

Summer wish. Desire….unsure

What I'm thinking when I am thinking about power

Basically I want to explain the general idea of what I might do. This idea is hereby taken and cannot be used unless I say that I will not be doing it. 

When the topic was raised for the project I stumbled around in my head about power relationships and the obvious ones were all there. I didn't feel very connected to any of those. So I thought about what I power relationship I have direct experience with. Technology. So I thought about how technology has changed my life. I thought about the what it has helped me with and what it has hindered me with. I conjured up two images in my head that I want to recreate in a story with illustrations. 

The images: 

I saw a young adult sitting at a desk. On the desk was a computer. He was typing or searching the web. There were cables snaking around the chair and up behind his head where they where plugged in. More cables descended down and wrapped around his wrists and ankles effectively making him a marionette. 

The other image was of a peaceful and quiet village. The people there bartered and traded for everything. Money was rarely used. But crawling all around the village was an army of cell phones, pda's, laptops, digital cameras, iPods, and many other things. They were stalking the people. It was moments before war. 

Digital Revolution

Brian pulled out his desk chair and sat down. He opened the laptop. The screen blinked on and filled the dark room. Stretched shadows grew bold on the far wall. He clicked the internet icon. A window popped up displaying subject lines for three unread emails. A "read now" bubble flashed red. Brian closed the window. He clicked on his music files. The folder came up but was eclipsed with the email window again. 

"Dumb computer's trying to make me do stuff again," Doug, Brian's friend, had said a couple of nights ago at a bar. 

"What kind of things?" Brian had said.

"Darn thing keeps flashing my unread messages until I read them. And yesterday it wouldn't let me turn it off. Said it was updating or something," Doug had said. 

"Did you try pressing the power button until it turned off?" Brian had said.

"I'm not an idiot. I swear it is watching what I do. Listen. I think we are about to be taken over or something," Doug had said. 

"Not your digital revolution conspiracy," Brian had said.

"Just like the industrial revolution. It was pushed on those people then too," Doug had said.

Brian shook his head and closed the email window again. Again it popped up. The cursor slowly moved over to the subject line. Brian stared at the mouse connected to his laptop and his unmoving hand on it. "No," he breathed. 

Brian put his hands on the desk and pushed back. The rolling chair didn't move. He lifted his hand to the small power button next to the screen and pressed it. He pressed it again. Nothing happened. Brian pulled the screen down and out of the back of the computer were several thin metal flexible tubing running toward the wall and down to the floor. 

The metal tubing was wrapped around his ankles and chair. More tubes shot around Brian's wrists and pulled them away from the computer. The screen righted itself. Brian pulled against the tubes. They pulled back. 

"Now Brian, no use to struggle," a sweet female voice issued from the speakers. 

"What? Let me go," Brian pulled harder. A drop of blood ran down one of the tubes from his wrist. 

Three more tubes with tiny drills snaked up behind his head. The drills started spinning. Each one had a shrill high pitched noise. 

"What's that? Where's that noise coming from," Brian said.

"Relax, Brian," the computer said. 

A few separate tracks of ideas:

I'm looking at two separate ideas right now, the first focuses on modern soldiers and their experiences. I'd like to create a series of separate but related articles/clips/stories based on observations, news reports, research, and correspondence with soldiers, veterans, and some in training. I'd like to both copy older forms of war protest (and how it changed from war to war) and try and incorporate styles that seem to be currently occurring and (hopefully) come up with some new stuff. It's my fear that this is too far on the political side, and risks getting cliched quickly.
My second idea is to work with something on the lines of emerging technology and using a power relationship with existing works of literature. I like the idea of an Artificial Intelligence doing a version of Paradise Lost, or Frankenstein, or mixing all of the above. Basically, for either of these, I'd like to do a power relationship with works that have existed before mine, while trying to challenge views we have now. Whether to do that with soldiers or science fiction, I'm not quite sure. Here's a taste of what I was thinking for a sample article/few pages in the soldier line of writing. It's a play off O'brien's "The Things They Carried;" a modern version.
...He carried cigarette burns on his lip and knew too well the smell of burnt hair and burnt hands and burnt plastic and how they mix together with the smoke and don't smell like much of anything. Of course he carried his medals, purple and red and blue and with crosses neatly polished and high thread counts, but only on his dress uniform and only when appearances demanded it; like at the Memorial Day dance they put on near Kabul. Where they strung streamers in a high school gym and he remembered how his shoes scuffed the floor with short black streaks and how her dress looked but not felt and how it wasn't air conditioned but nothing was and how everyone was in neatly ironed uniforms but stood around the punch bowl and looked into half-full cups and how the sound kept cutting out because of bad wiring and not from insurgent attack.
He carried the way Mom smiled that half-smile when he tried to talk to her about what it was like over there; like how she smiled when Dad told to tell her he'd always hated the way she made mashed potatoes and how her knuckles went white when she did the dishes. He carried the prescription for three Prozac and the number to the veteran's psychologist and the certificate of an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, U.S. Rangers. Take three twice a day, with water and food but nothing too acidic, like orange juice. The pharmacist looked a lot like Davis from Third Corp, the one who won at cards not the one who lost his shins.
The more sci-fi oriented one would involve something like this:
There is no typicality in commiserating with the beast. I stand no benefit in applying emotional labels to my current state. Anguish, lamentation and despair have no meaning beyond their definitions. To work in the abstract must be a thing of divination; the idea of which I can comprehend fully, but never experience. I "know" blue. It rests as a piece of fact, indomitable in my consciousness. A wavelength I can calculate to a thousand decimals, but it remains equally meaningless.

Random blob of crap

When I was young I played the game of war with a troop of soldiers. As the bayonets opposed I took a second to decide that right was best simply for no other reason than that they wore green. And blessed by my hand they began advancing towards the rifles spitting of bullets beige and their fate. And as the cries and death knells keened the man to my left, shot between the eyes, fell upon a rock, and on my right, before I could look, my comrade bled through his heart. But I was in no danger - no, not I, I who saw from above! For it was I who flicked the pawns, I who heard the laughs of war, I who sent them to the fore. Like a suit behind a desk I profited from their game, caring not what the carpet beneath my feet became. Mine fought for an unknown goal, issued from Above, only assured some heroes would be maimed. One private’s legs melted off under a lighter’s bit of flame but colonel lost his mind - a bad guy’s blade sheered through his throat or my dog gnawed off his head. I can’t remember which stole him to sullen fate. There his bloody torso lies until the last enemy falls. Few green are left standing as I emerge into a lusty atmosphere. This ground I created is strange to me. But together we walk across the blood-stained grass towards our fallen comrades. That those they shot are indistinguishable, that I’d be blind were in not for green and beige they cannot know. For they return to a hero’s welcome only consisting of me. And they return to a ceremonious welcome before that slide into anonymity. The green ones receive a hero’s dump into a bucket and the beige ones receive the same. Divided once in battle, their mangled bodies lie side by side and I, amused, return to the wealth of my world.

We’ll do it again next week.



(I see a skyscraper. On every floor people live and breathe and go about their work. Every so often a window opens, providing a glimpse of these workings to those who see from the outside. But now we can see who constitutes each level, from the tycoon in the office at the peak to the working men and women at the bottom, perhaps even those lower or on the outside. Where does the power truly lie in a society that preaches one ideology but practices another?)

In today’s world it seems to me that power and personal freedom seems most often connected to financial freedom. When thinking about my project I decided I wanted to do something creative examining how power or lack thereof determines the way a person speaks, what they say, and how they act. I figure that visiting the Drop In would be a good way to grain a different perspective as to how having power or financial freedom changes the way people act, look and speak. Since I have not had that opportunity as of yet, I decided to try to keep my ears open this week to conversations that people around Miami have, or situations and topics that arise that exhibit a level of personal power and freedom. Until I do go to the Drop In I figure doing this is a good way to get used to observing power relationships and maybe use themes I observe in a longer piece of fiction. This is one somewhat fictionalized scene:

Thirty minutes early for class, I sat opposite the shut door with the few other eager beavers. The girl to my right seemed disinterested in the whole scene. Mountainous Bose headphones, nose in a textbook. Of the two standing against the wall across from me only one was obviously a student. The other looked more like a housewife. Mousey, with a nervous smile and one eye that seemed a little more shut than the other one. And awkward too, like a teenager wearing his dad’s suit. The one speaking tipped his chin back while he spoke and ran his hand through his shoulder length blond hair.

“My interests have always just been more esoteric,” he said. The way he pronounced the last word reminded me of melting butter.

She pawed at the hair on her ears. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Well what I mean is… well OK, I’m a poet, right? I mean I write fiction too and I wrote a play once and paint but that’s beside my point. I started out doing graphic design and it just felt like...” he looked over her shoulder, a soliloquy to his muse offstage, “…It felt like artistic prostitution. There was no freedom, it was just for the endgame, and I think it should be about the process, you know?” He switched the leg he was standing on and adjusted the straps of his pack over his argyle sweater.

“Well I’ve not really thought of that. I just need a degree. It ‘s hard in this economy to hold a job without one.”

“Well why would you choose English?”

“Oh, well I used to work in a library and I figured this is a logical thing for me to get.” Her tone indicated dependents that needed her to be logical.

“For me it’s just what I love, and if given the opportunity why not do what you love?” He looked down at her face. “I think I’ll probably get my MFA too but this seemed like a great place to start.”

Mallory's First Project Idea Proposal

So I know these first posts are probably going to be confusing and perhaps even inconsistent, but my ideas for the final project are not perfectly in place. As of right now, I know I want to focus on the Freedom Summer of 1964. Because the class is focused on power and words, I thought it would be interesting to bring knowledge of this moment in history to those perhaps unaware of it. I want my creative project to be a collection of interviews and reactions. I wanted to use newspaper articles from the summer of '64 as well as those referring to it from more recent years and use those to evoke emotions or reactions out of those I interview. Part of me wants to do a word-association type conglomeration for my project and then create some kind of chapbook from that. For instance, I may read a passage from an article covering the death of one of the Freedom Summer volunteers in which words like "segregation" or "racism" are used, and ask their first reactions to the passage, what those words make them think, feel, do. My goal is to make some kind of impact through bringing the past and the words used then to the present. I want to educate and hopefully inspire those whom I interview. I would love for any ideas or criticisms on this as well. I have not conducted any interviews, but I hope to start collecting newspaper articles soon in order to begin the process.