Pedantic

 Rob used to call my poetry pedantic. Maybe it's because well he'd put take crack shots but I also like that about him. He too seemed like to be coming into a place of healing from something else. Of course that teacher Robert Johnson would take pokes at us. It's the trouble with masculinity. The thing about being pedantic in my brain is trying to figure things out and finding a way to make sense of it through certain ways of creating a statement. Of course the qualifiers help that we don't want to say all but many or some

Being pedantic or just trying to make sense of the world through all of the different things that come to me in my brain or things I've read or things I'm engaged in

It's the same with the latest Batman movie where hypermasculinity is about hyper individualism. But it can also be someone with cptsd not able to move out into the world. Of course we also need to think about neurodivergence. As I'm near a Divergent and went through trauma it was very hard for me difficult for me to put even things in words. And so now it's likely that some of the words I use sound pedantic because I'm still trying to flex those muscles and not think to rock brain about it

Classroom religious

 I noticed when people pray, they close their eyes and bowed at their heads. Someone often leads in prayer with their words. Maybe closing the eyes is to avoid visual distractions. It's also to help concentrate on the words. In my classroom, even though I'm not asking people to close their eyes and bow down, I would still like for them to concentrate on my words and keep their visuals distractions be a cell phones away

Don't worry about being too avant-garde

 “Something comes out, and it’s too avant-garde at the time. And then the real world catches up with it,” he says,

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/tron-ares-upgrade-saga-holy-grail-graphics-exclusive/

Persona

 Poetry writing class a student who is in the theater said that's how you take on a role of acting, that you read the script and learn the character but then you have to make some kind of connection with that character. You figure out how to enter that character's world through something you have in common and then you can inhabit that character in a way no one else can. That you aren't yourself when acting but you also are through that character.

And no one else can act that character like you can.

The same with Persona poetry, how I loved learning about it through the poet Ai and was deeply moved by how her ethics of being someone of color couldn't have it serial killers and other white people because the oppressed know the oppressors more than themselves.

Persona poetry taking on the mask and that you can actually feel more through that.

So as I'm reading about all of the different names going around about who will be the Batman in The Bold and the brave, I realized I'll try to connect with that character. And I'm thinking of childhood and the feeling of being an orphan the orphan archetype.

Then I start crying. It's because of these untapped parts of my childhood that I haven't explored still as someone who could see it at a distance. That I don't want to relive it has that causes damage but to see it objectively in this idea of in happening a character who is felt those archetypes that I have that we all have in US allowed for me to release some kind of visceral feeling.

Boyhood

 Boy, I hated that movie. Maybe it's because we are faced with our own childhoods when we see a movie like that one. As a parent we have to face our own childhoods as we're bringing up our children. But I find that the worst space is when you return to a place from childhood even as an adult there are those days that you've let your guard down for some reason and those floods of memories come back. Like I'm at Gage Park and thinking of all of those things while trying to remain optimistic and grounded that my son is here learning theater learning the tricks and the trade as they say, Helen Hawker,

I want to load up all of those experiences that could play me onto the back of the train and let it take a ride around the park

 but that I think of me when my own theater experience as horrid the grease Musical for a movie I loved but was treated so horribly by those older teenagers. And then I let myself be the Clown because I don't know how to fit in. So much of me not wanting to be a boy and having all of those expectations that I just wanted to care about others in this gender dichotomy. That even the Young woman who was put up by her friends to give me a kiss on the last day as I was waiting for my ride I was wondering then where are her friends? Where are they watching from? And I didn't give a kiss. I told her I was uncomfortable I told her the truth

Follow the fun

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJAylIpv5Tb/?igsh=MTdwdDRiNXgyd2g1aA==

So much goodness in this, that the way to look at having fun is to write the movie you want to see, or in my case the book I want to read. I need to put this Forefront write the book I want to read then I'm going to have fun reading.

July and beyond

 first week: just rest and decompress

 second week: fun brainstorm, set up table of contents, 

Aug 4 send slides UUFT 

Aug 17 UUFT presentation

Aug 19: Kansas City Speakers Bureau

Oct 1 Colby Speakers Bureau

16-19 writers colony

 Nov 20-23 NCTE

 

Drama

 my mistakes this summer in handling GPT work

to avoid copying those oppressive-based professors

online, no student knows me

while I see the signs for drama--that some thrive off of it based on my familial, workbased, and bad friendship experiences

some people love digging down

drama and the need for it

drama thriller

you are being melodramatic, but there is something about our brains that might be drawn to this?

 

Redirect, not block

 As I am fully engaged in how to help students, how I learned not to reach out by email in any way to "confront" with GPT evidence, how students have to remain in their stance--even dig in.

 I, too, get dramatic if I am accussed of something I didn't do. I, too, can rally people to help if someone is out to get me.

 That statement comes from my experiences.

Now I need to let it go after this semester, because the big vision is the sabbatical project.

Maybe I will write a chapter called Drama? 

Chatter

 As someone with adhd, that's what I call it. As the overall mind doesn't stop thinking, there are other possibilities that come to intrude, especially when asked a question or when we can pull in for different things at once but we know we have to find a way just to discuss one. I know if my most calmest meditations the chatter is gone. And I can just focus on the breathing in the body. 

This is also what happens to me at the movies. And this is also what happens to me when I'm in that Zone of poetics. It's because my mind is fully engaged and open to possibilities. It's an engagement that I'm happening on a different level where I can just experience. Even in creating a poem, it's the best one I Let Go

Believers in the 20s

 So what we know post pandemic is that more people would rather stay at home to stream movies than they would going to the theaters. And while we're really know there's a push to go to the movies bye Hollywood ads, we have to also acknowledge that there's something special about such ritual making. That I know what it means to go to a movie theater because of the rituals and Healthcare that I've gone through. That when others might see movies is just entertainment or even emotionally moving, I recognize that they have a healing power for me. I mean even 28 years later I love the genre bending and challenging that Alex garland does to get us in the state of being scared and terrified when it's actually the world we need to be scared of at this present moment. And why the movie goes into a deep message about love and what Humanity means because we need that message. We can't remain scared that we have to be able to leave those who would lie to us and leave like the hero's journey home to become transformed in love.

Sabbatical wishes

 As the sabbatical approaches and what I mean is July is the full on start for me, I want to make sure that I'm going to start taking good care of my own body. It's going to require also what I'd like to do with that writing that comes from somatic practices. I was noticing in my poetry writing where I get into the letting go and letting the words down that it's a cool way to connect memories. So I'm going to try that too. So here's my list.

I want to treat Monday through Friday as the working days, and Saturday and Sunday as days of rest.

I'm not going to drink a beer every night, but maybe on Friday nights.

Having going to the gym, the rec center at washburn, Monday through Friday as part of my work day.

Eating well

Carrie gets Thursdays

Cinema speculation

 I'm looking at Quentin Tarantino's new book, a memoir of stories about working in hollywood, and I'm not buying it. Okay, it's not that I don't believe him, but I'm just not forking over the money to buy this. Also, it's problematic to me as he defended Weinstein when finally women came forward as survivors, out of the male dominant oppressive system of Hollywood that protected him, that victim blames women and employs silencing tactics.

You should look at that interview, that Tarantino couldn't know or even step back to see just because Weinstein treated him great doesn't mean he's not a monster.

And I'm looking through this book now and seeing that it's full of these stories that dip into his memoir, but I don't see any mention or lifting of survivors. 

It's all about Tarantino and how he describes his fun.

Some of the best memoirs coming out from people in The Biz for me is showing how the silencing and traumas are intertwined with the public, the personal in the public reflecting on being a survivor, and in writing survivors are healed through the writing itself.

There is no speculation for me that the women who come forward as well as the men or anyone I might add are creating speculation. This is for real. 

Film as representation

 Yes, plenty of films about boys surviving abusive fathers. But where is one film that shows in honesty how two people, one abusive, one enabling, happens to be respectively female and male? 

And I mean in the way that the abuser is also a Survivor which is why the enabler is fully understanding of why they might do what they do.

Gone Girl, now that's a movie that I think of my first girlfriend. When anyone could be mentally unhealthy disordered or illness

And he still goes back to her.

As movies can allow us the Deep empathy, that allows us to inhabit bodies, that I can inhabit the feeling of being able to escape someone who is abusive.

There was a time I felt shameful for being a boy as well as being a man. There are times I wanted to be a mother and Carrie knows that I even mentioned that bond.

During my ma celebration where people bought me drinks, I love pina coladas, I somehow shouted out or said out loud I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body. Everyone looked at me and laughed woth me. I was trying to put something in words that only something ridiculous could come out. Of course they knew I was raised by two moms so that was on my side.

That's why I love movies with strong female leads or even lesbian couples because it reminds me of the times I admired my mother's. Of course they had their own childhood traumas and things were always peachy keen.

But we always loved movies 

We found ways to come back to each other

Punch drunk love

 I mean this is a person who has had to be the black sheep of the family, he's been picked on by his sisters, he's blamed and made fun of, he cries for no reason, he really is trying to move forward through the unknown traumas that we don't know of. He's also trying to keep secrets and lies, like calling that number, and doesn't know how to stand up for himself.

William defoe

 On the stuff I am talking about

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIVQt_hRiXd/?igsh=MXZ0MDRwMTBmNWY3bQ==

The scientific method

 Just in science that scientists create a hypothesis that they want to test out to see if it's correct or not, writing is my scientific method where I have an idea that I don't know about so I experiment on the page, ocean Wong said a sentence is a laboratory and not performance of power, and then I'm trying to figure out if this hunch is there or even the beauty of what I don't know because I'm Letting Go in my writing. I'm just following where the writing is taking me as much as I'm writing. And it's hard to tell people this because we're always taught in academic and school settings that writing has to have a purpose and that you have to write because the teacher is asking you to. That teachers are also part of a system where they have to show results in performance and not the joy of learning and discovery that happens when you put all of that performance aside.

One more thing about pattern recognition

 When I realized poetry is about assembling three even four things together and finding the language that cross references these ideas in a figurative way, I realize that my own line of thinking with whatever stresses I might be under as well as whatever lessons I still have to learn, the mistakes I make, and the need for healing drive my mind into thinking of how these aren't separate things but collective. Even tokopah Turner sees writing as ecological that your mind in touch with Mind Body nature and how your reliant on nature will mimic these systems of needing dreams to tell us to come give me to give us its own language of how our bodies are part of the system of the world.

Pattern recognition

 I I just realized about my own pattern recognition that I know I've always had a hard time finding something in the refrigerator because it's not where I was thinking it would be even as it might be in front of me, because that's the big joke and we know that's because I'm neurodivergent. But when Carrie said this to me about pattern recognition I had never even thought about using that as a lens on how I even function in the world or why I love reading writing

With pattern recognition we can get a sense of rhetoric, the rhetorical copies like what you would read in a lawyer's document or the newspaper. These are very easy to do it because our minds get used to the rhetoric of how something sounds. Even in a car to someone homework has it down right that we pick up a card and we want it to read a certain way so that we pick it because of that. But that's what I love about poetry is it disrupts the rhetoric, that it depends on the figurative language that is always fresh as a writer can freshly write it, and the surprise of even the line break because of enjambment that breaking the line creates a little surprise every time. It alates me it's I'm reading for the surprise I'm reading for what not to expect. This is similar to going to the movies that yeah I'm going to go to a movie that's formulaic because it's going to fit a certain psychological need at the time. For example if things are really going tough in my life I don't mind a good romantic comedy that I'll know hey everyone's going to leave this film feeling good and yeah the acting subpar or the acting is okay and we know where it's going and we going to we know what to expect. But I'd go to those other movies that will transform me because I have no idea where things are going. We know that these twists what we call the twists are a fun because it means that there are certain things that have been with us through the whole movie and then all the sudden it's obvious this real big surprise twist ending that we read the movie wrong. Also when things are like that in literature or poetry like that saying the surprising should be oh the ending should be both surprising yet inevitable. I mean there's something just magic that's why they call it movie Magic. That's why they call it something engaging and even on the Mythic level that tell us our values our ethics are

Okay so that's what I mean when I'm reading each student paper because each student is taking me for a kind of Joyride where I don't know what to expect and they might even phrase something different in a sentence that maybe a teacher like I had had in elementary school would have said this sounds weird but I should have said no that's exactly how I wanted it to sound. I want to play with language I want to play with what can happen that I'm not even expecting as I'm writing. In other words yeah I already am too fixed in the patterns but in my brain playing with those patterns and putting them on a page I love what it does to me as a writer.

That's why GPT is the greatest letdown because I know right away because a pattern recognition that I'm reading something gpt. And then because of this pattern recognition which and people like me who are neurodivergent we have a really strong Keen sense of pattern recognition that we just kind of let our brain do its own work. That I get excited just like I got excited as Sherlock Holmes and all the Mysteries like it's up to me to go okay I'm sleuth now. I go to GPT run my own prompt based on how I know it works, and then many many times I'm able to show a student look how to PT Works with what you turned in. And then this is where the real delicate matter must be. It cannot be out of oppressive forms of power. That we can't blame students for using GPT when it's the culture that has provided this tool out of whatever capitalism, shortcuts, saying not valuing personal writing, that really the devaluing writing and reading, and on top of that the Hoops the checkboxes the let's see how tough you can be to get through this grueling program to get your degree let's just see if you're worth it. What I'm trying to say is you're already worth it.

And that's why people use GPT because of stress and time. I know that's the reason why that it's not that anyone's ethical or unethical which I was just trying to use a way but I need to stop even doing that language. I'm just going to Simply get my evidence sit down with the student and say hey my brain can't assess writing if it's not yours. This reminds me well maybe I don't know if I should share this this reminds me of the lies and secrets I had to keep in order to be safe because when you're talking about dysfunctional families or families of abuse you're going to have the one side that is the abuse but then on the other you're going to have the secrets and lies just because of survival and the psychological need to keep going Day by day.

Pattern recognition is how survivors can read other survivors in the world and try to build allyship and support in the most delicate way that would not re-traumatize someone. That's why we have these Open Mic poetry readings because these are issues that deeply affect us in a culture that would blame victims, that would laugh at such things. We need to create the safe spaces for others that we can all lift up survivors as well as be lifted ourselves.

Jayhowk

 Going into Jayhawk Collectibles is like the imaginary Emporium in other words it's a blast from the past of a childhood we grew up with. Many of us were Geeks and nerds in a time where such labels were derogatory. It just took popular culture to catch up with us is now seen in the recent superhero films as we already grew up with the Mythos and religious practices of such belief systems. But I also want to say this is where seeing such a collection where someone would sell, also means that I know for from my experiences that collecting also means trying to heal from those broken childhoods in which collecting these things will never work. I was a collector of ornaments toys cards figures you name it. That's why these Collectibles can be so expensive while Legos can be so expensive because not just the engagement but I'm guessing there is something of someone trying to heal if it's too out of control. If you're relying on such things for happiness then that's also a definition of addiction.

Teaching is healing

 It is an ongoing healing process I learn from

My mistakes make me stronger, just as I ask students to be open about mistakes, in writing and gpt

If you've only been asked to write an academic settings no wonder so many people hate writing if all they received is negative comments about the writing no wonder people hate writing

I need to stop using language that's talking about ethics or non-ethical people, and stop viewing it as students ethics but that they are only trying to survive. I need to just tell them I that this is something about me that I can't act as if, I can't act in a big lie that this is their work and I'm going to give comments on it this is something about my own Survivor Journey as I come from a family we're lying in secrets were a norm

What I mean is that because there are abusive people on one side of the family the other side of the family has to lie and keep secrets in order to survive

Sound of settling

 Settling

Sometimes the mind doesn't even know what it's doing because the heart is craving to be with someone but the mind says who's going to love you? No one possibly would.

Honestly I lucked out with Carrie

But I do want to say those brief two years I grew a lot as single

Escalation

 Trauma based upbringings teach escalation, fight or flight

Or maybe even stress situations that I didn't even realize I was escalating things as I was just trying to ask students for their work and not GPT

Ones that got away

 So many tropes

La la land

Even friends I might have accidentally lost because I didn't teach in to keep in touch, or friends that stopped staying in touch because of whatever I've said or done, and even recently where I feel I've lost a friend whom I'm not going to meet for lunch again because of something I had said then quickly apologized. The reality is I need to remember boundaries. And I need to be very respectful of those boundaries by not trying to reach out and make things awkward.

Even as groups of people I've been through school with still might get together but I'm not included, I need to remember that that is okay that that is what just happened because of the circumstances in places and no one ever means for things to happen. That would separate such friendships.

I guess the best way I like to put things as I have been married before, is that no one gets married thinking they're going to get divorced.

Pattern recognition

 Why I am great at gpt recognition and it look over texts to see the similarities

Speed reader, computer programmer analyst, a teacher of English and a reader of texts

Poetry

Comedians have a high-level pattern recognition, puns, play with words

The battle over superman

 https://www.ign.com/articles/snydercut-subreddit-issues-statement-after-james-gunn-dismisses-fan-calling-for-mass-superman-review-bomb-campaign

This really shows the toxic masculinity culture we live in. Hyper individualism and the call to spread lies to bomb something really gets in the way of an artist and Storyteller doing all they can to help out the culture. James Gunn deliberately made Superman this time to be that nuanced exploration of how not taking sides in what would be a political fight would work better. As Superman is alien, this concept is alien.

Concessions

 I have the feeling I've already blogged about this, about how buying concessions or giving someone concessions has this strange duality. That the word has different meanings. And to find out the root of it. Plus I realized trying to go to see how to train your dragon that we were not going to buy any concessions for the boys. I realize that that was a deep way of handling stress, my mom would often snack. She even created a candy stash for the boys at her old house. I had problems with that too that I would buy candy as a boy and hide it so no one would know. I would go out to the tree to eat it and then my sister reported on me. Of course the parents response that was I was hiding candy and I had to share. I was disciplined for this thing about secrets and lies that keep the secrets and lies going because it's disciplinary and not corrective. I still have a trouble with hiding I even hid soda pop when I was addicted to it. The addictions hiding secrets and things we want for ourselves are all part of the issue coming out of such families that are dysfunctional.

In fact USDA subsidies of junk food are why junk food is cheap and for many families the only way to buy food. Similar to going through McDonald's drive-thru I'm not going to blame anyone who has to go through that drive-thru because there's already so much at risk so much stress so much Limited funds. White Dollar General is so popular because Everything's a Dollar so forth so if you only have so much money injured craving and needing things you're going to go to Dollar General and spend all the money you have there.

King Corn the documentary showed we are made of corn. Going to the movies as a corn experience.

Nobody was here

 The film Nobody really plays up the masculinity tropes of how a man should protect his castle and those he loves. It creates these real world bullying situations. It shows that he needs to protect people by not taking action in which he's criticized for. Such a good film in these ways that it shows if you are aware or have the masculinity lens, that he's going to play things cool once he's even caught. He's all powerful he can take out anybody but yet he also keeps a cat on him

The day by day tedious tasks that even has an office in a factory and that he has to go through all of these everyday routines. As the whole week is highlighted as a repetition.

Train Your Dragon

 maybe the movie series represents the dragon in us--that we can be fierce or loving

of course the boys! 

the mythic, too 

Healer seeker archetype

 https://youtu.be/UKhl5CyWDJY?si=rM0Rw6jF3mRMSF0N

Writing is healing

 And as I'm trying to write a book about writing his healing I am going to have to write into the unknowing, that there are definitely things I won't know until I get there through the writing, because that's where the healing also happens, and the uncovering, recovery, looking for what is there and the safety of already being there because I found the words that led me there from the words that I've already written.

Nonfiction now conference and the film that they are showing

 Watch How We Got Here on Tubi: https://link.tubi.tv/WuCCMpAN7Tb

https://www.nonfictionow.org/

My summer of closing the gap between my body and the Sun

 Talk about movies being visceral

CA ritualmoving ahead

Collection of joy

Talk about how the Endless Summer documented really created a culture of surf as people were looking for the ideal they were looking for the Utopia as they also knew that if they find it it wouldn't last long

Tje virgin suicides

 Purityculture damages, men want one thing

Women and Other Monsters

Healing from writing

Raised to not objectify women, eye cast out

Sci fi meet gpt

 https://deadline.com/2025/06/openai-sam-altman-obsessed-2013-film-empire-of-ai-karen-hao-1236422943/

Wes anderson

 With his authorship and so many people writing about him, and even the breakout movie Royal Tenenbaum and when that happened, as well as the music and the choice of Elliott smith, and that the roles of the people living in deep depression or abuse neglect, we enter this world like a true representation of the world. This is where filmmakers can take us into the dream world to show us the deeper reality past the reality we live in.

His new movie Venetian scheme I saw last night and it was so fun to hear even some people laugh at some of those liners. I saw it with just a general audience and Lawrence Kansas at the Regal theater, and I kind of liked seeing it there even though it's regal and not an independent movie theater because then people could be allowed to laugh. I do love independent movies but the idea of laughter especially when the themes are so dark but again a reflection of the realities we all go through. He has his style of getting the mise on sin and we all know he is very particular about it, in a measured way. But isn't that what's fun about that skiing scene? So fun but it's also how the fun enjoy is attached to fast moving dialogue. When people argue they really have it out everyone starting at the same time and finishing at the same time. That's what arguments are like, no one hears each other.

Might look at the Phoenician scheme because it's really fascinating how he uses this none in a way that both is making a statement I mean the heaven scenes are hilarious, and a judeo-christian way, but also this character who is really earthbound. The nun. Well the main character is on trial in heaven. As he goes in and out of close death situations.

For me Royal tenant bombs was a relief to see hear these are people are depressed but it's somehow a good movie? People leave not feeling depressed? Like a but other real dramas might do to us. That this surreal approach of reality is a better way for us to be removed from the depressing realities we face. The family Dynamics and dysfunctions.

Great search db

 https://luthersem.libguides.com/religionfilm

Superhero films

 Journal of Religion & Film 

Volume 21 

Issue 1 April 2017 

Article 37 

4-1-2017 

Superhero Films: A Fascist National Complex or 

Exemplars of Moral Virtue? 

Chris Yogerst 

University of Wisconsin Colleges

Cinema Paradiso Scriptio Divina

 Okay, so I am doing a mashup of Italian with Latin, but both sound so well together! One is the famous film about movie-going, the second is about writing as a sacred practice.

Films and writing are sacred to me.

To write

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKNwJZIy8Rw/?igsh=Ynlpc2xrNXFxbHA4

I had to write my Escape story via a poem. Maybe that's what this Memoir is to help those who couldn't escape Topeka and still have to face these horrible men but know that you can go anywhere to find horrible men.

Independent movie theaters I'll never forget

 I I think the most impactful one out of the spirit I did when I had to take a chance of risk to go to Seattle to see what was left of the Grunge music scene and to find it was already gone 

Just days after my birthday I went to see the release of Basquiat and now I'll Search for the movie house

How movies help me to remember things as in what times and what things were going on the films are markers for what's going on

Like Divergent March 21st 2014 opening night I'm there at Alamo Drafthouse for the first time realizing Kansas City had this movie theater before I even knew it was a franchise. It would have been spring break. And here it can unfold all of these memories because of that film and that movie theater that I would come to Treasure until it shut down in 2020. Which is another story

Amazing film critic

 https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-unloved-part-137-immortals

I found someone I need to interview. I found this person to be so engaging!

Fears of Water

 swimming instructions

James bOnd movie song

this is the end

how going to texas, I discovered how a fear of writing can be confronted

through immersive love and play

 ocean and water park

Ennagram archetypes

 https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/crafting-archetypal-arcs-using-enneagram-insights/amp/

Thou art that

 P 92 and 93

Joseph campbell

Ecritue feminine

 When I'm thinking of all the step stack posts in the sub stack followers they can be women. When I look at all of the books I'm buying poetry or Memoir they rent by women. Yes I tend to be sexist because I knew when I read that Helen Subaru that she was making sense even way back then. I want to steer clear of that masculine form of writing

Masculinity

Vision quest

 How it created something mystical

Romance of imagining 

Videos

A poet aims

A film maker

Poetry is not a Luxury

 Audre Lorde's essay needs to be the center of my writing

Maggie Smith's Dear Writer

Maureen Murdock's Myth and Memoir book

Soundtracks

 Nine Inch Nails in Topeka Kansas and moving into soundtracks and now for Tron Ares

Interview

 People like Joanna Gardner

Boyhood

 Protecting our sons

Homeschool joy

Film school

School of Rock

Boys of summer

 

 

At the Movies for a New Masculinity 

Whiplash examines toxic masculinity, esp those in power

Kings of Summer

A couple of missed chances when it comes to neurodivergency and queerness

First Cow

https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/qjkqqw/movies-about-masculinity

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2019/01/24/expressing-vulnerability-a-different-portrayal-of-masculinity-on-the-big-screen.html

 

Gen X

Yes it was ironic that the X in X-Men not just Xavier

But the unknown or uncanny

Finally the descendants.of the Vietnam era were seen

Naropa commencement

 I just sent the naropa commencement speech from this year. The message at the end shook me to the core, community doesn't mean to "ignore harm or avoid accountability" but it's also important to "not reduce people to the worst thing they've done or the hardest truth they haven't learned yet." 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJuzFMcSD0x/?igsh=OHY4a2t0ODJsenM4

Dodgeball

 Class

Disability 

Masculinity 

Documentaries

 I always ask for a paper receipt, a paper ticket

I love documenting things

Memory is difficult 

I don't remember a lot about my childhood or really a lot so the few photos I have are good in that way

Erotic films

 Stop right there. I k ow what you are thinking.

P 75 77 of febos, body work

My adhd makes me fiercely irrational when it comes to engaging with others

Chang9ng the narrative 

Fighting aga9nst sexual assault

28 days later, final scene, that he loses himself to being a savage

Not distinguish him from zombies

The right resp9nse to something just as irrational,  as damaging, as abusive

 

Ditching

 Maybe call this Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and then collage with different things. Like a creative nonfiction piece. Collage things about fast food, skipping, and school

Find that book where someone's talking about the movie from the '80s, it's an eighties book from the library

Watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off just before I started working at McDonald's

Ross gay talks about how he, too seldom missed school. He never skipped a day or basketball practice.

He said just before his father was diagnosed with liver cancer and he was ready to get to his job at Applebee's, Ross said oh man, blow it off. Let's go watch Hellboy.

You have no idea how bad I wish I could. That was the first time he said anything like that.

We have our duties and responsibilities, but we also have the fear of being fired and such systems. Even calling in to work at a restaurant you could get fired.

Skipping work in a corporate world, you have to call in and use one of your personal days.

You might get two weeks vacation off but one of those weeks have to be split up. Also they can't be back to back

I told my students, which I mean those students who would never miss a class, just plan for one day where you can miss a class. But I still hear of instructors saying they cannot miss a single class. The tyranny of this, the authoritarian horribleness, sorry if you're one of those professors who are reading this. I fully understand you want students engaged but we have to find ways to engage students through love and commitment. We have to tell students they can take one day off and go somewhere get out of town.

Sandra would do this, that she was just decide on an afternoon she was going to Kansas City instead of sleeping as she worked the night shift. I try to think of her when I do skipping.

Ferris looks right into the camera, right into the audience, and tells us this wisdom about life. He's encouraging us to enjoy a day by creating the best escape plans. There is no day we get to see Ferris in school. There is no day we get to see his work ethic except that he somehow convinces everyone on a float to do a dance coordinated song from the Beatles

Close-up shots

 How attention deepens when you become a poet, because attention is what poetry creates. The window to slow down, to notice things that one wouldn't notice. The movie screen does this too, at the director and cinematographer choose what we should pay attention to, whom we should focus on.

Maybe the conversation aren't dialogue, as a prompt

Character and Story Arcs

 in fiction writing class, I show students how one can draft what happens in a story, and if the character is up or down in their life

 I also ask students to experiment with their own, keeping in mind that resilience can be a theme in our lives

i have never had a student graph only below the line

I think of beau is afraid, he is never above the line 

[

 cinema therapy, that the character arcs and situations reflect our own

 

opening night

 the comfort of nighttime

how even the feel for going to a film when it opens

it feels like it is gone

 

Lights cameras action

 Action movies tell us we have to take action.

The lights help us to see

We need the attention of cameras

And we can take action

ADHD paralysis is real

Redemptive violence

Superhero films

Nuance

Summer Blockbusters

 Summer was always a block for me. I became paralyzed. 

Blockbusters, named because of the lines.

Going to Naropa was the blockbuster I needed. 

prompt

write two months that are the best for you

write two months that are th eworst

 

freewrite about your sleections

write a memory for each month, even if "not accurate"

write a symbol for each moth

make a metaphor with my metaphor-making approach

 

Enjoy the Magic of the Movies

 B&B theaters

George?

What magic is

religious studies

why magic is that category of the unexplanable

poetry is the closest to representing as ambiguity helps in meaning

the reader takes part

just as they do in a magic act, they can;t know how the illusion is done or it takes the thrill away

the belief suspended

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR ALL AUDIENCES

 introduction 

layout

who is the audience?

 

Silence Your Cell Phones Now

 why people won't allow themselves to engage at the movies, they see as entertainment, something to do

some ADHD folks can't sit still

the way my ADHD works allows me the chance to focus in a way that isn't exhausting

[

writing poetry, you write out of attentoin

silence

 

[

silencing can also be harmful

the need for nuanced conversation

Trust Your Mind

Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing

by Jenara Nerenberg

 

 

book

 

Trust Your Mind

Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing

by Jenara Nerenberg

Supporting cast

 Have a lot of my life I played a supporting role in someone else's story. When I could become self-actualized then I could support others in their stories while being my own person. That it wasn't a negative correlation, I wasn't just a tag along.

We are writing to know we aren't alone, that we are asking people to join as well as we are asking to join

Two types of support

Healthy or unhealthy

On location

 How i scope out movie theaters and where films are made

Kansas films

Immersion writing

Diagetic sound

 The things that we can hear as a character in our own story, our internal dialogue, the negative cognitive messages

Intermission

 Etymologies

To withdraw,  to go back

Playing hooky

Ferris Buehler 

Screenplay

 We inherit many of the things we believe about ourselves from others, and if we aren't taught how to do our own speaking, our own writing, working out of character, we can feel trapped

" my personal definition of Oppression is being trapped in someone else's narrative with no power of authorship. This definition thrives in the ways that The Narrative of white supremacy has authored Blackness as dirty and delinquent, Indigenous as uncivil and cannibalistic, latinx as parasitic, in the list goes on and on."

Jamila Lyiscott

Black appetite. White food. Issues of race voice and Justice within and Beyond the classroom

(

So the way that narratives play culturally, can also reflect the personal, that also reflect how we believe about ourselves. The negative cognitive messages that we believe about ourselves.

(

Movies are the last playgrounds the poet said, and we get to engage with play on the screen. No wonder they call it screenplays developed from the play both performing as someone else and of having fun, the best way to learn

Method Acting

 About trickster survival

Other tricksters

Truman show

Masculinity

 

you become a character by believing you are that character

you connect with something from your personal life to enter that character

Women and mythology

 https://www.womenandmythology.com/?mc_cid=fa27d6711c&mc_eid=a044939049

Book

https://a.co/d/1UlQH1n

Cunematography

 How I have seen Topeka, how I've seen my life, how I've practiced to pay attention, how poems have helped me to pay attention, how I've started learning to love the Prairie, but how I still love where movie theaters are

Other film terms

 Audience, something similar to writing, in that question, who is your audience? It's why narrowing down focus on the subject is important, why the title of a book reflects that subject, and then why someone would be opening the book to find something about that subject. That people are reading the book I'm writing tells me I've already won them over in some way. But it's also the audience like in the movie theater, how can you win everyone over into how the engagement should be done?

Like I like mixed forms so it was perfect to have a mixed form in my memoir, but that won't win everyone over.

Editing, talk about the naropa approach, how poetry can be through generative practices, but also editing as in ADHD. People won't be self-editors for ableist views.

Movies and poets

 https://youtu.be/KgJiHpxe1Tg?si=LuOaWNxuJW0z9508

Back matter

 Include all of those academic definition things in the back of the book. The Memoir itself should be driven by the vulnerability and experiences while dipping into the needed Concepts. But if I show something like I did in Eureka springs, defining the trickster, it's going to turn the audience away. Can't rush huge leaps of Concepts unless someone is willing to engage, but we engaged on the deeper level with storytelling and metaphors. The experiences themselves help us engage with others because they are non-academic.

Good memoir advice

 On pages 129 and 1:30 in dear writer

How when discussing things about vulnerability and breaking the fourth wall intimacy, that the sharing has to also be deeply human. How to innovate push the envelope Trust oneself. How to enact waves of grief while making a sensitive leaps of memory in the narrative

Table of contents

 Part have me wants to develop the table of contents, looking at Deer writer by Maggie Smith, it's genius that she has the contents laid out with different aspects of creativity and then can have the subchapters do their work on how it applies to that.

I'd like to even try the different elements of film, like lighting, mesonsin, actors,

Another idea is that I could take the different aspects of the trickster. But I'm not as excited about that as thinking of taking different aspects of film to write about movies and poetry with. Ways to think about my life to. Definitely actors would include the trickster. It could also include persona.

Dear writer

 Maggie smith

A fragment from p42

"From a film not as much about plot as character"

Poems led me to community

Also, the metaphor of film is we each can be different people in a way each of us only can be

Art depends on the viewer to make meaning

Archetypes

 https://www.carolspearson.com/archetype-pages/seeker-archetype

https://www.jcf.org/post/myth-understood-the-archetype-of-the-seeker-ex-machina?mc_cid=8f5a143077&mc_eid=a044939049

Rawness

 https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-with-teeth-saved-nine-inch-nails-career

I want to capture this rawness and this rise of artistry, just really getting angsty

I want to go to Kansas City where I'm not going to get into a car accident

I was trying to see the new hip bookstore and the traffic was just unbearable, and I took a side street thinking I could Circle the block but then I couldn't

There was another event going on in that street so try to go back to that street and then I couldn't see down the way because of all the cars parked

I was so paralyzed I couldn't even back my car up as I knew a car was coming and I know I might get hit all I was doing was just standing there still watching the car hit me

Alamo drafthouse

 I need to write its own little piece of writing because it really broke my heart. There will never be something that I see could mimic what the Alamo Drafthouse was on Main Street.

Look for ephemera

 Take some of the ephemera that I've collected from movie theaters as well as look for other ephemera, including movie tickets, and scan and write about them. It's my documenting for the experience. I was raised up in the souvenir era everything is a souvenir what that word comes from memory

Also the popcorn carrier craze is just an extension of the popcorn movie Bucket an extension of what a collectible is.

to do

 Double feature, movie theater crawl, writing in the lobby, interviews, 

Trip to hollywood

Reminders

 There's an anxiety that comes when you're thinking of the large project. Just like I compartmentalize time and work, I have to remember that the ritual that will get me to the place of writing, the books that I will use during my journey for creativity, for just having the time and space to do all of this is like having a huge support system of other writers. And maybe that is something I will include in my writing that the support system that writers provide is an appeal to books. To movies. To poetry.

Daredevil post

 https://youtu.be/7-g0c9n_HsM?si=BXqTVsCKeVgamrqc

Documentation

 Be sure to document everything about the writing, where I did it, what books I was reading to influence my writing, some of the people I talked to, anything about it I want to create the notes for it as I write in the word document,too. Facebook is an open diary.

Places to write

 I would like to write a movie theater lobbies

Spend a day in the Topeka Public Library working on writing

Spend a day in the Lawrence Public Library

Spend the day in a coffee house in Lawrence

Blackbird

Juli's

Flow state

 They call it the Flow State and sports and physiology, I call it the somatic writing ritual along with others from naropa from where somatic Poetics is practice. Like ca Conrad as a practitioner includes in their published works.

12 angry men

 Hypermasculinity and flat out anger

The movies unhinged and the other one with Michael Douglas

Balance with first cow

A student with friends to see a double future. One of her friends leaned over just whisper one word and the guy behind them flew out in anger yelling at them.

I know I need to work on cell phone use in the movies

How do I ask in the most quiet nonconfrontational way

A way to language

 When I mean is that we all have the way to use language that we aren't often asked to attend to, that we're asked to follow certain patterns that seem foreign to us instead of phrasing things in the way we want to phrase them.

My way to poetry through Dr nobo, through poetry nights, through poetry saving me, interspersed with these movies how trauma affects someone's ability to move forward even as they have abilities

Good will hunting, Dead Poets Society

Finding Forrester and how the poem is never heard

Did they chicken out? Because in Slam the poetry of Saul Williams is powerful. Why couldn't they have gotten a poem from anyone who was currently writing at the time

Li Young Lee in Wichita

Someone said, poetry isn't a hobby

My mentors are women

Liberty hall podcast

 Liberty hall podcast

https://open.spotify.com/show/3vF5XLKJidmxJ4STbUfmF1?si=wR7pEVk4QXOHnbmyQYfP4A

What I mean by free writing

 Even as I still ask students to free write which means tapping into the subconscious flow of words in writing out what comes, I sometimes wonder if there are those who don't hear me or just can't do it because we've been taught to think before writing. Thinking before writing doesn't help us get to our deeper selves as well as just letting the writing happen.

I'm going to start doing these writings on the board to show students what I mean.

A student's idea of free writing:

I can't wait for the weekend. I'm looking forward to some free time. I'm too stressed out.

My idea:

For the common flight of witness my albatross has wings again

Chick flix

 Or why I never have to turn in my man card because I never had one 

Mental rom coms

 I use Mental to try to challenge the pejorative term, and that these rom-coms show in the best way possible with the best understanding of psychology to put characters in the protagonist role. As we know with disabilities and mental illness, it both matters and doesn't matter. And that's what I love about these rom-coms is that I can identify with the things inside me even though the characters might have something different about them.

A whole day at the theater

 I know sounds obsessive, excessive, even as some of these movie passes you can only go once a day, I would love to know what it would be like to stay the whole day seeing film to film. Sure the lunch wouldn't be that great. Or the dinner. Maybe even see if there's going to be a marathon? That's what this sabbatical is about, finding different ways of doing things I haven't done yet.

Religious studies folks

 They are my people

Their ideas are amazing 

Family dynamics

 We can't see the narcissistic person

We can't see the emeshment

Or people not under self regulation 

Window of tolerances shutting

Someone who says they are the rescuer

Hospital

 Yes so the heart and the stroke, lymphoma, 

Coronary artery disease

The shunt caused a problem. With blood.roto rooter her veins every three months.

Dialysis.

Going to the hospital brings those memories

Austin Kleon

He likes to share 10 things worth sharing every week. I like how he moves from list number two to three by borrowing from the end of list two. Maybe this is something to do with a piece of pulling together some of the research.

2.Kurt Vonnegut: “Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

3.“What is civilisation? I don’t know.” In “The Seductive Enthusiasm of Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation,’” Morgan Meis argues that the TV series Civilisation succeeds “despite its underlying ideas, not because of them…. Clark is an indispensable guide not so much because of what he knows—though he is deeply knowledgeable—as because of his unabashed enthusiasm for the art that he shows us.” (This is something I remember from watching Sister Wendy in art class. It makes me think of a line from physicist Brian Greene: “My best teachers were not the ones who had all the answers. They were the ones deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.”)

Princess leia tshirt

 And our boys struggling with wanting to read books about unicorn princesses

The Criterion Channel Free Movie Week 2025

The Criterion Channel

Free Movie Week 2025

Tuesday 4/8

6 p.m. ET - BREATHLESS (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

8 p.m. ET - THE BEAST (Bertrand Bonello, 2023)

10:30 p.m. ET - CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)

12:30 p.m. ET - PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Wednesday 4/9

6 p.m. ET - 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

9 p.m. ET - THE DAYTRIPPERS (Greg Mottola, 1996)

10:30 p.m. ET - EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022)

12 a.m. ET - HOUSE (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

Thursday 4/10

6 p.m. ET - THE TRIAL (Orson Welles, 1962)

8:30 p.m. ET - EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

10:30 p.m. ET - MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Friday 4/11

6 p.m. ET - ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

8:30 p.m. ET - MIKEY AND NICKY (Elaine May, 1976)

10:30 p.m. ET - NIGHT ON EARTH (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Saturday 4/12

3 p.m. ET - TAMPOPO (Juzo Itami, 1985)

5 p.m. ET - PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, 1967)

8 p.m. ET - BLOOD SIMPLE (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1984)

9:35 p.m. ET - BEAU TRAVAIL (Claire Denis, 1999)

11:10 p.m. ET - POLICE STORY (Jackie Chan, 1985)

Sunday 4/13

3 p.m. ET - BLACK NARCISSUS (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

4:40 p.m. ET - DAISIES (Věra Chytilová, 1966)

6 p.m. ET - PARIS, TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984)

9 p.m. ET - CURE (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

11 p.m. ET - TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (David Lynch, 1992)

MONDAY 4/14

6 p.m. ET - CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962)

7:30 p.m. ET - RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

9 p.m. ET - THE PLAYER (Robert Altman, 1992)

11:30 p.m. ET - STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

 

12 angry men

ANGRY WHITE GUYS. Even gentle white guys like me have to deal with them. We're at the stop sign on a one way street as the ambulance on my right has its lights on. No sirens. I still think that I'll just wait for the ambulance to pass by me because I know it needs to get into my lane to get to the hospital. Light turns green, and the guy behind me lays  on his horn for me to move. So I just move a little to let the ambulance pass me. We approach the next stop light and Mr Anger is on my right now, window down, TOO CLOSE to my car, staring me down and not looking at the road, with anger on his face. I roll my window down. I yell, the ambulance lights were on. He doesn't hear me as he asks, are you all right? He doesn't ask in the way that he's concerned about me. I then repeat again, the ambulance lights were on, man. He looks over to notice the ambulance in front of me. Oh okay, he says as he drives on by.

Kismet moments

 Just as I'm thinking about The Uncanny I think about Kismet

Then in the used bookstore I found a copy of a Mythic life that came out in 1996 by Jean Houston

In the mythology section

Is the daughter of Jack Houston who is a comedy writer and the introduction begins where he took her almost 5 years old to MGM Studios in Hollywood

Now get this I'm trying to write a book about going to the movies as modern mythology and here it is in the part of the book where I always love going, the introduction, where I can get the juiciest of material from any book

And it's so uncanny to me as I'm reading about Hollywood that I would have find it in a book about Miss in someone encouraging to find their own Mythic life

bechdel test

 https://getpocket.com/explore/item/10-iconic-movies-that-pass-the-bechdel-test

 

uncanny

 as the X-Men

 as how students who are similar sit together in a class without knowing each other

as in etymology, the eerie, the way we can't say why

in medias res

 One of the first things fiction writers are taught about effective story-telling is to start in medias res, in the midst. It's also something I tell people when they ask how I am doiung suring a busy time--I'm in the midst. Soemthing educators say in April.

 

Films are 

We are

our origins reinvent themselves as we are in the midst

 

the big T word

 yes, include trauma in the writing

 

awareness of truama, not as a buzzword, but as a reality

not to label or serve as a detriment, but as a reality

the strengths of survivalhood

the strengths of ADHD

the strengths  

although I also hate it when people say, well, it made you a stronger person

 

To come up with a metaphor for each thing in a theater

 Some of the audience with their cell phones out are like June bugs I've already caught

Joan Foth

 How was I supposed to know that she lived across the street from me that she was a famous artist?

People you just don't know that you might think you know who they are but you don't know.

The saint

 Val Kilmer

He's hiding running from the past, does he truly care about Elizabeth's shoes character

He's posing as different people

He's realizing he can't do what he's hired to do

why these notes

 I will come back to grab all these notes when I sit down to write.

Remember: to keep track of the books I am reading, movies I watched, people I spoke to for each chapter. NOTES section. Even inspirations from what I read. etc.

People with ADHD have so many brilliant plans, but it is common not to complete them. 

It might be ADHD paralysis.

Exhaustion, lack of hyperfocus, lots of reasons to not finish. Not laziness, but burnout. or even worry to start.

We may have a history of not finishing which compounds into shame.

We ,might take a project on forgetting the work we already have.

 

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

 It's a funny thing that happened today. Louise sent an email noting how she might have lended someone the copy of her book Citizen and asked if anyone had a copy that she could borrow or return. I went in to place my copy into her box and found there was a copy already there. Then Melanie said yes I too try to put my copy in and noticed someone already had. I said yeah this is the fun thing that so many of us have a copy of this.

And I think New York Times recently said it was like the number one nonfiction book of the century so far. It's something to keep in mind if you're going to teach a nonfiction writing class. Maybe also not to discount this if you're writing your own memoir?

Note about my memoir

 Just a drop a few notes about what I would like to achieve

This won't be a memoir that seeks revenge on anyone. I've seen people advertently or inadvertently writing to somehow get back at someone and that will never work. 

This won't be a memoir that describes the trauma as much as it covers how going to the movies can be healing. In other words just like trauma-informed care, it helps those who have been traumatized but also benefits everyone. That going through trauma is in a deficit.

Wystan says put in a good word for me

I'm not going to cover everything. There are just some things that are best Kept Within a family or privately.

That's it this is not an autobiography. A Memoir takes selected things and make some mashup of how they are connected. Or that there's Simply Connected because you put them together.

I'll definitely be referencing the book body work because I like how she puts and changes things into different povs

why women's and gender studies

 I know with the current abolishment of DEI, it is difficult to explain to people why such a concept exists. It's not a concept, but a reality. 

Just like having ADHD, it both doesn't and does matter. 

The nuance to be able to accept something which seems a contradiction in terms means getting away from either/or logical fallacies.

the fact that I learned women's and gender studies first-hand before taking any class about it

 

pop-up poetry workshop

 Part of me would like to just rest and work on my book during the sabbatical, but the other part loves doing workshops--especially in differnet places one wouldn't find one. Without classes, this seems the perfect time to do it.

 

Plan to reach out to movie theaters and coffeehouses where there aren't theaters.

Trickster

 https://youtu.be/aL0V1MsOeFM?si=Cxccub-m0BPJWiVp

https://www.jcf.org/post/trickstering-casablanca-and-resistance?mc_cid=69392d8813&mc_eid=de3bf080d3

Poetry books

 https://a.co/d/dqvNsoy

Book

 

Myth & Mythmaking

By Henry Alexander Murray

Depression in movies

 I haven’t listened yet but I like this podcast 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hilarious-world-of-depression/id1181589175?i=1000475691309

Definitely part of the book

 Maureen Murdock who I discovered through teaching mythology has a new book about using myth and memoir to tell one's truth which leads to healing. This has been my experiences with film as a way to feel safe and self-care to then poetry writing as a way to move outside of myself. The truth of the adverse childhood experiences I went through which is a wonderful way to be sensitive to myself.

Mythology religion and psychology

Shame

Shadow self

Myth making memoir maureen murdoch

 Myth making and memoir

https://youtu.be/fEtHpYbQf4E?si=D9REt8lRvVeT0hzJ

Book to get

 Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD: A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals

Book by Brian P. Marx and Denise M. Sloan

In Omaha

 As Rilo Kiley made the journey to the city based on Connor Oberst and those who made Azure Ray recording downtown and whatever film theaters are going on with film streams and the connections of artists creation

Arrested Development

 In the midst of naviagting my late teens and twenties, I believed the healing of my childhood meant engaging with what I could do with my earned money: collecting.

 I now say as a joke, a collector is really a hoarder who wants to come to terms with how collecting serves the collector.

 When the term arrested development came a public term, maybe through the TV show?, it was a new use of language to focus through.

Suncoast Era, Gen X, and the Losses We Felt in the Seventies and Eighties

Obstacles for students

 We only have so much time, so trying to push yourself into being creative is barrier making

It's an assignment, so it's already a resistance

Some students really aren't interested in poetry but they enrolled in the class anyway

Students are used to Turning something in and getting a grade for it. They aren't used to really writing something they would want to read or want to ride. Or that they would even have written by a deadline.

I'm asking them to share emotions with using words that they wouldn't normally share. That the art has to be there.

Art and sharing feelings are never encouraged in classroom settings. They are not often graded on. Again, the grades!

Students are more focused on what they need to do for homework then they are on the experience of being in a classroom where they can be themselves.

How books mean to help

 This one of my best writing practices is to have a pile of books beside me.

Even if I feel stuck, I can pick up a book and in no time at all I start writing again.

Engaging with the language itself changes my own way of thinking, that then words that are coming from somewhere come out in a way that's different than they would.

Of course the prompts are also wonderful.

https://open.substack.com/pub/mondaysarefree/p/exercise-001-the-list?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2dy8e9

Check the sources for: Here’s Sontag’s list of beliefs, list of likes and dislikes, and list of rules for parenting. 

Essayism by Brian Dillon

My journey into mythology as mythology

 My journey into mythology as a mythology that I left home many times to get home

I first taught myself about mythology through all the books I could find at the library. Then I took mythology in high school which meant memorizing the gods names in matching them up. What I mean is Greek mythology. Then there was a dash of Egyptian mythology and another dash of Norse mythology.

Then it came to my teaching of Mythology which I looked through the books about inclusiveness, the students worry about studying another culture, and realizing that the stories that represent realities mean that we have modern mythology.

That the stories themselves mean nothing if we can't apply them to ourselves and of the world. I also don't mean negative appropriation, but looking at systems of tricksters and what makes a trickster, alongside what is a modern trickster look like, and specifically how can I be a positive Trickster?

phenomenological philsophical journeys

 I will beed to write about comic books, having chicken pox and getting Richie Rich and Casper, books I could read, then going to Kwik Shop, then movie comic books, XMen, Spidey, then comic book stores, 

alongside drive in movies, then movies at Gage 4 and other places, the nuances each theater held, looking through Friday's paper for movies, magazines at store, comics, trading cards and book adaptations, then toys, then coollectables, Suncoast, collector widescreen VHS tapes, DVDs

alongside library books, albums with soundtracks, buyng such soundtracks at the record store, drving my bike to all of the places around, mythology books

experts in Suncoast, Hot Topic being the closest version now

More books to remember

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1910559962?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_K5PAMMNX5GBG5FQKFBQF&ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_K5PAMMNX5GBG5FQKFBQF&social_share=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_K5PAMMNX5GBG5FQKFBQF&skipTwisterOG=1&bestFormat=true&dplnkId=144356ae-c209-445c-a6e0-eec8b5cea347

Maureen Murdock will join us to discuss her book Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir. We believe mythic memoir is vital for practicing enchantment and for bearing witness to our lives.

Things to do for sabbatical

 Visit Jason's friend Dustin, who has a Superman collection

Reach out to the movie theaters about being their Poet Laureate for a day

Look into film related places

Interview Austin Snell

Magic is Illusion

 As I reflect on my finished writng, I know I should incliude my own struggles--my own stories

That if my upbrining was a film, the illusions I lived within

Film was that get-away to magic

include my own words and reflections

did you see the length of that paragragh about Star Wars?

try other development ideas like that one

Ritual

 Intuition is seeing the solution

https://youtu.be/JYFxTO6nDE0?si=quGJmBjLDTiJXIqQ

Go in as of you are in a movie

poetry + film

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/162518/self-portrait-as-david-lynch

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/159668/poetry-and-film

David Lynch passed away today

 How can I sneak in some David Lynch into my writing? How can this be a part of what changed my way of looking at films?

Memoir

 It was kind of like this boy's life but the stepdad is the dad and the mother has to get out of there like in fried green tomatoes as the dad comes in to hit her.

And it was like Goodwill Hunting but for 11 years actually in college.

Robin Williams telling me it's not your fault it's not your fault

21 c memoir

 How this article describes the beginning of the 21st century in that the confessionalism of the memoir launched into the 21st century. It's the same thing from the confessional poem, that we seek a post-confessional poem. That the representation needs to lead to Healing include others or create some fluid I

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/nonfiction-book-bestsellers-subjects-b2676650.html

Rachel Zucker wrote a lot about this about how the I needs to be included

https://www.foundryjournal.com/zucker.html

How can we write past the confessional but what I mean is that through my healing I don't really find it necessary to name names. I don't need to say anything about the tragedy or abuse I went through. You just need to know that I survived and then I can show some of those joys and loves in play and wonder.

It's the same with how my poetry really launched off, that I attached joy and play to the writing.

And experimental work is the best punk way to work. We have to adapt a punk nature against masculinity. Which is why I was talking about against white male poetry classrooms. White male teaching.

I know it's the irony of me being a white guy but that's why I know even more from my own experiences of having a life where I could reject men and didn't want anything to do with them. That I became my own heroine Journey.

Hero versus heroine Journey and maybe I'm also on the monster Journey

So the Memoir can be that representation while speaking out against oppressive forces.

That's what my research will eventually be too is to look at the Memoirs coming out of Hollywood and comparing them. I'm stuck with equiterre feminine Helen Gireaux 

Something I will have to go back and remember how to spell.

Romantic comedies

 https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/of-minds-and-men/202501/three-love-lessons-from-a-century-of-romantic-comedies

Interesting as I think about these things, especially how I wait to watch Eternal Sunshine when it's Valentine's Day.

What do these things tell us?

Mythmaking

Another Punk aesthetic in Miranda July

 Me and you and everyone we know as an ultimate homage to the vulnerability we all have, the unexpected, the things we're searching for and the things that we realize we don't need. And that's what I need to do with thinking of the sabbatical, this writing, is stop thinking that I need to do something and just to be truthful and honest. Then go back and write to make it good. Just that like the line in Lee, worry about telling the truth first.

John Waters

 I'm looking at his films on Criterion Channel as I have it this month and I'm thinking about how he made the movies he wanted to make. He was called all kinds of names, but he still made those movies the way he wanted and now he's invited to give commencement speeches at colleges. Well I want to write the book I want to write. Maybe I need to take that punk attitude. I'm looking at all these books and they will make good guidelines, but I also want to be true to myself and write the book I would want to read. What are the things I would want to read about the things I want to talk about. I want to put them in my own way in my own words. And I know I have the style of saying these words that I mean to be colloquialisms but they turn out wrong but I like that. It's like I said many I'm weighted down by money but I mean money is so scarce that it weighs heavily on my mind. Why can't I just say that I'm weighted down by money. Okay when I think of money I get weighted down.

I want to talk about that movie everything everywhere all at once and how I'm like women that I totally understand how he uses kindness as an way to get around the world. I've never been one to try to be rude. It's just my midwest Kansas upbringing and if that can't be a strength what can be? I mean I was thinking about the cynicism that when you're a teenager it's so cool, but then you continue being a cynic and you're grown up and you think what the heck am I thinking about? Why am I feeling this way about things? This can't be healthy!

So I'm going to be Punk and I'm going to go to the movie theater no one wants to go to in Topeka and I'm going to set up my poetry shop there.

I mean it's so corporate that now it's anti-corporate. It's a hole in the wall that Regal just keeps open because they're not going to lose any money from keeping it open but it's so Punk they won't change it in any way. And that reminds me I need to go look in that hidden movie theater and see what happened. They only have seven screens open and I want to see what they're doing about the 8th. I saw those chairs there I wonder if they're remodeling.

A Sabbatical of Joy

 I am wishing to merge work with joy--just as I have in the past--so I will be up for suggestions.

One thing I want to do is reach out to movie theaters to ask if I may be their Poet Laureate for the weekend. It seems the best time to work on my own stuff, draw creativity, and offer five free poetry tickets for anyone who wishes for one.

Maybe even take my printer with me?

Other sabbattical movie writing topics

 When Carrie and I met >> mental rom coms

Work >> Fast Food National, The Matrix Office Space

Golden Globe speeches 2025, The Brutalist with director autonomy / capitalism, disfigurement ableism, women's voices "I am who I am, not what you want me to be"