ToW #7 - Visual Text by Daniel Kurtzman: "Marriage Equality"

"Marriage Equality"
Found Here

        Clay Bennett, the 2002 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, published this political cartoon in the Tennessee newspaper Chattanooga Times Free Press. The cartoon is on the topic of recent developments in marriage equality, specifically the New Jersey law enacted on October 21st allowing gay couples to marry. Triumphantly playing on this recent piece of legislation, it juxtaposes three happy advocates of marriage equality with one of its defeated-looking opponents. It also features the old marriage adage, "Something old, something new / something borrowed, something blue," which describes four separate items that are supposed to be worn by a bride on her wedding day. This reference to tradition emphasizes the four items worn/held by the figures in the comic: an old Constitution, a new LGBTQ support flag, a borrowed marriage equality pin, and a sign protesting gay marriage held by a blue, or sad, man.
        The Chattanooga Times Free Press seems to have online articles that are written with equal amounts neutral, liberal, and conservative intents, implying that its audience is of no specific political orientation. Other information, found on a demographics database, claims that 55.8% of Chattanoogans vote Republican while 42.4% of them vote Democratic. It is important to note here that Bennett depicted the defeated opponent of marriage equality as being a Republican, wearing a GOP hat. In doing this, Bennett seems to be isolating over half of his potential audience for the sake of celebrating with the implied Democrats who support marriage equality. That said, there does not seem to be much more to his purpose than celebration, besides perhaps guilting Republicans into considering the cause for equality. All in all, it can be said that Bennett is very successful in his celebration. This success comes mainly from his usage of the marriage adage; it's punchline, a defeated opponent, is snarky and gloating but nonetheless effective. He also includes the US Constitution on the side of support for gay marriage, reminding all that the primary document of United States government enforces marriage equality.

ToW #6 - Short Story by David Malone: "George II"

        "George II" is a second-person command narrative (much like "What Really Happened") in which the reader takes the perspective of George, a professor who has recently come back from the dead after six months of afterlife. The entire story manifests itself in a conversation between George and his already moved-on widow, Anita. It's writer, David Malone, is a postgraduate who works as a researcher for BBC World Service. His works have been published by five relatively small-time but high quality literary magazines.
        Carve Magazine published Malone's "George II" as one of the five short stories in their Summer 2013 issue. The core demographic of Carve, which has the slogan "Honest Fiction", must by nature be people interested in reading provoking literature. They don't even have to have formal training in literature; "George II" can be read at face value or analyzed deeply to be enjoyed. That said, as perception of honesty often comes with age and experience, Carve is probably best suited for an all-around mature audience. And Malone's subject is most certainly mature: in an interview with Carve, Malone gives some indication of the muse for his work, speaking about the "rational fear ... that there may be nothing beyond this life". He then poses the question "what if you suddenly knew the answer to the ultimate what’s next and didn’t like it?" The inclusion of these lines leads me to believe that his motive in writing was to explore this question with philosophical intent.
        Obviously, it is easy to get lost when following a philosophical path. Realizing this, Malone employed a few strategies in order to help his reader through the journey. From start to finish, he begins most sentences with command words, writing sentences along the lines of "Eat the spaghetti. Look at your glistening fork." These commands immediately immerse the reader into the narrative, forcing them into the perspective of George and thus helping them take ownership of the story. Also throughout the story, Malone helps his readers understand the story's implications by referencing familiarities from Christianity. Examples include Anita's Christ-on-a-cross necklace and her new boyfriend, "Peter the rock" (Peter the Apostle was named for the Greek petros, meaning "rock").
        All in all, Malone had a pretty simple purpose: to write a short story about knowing what the afterlife is. I have to say that he did fulfill that purpose; heck, George even divulges what the afterlife is like at one point. But of course, most authors have a higher purpose than their primary one. They want to make their writing good. Simply from the sheer sophistication of the previously mentioned strategies, I hope that it's clear that Malone's "George II" is better than good.

Read "George II" here.

George rises in much the same way, 

though Anita isn't sat there crying any more.

ToW #5 - Article by Joanne Lipman: "Is Music the Key to Success?"

        This New York Times article is an examination of music's role in success. In order to gather her information, Joanne Lipman interviewed traditionally successful people (Woody Allen, Chuck Todd, etc.) about how their musical pursuits have contributed to their success.

        Lipman is a frequent business commentator, appearing on CNBC and CNN. She is also the co-author of Strings Attached, a nonfiction work about her childhood music mentor, making her very qualified to write about music and success. Written just 11 days after Strings Attached was published, it seems that the main context behind this article is clear. I hypothesize that Lipman wrote this article in with the idea of promoting her book in mind. After all, each page of the article is followed by a line mentioning it. While the explicit purpose of this article is to answer the question "is music the key to success?", Lipman hints at a perhaps ulterior motive of hers (besides promoting her book) in the fifth-to-last sentence. She states, "[Music's ability to improve perseverance is] an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country." This note of Lipman's points to an implicit purpose of her's in writing this article about the benefits of dedication to music: to encourage more people to pick up instruments, saving music from its decline.
        Published by The New York Times and clearly written for people actively pursuing methods to success, this article is rather simply intended for an intelligent audience. This assumption is bolstered by Lipman's almost scientific data-collection and conclusion-making processes. Not to mention that the article is strewn with logical appeals. Lipman both begins and ends the article with lists of examples: at the start, it's successful people who play instruments; at the end, it's success-bringing skills that music teaches. Quotes from her interviewees are also frequently used, constituting appeals to ethos when the speakers are famous and pathos when they recollect personal stories. This article had an interesting effect on me: just a day after I declined an offer to learn how to play the guitar, I'm reconsidering my estrangement of playing music. Simply because of this effect, I feel compelled to say that Joanne Lipman was especially successful in this article. In fact, she was so successful that I must assume that she has played music for all her life.

Link to the Article

ToW #4 - IRB by Michael Pollan: "The Botany of Desire", Chapter 1

        Michael Pollan has been educated in Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University and is an author of four agriculturally-rooted New York Times bestsellers. He begins the core content of his book on the causal relationship between human desire and the success of plants with a chapter on the sweet-tooth-gratifying apple. He primarily investigates the story of John Chapman, commonly known as Johnny Appleseed, in order to explain how the desires of early American colonists led to the biological success of the apple tree in North America. Pollan writes this chapter assumedly after he takes a trip along Chapman's path from Pennsylvania to Illinois and visits an apple orchard in Geneva, New York that houses some 2,500 varieties of apple.
        The most evident goal of the first chapter of Pollan's The Botany of Desire is to illustrate the marriage between the success of Americans and the success of apples. In order to accomplish this goal, Pollan transports his readers to early 1800s America, where he notes that John Chapman made it his business to plant orchards of apple trees so he could sell them to frontiersmen looking to establish new towns. When explaining this history, Pollan often employs primary source accounts, theories from established historians, and completely logical arguments to get his points across, constituting both appeals to ethos and logos. Appealing to pathos, he also reasons about the fear of starting a settlement in the 1800s and the comfort that the ownership of an apple tree brought. Given that Botany of Desire contains a fair amount of science, Pollan makes it very understandable to people of most levels of education by explaining any and all complex concepts that he presents (for example, the extreme heterozygosity of apple seeds). In other words, his audience ranges from the hardworking farmer of Tennessee to the scholarly biology professor of Harvard. With his combination of a large audience, credibly written arguments, and plenty of examples of the mutually beneficial American-apple relationship, Pollan is very successful in convincing his readers to view botany as a projection of human desire.

Recommended Reading