Listener Lyric
In English, we were introduced to the Listener Lyric assignment in October. Unfortunately, the assignment was not just having me listen to song lyrics for a week or two, but that’s okay. I’m not disappointed or anything. The actual project was based around the idea of listening to someone different from you in an identity category, and turning your personal interview with them into a “lyrical essay”— which, unlike in AP Comp, was more of a poetic work. The concept of this project was inspired by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
I’ll keep my interviewee anonymous, just because it doesn’t matter and also makes it sound mysterious. My interviewee was a woman in her thirties to forties dealing with miscarriages and in vitro fertilization (IVF). I would have never come up with this topic myself, by the way— I sort of opened the floor to her on that front. Here’s a transcript of the interview I had with her.
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Open in new tab Below is the final Listener Lyric I wrote, which I titled “Means to an Anything.”
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Like I so often say with many of my assignments, I wasn’t all that proud of what I’d created and didn’t think it was very good. But when I read it in class, people actually seemed to like it. I was successful at keeping it just perfectly vague enough so that no one figured out what it was about until I told them. I was actually planning to rewrite the entire paper before class because I didn’t think it was strong enough, but then class happened and I hadn’t rewritten it. And I didn’t change it after. But I’ll just chalk that up to satisfaction and not laziness.
I remember fearing it came off as too pretentious and awkwardly slipped in and out of metaphors. I tried my best to capture the snarky tone of the interviewee in the way it was written. And I think I was successful in that. In hindsight, I do really like the line “Flick a lucky penny in my fountain and cross yourself before bed,” which was regarding the expenses of IVF treatment, as that was a major part of the interviewee’s questions.
Overall, this paper was extremely uncomfortable for me to write— it’s a topic that’s uncomfortable for anyone, really, but for me being who I am it’s just something I feel very awkward thinking about. Even more so, I felt that there was a strong sense of irony in me writing a paper with a constant underlying tone of “you don’t understand me, don’t pretend you do” when that was exactly what I myself was doing. Ah, well— that’s the assignment, and somebody’s gotta do it.
One final note, which is some odd inspiration for this. Looking back, the writing style and tone was clearly inspired by a monologue from the play Mercy by Adam Szymkowicz. It was a monologue I performed at the ITS festival in April 2019 and again in an audition in January 2020 (two months after this assignment). I hadn’t thought about the monologue much, but I can definitely tell I wrote in the same style. That monologue depicted a father telling his baby that he saw the man who killed his mother in a drunk driving accident. Since I wrote this paper from the perspective of a mother talking to her unborn and nonexistent child, I supposed I lifted the same tone of stunted sentences and streams of consciousness.
Touchstone Artist Research Assignment
This isn’t something we’re required to put on our websites, but hell, I’m really proud of this, so I’m going to.
Our final assignment in the first semester was to take a work relating to our elective class (film, for me) and analyze it. There were two parts to this assignment: a formal analysis and a research paper. We were supposed to start with a closer look at a specific part of the work, then expand our analysis to a larger scale. I quickly realized that I’d already done this assignment at the end of my junior year for my Explorations project. I chose to make my research paper more based around the story itself as opposed to the visuals, considering I’d already focused closely on the latter for the aforementioned project.
I chose to focus on my favorite television series, Breaking Bad (which my friend coincidentally began watching a few weeks later). And I’m actually extremely proud of my final product, and I’ll never admit that I might have written almost all of it the night before it was due. It might have been after it was due, actually. I can’t remember. But that doesn’t change the fact that I really do like it— mainly the research paper half. I chose to focus on the final scene in “Crawl Space” (season 4, episode 11). I focused on the visuals for a close analysis, identifying themes and tying it all back together at the end.
I then moved onto the bulk of the assignment, and the part that I’m very proud of— the research paper. Even though I’d watched the show over three years prior to writing this, I found it fascinating to learn about the allusions and connections the show made— namely to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I tied the paper’s focus together with one line from the pilot episode and used that as a point to pose a question— one that I attempted to lean into as objectively as I could. That question was essentially when Walt truly “broke bad” during the show, which I was obviously able to tie into the show’s title. Here is the paper:
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What I enjoyed the most about writing this paper was probably the natural flow I gave it. After years of elementary school’s “topic sentence, body, body, body, conclusion” and AP Comp’s dreadful “thesis, counterclaim, minor claim, minor hook, whatever thing”, it felt really nice to just let myself go structurally. I still gave it a topic sentence and made each body paragraph focused, but instead of wrapping the body paragraphs back to the claim, I used the development of the paragraph to introduce and naturally segue into the next topic paragraph. My main claims and evidence actually shifted multiple times throughout the writing process, as I would discover something entirely new to write about as I got closer to the end of a paragraph.
I liked the way this natural flow enabled me to pose a simple question and then add layers on top of it to change your mind on what is seemingly a simple question. I enjoyed delving into the murky philosophies behind all of this and trying to maintain a stable course the whole time, and somehow wrap it up without having fully entered a vague gray space of endless confusion and insignificance, even when I intended to tap into that given the subject matter. I think I managed to successfully pull the reader back out of that gray area and wrap it up with a satisfying conclusion. I think I can safely say this assignment is one of the ones I am most proud of throughout the course of all my high school career.