The 73 words Larry Nassar spoke Deaths and Funerals for Saturday, February 3, 2018
Man arrested outside Lana Del Rey concert, while Eagles fans storm
Philly, The fourth fatal Amtrak crash in two months.
STORIES THAT SHOCK (14 VIDEOS)
Trump’s unrelenting war with More winter says puxatawny phil.
Does the U.S. Constitution protect
your right to give law enforcement the middle finger?
#travyonmartin.
Kimchi, moose and onesies: Canadian Olympic athletes arrive in PyeongChang.
There are signs that the sector is falling behind:
Phone scams are getting more elaborate and harder to track,
Child death toll in flu season,
“Come journalists, writers who report the facts /
And brandish your pen to fend off his attacks /
Look past what he says and look
at how he acts / The fire and fury is
raging /
For his words can hurt, but your words can fight back /
New York Times, they aren’t a-failin'”
A newly-discovered species spider with a scorpion-like tail has been discovered, preserved in amber.
Do the Math and Switch To Sprint
I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark through all the assumptions. Understand you’re used to me bringing you along on all my journeys. My pregnancy was one I chose not to do in front of the world.
TAX POLICY UNDER TRUMP
THE MACHINERY OF TRADE ENFORCEMENT UNDER TRUMP
BLACK EMPLOYMENT UNDER TRUMP
Research into e-cigarettes is fueled by a need for answers as to whether e-cigarettes will lead people to — or away from — combustible cigarettes, known to be disastrous for a person’s health.
FBI HAD RESOURCES Why Prince fans are bashing Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime performance
this retirement hack is for you: Examples of infrastructure Woes: Valentine’s Day Escapes: North Korea slammed President Trump’s first State of the Union, calling it an attack on the country and filled with quote,
“self-conceit.”
—————————————————————————————————————————Explanation and goals:
I had originally tried to research what effect the ‘newsreel’ and ‘camera eye’ sections in the novel had on the future: whether this sparked some sort of movement in stylistic approach or if it effected the creative nonfiction genre at all but alas it was not a fruitful search. I then began to think about what 2018 would look like as a page from The 42nd Parallel. This was the result. I think the concept of these asides are extremely interesting in their reflection of the current period interspersed with Mac’s story. That being said, I was able to grasp the newsreel better than the camera-eye sections and therefore did not imitate that part as well.
For my version, I pulled things from USAToday, CNN, Twitter, Fox News and Post & Courier. I tried to only use bits and pieces of the news that was sensitive to this week or last month. I also stuck to news that was only about or within the United States as I thought back to the scholarly article we read the first week of class as it referred to The 42nd Parallel and the U.S.A. Trilogy as trying to reach that mythical and perhaps unattainable “Great American Novel” status.
My goal as well was to deliberately mimicked the style and form from the newsreels within the first 100 pages of the novel, some of them were:
- The lines drifting off into the page with song lyrics (mine taken from Jimmy Fallon’s parody of ‘These Time’s They Are A-Changin”).
- The repeated phrase “…under Trump” is supposed to mimic page 2 with the line “…greets the new century”
- Formally: Parts of the newsreels that are bolded, sectioned off, aligned differently or in all caps.
It was a lot of fun to recreate. I like to think of it as half ekphrastic, half like a collage. Recreating this ultimately arose the question in me, are the newsreels poetry? are they creative nonfiction? a part of the fiction itself?
Though it’s an open-ended question, I think it’s worth thinking about.
This is awesome! I love how fresh the newsreels can seem when they are plucked from the present day (or week). It’s interesting to consider, though, as someone noted in class, that these would always seems somewhat alienating for their readers, who are, at the start, at a 30-year remove from the events themselves (novel published 1930, novel’s action starting around 1910). The reader would likely identify the big historical movements, but perhaps the smaller items and pop-cultural references would seem nearly as odd to them as they do to the contemporary reader. In any case, as an artistic re-casting of this method, with careful attention to its qualities of collage, repetition, global reach, and clashing pop cultural throw-aways and world-historical items, this is just awesome. Makes me wish I could assign you all to do one of these for year in which you were born. Such an interesting way to frame individual growth and development alongside the march of Time.