Unjournaling

Unjournaling
Author: Dawn DiPrince
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2021-09-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000490262

Some students just don't want to share intimate details about their thoughts, feelings and lives—at least, not with others in a class or group. That's where Unjournaling comes in. All the writing prompts in this book are entirely impersonal but completely engaging for both kids and adults. Two examples of the 200 writing prompts include: Write a paragraph about a girl named Dot, but use no letters with a dot (in other words, no i or j). Why on earth would Yankee Doodle stick a feather in his cap and call it “macaroni”? Come up with a plausible explanation. The book includes sample responses to all of the questions—a helpful tool for anyone who gets stuck with a topic and wants to see how it can be done! Grade 7-Adult

Unwriting Maya Literature

Unwriting Maya Literature
Author: Paul M. Worley
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816534276

Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation. As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works. Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History
Author: Joasia Krysa
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-09-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262029588

A critical mapping of the multiplicities of Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi—composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, inventor, collector, futurologist. Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid—a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, ”In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi's multiplicities. The contributors describe Kurenniemi's enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi's achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.

Unwriting Maya Literature

Unwriting Maya Literature
Author: Paul M. Worley
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816539871

Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation. As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works. Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History
Author: Joasia Krysa
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262331101

A critical mapping of the multiplicities of Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi—composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, inventor, collector, futurologist. Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid—a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, ”In 2048,” Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi's multiplicities. The contributors describe Kurenniemi's enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his “video-organ,” DIMI-O. A “Visual Archive,” a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi's achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.

Dude Lit

Dude Lit
Author: Emily Hind
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081653926X

How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? Dude Lit examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit. The makings of the “best” writers have to do with superficial aspects, like conformist wardrobes and unsmiling expressions, and more complex techniques, such as friendship networks, prizewinners who become judges, dropouts who become teachers, and the key tactic of being allowed to shift roles from rule maker (the civilizado) to rule breaker (the bárbaro). Certain writing habits also predict success, with the “high and hard” category reserved for men’s writing and even film directing. In both film and literature, critically respected artwork by men tends to rely on obscenity interpreted as originality, negative topics viewed as serious, and coolly inarticulate narratives about bullying understood as maximum literary achievement. To build the case regarding “rebellion as conformity,” Dude Lit contemplates a wide set of examples while always returning to three figures, each born some two decades apart from the immediate predecessor: Juan Rulfo (with Pedro Páramo), José Emilio Pacheco (with Las batallas en el desierto), and Guillermo Fadanelli (with Mis mujeres muertas, as well as the range of his publications). Why do we believe Mexican men are competent performers of the role of intellectual? Dude Lit answers this question through a creative intersection of sources. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and critical readings, this provocative book changes the conversation on literature and gendered performance.

Leap Write In!

Leap Write In!
Author: Karen Benke
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-04-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1611800153

Invite your jittery mind into quiet slips of timed or untimed writing experiments that are designed to encourage your timid heart to forge forgotten feelings and entice your shy-self to make friends with emerging emotions. With a bounty of prompts to select from, you’ll be inspired to explore all the wacky, confusing, brave, soul-stirring wonderings and wanderings of your emerging life’s inner treasure in a way that’s sure to unleash what you most need to say. In this book you’ll find: • On-the-Spot Drops that offer quick “free-fall” prompts on different themes, such as short-winded poems and seven-line stories. • Mini Memoirs to unlock personal narrative to share, or not. • Suddenly a Story suggestions to explore feelings and states of being like fear, reluctance, compassion, kindness, anxiety, anger, jealousy, happiness, and more. • Surprise Yourself Surveys for those who think they know everything about themselves. • Untie-Your-Mind Word Lists to jump-start stalled imaginations. • Definition Decoders to introduce new ideas and styles of writing. Created especially for tweens, teens, and other earthlings, this book provides you with a chance to create imaginative poems, stories, fragments, and real-life on-the-spot sketches. All that’s required is that you take a breath, relax, reset, and leap write in!

Reading Popol Wuj

Reading Popol Wuj
Author: Nathan C. Henne
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816541248

Popol Wujis considered one of the oldest books in the Americas. Various elements of Popol Wuj have appeared in different written forms over the last two millennia and several parts of Popol Wuj likely coalesced in hieroglyphic book form a few centuries before contact with Europeans. Popol Wuj offers a unique interpretation of the Maya world and ways of being from a Maya perspective. However, that perspective is often occluded since the extant Popol Wuj is likely a copy of a copy of a precontact Indigenous text that has been translated many times since the fifteenth century. Reading Popol Wujoffers readers a path to look beyond Western constructions of literature to engage with this text through the philosophical foundation of Maya thought and culture. This guide deconstructs various translations to ask readers to break out of the colonial mold in approaching this seminal Maya text. Popol Wuj, or Popol Vuh, in its modern form, can be divided thematically into three parts: cosmogony (the formation of the world), tales of the beings who inhabited the Earth before the coming of people, and chronicles of different ethnic Maya groups in the Guatemala area. Examining thirteen translations of the K’iche’ text, Henne offers a decolonial framework to read between what translations offer via specific practice exercises for reading, studying, and teaching. Each chapter provides a close reading and analysis of a different critical scene based on a comparison of several translations (English and Spanish) of a key K’iche’ word or phrase in order to uncover important philosophical elements of Maya worldviews that resist precise expression in Indo-European languages. Charts and passages are frontloaded in each chapter so the reader engages in the comparative process before reading any leading arguments. This approach challenges traditional Western reading practices and enables scholars and students to read Popol Wuj—and other Indigenous texts—from within the worldview that created them.

The Maya Art of Speaking Writing

The Maya Art of Speaking Writing
Author: Tiffany D. Creegan Miller
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-05-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081654235X

Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands, Tiffany D. Creegan Miller discusses images that are sonic, pictorial, gestural, and alphabetic. She reveals various forms of creativity and agency that are woven through a rich media landscape in Indigenous Guatemala, as well as Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Miller discusses how technologies of inscription and their mediations are shaped by human editors, translators, communities, and audiences, as well as by voices from the natural world. These texts push back not just on linear and compartmentalized Western notions of media but also on the idea of the singular author, creator, scholar, or artist removed from their environment. The persistence of orality and the interweaving of media forms combine to offer a challenge to audiences to participate in decolonial actions through language preservation. The Maya Art of Speaking Writing calls for centering Indigenous epistemologies by doing research in and through Indigenous languages as we engage in debates surrounding Indigenous literatures, anthropology, decoloniality, media studies, orality, and the digital humanities.

The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water
Author: Lidia Yuknavitch
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0983304904

This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.