Monthly Archives: November 2014

Thoughts on my TED talk

I gave my TED talk, posted above, this past Monday, November 16th and I have to say that I was disappointed in my performance. Knowing that I have always struggled with presentations that have to be recited from memory, I spent many hours trying to prepare myself. However, once I stood up in front of everyone to give my presentation, my carefully prepared speech and what I believed to be clever transitions disappeared from my memory and thoughts and were replaced instead by my nerves. Watching the video back, I think that it is very clear that I am flustered when speaking and that it appears I have no direction. Also, I looked at the computer screen a few times without realizing and also messed up the timing of a slides on one or two occasions. I am sorry to say that I did not do nearly as well as I would have hoped on this project and I wish that I would not have let my nerves get the best of me. Despite being a little under time due to a presentation that was salvaged from the few bits and pieces that I could remember, I do think that I did a good job overall of staying around the time limit. I also believe that I did a good job of enunciating my ideas so that they were understandable.

As far as the presentations of everyone else in my group go, I believe they all did a fantastic job. They were all well-practiced and clear and even unexpectedly built off of one another. I especially liked the photos that Edka chose to use to illustrate her point and thought that Meghan’s presentation was very organized and made a good point. Overall, I was really impressed by everyone in my group!

Margaret Atwood Visits Penn State

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“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.” ~Margaret Atwood

On November 12, Penn State honored famous Canadian author Margaret Atwood as the 2014 IAH (Institute for the Arts and Humanities) Medal for Distinguished Achievement recipient. The awards ceremony was held downtown in The State Theatre and included both the presentation of the award and Margaret Atwood reading selections from her newest collection of short stories before answering audience questions.

Atwood is known internationally for her writing which includes more than forty volumes of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. Her novels include The Blind Assassin which won the Booker Prize in 2000, and The Handmaid’s Tale which was adapted into a motion picture. She is one of North America’s most prolific and well-known contemporary authors and continues to write even now. Her most recent publication, The Stone Mattress, was published earlier this year. Also astounding is the fact that her work has been published in more that forty languages including Spanish, French, Korean, Finnish, and Estonian.

When I first heard that Margaret Atwood was coming to town I rushed back to my dorm ready to buy a ticket for the forum that she was scheduled to give November 13th at The Nittany Lion Inn (the awards ceremony was free public admission) only to learn that they were all sold-out. In essence, this woman is a rock-star within the literary community. In fact, her name (and fame) continue to grow each and every year as her books gain prestige and are increasingly studied in schools at both the secondary and collegiate levels.

Atwood was introduced to the audience by way of a video that was part of a series done by the Rick Mercer Report which highlighted celebrities doing things that were completely unrelated to what they were known for. The video Celebrity Tip with Margaret Atwood which was aired in 2005 was a hilarious look at both Atwood’s sense of humor and spirit as she explained the basics of being a hockey goalie and how hockey is like writing (which it is nothing like). Despite this, it was a clever and humorous introduction to a woman who kept the jokes coming for the rest of the night. When asked how she was able to write so well about both the young and the old and their experiences she responded by saying “I’ll tell you a secret that not many young people realize. All old people were once young too.” This was followed by a young girl who told Margaret that she was “so glad to be in the same world as her” to which Margaret responded by saying “Well, enjoy it while you can,” referring to the fact that she is at the tender age of seventy-five.

The ceremony ended with Atwood telling the audience that “deciding to write a new novel is like deciding to swim in a lake in the winter. You’re either dedicated to doing it or you’re not and the hardest part is deciding to go in in the first place.”

A Story Worth Telling

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“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” – Willa Cather

I distinctly remember an incident that happened one day in a creative writing class I took during high school. One of my classmates sat staring at his paper with his hands folded in his lap while the rest of the class scribbled furiously away at their desks. Our teacher walked carefully over to him, spoke with him briefly for a moment before asking us all to stop what we were doing as she picked up the chalk and began to write on the board. In her wake she left the ghostly white question of “What if I have nothing interesting to write about?”

This question haunted me for years as I considered that on the surface I was just a white middle-class teenager who, like most teenagers with strict parents, relished in a little harmless rebellion. It was the same story that had been told for generations whether it be through books like The Catcher in the Rye or films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (please excuse my lack of current pop culture knowledge if your idea of teenage rebellion is whatever the heck happened to Miley Cyrus). The point is that every story there is has already been told. In fact, the key to successful storytelling is to take a look at the world around you and to personalize it so that you have created something original out of something familiar. For example, it is safe to say that many people here in State College have witnessed the beauty of the starry night sky. Haruki Murakami wrote that “the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.” He took a piece of nature that we are all familiar with and gave it life, thereby giving it a new perspective and making it unique. The power of this is that the reader can then take a step back and say “yeah, sometimes it does feel as though the stars are sitting up there and watching life on earth go by.” The power of this observation and the power that it serves within the context of its larger story is that Murakami did not describe how he felt like he was flying when he cliff-dived next to a waterfall in Belize or how he found the meaning of life while traveling through the Outback with the aboriginal people of Australia. One does not need incredible experiences to be a great writer, in fact some of the very best writers are those who have the talent to take something mundane and make it interesting.

Everyone has a story. So next time you’re taking a walk look at how the tree leaves dance to unheard music at the urging of the wind or how the sea keeps kissing the shore no matter how many times its pushed away. Look at how the dad is always the first one to respond when his little girl falls and scrapes her knee or how a groom looks like a young boy on his wedding day. Take the ordinary and find in it a story worth telling.

TED talk: the orchestra in my mouth

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There are numerous TED talks that are available for public viewing with topics ranging from how to get people to listen when you’re speaking to how a 12 year old boy became an app developer. Despite the wide range of topics, all of these talks have one thing in common: they are given by people who are experts in their fields who have an idea that they feel is worth sharing. One such expert is beat boxer and sound enthusiast Tom Thum. In his talk titled The orchestra in my mouth he uses comedy and impressions to show the range of human sound. He begins his talk by saying that he has “come here to come clean about what [he] does for money” and that he “uses [his] mouth for strange ways in exchange for cash” and that he does this on “seedy downtown bars and street corners”. This comedic introduction to his talk is one of the only times he actually speaks throughout the entire 11 minute and 41 second video as the talk is mostly comprised of him beat boxing. The sling beats seem almost inhuman and entirely instrumental. In fact, at one point in his talk he drops some beats without his microphone just to show that he is only using his voice and that there are no effects on the microphone.

This is my favorite TED talk for a variety of reasons. The first being that it is a very performance based act which keeps the audience actively engaged as opposed to some of the TED talks I have seen that include a slideshow of facts and pictures to move the presentation along. The second reason I enjoy Tom Thum’s talk is that he captures the true spirit of TED by taking a subject of which he is an expert (demonstrated by what in my opinion is incredible talent) and uses his skill to make an audience excited about that same subject. In short, he is presenting an idea worth spreading.

I hope to take this lesson and apply it to my own TED talk.

Social Media and Storytelling

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When I think of a storyteller I picture a figure standing over a fireside, who is painting a picture of great adventures and daring deeds and in the middle of it all I imagine a young girl with wide eyes staring up at this person who possesses this magical talent for creating worlds.

But this image of the storyteller is being redefined in our contemporary culture. With the world at our fingertips and the vast network of technology that is available to us, we are the new storytellers. The fables of talking foxes and stories where fairies roam the forest do not exist in this new world. Instead, my generation is telling the story of what so and so ate for lunch or maybe posting an Ernest Hemingway quote under a photo of themselves making a duck face because it will make them seem more intellectual which will add to their overall attractiveness. And in a new society where image is everything, attractiveness plays a key role. We are no longer reading about literature’s newest detective, but instead reading about what our friends have done and where they have traveled.

Once we read to understand what it meant to be human and how the lives of those we read about in books could apply to our own lives as well. Whether it be that pride and prejudice are a hindrance to love or the power of deductive reasoning, books (even bad books) have always had something to say. So what does social media say about us? It tells us that we are a generation consumed by the way others perceive us to the point that we obsess over a new profile picture for hours because we want to send the right message. We want others to grasp the story of either our real or imagined lives. In this way, we are writing the world a sort of memoir of what it means to be us. Yet, this story of our lives is incomplete in that there is no real value in it. Can you really imagine English classes studying and interpreting your friends twitter feeds? Probably not. And the reason being is that most of what we put out into the cyber world is meaningless jabber about how we were “feeling depressed and need to know if anyone knows how to fix a phone that’s been dropped into water because rice isn’t working”.

The art of storytelling is being transformed and not in a good way. We are losing the effect and power of well-strung together sentences and thoughts amongst a sea of “YOLO” ‘s. And this idea of you only live once is being lost on us as a generation because that’s just it. We have been gifted this life to meaning to and we are wasting it staring at screens typing pointless status’s just so that someone we met once at a party who is also typing pointless status’s can read about it. So my parting wisdom is to go out and live your life so that someday you might meet a young girl with wide eyes sitting by a fireside who you can tell your story to.