Project 2: Books

After getting to know McKenna through conversations and our shadow tracing exercise, I found that she really enjoys theater and musicals.

This was my proposal for the first book of Project 2.

In class, McKenna and I had a chance to talk about our interests and backgrounds more intimately. As McKenna loves theater and I really don’t know much about theater, she showed me some clips and talked about some of her favorite plays. One clip that stood out to me was from Spring Awakening, in which a father yells (at first visually through sign language but eventually audibly) at his deaf son for having failed in school. This struck me, as my sister is deafblind and we often have mutual frustrations when we cannot understand each other.

McKenna and I then went to Blick Art Supplies to look at some materials for our projects, and we continued to share our interests there. She showed me some color gels that are used in theater lighting. She is thinking of constructing her book on these gels. I talked about canvases and paints as we passed by.

In Seminar on Friday, we got to interview each other using the Proust questionnaire and also to show each other pictures of our families.

This is the seminar poem I chose to use for my second book. I felt that the poem has a very whimsical, constructed feel to it, and this is what I wanted to match in the aesthetics of my second book. I wanted the book to feel like a construction of whimsical elements, as I feel that these two aesthetics juxtapose nicely. The poem itself is a juxtaposition of whimsy and harsh, rigid words such as “canid” and “dental,” which I think is what the poem relies on for its success.

In regards to the Wendy Doniger reading, I am interested in what is to be gained from “triple-cross-dressing as our true genders.” As a form of masquerading, it does grant a higher level of control over society. Society often controls individuals by forcing a perception on them, but, by altering this forced perception, one can instead control society. This is a gratifying and liberating idea. Furthermore, the text deals with the truth behind masks, masquerades, cross-dressing, and identity. As McKenna said during her Mandala presentation, even those aspects of ourselves that we consider fake are part of our true identities. I believe that, as both Doniger and McKenna implied, the mask an individual chooses to wear is telling of his true self.