Cultural Touchstones Worth Knowing

The following blog comes to us from this semester's Librarian on Location, Karen J. Rupp-Serrano, who is in the Writing Center Thursdays from 1-3pm. After reading her words, we invite you to share your own cultural touchstones in the comments.

I recently read an excellent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Entitled “Tea, Shortbread, and 3 Things Worth Knowing,” the article outlines one professor’s weekly session—open to all—to learn about three items of cultural interest. The professor, Shawkat M. Toorawa of Cornell, found himself amazed by the number cultural touchstones of which students were unaware.

I work regularly with students; sometimes they come to me with questions, sometimes I come to their classroom to provide library instruction, and sometimes they are students employed in the University Libraries. I have on occasion found myself trying to do what Dr. Toorawa does as I find students have never heard of things I grew up knowing.

In the spirit of Dr. Toorawa, I offer you three cultural touchstones. Please don’t assume I am so old as to actually have been alive for the heyday of any of these items! They are all, literally, before my time.

Jack Benny

Jack Benny was a comedian; for over 20 years he had a weekly radio show, and after that he had a TV show for another 15 years. He was famous for steadfastly insisting he was never older than 39, for playing the violin (badly), and for being the ultimate tightwad. No one could get a laugh with a well-timed pause like Jack Benny. The clip I’ve provided illustrates his miserly persona and features Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny and many other Looney Tunes characters) as the taxi driver.

Film Noir

French for “black film”, film noir movies were primarily produced in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. Generally black and white crime dramas, they frequently involve a hard-boiled detective, voiceover narration, and a shady dame. One of my favorite from this genre is fairly modern, Body Heat. Kathleen Turner made her film debut in this movie and you’ll also see a fairly young Mickey Rourke, before he got just plain weird.

Penrod

Penrod Scholfield is a worthy successor to Tom Sawyer. The Penrod stories, written by Booth Tarkington, are set in the American Midwest prior to World War I. A century later, I can still see much of Penrod in my own 12 year old son—the mortification of being on stage, trying to figure out the opposite sex, and the indignations of being constantly misunderstood by adults. Here’s a taste:

“A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this…”

(From Penrod, by Booth Tarkington, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/402/402-h/402-h.htm#2HCH0001)

Karen Rupp-Serrano

University Libraries

Writing Advice

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The Family Business

by Jessie St. Amand

I guess the answer to the Writer question, “What do you write?”, is scary because I don’t know yet. My mom, who is probably just as supportive today as she was when I was writing Hanna Barbera fanfiction, seems to be sure in her answer that I will write “the next Harry Potter – the thing that will get all the kids reading again.” I thought she would probably be less excited to see the things I do spend my time writing – like paragraphs-long refutations of my great-uncle’s racist Facebook statuses – but she was supportive of that, too, despite it fulfilling Phyllis Schlafly’s prophecies that English Majors like me are the worst, most godless, the most leftist, and the most elder-insultingly-cheeky of the disciplines.

I think what I, as a senior English Major, can contribute to this discussion about being a writer is the realization that my ability is propped up by outside sources so much more than I think – that confidence, this golden beacon of rightness emanating from within, is not as important to me as support – other people’s misguided, blindly encouraging faith that I am smarter and more capable and just better than I appear to be. I have to admit to myself that I have a lot of exterior support that other people – people with more or less the same level of bootstrappy interior shininess as me – lack. My family, for example wanted a lot of things for me that I do not want, and wanted me to be a lot of things that I am not, but in other ways, they are my greatest source of support.

I noticed this when was at Grandma’s house this summer eating handfuls of the mixed nut trail mix she buys with the chocolate chips and the dried cranberries in it. My Aunt Mary was there for movie night with the kids, and my brother Tom was out at the Redbox picking out something G-rated, and Uncle Mark showed up with his seven-year-old daughter, Gabby, who has red hair like him and is really small and adorable.

The kid-friendly movie, I would find out later, would be “Letters to God” (2010), a heartwarming tale of how a small-town child dying of cancer inspires his alcoholic mailman to get right with the Lord (and with the kid’s mom). I suspect that Tom, bless his Campus Crusade for Christ-filled heart, picks out these movies (as opposed to, say, Harry Potter) more because he wants me to be a Christian again than because he really enjoys watching them, which is kind of sweet in its own way. It’s probably what Jesus would do. But mostly the kid-cancer movie made me wonder if there were any of the bad kinds of preservatives in the trail mix and whether I could pull off the shaved-head look.

But anyway, Gabby was there now, so Aunt Mary made her a snack and told me that Gabby is a writer too, just like her cousin Jessie, and would I like to see the story she wrote? This filled me with a glowing, unwarranted pride and fear because I personally am too scared to call myself a writer yet. The label with which I openly identify is “English Major”, because that’s what I am, and because that is way less likely to get the response “What do you write?” – very scary – and more likely to get “What are you going to do with that after you graduate?” The other reason I have this stupid misplaced pride is because these two – my aunt and my elementary-school cousin – must have been talking about me as, like, a possible role model, like, as a person who does things that you should do, also, which is weird.

It also made me think of my late grandpa, who by all rights should have been there with us if he had not dropped dead of a heart attack in 2007. Grandpa Frank was the first person from our family to go to college, working his way through to found the family and the very house, and whose absence I especially missed on a night when he should have been talking through the boring movie and reciting funny poetry at us. Grandpa had once worked two of the same jobs I had now – well, sort of the same. He had supported himself as a butcher, while I cut deli meat in a big box grocery store (despite my vegetarian and capitalist scruples). In college, he had taken money for writing richer students’ essays in addition to his own work, and seemed nothing but proud when recalling this fact. Even though I have an ethical, professional job in my university’s writing center, where I consult other students’ papers and use what I know to try to make them better writers, I still feel a swell of pride when I think about how Grandpa would make the connection between our jobs and be proud of me, too.

Gabby pulled a printout from behind a fridge magnet and read us the story she had typed out. In it, Scooby and the gang solve a mystery of a ghost who turns out to be a man in a costume. There was lots of dialogue, a chase scene, a mean gypsy woman, Velma loses her glasses, etc. It was great. Aunt Mary kept widening her eyes and nodding significantly at me during the reading. When we all congratulated Gabby and she got shy and ran away to go harass the dog, we all talked about how smart she was, how important it is that she has the ability to make stuff up.

I have been trained by my studies to dissect things like Scooby Doo and “Letters to God” and discuss what exactly makes them boring and unimaginative (or, in the mystery of the Mean Gypsy Woman or the alcoholic mailman: ethnocentric or heteronormative), but that ability to make stuff up – something that captivates and speaks to people like my brother or my cousin or my aunt – is probably something more elusive, that you were born with, but have to dredge out of yourself – or get help dredging – after years of not considering it important. When I am a writer, I want to be true to myself, my beliefs, and my studies. But, in some way, I want whatever I end up writing to also be for my family.

Science Writing

Hello Writing Friends!

Are you faced with writing a lab report? You are not alone - remember that professional scientists (your professors and TAs) are writing lab reports all the time, only we call them "journal articles". I am here to tell you some trade secrets about writing your very own journal articles to turn in to class. (I think you should consider your lab reports to be journal articles... "lab report" is so high-school.)

Science writing is certainly its own genre. It is part storytelling and part argument; the search for observable truths in the natural world around us. So many of us have learned in our early years of writing that science writing is cold and impersonal, the Mr. Spock of the literary world. What deception! What lies! While writing a journal article, it is important to be concise and direct, but you don't have to remove all of your personality from your writing. Use active voice! Be confrontational! Be heard! (Okay, don't get carried away...)

Writing journal articles serve two purposes: 1) to help you understand the implications of the work that you've done and 2) communicate to others what you've found out so that they can understand those same implications. This allows science to build on itself. By reading your work, others will think of questions and ideas that you haven't and your work will continue on.

So, how does one write a journal article? Here's the secret: start with your results. Don't write your article in the order of the sections by any means! This order is normally as follows: abstract (a summary of your whole article), introduction (background material and identification of the problem, question, and/or hypothesis), methods (how you conducted your experiment/observations), results (figures, tables, and text highlighting the most important results), discussion (an explanation on the "why" of your results and reflection of how this fits in with our current understanding of the world), literature cited (a list of all of the references you used in your paper).

So why results first? Results are the basis of your story. By deciding what tables and figures you are going to use in your paper, you can then build the rest of the paper around these concepts so that everything flows together as a cohesive unit. Once you decide how to display your results, you can describe the methods you used to achieve those results and only those results. After results and methods, you will want to set up your argument in the introduction. The introduction should start with broad, global concepts and move toward the specific ideas behind your experiment or observations. Move on to your discussion next. Make sure you explain your data and back up your ideas with evidence from other scientists who have done work in similar areas. If your data disagree with another scientist's findings, explain why. Finish your discussion with the broad implication of your findings and/or additional work that could or should be done. The discussion mirrors the introduction in that we go from specific concepts to broad ones.

Finally you are ready to write your abstract. The abstract should be no more than about 250 words and include important (summarized) information from each section of your paper. This is the writing that most scientists will read to decide whether or not they want to read your paper.

So. This is the way that professional scientists write journal articles. We also go through a pretty rigorous process called "peer review", which not so unlike being graded! Because we need for the peer reviewers to approve our articles before publication, we have our coauthors and colleagues read them several times before we submit them to a journal. We go over and over the rules and requirements of the journal so that we have our paper formatted just right.

You should have your classmates and colleagues read your writing too. I will be more than happy to help you with this as well. That is why I sit behind the Bedrock Cafe in Sarkeys EnergyCenter. I am waiting to read your journal articles you've prepared for class. (I also read articles for other courses and scholarship/graduate school applications too! Whatever you want.)

Looking forward to seeing you at Science Fridays in Sarkeys!

Happy writing,

Your Science Writing Consultant

Carrie Miller-DeBoer