Ceetothethirdpower's Blog

RJ 19 Ch. 7 box 29

For this exercise I’m going to talk about an archive that’s on the wall in Cowhill and that I didn’t notice at all until I was conducting an interview with Jerald, the owner of Cowhill Express. We were talking about how he collects antiques and even has antique shows, and he pointed out a sign on the wall. He collects coffee signs, and the particular one he was pointing to was a small red one, with a cartoon character on it and a place where a thermometer (which I’m pretty sure is broken) tells the room temperature. In an offhand kind of way, Jerald says in his Texas drawl, “That there goes for about $950 dollars. But most people don’t know that.”

I’m completely shocked! First of all, why in the world would an old piece of metal with the word “coffee” on it be so expensive?? Second of all, why would you hang it on the wall? Third of all… why is old stuff so expensive??? It doesn’t make sense to me but I guess I can’t bash other people’s hobbies when it’s actually a big thing for a lot of other people. But this piece of history shows how some people treasure the past and do their best to keep it alive and well.  The history of this particular piece isn’t important compared to the meaning it holds for the owner, who takes pride in collecting coffee signs, coffee tins, clocks with coffee logos on them, etc… Each piece of history is important to him but not necessarily to everyone else. I think this relates in a big way to songwriters themselves – each event in someone’s life is important for a different reason, and only he knows it. Have you ever thought about how one event in your life, if it was taken away, could have changed your entire life course? It’s an interesting question.

RJ 18 Ch. 6 box 25

Some of the things I noticed about conversations about songwriting and stuff is that often the people that are musical talk about “getting together to jam” all the time. Which, depending on the people, could mean getting together to write music or just getting together and playing songs by other people. This in turn sometimes sparks inspiration. These “jam sessions” are necessary to keep the cycle of inspiration going in the writing communities. I think this pertains to both the larger society and the small-town mentality because it affects everything. Social interaction helps to create new levels of inspiration. When interviewing Brad Davis, the organizer of the songwriter’s event, he talked about getting together with his core group of artists to write songs. He says you have to limit yourself to who you write with because first of all, you don’t have the time, and second of all, some people you just don’t “click” with. There has to be a connection there that is unique and inspires creativity. That is why these jam sessions are important – they inspire and they help you find connections that will continue to help you throughout your career (or simply just your experiences).

Another phrase used was “Hook line.” This came up when talking about the writing process – the writer first comes up with one catchy phrase or chorus, or even a guitar riff, and continues from there to write the entirity of the song. This I found important in light of literacy because literacy is a process, and you have to start somewhere.

Sadly there wasn’t much else besides this single important term because all the other “phrases” are normal, regular, understood by society. Unless you get down to the technical terms about music or writing which are mostly educational, and to be honest, not widely used among songwriters themselves. That is why I’m not making a big use of them – simply because they’re not that important unless you’re taking classes about them or learning them for your career. When songwriting is a hobby, there’s just no use for them.

“Terms” that songwriters use are pretty regular and often used in stories. They say, “well I wrote this song a couple days ago so hang in there with me.” They say this a lot – as if apologizing for doing badly even though they rarely do badly. I think this is a kind of reverse psychology: if I say it’s a bad song (even though I myself don’t believe it; otherwise I wouldn’t be performing it), people will expect it to be bad and be surprised when it turns out ok. It’s this kind of thing that songwriters use a lot, but the terms aren’t new to society. That’s why I’m having a hard time coming up with a solid list of words. However these few things I’ve pointed out should be helpful for insight into the writer’s mind.

Research Journal #17

I’ve greatly enjoyed the events I’ve been taking notes on, especially at Cowhill. These events opened up my mind towards personal histories and the importance of apprenticeship and sponsorship in people’s individual stories.

What surprised me? I was surprised at such a large range of styles and talents. Each person’s style is so different and yet each are unique in that their life stories have affected how their style comes out. If I may make a reference to one of the speakers at the graduate students presentation, the man who’s life is centered on writing is a prime example of this. The events of his life caused him to be consumed with reading and writing, making him a “nerd”… a better writer, a master student. His life events shaped his style, and his way of living.

What intrigued me? I was intrigued by the way that these many forms of writing and songwriting captured the attention of the audience. Given, it is always a special audience filled with people who desire to be there, but nonetheless the talent of the performers caught their complete attention. These different genres combined to one – Heartfelt music – because each song, despite the style, form, or whether it was words or music, touched the hearts of those who were listening, affecting emotion. Funny, scary, sad, or happy – each changed the person’s reaction according to the emotion created. This is what I found so intriguing.

What disgusted me? I was disgusted amidst my feelings of awe and amazement when I thought about how most of these amazing, talented artists would never be recognized by the world’s standards. It takes luck to catch the attention of society – who one knows, how committed one is, etc… but some people who work equally hard and have endless amounts of talent will not “make it” because they are not up to society’s standards. They have talent but not sparkle. However, my disgust is partially appeased when I reason that these artists can affect their community around them in a huge way, even if they never make it to the media. It’s events like Cowhill Songwriter’s night that allow artists to affect their immediate community in big ways that might not affect them if the artist were a “popular artist” in the media. The amount of influence someone has on a life does not depend on how largely popular they are, in my opinion.

Box 30: Since my project is a little different, I haven’t gone through boxes of archives looking for interesting things because all of the interesting things related to my project are hanging on the walls of Cowhill Express. I love this about the coffee shop because of the sense of timelessness and history it arouses in me. I’ve come up with a possible title for my whole research project that I think is catchy and meaningful – “Heartfelt and Timeless.” I think this ties the meaningfulness of my project all together in that one little title. It references the genre of music I’m studying and how it effects emotion and also the timelessness of the cafe in connection with the timelessness that words possess. I think tying the personal histories of these talented artists to the history of Cowhill songwriter’s night will create a meaningful project that people will enjoy reading: I’m hoping that it will attract more people to this event.  The archives I will be focusing on, though there are many interesting pieces in Cowhill, are the clocks. In my interview with the owner of Cowhill that I will have on Saturday morning will hopefully shed some light on the background of these pieces as well as some other pieces at Cowhill. I’m excited to find out more about these archival objects and their significance to my project. Wish me luck!!

Research Journal #16

Chapter five of Fieldworking was really helpful towards me in how I’m going to be conducting my interviews. I think that the most important (even if it was the most mundane part) was when it talked about recording and transcribing… I need to date and label my interviews. I don’t think I’m going to be writing everything that my subjects say, but I will go through and listen several times in order to collect as much information as possible for my project. It’s important to write everything down that’s not recorded because that way, it’s not as easy to make a mistake and lose a large chunk of useful information.

Also the references towards closed and open questions were helpful to me in clarifying how to conduct interviews. Closed questions are the ones that are straightforward – when did you come to Commerce? How old were you when you started writing? Etc. Open questions are questions that allow conversation. I like this because even though I have a set of questions, I know that if the opportunity comes up I can ask more, continue the conversation, broaden my research. It opens up things to grow and more stories to be told. This is awesome for an ethnography, especially mine,  because it’s so important to collect the histories of people. In asking interview questions, I have to establish a friendly atmosphere in order to invite conversation and thus learn more about the appropriate histories.

These things seem to be common sense, but they were still helpful towards me. Everyone needs a little reminding sometimes, and it will be beneficial for me to keep these at the back of my mind as I conduct my interviews. Hopefully they’ll help me out a lot!

For Box 22, I have not yet conducted an interview yet… my first one’s coming up on Saturday!! The I Can Read And Write story was very touching… I found it an encouragement for the individual. Kind of like the cliche of “you can do anything if you believe in yourself.” Which is true sometimes… and in the man’s case, especially when his parents weren’t literate. Plus, he takes it to the next level because he appreciates his newfound literacy. Because he can read, he reads all the time. And I think that’s awesome! It definitely paints a picture of the importance of literacy in the changing generations.

See rj 15 for my Commerce week on writing expanded fieldnotes… more to come for other events.

Research Journal 15

Expanded field notes for Writing Local History: Week on Writing.

With all the publicizing I’ve seen for this event, I expect it to be pretty big, so I’m pretty surprised when we walk into the library and there are only enough seats for maybe ten extra people outside of our 102 class. No biggie, though, I think to myself. Even things that are not appreciated by the larger population can still be important and impactful. I settle down to listen, noting the chattiness of our class before the event starts. A camera man taking video makes me nervous at random times during the event… I’ll be paying attention and then I’ll notice him out of the corner of my eye, with his all-seeing eye recording my hunched-over lazy posture and a depressed looking face. People tell me I look depressed when I’m concentrating. Wierd, huh? Halfway through the session, some girl’s phone went off and she talked on it, distracting everybody, and not even thinking to leave. She just lowered her voice to what she apparently thought was a discreet level and kept talking, annoying those around her. I thought that rude and out of place at an academic event, especially an optional academic event.

The organizer of the event introduces the speakers, all older and scholarly looking. I find the oldest man on the panel entertaining. He has trouble with the mike. “Um, huh… is this thang on? Can – can ya’ll hear me back there? I don’t think it’s working.” Someone rescues him by turning on the mike. “Oh, right, there now it’s working.”

Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed some of the speakers. I think that it’s mostly because the majority of them focused on personal histories, stories, etc, which I could listen to and relate to or just enjoy. The one I most enjoyed was the man who, when he was in his twenties, wanted to be a novel writer but felt that he couldn’t make a living at it. That’s exactly how I am – I would love to be a writer but the market is so competitive that there’s no way I could survive just doing that. He ended up being published in his later years, which was both an encouragement and a downer on my part… one, it’s good that he’s been published. Two, I don’t want to wait that long, but the process seems so hard… Plus, he says it’s all about who you know in order to get published. So I need to pray for some good connections, is pretty much what he was saying. I loved one point he made, that the power of stories help to heal and inspire. I think this is entirely true and a very “Heartfelt” statement, in reference to my own project (see Cowhill analysis).

The only woman on the board was pretty interesting as well as she told some stories about her childhood, like how she raised the pig and had contests with him… Again, this captured my attention, although not as much as the above speaker since she didn’t appeal to my personal interests, because her stories were engaging. She also told us about the Silver Leos, the group of alumni working on memoirs. I have a thought, thought, that is slightly disturbing… as bad as it sounds, who really cares? I feel like there’s too much information out there. Does anyone ever think about how many million books are out there and yet how we keep producing more? Stories, I might understand for entertainment’s sake, but really? Is there any real use for MORE information than we already have? Maybe I think these thoughts because I’m not a history person, but how many people out there really want to know about the lives of some people who used to go to a certain school?

Dr. Spencer, who deals with Journalism and Photography, said something I found profound. “We are our stories.” He talked about microhistory (everyday people, small scale, that do extraordinary things) and it’s importance, how he is motivated by individuals, and how we occupy the spaces that people before us have. He creates bibliographical snapshots – people and their stories. I loved his talk because it was so pertinent towards my own project and how I need to approach my research. Bibliographica snapshots that contribute to the larger whole of the songwriter’s subculture. I found it amusing that he kept mentioning how he was intrigued by outlaws and their stroies, social villians as he put it. He even researched his own family history to find interesting stories, like his grandpa who rode with some outlaws. He wants to find those stories, and I loved that.

I think it was a successful event, and even though only a few people attended, the things the panel said affected that small group of people.

RJ 14

1) I analyzed most of my field notes in my previous post (analysis of Cowhill) but I have some more thoughts to add to it from my previous fieldnotes. I’m very excited to be starting my project soon – I’m trying to set up some interviews for this week – and get some answers about not only writer’s stories but the story of songwriter’s night and how it got started. This place is so rich in history that these stories need to be told! After the songwriter’s night yesterday evening I stuck around a bit, taking pictures of some of the things on the walls and talking with some more of the performers. I got some funny comments from some of them. They said how intimidating I looked with my camera and notebook, like a journalist. We laughed about that and then I explained more of what I was doing, and most of them got pretty excited about it. It made me feel encouraged more about my project.

2) For the Commerce week on writing, I have attended the songwriter’s night at Cowhill (of course!) and loooved it. For my other field notes assignment I will be taking notes at both class events, but I haven’t decided which one I will use yet because both seem like they could relate to my project. So I will decide which event to use after I’ve taken notes.I think that attending these events will be very helpful towards my project because not only will I experience the event at Cowhill, but also other events around campus through Commerce Writes. I think they will be some awesome experiences and provide rich material for my ethnography.

3) I think I did a solid job with my WA3, but I’m going to be adding more to it after the peer review. I just think that when I get my interviews together I’ll be really ready to write my final project. I’m actually very excited to see how it’s going to turn out. But I do have a question… I know we have to do a portfolio, and I know that I have a lot of stuff to put in it, but is the final project going to be a separate deal than that? Because I know that I don’t want to include my WA2 in it if everyone is going to be looking at it because I realized a lot of my errors in my assumptions for that assignment, in reference to respecting my subjects for my project.

I learned a lot from my reviewer, the beautiful Rachel, who made suggestions as to how to make my interview questions more pointed (especially about finding out the process of songwriting for those in my interview in relation to literacy and growth). She suggested that I relate more of the material to myself, that I should be more specific about what kind of data I’ll be collecting, and that I should reference some reading material into my WA about making a connection before the interview. I found these comments helpful towards solidifying my project.

Expanded field notes and analysis of Cowhill (for Dr. Carter)

Cowhill Express hosts a songwriter’s night once a month. As a lover of song-writing myself, I was well aware of what was going on when I stepped through the doors into my now beloved Cowhill Express… or at least I thought I knew what was going on. First off, I was apparently late as I scooted past the stage with my friends, hoping I wasn’t noticed but knowing that no one can ignore a very tall girl and her friends walking right past the performers and slinking up the stairs to the second story where there was some free seating. I settled down on a not-so-comfortable bench and with a quick smile to my friends, extracted my notebook and pen from the black hole of my purse and focused my attention on the performer. Brad Davis, grammy-award winner and the organizer of this event was performing with another man. A musical piece.

It’s true that not all of the song-writers who perform have lyrics, but this man nonetheless introduced his pieces with little stories. One, I believe, about his daughter, but I can’t remember because my memory is so consumed with how fast these guys are playing their stringed instruments. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was completely jealous of their skills. My gaze shifted to the crowd below me, and for a moment I’m grateful that the house was so full tonight because it forced me up the stairs where I had a lovely view of all the spectators. An ethnographer’s goldmine. As I watch, I notice that unlike other school-organized events I had attended, every member of the audience was completely absorbed in the performance. Young and old were in that crowd… all bobbing their heads, smiling encouragingly, or whispering in awestruck tones to their neighbors. It makes me think of how supportive this group is. Everyone who is attending actually wants to be there, enjoys music, and loves hearing other people’s creativity.

The whole evening is relaxed and socially oriented. When Brad Davis gets on stage to introduce the next performer, he often tells a joke, laughs about the technological problems they’re having, or simply praises the talents of all the performers. I notice that each artist introduces their songs with a little background, a story that goes along with it, or in some cases, just whatever comes to the mind. One woman got up to perform and stated that she had been bailing hay earlier that day and got fire ants all in her clothes and was covered in bites. Not everywhere you go could you find someplace that accepted this sort of thing… and I speculate that it’s because these people actually care about personal stories, anecdotes, or jokes. This, in my mind, is what’s so wonderful about a small town. People care!

Mary K. Croft performs a song called “Monsters on Parade,” which she says she sings every year around this time. And, she adds, the crowd must participate. When she gets to the instrumental part she has the crowd make scary noises. And scary it is! An old man cackles and an old woman makes ghost noises among the various other noises that come to a crescendo when Ms. Croft nods to signal a stop. As I giggle at the silly crowd, a thought creeps into my head along with the jittery nervous feeling in my stomach. A song doesn’t have to be sad to capture emotion. This song created feelings of anticipation and fear in me even though I knew it was just a silly song. After the song finished and everyone was laughing at the fun of it all, Ms. Croft cackled like a witch and then commented, “Loosing a tooth sure makes that impression go over easier!”

The performances range from cowboys singing about barbecue to hip jazz songs to ballads to silly songs. And yet all these genres have something in common. They come from the heart! These songs aren’t necessarily meant to catch the public eye, but to share a thought, an emotion, and to connect the artist to the listener with emotion. If I can be so bold, I’d like to coin a new term for this genre. I want to call it Heartfelt music, because even though there are so many wonderfully different styles, all the styles are connected by the emotion created by the artist and brought out in the heart of the captive audience.

At a lag in the show my eyes wander around the room, up to the point over my head where there are some words written on a mirror. “We can’t spell S_CCESS without U. Look into the mirror close…” I find this profound, since everyone who performs there is usually a beginner or not well-known but has much potential. Enough potential at least to get up the guts to perform.

Part of me is sad while I watch all the talented artists as they perform, time after time. I’m sad because I feel like there are so many people out there who have a lot of talent but don’t have enough connections to get their music out there. And then I think to myself… does it really matter how popular someone is? If it’s enough to perform at a small songwriter’s event and get the appreciation of other songwriters, isn’t that what life’s about? Affecting those around you, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you? You can’t ever really tell what affect you might have on someone, and at least for today, it’s a good thing to share what you have to say with other people who will appreciate it. This is why Cowhill’s event is so special. It holds a significant meaning for those who become emotionally involved with it and experience it’s Heartfelt performers.

Research Journal #13

1) Chapter 4 in fieldworking had a lot to do with places – it talked about spacial gaze, which is mostly how you as an individual focus on specific things in an environment, often different from what other people would focus on. The chapter emphasized how if we want to see how people use their space, we “must look closely, record what [we] see, and then look again.” It means a lot of watching, a lot of note taking, a lot of analyzing, but in the end is completely worth it. Other things to do are to visually recreate your environment in sketches or pictures. I thought this especially true (for a portfolio most importantly) because maps, sketches, and pictures of things in the environment would help to make a project that much more rich and full of detail to bring alive a subculture to the readers. By critiquing our data (both written and visual) we can take our simple recordings and make them into thoughtful analysis.

2) Before you read: 1)  I like the quote “literacy is located in the space between thought and text.” I think that this saying takes literacy to the next level, since literacy is neither skill nor knowledge… what is it? Defining a word past it’s surface level meaning, in which case literacy is the ability to read and write, and ultimately redefining it is difficult because it forces you to think through what a word really means in the context of society. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has drafted a definition of literacy as the “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.” Thus, literacy is located inside each of us; it is each of our individual understandings of the world around us. While we have been taught to locate literacy in libraries and schools, really literacy exists in daily living, daily learning. Life is a learning process, and our literacy results from that process. 2) In schools, in the home, in learning the practicalities of life… the pattern in these is that literacy is what you need in order to function. Some people use the bare minimum while others pursue it like an addiction. 3) Literacy skills are the straighforward, nearly measurable aspects of literacy like: how fast can you read? How well can you structure a sentence? Literacy events and practices are those things that help you function in life and become an individual. How are we each different from someone else? After you’ve read 1) I think this quote means that everyone’s experiences are different, and so everyone’s literacy turns out in a particular way, according to the kinds of life we choose to lead. For example, the fulani tribe in Nigeria learns how to heard cattle, buy and sell, communicate, while a Nigerian in the city might learn to be a mechanic instead. Each person lacks the literacy that the other person has, but doesn’t even attempt to pursue that kind of literacy because he doesn’t need it for the life he has chosen to live. A mechanic needs no knowledge about cows and a fulani needs no knowledge about transmission. 2) … unfortunately not doable in this thing.  3) The kind of literacy I’m going to talk about in my personal life is that of songwriting because it ties in with my final project. Songwriting is a type of literacy that I learned, you could say, through the institution of friendship. I say this because I’ve had no formal musical training and no formal lyrical training beyond that of the English classroom. Songwriting grows and changes as you are influenced and influence other writers, listen to more styles, and experiment more with your own talents. Even though I can’t read a note, I can play a few chords on the guitar, and even though I don’t understand all of Shakespeare’s works, I can still write a good poem. Combine these together and you get my literacy.

3) Expanded fieldnotes – round two. Went to the coffee shop again and this time ordered a drink for myself – I can’t help but thinking wow this is a good frozen cappuccino but I am so broke I should not be buying this!! But I buy it anyway so I don’t feel like I’m a stalker intruding to take some notes. I leave my contact information for the owner but the girl behind the counter seems to think I’m weird… I don’t know if the owner will get that piece of paper or not. I rush as I write it, hoping that I’m neat enough that he’ll be able to read it but that I’m not taking too long. The girl is impatient. I sit down with Samantha who kindly came with me so I wouldn’t have to go alone… she doesn’t order anything and we sit in near silence as I take my notes. I feel bad for making her go with me. Then I start to focus, and notice things around me. At the table beside us, two guys with heavy drawls are talking about hydrolics and transmission, like a cliche. A man wearing a cowboy hat enters and orders a cappuccino and I am completely surprised by how high his voice is. Aren’t cowboys supposed to have deep, gravelly voices? But anyway, him coming into the shop reminds me of the old western movies where the cowboys sling open the wooden doors and the cowbell rings, and they stand there with their hands on their belts glaring masculine-ly into the darkened room. This is nothing like that but that’s the mental picture I get. Then I notice another guy who’s mostly bald, and chuckle as I hear him talking about how he needs a haircut. He seems serious too. There’s some people talking about a back surgery. Then I start thinking… maybe I’m paying too much attention to the people and not enough attention to Cowhill itself? The youth leader from the church I go to walks in and greets us, chats for a bit before he orders coffee and sits down with the people he came with. So I realize one thing – Cowhill is a community. These people for the most part know each other and connect with each other at Cowhill. Now, focusing on the shop more, I look around a bit, noticing signs such as “Drake Furniture” and thinking… their advertising is random and hidden. I wonder how they make money here? Is it a really well-off coffee shop? You couldn’t tell from how it looks but maybe they actually make some real money here. There’s a sign by the front door that says “non-smoking area” and it strikes me as funny for some reason. As if the place was big enough to have a smoking and non-smoking area! But I think that they mean the whole inside is non-smoking, since some people are sitting outside enjoying a cigarette. Samantha absently draws a heart in the corner of my notebook. I notice an article on the wall, and I stand up and read it. It talks about Cowhill’s history – how it started in Canton, how it developed a syrup for it’s frozen cappuccinos and has sold them all over, and it has a picture of the owner featured. He looks familiar… I think I must have seen him at the songwriter’s night when I first came there. He seemed nice enough. A couple of teenagers come in, order coffee, and sit down in the tiny stools to play checkers with the bottle caps that I noticed last time. I glance at the time and suck down the remnants of my cappuccino before letting Samantha know that we can go now, I’ve collected enough information for the day. With one last glance at the girl behind the counter, I hope that she passes on my information to the owner. I really do want to talk to him about Cowhill. Maybe I’ll make a special interview for him and ask him more about the history of Cowhill and how the songwriters night got started?

Research Journal #12

1) [p148] I like how Alice Walker uses the subtleties of culture to show the importance in that style of life over all. She compares her characters’ body shapes, attitudes, and life tragedies to show how different and yet how similar people are in the same community. Different stories intertwined to create the big picture of a culture. The values that the characters placed on objects were different based on their life stories: for example how someone who came back to that community saw the quilts as opposed to someone who was there when the quilt was made. Everything simplistic at first glance actually has so much depth and story to it that no one could understand unless they asked the people involved in their making and use. Interaction between tradition and creativity are intricate and hard to detect sometimes but are nonetheless vitally important. Like the narrator’s dream in which everything is happy and yet ironically strange, and she wakes up and everything is the same and she is a big-boned woman with man-working hands… it shows how she wants to be unique and beautiful and yet feels that she is bogged down by the “tradition” of the work she must do daily, while she watches others work hard at their creativity. The relationships between the mother and the daughters seems intensely emotional from the view of the narrator and makes the reader wonder how close the narrator was to these people. And then the use of snuff in their culture, which would be shocking in today’s culture, shows how they use these things, like creativity, to make life a happier place. They accept the use of the snuff as regular, and even necessary. As a fieldworker, this would be important in defining a culture and working it into ethnographies. How does the use of snuff help each individual and who would they be without it? Would they be better off or worse off?

[Box13] The object I chose is in the coffee shop, hanging on the wall by the bathroom. It says Bois D’Arc street, it’s old and faded, it’s hung at an angle along with another old street sign. I love this piece because it brings out the sense of history that is so important in this coffee shop. Bois D’Arc street still exists but it has a different sign, but I like that Cowhill kept that old piece of history. As I said, the place is timeless. Without it’s history, it’d just be another coffee shop, unnoticed by the outside world. Cowhill is actually pretty well known, did you know that tidbit?

2) {First} In my cite, I have to be more sensitive to what people think of themselves. One thing about creativity is that it’s fragile – if I go into an interview thinking that someone isn’t very creative, that would offset any information I could get from them. Someone has to have a high self esteem to be able to do what these songwriters are doing – to perform and bare their souls to other songwriters… I have to go in with the mind set that this person I’m interviewing is the best that they can be and I think that will help me connect with them on a deeper level. These people will expect me to understand what they’re going through since I am a songwriter too, and to “behave” like they do towards music and songwriting – as an art and a passion. They might excuse me for doing things my own way in that there is an understanding that everyone has a different style, but how to treat them is uniform. Songwriters must have a mutual understanding of our thoughts and feelings.

{Second} How did events and people in your life encourage you to become who you are today? What are your hopes and dreams in connection with your songwriting? If you had a choice to do one thing over in your life, what would it be? How has songwriting helped you to become more (or less) brave in your writing? Has it encouraged you to write even more? When do you produce your best songs – when you are experiencing an emotional crisis or when you have other people around you who are also creative? What are your plans in the future to get your stuff out there? Or are you comfortable just writing songs for your immediate community? What is your personal definition of success?

{Third} I think the most important code is simple: respect the individual. No matter how good I think I am (per say), I cannot judge others according to my own rule of measure if I am only trying to find out their stories. If I offend someone by a careless comment or a general assumption, that cuts off that individual from me so that I cannot connect with them any longer. And in my writing, I need to assume that each of these people that I am interviewing will be reading my work, and therefore I must not demean any or promote any above another. They must all be equal in their essence, because that is what I am trying to capture – the histories of songwriters, not the histories of only the successful songwriters.

3) Moss’s study on African American churches was a study that focused on literacy within the church: mostly in how the sermons were set up, what text they used during the sermons (bulletins, etc.), and how they either sang or spoke their hymns. I thought it was interesting how Moss focused on how the ministers connected with the people in the pews with the language that they used. By involving the people in their sermons, they are able to identify with them on a personal level. Their sermons depended on audience interaction since no real boundaries between them existed… these sermons focused on constructing community identities. That is why African-American services are so performance-oriented. I also found it interesting how she focused on the roles of women in these different denominations, since they were very similar in each of the congregations despite the different roles they played. Also, I found the roles of the youth intriguing because of how large of a role they took. Even to the point of teaching sermons! It shows the importance of community and sharing and building relationships off of each other in a very dependent culture. This is why the church is the strongest African American organization.

Research Journal #11

2) Moss’s essay had a lot of insights that I hadn’t thought of before, even if it’s just the categorizing of different kinds of ethnographies. I hadn’t seen how one could separate something like that. Also her insights on the ethnographer in Momma Day were helpful because it helped me understand how you can never assume that you know the answer to something. You need to be a part of the community instead of  just an outsider. However, as she goes on and talks about the story of the Arab woman doing an ethnography on her own community, she was too familiar with her surroundings and was “neither interested nor stimulated.” This magnifies the “making the familiar strange and the strange the familiar” idea that we read and then talked about in class. It’s so important to understand your subjects and yet let them talk – instead of assuming you know everything about them you should ask them questions and clarify all the murky areas. This corresponds with Mama Day’s lessons – that we should assume nothing, listen carefully, and dig deeply. It’s the only way to get the real story, unhindered by our own personal beliefs. And we should be responsible towards our communities.

3) Reading Mama day was an interesting experience because the author shoves you right into the story without really warning you what’s going on… talking about this magical lady and 18 & 23 and an outsider who thinks he knows everything… It’s sobering, I think, to the academic world. It shows our research and researchers and goals as over-excited, closed minded, and for the most part frivolous. I’m still not sure who’s perspective this story is from, except that he or she is obviously a member of this community. You can tell this because he just throws in names as if we know who he’s talking about and what the significance of these people are. However, it’s an interesting way to write because it doesn’t waste any time boring the reader with details – instead it keeps us searching for what’s really going on. And her uses of the characters that are such vivid individuals is compelling because it draws the reader in automatically. Even just hearing how proud Reema was of her spoiled rotten and ignorant son, from the eyes of the rest of the town, was enlightening because it shows the differing attitudes from this community. The setting – rural, underdeveloped – aligns with the attitudes of the people. As if the land scoffs at the idea of change just as much as the people do. It’s an intriguing story that probably would be more easily understood with a little background details, but at the same time is complete in the lessons it tries to teach: listen, think, talk – the only voice is your own. When you listen and don’t assume that you’re the one who’s always right, you might learn something that not everybody knows or realizes, and you might be surprised.