This entire week, I explored the concept of unconventional essays, such as video, audio, and hypertext essays. The video essay I chose to explore further was Mangoes, by John Bresland. This video was not the best quality, because it seemed to be shot from an iPhone. This bad quality however added to the effect of his project. The central theme of this essay, is the attempt to preserve masculinity. One thing that Bresland seems to be worried about is that his life as a father is making him less of a man. He refuses to wear the babybjorn because it is a question of his manhood. Overall throughout the video he just seems unhappy with his life and all of the “baby shit” and “injected molded plastics, but babies love injected molded plastics.” He concludes his video essay with questioning his capabilities as a father. He tells us, “I wonder if the best thing I could do for this child is disappear.” Following this, he shows a video of him feeding his baby mangoes just after his wife told him not to feed it mangoes. This shows that he is reluctant to listen to his wife, because it makes him more of a man. His particular choice in words allowed me to realize that he values his masculinity over being a father. Mangoes was not exactly the most entertaining, however it did in fact resemble the essays we read before. The b-roll and music present helped enhance the rhetoric of the project.
The audio essay that I found myself connect with, was the Angelic Symphony heard on Snap Judgement. Being a religious individual, I truly enjoy hearing of stories of divine intervention, and it changing someone’s life. The story begins with Stuart Sharpe telling us of the experience of his son dying. His son, Ben, died during birth. After the burial, Stuart experienced what we know as divine intervention. He had a dream where Ben, his son, rose from his grave, and ascended into the heavens. There was a symphony of angels playing the most beautiful piece Stuart has ever heard. The angel came to him and said, “Ben is safe now. And in these circumstances, we always leave somebody a gift, and the gift for you is you will remember everything. And I could hear every single note of this piece of music. I heard everything.” And so he remembered. He remembered so much, that he devoted his life into recreating this symphony he heard. The only problem was; he did not have any musical experience. The story continues in describing the adversities in recreating this symphony from nothing but his own head. Being the religious person I am, I felt immersed in this audio piece just as I was with the Narrative of Fredrick Douglass, and Girl, Interrupted. The piece contained absolutely no logos however, because there was absolutely 0 logic in him leaving his family and moving to London. The project did contain rhetorical elements, such as pathos, ethos, and metaphors, that were similarly found in our previous readings. The background music allowed for smooth transitions, and helped me stay engaged for the entire 16-minute story.
My Body – a Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson was one of the hypertext essays I chose to interact with. Although a very strange piece, the essay contained many key words that allowed to connect to me as a reader. The overall piece was a drawing of a body, and you could navigate through each part, learning more and more about this individual. I quickly learned that this is the body of a hermaphrodite or a many girl, that did not seem to shave her legs. There were many disturbing sections of the body that I oddly found myself reading completely through. One section that really disgusted me was the phantom limb. Jackson writes about this body and its vagina. “My vagina has very long and sticky lips and sometimes I would stroll pantyless through a store in a short skirt, brushing nonchalantly against the merchandise, and come out with valuable items stuck to me. I always felt these goods were mine by right, as they had attached themselves to me like burrs without my deliberate intervention.” Frankly after reading this section I was so disgusted that I had to stop navigating through the hypertext. Sections like this did not allow Jackson to be successful in her project because it was just too graphic for readers. But other sections, she uses pathos to allow the reader feel bad for this person and their body. A good example of this was when she was describing her experience in gym class and comparing her muscles to other girls’. She writes, “I knew I was a different animal.” This is a very good choice of words that allows the reader to feel a sense of pity for this person and their struggles of self-perception. This entire project was not as successful as other essayists because of the graphic content that leaves a sour taste in the reader’s mouth. If the project focused more on pathos, and less on graphic content, the reader would better be able to grasp the authors goals.
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