El Bosque Monstruoso: My College Essays

Freshman Year

Starting in on freshman year, we have:

The Making of the Christian Bible

Your typical freshman class on something heady, including creative writing exercises that I titled The Secret Wisdom of Nick and The Letter of Nick to the Californians. Not to be outdone by my creative writing titles, I named the midterm paper Jesus and Moses (or how I learned to stop worrying and love typology). That is not a joke.

Introductory Italian

Nothing too bad here, although one of the compositions is inexplicably titled La Megafesta Hollywoodiana!.

Introduction to Ancient Philosophy

What do you Want!?: Plato vs. Socrates: Human Motivation introduces title-motif number one: sub-titles. Apparently I love them. This early example has not only one subtitle, but two. We will see more of them, I promise.

English 129 (Something about Europe)

I don't remember the official title of this class, but you can tell that my nascent titling genius is already tickled by the reading arts:

Don't You Think?: The Role of Silence in Beckett's Waiting for Godot (yes, that is an alanis morissette reference, don't ask me why)

That Shakespeherian Rag (now an Eliot reference, getting better...)

A Chorus' Lines (oh my god, about Hippolytus. I was a genius)

And that wraps up the glorious papers of my freshman year. The other ones never made it to my save folder, I guess.

Sophomore Year (Finding a Major)

We start off with a gut science class:

Porn in the Morn (Also called Sexy Biology, I can't remember the real name anymore)

Facilitating Decisions of Gender Identity in Intersex Children

That one is not a winner; scratch biology off the list of potential majors.

Pictograph to Pixel

A history of media class:

Jensen's Eusebius

I am cranking out yawners this semester for some reason

The Medieval Book

The Folk Doctrine of Indulgence in Beinecke MS 410

yaaawwwwwnnnn, but it looks better in Wordle! (with an appropriately Jesus People-y font:

The Rest

Someone must have told me to tone it down on the titles sophomore year. These are all clunkers, and some of them, inexplicably, have no titles at all in the document files. I should explain a little about how my titling usually worked: I would start writing a paper, maybe a day or two before it was due, and after writing all night on the last day, I would remember "oh shit, title," and then make up something that I thought was humorous or whatever in a quasi-drunken stupor. So really, I'm just following the lead of the dozens of cultures that rely on sleep-deprivation and hallucinatory states to find the deeper meaning in life. Except I usually just end up with bad puns.

Junior year

I start the year as a Religious Studies major, realize I didn't sign up for any Religious Studies courses because they looked boring, and then ditch a class to go meet with the dean of Literature and switch majors mid-stream.

Lit Theory: A series of unfortunate events

We had three papers in Lit Theory, and I botched the titles on all of them:

The Coherence of the Text

Theory: The Expansion of the Text (another sub-title!)

The Role of History in the Study of Theory (that one was a bad paper too, I think)

and combined together in Wordle, vague and generic content!:

White Male Sexuality in Popular Culture

Awesome class. We got to watch Top Gun, and this is my reading response:

This was also the first class where I knew I wanted to write about recordings and lit theory. The title of my amateurishly brilliant term paper on David Bowie?: Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma'am: The Aesthetics of Rebellion in Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. That starts off the "quotation: real title" model in full swing.

Notice how the only big words are 'Ziggy' and 'Bowie.' Hmm.

Art and Ideology

A paper on Brecht titled: "His Master's Voice": Alienation Effects in Record Production. One of the papers I ravaged to put together my senior essay.

And on Marxist-Structuralist-Lunatic Louis Althusser: Copyright and Capitalist Hegemony. Loving the copyleft already.

Nothing else too great from junior year, so on and up!

Senior Year

I was behind in my foreign literature requirement, so I took two sort of half-Spanish classes sort of half-assedly.

The Jungle Books

Jungle Noises: On Entering the Jungle, and

"El inacabable mimetismo": The Structure of Truth in Los Pasos Perdidos and Tristes Tropiques. I have no idea what that means.

Dictator Novels

"El Bosque Monstruoso" and the Topography of Dictatorship Now that one is a doozy.

Lit 120: Narrative something or others

In my senior year I had to take this freshman lit class to finish my prerequisites. You might call this my baroque period of essay titling:

The Eventfulness of Non-Events and the Non-Eventfulness of Events in Jeanne Dielman

A Question of Power: Clues and Narrative Building in Vertigo

The Unavoidable Villain: On the Discursive Generation of Archetypes

Systems and their Theory, and Art, Music, Theory

Two classes that were all formative on me and stuff, but without snappy titles. In Art, Music, Theory I wrote a paper about Lacan and sound artist Alvin Lucier:

And you can tell by the comments I got back how well I understood my terms:

A paper on repetition in Reich and LeWitt (that's the "Art, Music" part, with Deleuze carrying the "Theory"):

Systems and their theory was pretty great, in large part because I only had to think about one thing the whole time:

The Senior Essay

And of course it comes to an end with the glorious senior essay, titled:

The Tubular Groaning of Galactic Refrigerators: Noise in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility, which manages to reference Rolling Stone, Lou Reed, and Walter Benjamin in its svelte 14 words. (you could maybe call it TTGoGR:NitAoIMR for short.)

That Wordle is in the last post, but since it largely cannibalized every other paper I wrote in college, I decided to run all my term papers from senior year through Wordle and see what happens. The result is so awesome at describing my academic interests so far, that I may actually print it out and use it for explanation. It was the leading image on this post, but I'll put it again so you don't have to overwork your scrolling fingers:

That wraps up my public humiliation for now! Join us next time for something that will be equally embarrassing in the not-too-distant future.