Final Portfolio by Mark Abadi
I’ll admit that I didn’t do my research. When I picked the seminar “English and Computers” without reading the background info, I thought I was signing up for a linguistics class, something that would apply to my intended major. I thought that my days of analyzing literature had been over since high school. So when I arrived to class on the first day and it slowly dawned on me that this was indeed an English class (with books and characters and effort) I was a tad dismayed.

Since that day, however, I have found myself digging deeper into my favorite works of art than I ever have, and expressing my interpretations in creative and unique ways.

Before we created anything however, we began the semester by discussing significant pieces of literature and poetry for a few weeks. This got me back in my analytical mindset, and more importantly, exposed me to art I needed to know about. At times we even discussed the linguistic qualities of the literature, like the cacophonous “oil” in “The Filling Station.” I especially enjoyed reading and talking about “We Real Cool” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Later on, we began creating our own work, and each project required serious thinking. In fact, in planning my work I had to perform my best method acting, and get inside the head of whomever I was analyzing. Take the playlist assignment for example: the task called for a series of songs that represents Paul Berlin’s character. Not songs that represent the book Going After Cacciato, where Paul comes from, and definitely not songs that just summarize the plot. In order to accurately depict Paul through music, I had to be Paul. I had to pinpoint each of the variety of emotions he felt before I could select the appropriate songs.

Of course, becoming an expert on someone’s character helped me realize my own growth as a literary thinker. I understand that analysis extends much further than just text. It’s images and sounds and feelings. And as I found, you can’t express something correctly until you find the perfect sampling, whether it be sound clips or quotations or photographs. The whole package is never complete until each element within has been perfected.

Playlist
Playlist First Draft for Going After Cacciato’s Paul Berlin

Our first project of the semester was to create a playlist for a literary character. I chose Paul Berlin, a soldier in the Vietnam War from Tim O’Brien’s novel Going After Cacciato. I quickly focused on one aspect of Paul’s character: his wild imagination (the first song I selected was “Just My Imagination” by the Temptations). Pretty soon however, I realized that I couldn’t depict Paul without hitting some of the more subtle, yet crucial traits: his hopeless desperation, his blurring of reality and fantasy, and his ever-present feeling of confinement.
My first draft received positive feedback, with the suggestion that I provide more detailed analysis on a few of my song selections.

Bu picking the songs was not enough. The overlooked and not immediately noticeable aspect of this assignment was choosing the song order. Strangely enough, I have a history in this department: my older sister and I used to create mix CDs from scratch when I was in middle school, and I placed the utmost importance on song order. I listened to the final notes of every song and made sure they flowed with the intro of the next. You couldn’t put too vastly different songs back to back, but even worse than that was putting songs that were too similar. The two of us would have quasi-heated arguments over which order contributed better to the mood of the album. (My choices left an impression on me—to this day, when I hear a song on the radio that I used on one of my mixes, my mind immediately plays the next track on my CD upon its completion.)

So appropriately, I picked an order for my playlist that fit Paul as much as the songs themselves did. My first song, “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies, serves as a kind of thesis statement for Paul’s life. “Coconut Grove,” a laidback song I used to represent Paul’s innocent longing to reach Paris intentionally succeeds the most raucous, jarring and climactic track on the playlist, “Province.” I was especially proud of that string of song choices: after “Coconut Grove” I include another surreal whimsical piece (“Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”) and then I rock straight into the clashing “Easily.”

Playlist Revision
For my revised playlist I added better analysis to the three songs which were most lacking in the first attempt: "In Cairo," "Coconut Grove" and "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss." I provided more lyrics and demonstrated how the music played into the moods of the songs to capture a specific feeling. I also included the complete audio for "Coconut Grove" rather than a short clip to give the listener a better glimpse of the song. I am still working on finding a better clip of "Where Is My Mind?"

Note: I was finally able to find a more appropriate Youtube video for “Where is My Mind?” Rather than the scenes from Fight Club, which distract the listener, I found a video of the song matched with images of a dog running around. Not optimal, but better than what I had. I figured it wasn’t worth creating a new revision of the playlist only to include this one clip, so I just edited my earlier revision.

Podcast
Podcast First Draft on The Clash

For my podcast I chose to talk analyze The Clash’s music, focusing on their 1979 album “London Calling.” I have produced videos and recorded segments for class assignments in the past, so getting comfortable recording my voice wasn’t a problem. The hardest part was settling on the content. I realized partway through my recordings that I didn’t really have a thesis. I had to go back and add certain lines that reflected how The Clash had literary merit.

It took me a while to get adjusted to the Audacity sound mixing program, but after I gained a simple understanding of how to fade in and out and how to adjust the volume I pieced together my sound clips with ease. The project was a time-consuming process, but every quotation and every audio clip was necessary to make my point.

I have a few edits I still need to make. Some of my classmates pointed out that the song “London Calling,” which I use during the podcast’s introduction, plays on for too long. After re-listening to the podcast I agree. I can’t decide between cutting out the first verse or the first chorus, so I will have to go back and see how the finished product flows without either of these elements.

In a similar problem, the song “Lost in the Supermarket” also plays on too long. I don’t want to cut out any of the chorus or the verse, since I think they’re both essential to describe Joe Strummer’s lyrical abilities. As a compromise, I will simply break up the chorus and the verse by writing in a segment and putting it in between. Since the chorus and the verse are notable for different reasons (I use the chorus to demonstrate symbolism and the verse to demonstrate social commentary), it seems reasonable to make this distinction in the podcast.

Podcast Revision
I chose to cut out the first verse of “London Calling” from the introduction. My later explanation of the song states the song describes London “on the verge of an all-out apocalypse,” and the chorus depicts this image best. Also, I use the “Beatlemania” line from the verse shortly thereafter, so at least there is some representation.

I decided not to split up “Lost in the Supermarket.” I noticed that on my piece analyzing the title track I had used three sound clips divided by my recordings. I didn’t want the podcast to seem formulaic so I kept the different structure for the subsequent pieces of analysis.

Collages
Woody Allen used to say that none of his works fulfilled the vision he originally had for it. That pretty much sums up my two collages. I loved the concept of creating a visual interpretation of a character and a poem, and it was very enjoyable brainstorming all of the possibilities once I had selected my subjects. But a couple of factors hindered my ability to fulfill my vision.

The first problem I encountered was the difficulty of finding the perfect images to mesh together. For example, in my collage of the poem “Digging,” I wanted two faces fading away in the background, to represent the father and grandfather of the speaker. I scoured the Internet and sifted through hundreds of portraits of old men, but I couldn’t find one whose subject had just the right look of pensiveness and gravity. On top of that, the two had to appear as if they realistically could be related. I ended up settling for only one photo, and had to relocate it since my canvas was now emptier than expected.

I also was held back my lack of expertise with the GIMP program. I wasn’t able to blend my photos like I wanted to, and sometimes I had to compromise my vision for which GIMP tools I knew how to use. Still, I enjoyed this project just as much as the others, and my second drafts will be much better once I grow accustomed to the software.

Character Collage for Mark Antony from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"
This was my favorite out of my two collages. I didn’t realize everything was black and white until I added the vividly orange fire. I decided to keep it in color rather than black and white to add some flair to the collage and place further emphasis on the right half of the canvas. My most important move, which I performed by accident, was my transforming the background crowd image from a camera shot to what looks like an oil painting. Most of the collage’s elements are gray so this provided some separation and allowed Mark Antony to really jump out.

Poetry Collage for “Digging” by Seamus Heaney
This collage, my most recent work in the class so far, demonstrates the necessity of the masking technique. I definitely need to blend the images of the dirt and the grandfather into the background better. Also, I tried to make it look as if the hand with the pen was drawing the potato in the center of the collage, although in the end the potato just ended up floating there.

Going back to the Woody reference, I think my original vision is pretty strong. In the poem, the speaker reflects on his family’s history of plowing the rough Irish fields, mentioning his father and his grandfather as lifelong field workers. In the end he concludes that digging isn’t the profession for him, but he will echo his family’s virtues through his writing. What I wanted to convey this was a hand with a pen drawing a potato on a sheet of paper, with the faces of the speaker’s father and grandfather fading out in the background, and the paper blending into a dirt field at the bottom.

Poetry Collage Revision
My revision shows a better effort to blend the corner photos into the background. For the dirt picture, I attempted to have the right edge fade into the light-colored paper by using the “blur” tool. Once again, not optimal, but the errors are not flagrant enough to distract the reader from understanding my interpretation of the poetry.

Video
Trailer Mashup between Ice Age and 300

Our final assignment, the video project, was by far the most time-consuming, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by my product’s modest running time of one minute, 52 seconds.

Still, when you watch the video and see rapid-fire cuts from scene to scene, it represents hours of agonizingly repetitive snipping and stitching of movie clips. I could have chosen one of the other video options, like recording an original video-argument about one of the movies we saw in class in the style of our earlier podcasts. But after thinking about the serious tone of all my projects in this class, I wanted my sense of humor to shine with this one.

I chose to “mash up” the sounds of the gory war flick 300 with the images of the family-fun piece Ice Age. The idea was to portray the latter as an epic, triumphant battle movie simply by replacing the audio with that of the former.

The selection of my two movies hung me up for quite a while. I spent several class periods wracking my brain trying to find two movies from opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, whose juxtaposition would undoubtedly produce laughter. The shortlist included The Godfather, Madagascar, Scarface, The Breakfast Club, Finding Nemo and Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker.

I downloaded two to three scenes from both movies, including both trailers, which I figured would supply the best audio and video. I watched all the Ice Age clips, first with sound and then without, and then I listened to the 300 clips, first with visual accompaniment and then without.

I then matched up random pieces of Ice Age video with 300 audio, just to see how it would look with little editing. I saw how certain clips seemed to fit with each other, and I gained an understanding of when I had been dwelling on a particular scene for too long and needed a cut. After several rounds of watching and re-watching, I grasped the skill that would prove most necessary: to match up lines of dialogue with the characters’ moving lips. I quickly realized you really only needed a second or two of perfect matching; you could then cut to another scene with the dialogue still running.

Getting the crucial segments of audio to match up was definitely the most difficult part of the assignment. For example, I noticed there were two loud booms near the end, and my project lacked the visuals to mesh with them. I couldn’t ignore them—they were present in the 300 trailer for a reason, and needed to be accounted for. So I watched all my silent Ice Age footage again, waiting for anything that would make a loud booming noise. Finally, I found my answer: an enormous chunk of ice crashing to the ground and the wooly mammoth’s gargantuan leg crushing Scrat.

This project made me an expert on sights and sounds. Kind of like with my playlist, the video project emphasized the importance of considering not just one, but each aspect of a work of art (full circle, anyone?). This applied with my underlying subplot of following the cracking ice as it meanders up the mountain. At first the frequent cutbacks seemed irrelevant, but after a few views I felt that really contributed to the “mood” of the mash-up. The traveling crack mirrors the sounds of war as they both approach their climaxes at the end of the trailer.

I also realized the importance of sights and sounds together when editing in three seemingly trivial pieces of video, which in the end turned out to be my favorite three split-seconds. At 0:35, the tiger scrapes his claws against the ice as he falls down a hole, while in the audio a faint screech is heard. At 1:10, Scrat is struck by lightning as swords clash in the audio, producing the sound of lightning. And at 1:32, Scrat screams at the looming avalanche while in the audio a soldier screams in a panicked crescendo. I easily would have overlooked these bits of audio if it weren’t for the visuals that happened to lie nearby. They are barely noticeable, but thanks to the visuals with which they now match up, they have become some of the more integral, and humorous, parts of the video.

Blog Postings and Comments

My first comment, in response to the class’s first question of the year (Which is the most poetic song or artist?), set the tone for all of the analysis I would be doing this semester.

I thought this comment offered what constituted poetry as far as hip-hop was concerned.

I tried to understand what Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where have you Been?” was going through in this reply to Kelsey’s blog post.

Here is my playlist reflection. This prompted a record four spam advertisements.

My blog post "Searching for the Perfect Songs" sparked a discussion over whether our playlists were spanning various genres or sticking to one. This also garnered a respectable three spam ads.

I give praise for Kevin's collage in this comment.

In this response to one of the live podcasts, I offer my opinion on why I think political satire is necessary.

Here I share how I feel about No Country for Old Men from what I've read so far.

When we were discussing the “soundtrack” of No Country for Old Men, I contributed with this comment.

We then moved on to O Brother, Where Art Thou? As students were pointing out parallels between the movie and Homer’s Odyssey, I added here that O Brother’s Big Dan served as the film’s version of Homer’s Cyclops.

I enjoyed watching Scott’s video, which explained why Anton Chigurh and Everett could be considered heroes depending on your interpretation of the word. I offer him my opinion here.

Several students observed how Tommy’s depiction of the devil appeared to match the portrayal of the prison guard in O Brother. I agreed with the group but had one remaining question.

Ashley talked about rock-rap group Flobots in her podcast. They are one of my favorite bands, and I commented on their socially conscious brand of music here.

Final Thoughts

You have just viewed, listened to, and I hope experienced the breadth of my work in ENGL 052: English and Computers. My wish is that you as you click the x in the corner of your screen and exit this browser, you exit with the same deeper understanding of literature analysis that I gained from the four months I spent in this interactive class.

It’s a thinking that involves using all the tools you have in front of you, and it’s a thinking that requires multiple ways to apply them. But most importantly, it’s a thinking that involves synergy: when you place two pictures side by side, you leave with something greater than when you started. You don’t simply have two pictures anymore—you have two pictures and the question “Why are these next to each other?”

Some say that the increasingly ubiquitous amount of technology readily available at our fingertips is degrading art as we know it. They say it’s cheapening real art’s intrinsic value. But I offer a counter-argument, one that embraces the widening slate of technology today and suggests that its powers indeed can be used to create real art. So that one day in an art museum you’ll see the iconic painting Nighthawks hanging beside a screen showing a trailer mashup of Ice Age and 300, and you won’t turn to the screen and sneer, “I can’t believe this is here,” but rather look at the two, juxtaposed so purposefully, and ask, “Why are these next to each other?”