BOS Showcase: 2009 Major Works (5 Viewers)

[ixswans]

philphie - don't really know how to word my thoughts in response to reading your RS, but it really did relate to my personal experience writing my major work. Every single moment my teacher put a pencil mark and wrote 'irrelevant' (or at times, even more infuriating, the single '?') was maddening. What was I writing 8000 words for? To write something that would please the extremely, extremely conservative English teacher in front of me.

So, writing about a subject I absolutely loved turned into a piece of work I ended up hating.

At the beginning of this year, I was going to take a Gap Year in South Africa. A few people said its a waste of my time, my parents said I'm too young, so next year I'll be going into a course that I might hate and have to stick with for a year before I can transfer.

What a bitch reality is.

 

[philphie]

philphie - don't really know how to word my thoughts in response to reading your RS, but it really did relate to my personal experience writing my major work. Every single moment my teacher put a pencil mark and wrote 'irrelevant' (or at times, even more infuriating, the single '?') was maddening. What was I writing 8000 words for? To write something that would please the extremely, extremely conservative English teacher in front of me.

So, writing about a subject I absolutely loved turned into a piece of work I ended up hating.

At the beginning of this year, I was going to take a Gap Year in South Africa. A few people said its a waste of my time, my parents said I'm too young, so next year I'll be going into a course that I might hate and have to stick with for a year before I can transfer.

What a bitch reality is.

thanks, it's starting to sound like my rs is proving to be better than my mw haha. i was also considering taking a gap year to go to either kenya, south africa through a private volunteer prganisation but i wasn't going to work up the money in time so then i considered going to either bangladesh or recently indonesia through AYAD as an aid worker but looking back, i don't think i have enough experience. so where do you plan to go for uni?

 

[alex.leon]

philphie - don't really know how to word my thoughts in response to reading your RS, but it really did relate to my personal experience writing my major work. Every single moment my teacher put a pencil mark and wrote 'irrelevant' (or at times, even more infuriating, the single '?') was maddening. What was I writing 8000 words for? To write something that would please the extremely, extremely conservative English teacher in front of me.

So, writing about a subject I absolutely loved turned into a piece of work I ended up hating.

At the beginning of this year, I was going to take a Gap Year in South Africa. A few people said its a waste of my time, my parents said I'm too young, so next year I'll be going into a course that I might hate and have to stick with for a year before I can transfer.

What a bitch reality is.

Reality?

Do the Gap year. I'm travelling next year- everyone I know whose ever taken a Gap year has said it has been the most rewarding experience of their lives so far. I can't believe your parents said you were too young, I'm 17 going abroad next year.

Have some ambition, go for it! Why make yourself enrol in a course you don't know you want to do?

 

[ixswans]

I can understand where they're coming from, I won't even be 18, I'm a girl and to travel abroad alone at 17 is a pretty big deal. I thought they'd be okay for the volunteering, but that's okay, I'll work get some money collected up and go for the 3 month program next year.

All Gap Year entries are closed now, sigh. By the time I worked it out, it was already too late. The i-to-i stuff I REALLY wanted to do in my holidays is all 18+ and I'm not 18 until next year.


I'm going to Sydney Uni next year =) (I like to pretend its Hogwarts) Thinking of doing Lib. Arts/Sc. as it'll cover every area I'm interested in.

Our careers advisor told us what we wrote down as career preferences in Year 10 - I wrote down 'pilot'. At the end of this year I wrote down 'i don't know'.

What organisation did you get it organised by, btw? I was looking at latitude.

 

[philphie]

I can understand where they're coming from, I won't even be 18, I'm a girl and to travel abroad alone at 17 is a pretty big deal. I thought they'd be okay for the volunteering, but that's okay, I'll work get some money collected up and go for the 3 month program next year.

All Gap Year entries are closed now, sigh. By the time I worked it out, it was already too late. The i-to-i stuff I REALLY wanted to do in my holidays is all 18+ and I'm not 18 until next year.


I'm going to Sydney Uni next year =) (I like to pretend its Hogwarts) Thinking of doing Lib. Arts/Sc. as it'll cover every area I'm interested in.

Our careers advisor told us what we wrote down as career preferences in Year 10 - I wrote down 'pilot'. At the end of this year I wrote down 'i don't know'.

What organisation did you get it organised by, btw? I was looking at latitude.

haha same reason why im going to sydney as well, or melbourne. ill be doing international relations and global studies though, but if i dont get in for that then lib arts/sci as well then. i checked out AYAD, it's funded by the government so free visa, free airfare, free accom but i wanted something during the summer because i didn't want to miss out on uni next year because i really didnt want to be in a class with the year group after me. anyway i'm doing exchange at uni so won't be missing out on too much and i can always go after i finish my degree. so that pretty much means i'll be spending the summer working at dymocks and gigging... hopefully

 

[alex.leon]

I can understand where they're coming from, I won't even be 18, I'm a girl and to travel abroad alone at 17 is a pretty big deal. I thought they'd be okay for the volunteering, but that's okay, I'll work get some money collected up and go for the 3 month program next year.

All Gap Year entries are closed now, sigh. By the time I worked it out, it was already too late. The i-to-i stuff I REALLY wanted to do in my holidays is all 18+ and I'm not 18 until next year.


I'm going to Sydney Uni next year =) (I like to pretend its Hogwarts) Thinking of doing Lib. Arts/Sc. as it'll cover every area I'm interested in.

Our careers advisor told us what we wrote down as career preferences in Year 10 - I wrote down 'pilot'. At the end of this year I wrote down 'i don't know'.

What organisation did you get it organised by, btw? I was looking at latitude.

I didn't do the 'official' GAP year thing, just travelling. January - April i'm in Switzerland at a French College, May-June i'm in Europe with friends, June - September I'm counselling at an American summer camp (organised by CCUSA) and then October onwards is not planned yet, though I think I'll either be in South America or Europe again!

 

[xandersnape]

Has anything read my major?

 

[Asubmarine]

Firstly, I have to say that I agree with you in regards to this "end of creativity" – but I'd love for you to explain, you seem very intelligent. I'm not familiar with the literary aspect of pomo (apart from these apparent convention-like tropes that the BOS believes all pomo texts are characterised by, e.g. 'intertextuality', 'self-reflexivity', 'pastiche' etc.) and as I mentioned before, I don't do pomo in EE1 (I do crime-writing lol).

...

Sorry if this was a tl;dr. Thoughts?

sorry for a late reply but have been kinda busy working.

Anyway to elaborate for you I have no issue with the fragmentation and widely accepted tropes considered "postmodern" as you sort of
touched on before. However I think considering pomo as an all encompassing description of current literary actions is fallaciously limiting. It's very much derived of deconstructionism as you mentioned earlier and because of this ignores alot of the fundamental aspects to language. I think pomo is very much geared towards the narrative form or at very least a narrative-esque conception of thematic ultimatum. There have been a great deal of inventive movements in the same period as pomo, while we supposedly have reached our limits. Consider the application of concretism to literature in Brazil and Europe in the 50s/60s.

Pomo's marking of the end of modernism is quite a major issue for me also. To do a hundred years of invention and then say "well that's it" is just lazy.
IMO this is very much a result of our society where attention spans have been minimised by our ideal of instant consumption. We want a product now and so decide we can't think of anything immediately obvious and decide that re-appropriation is the only option possible. The idea of defined eras in literature is very difficult to reconcile. On a basic level it works but when you consider the modernist idea of "making it new" you've got to realise that that's something just fundamental to artistic process. We're going to get very bored very quickly if people decide to settle on a set of arbitrary methods that define the limits to our inventiveness through their combinations. In history dialects will come and go eventually as will so called "literary eras". There's no chance that humanity has exhausted its languages just yet, we've just fallen into certain ways of thinking that will no doubt also come and go.

 

[Clifford]

Yes.

 

[Lydia Frances]

Uploading mine.. Probably has countless mistakes, so sorry in advance...

Let me know what you think..?



x

Title: Here Is The Edge
Medium: Short Story

 

[worbonom]

Thank god it's been over for several months now.

I took a little too long to get it up on here.

Title: Incomprehensibility
Medium: Short Story

 

[aussienerd]

wow all your major works are amazing... i'm planning on doing four unit english does anyone not recommend it? i'd like to hear what people tink about ex2 who have done it. =]

 

[alex.leon]

goodbye feedback. ill miss you.

 

[philphie]

goodbye feedback. ill miss you.

everyone is busy with exams. and anyway at least you've had feedback on your actual mw rather than your reflection statement

 

[alina yousif]

How exciting! When I'm on my computer I'll post mine. It's a short story and it's called: Electric Toothbrush.

 

[alex.leon]

everyone is busy with exams. and anyway at least you've had feedback on your actual mw rather than your reflection statement

bitter?

 

[foolish bowie]

Wow, Jess39. Your short story is really good!
I have only just started my series of short stories - such a long task ahead of me...
I would be really interested to know what you get for it eventually.
It is so good!

 

[philphie]

bitter?

very much so, i know it's not worth the read but i need that to be confirmed

 

[jotdan]

wow all your major works are amazing... i'm planning on doing four unit english does anyone not recommend it? i'd like to hear what people tink about ex2 who have done it. =]

Do something you have access to resources on!

I wrote a short story from the eyes of a Muslim Arab Boys and the conflicts or discrimination and religion in his life

Im a caucasian Christian that doesn't know any Arabs, let alone Arab Muslims T_T
Made researching WAYYY to disproportionate to work on the major itself

Still, the experience gave me an opportunity to learn about soemthing i otherwise would have had no opportunity to discover =]

&& keep your journal up to date- one less thing to cram

 

[alex.leon]

Just putting this out there- out of all the BoS showcase threads EVER, this has accumulated the most pages.

Feel proud people