College Magazines

For my own future reference I decided to post the college magazines here for inspiration.

BYU: Inscape
Caltech: Totem
Cornell: Rainy Day
Harvard: The Harvard Advocate
MIT: Rune
Stanford: Leland Quarterly
Georgia Tech: Erato
Yale: Yale Literary Magazine

Final 5

It has been a great term and while I initially attempted 10 different pieces, only 5 were actually finished on time to be handwritten and used in the group's final publication project. The project is to be an old journal, pages aged with tea bags and hand written. Each member gets their own section to simplify the ordering.

As for my section here are my five pieces in no particular order:

It

Super Van City

Lost Boys

Tres Doges

Dialogue with a Dictionary: Hominid

Special thanks goes to Professor Jim Cocola and all my fellow classmates who helped make this class an enjoyable fun opportunity to revisit the world of literature, poetry, and other forms of written expression you don't normally get to encounter in engineering classes.

It's been fun,

Yoshitaka Shiotsu

OED Human

One of the paintings that showed up when I google imaged soul

I looked up the word human in the Oxford English Dictionary and this is what I found:

1. a. Of the nature of the human race; that is a human, or consists of human beings; belonging to the species Homo sapiens or other (extinct) species of the genus Homo.

With this basis I wrote the poem Dialogue with a Dictionary: Hominid as an attempt to address the somewhat lacking definition of what a human is. It should be read as someone reading the definition out of the OED and filling in all the blanks in their head. I used the longest word in the English dictionary to accomplish this: Osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary, an adjective that means to be of bone, flesh, blood, organs, gristle, nerve, and marrow. I filled in the resulting symbols that come to mind when one thinks of each. Symbols that resonate with what it means to be human. I decided to include this piece which I had started at the beginning of the year because it seemed to fitting to use as a summation of the life experiences I used in the other pieces for the publication project.

Banyan Tree

The banyan tree is an important piece of imagery in the Lost Boys. The one in question used to be at my old elementary school but it had been cut down. It didn't have nearly as many roots as the one depicted here but there were enough to climb and swing on. When they removed all the jungle gym equipment across America they deemed the tree to be a hazard as well and cut it down. Regardless Acts I and II may not have much on the tree, but it figures importantly in Act III and ties everything together in one action packed conclusion.

Editor's note:

I regretfully could not polish up acts II and III of the Lost Boys enough to warrant putting them in the final publication, as such Act I which can almost be taken as a stand alone piece will be the only one to make an appearance. I am debating whether to post the other half finished works as a sort of adage to the process of writing, many ideas that just couldn't quite fill out, even a poem on writers block which although unfinished sounds surprisingly good for something born from 10 minutes of jest. I did put a lot of work into the second act and its regrettable that I couldn't include it as its ending necessitated a third.

Super Van City

This is Super Van City, created by Micro Machines in the mid 90's, it was a Van that folded out into a city, with a working car wash and race tracks for your hotwheels. I remember spending hours playing with the thing when I was a kid which is why I wrote the piece sharing the same namesake in its honor. My written piece may have embellished a little on the actual layout of the city.

Haunted Venice

There is no place quite like Venice; I could quote the countless praises for its beauty and its rich history in music and the arts however there is nothing more I could really say about it that hasn't already been said. I wrote the piece Tres Doges recounting the apparitions based on my stay near the Campo di San Giovanni e Paolo focusing on the darker parts of that history. It is important to note that those legends are really not of my own creation just my retelling of the existing ones that were said to haunt the nearby square.

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn compiled this collection of Japanese legends and ghost stories into a book in 1904, which was later adapted to a movie by Masaki Kobayashi in 1965. I both read the original and seen the movie when I was younger as Hearn a.k.a Koizumi Yakumo's work was very popular in Hawaii. This piece influenced my presentation format of some Venetian ghost stories I encountered while I was away in Venice for the IQP. I also have a work on mosquitoes in progress that if I use will engage his encounter with mosquitoes in a buddhist graveyard for ideas.

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis

"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

There are numerous translations of this famous short story, and while much of the germanic wordplay is lost in translation, the piece is still widely accepted as one of the most seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century.

While Gregor Samsa is often depicted as a cockroach, Kafka actually never intended for any one image to be associated with the word "Ungeziefer" which only loosely translates to vermin and is more strictly translated to "animal unfit for sacrifice." The term is most often used in Germany to describe a bug while the word vermin in English expands to rats and mice.

Regardless this piece utilizes the extraordinary circumstance of a physical metamorphosis to display what is otherwise a very normal occurance; that is when someone wakes up one morning and realizes what a disgrace to society they've become, a shut in with no real contributing value to society. A tad nihilistic but humerous nonetheless, I want to capture this surrealist exemplification of the quotidian within my lifewriting pieces as well; creating surprising and entertaining stories based on actual events.

Shells

Junonia(left) and baby's ears(right) and king's crowns(below) that were referenced in my piece "It"

Thomas Love Peacock: Headlong Hall

A satirical novel written by Thomas Love Peacock in 1815; The novel provides social satire and humor at the expense of a group of eccentrics, each embodying a different monomaniacal obsession, and their interactions throughout society. Interestingly enough the entire novel can be found for free on the web. As this was written in the 19th century it has excellent diction, and one need only read it to bolster their vocabulary. I was an avid fan of 18th and 19th century literature in highschool, but decided to post this novel as it is readily available on the web. Below is a link:

http://www.thomaslovepeacock.net/Headlong.html

Franz Kafka

Heralded as one of the most influential fiction writers of the 20th century, Kafka's works exhibit that type of surreal character I wish to incorporate within my fictional works. Granted I haven't actually delved into the sphere of fictional writing since my highschool years however for the purpose of this class I decided to revist Kafka's works and add them to my archive. Below is a link to website dedicated to providing translations of his works, originally written in German, the English translations are rough, as the official ones are liscensed, however they are still able to communicate much of the same themes of modernism, existentialism, and magic realism which captivated my interest in his works.

http://www.kafka.org/index.php?english_transl