Rhetorical Blog 1

Dax M.

Amanda Irvin

English 10803

Blogging Rhetorically

Reading this essay surprised me in the best of ways. Jeramey Kraatz's ability to write a college level essay with such a juvenile tone is genius. This essay would be a wonderful children's story and would serve well in a book of short stories for the young teens. However, the juvenile writing is part of the genius. There is a method to this madness. I believe that Jeremy Kraatz was connecting with the vocabulary that he used at the time in his life that he created Blake Stone. Voice is what makes this narrative unique. Voice is a hard thing to find in a writer and some go a lifetime without finding it in their writing.

Kraatz's description and attention to detail is absolutely remarkable. His description of CalendarGAL often makes it to where I can feel the woman's sculpted hip under the thin silk dress. His detail doesn't create the picture, but instead guides the imagination into place. This would very much be like the way he had to come up with the pictures. Given only slight detail in the chat profiles, his imagination was left to itself, but with the guidance of the words written in the profiles. By doing this, he recreates his experience and passes it on to the reader.

Due to the same re-creation described earlier, Kraatz transfigures this potentially boring narrative into an adventurous fable. His description of the chat room and quote of the conversations there-in would be absolutely boring if they were just flat out read. Instead, he creates a story with the manuscript of these chats. Just his simple banter with CalendarGAL and her flirtatious tendencies are enough to cause the reader to want to read faster. His narration in between dialogues creates the perfect sense of scene and placing. The fact that he switches between first person and a form of third person omniscient causes an immersion of the reader that is terminal.

The immersion of the reader is caused by Kraatz's weaving of fantasy and reality. This world created by his, ultimately the reader's, imagination is so intriguing that it is possible for the reader to wish that the story doesn't end the way it does. Some readers could wish to stay emerged in the swirling fantasies of this teenage boy. Elaboration preserves the magic caused by this revelation. The real world can be completely wiped away with a few clicks of the keyboard, and that makes everything so much more appealing.

Why is this moment so important to Jeramey Kraatz? Why is it that this simple chat room experience had such an impact on him that, almost a decade later, he chooses to write about it? To an overweight pubescent boy, and I speak from experience, going a day without ridicule is hard. I believe that this is one of the first waking moments for the young Kraatz. He can finally escape into a world where he is the man he wants to be and he equal to everyone. Yet later on, when his dreams are crushed by seeing the reality of CalendarGAL, he banishes the chat room from his life. All of this to find out that there are people just as unattractive as he was on the other side of the screen. What could possibly be the moral in such a story? The loss of virtual friends, the playing on the heart strings of a young boy, the realization of a boy's mistake in sinking too far into the fantasy world; What gave him the inspiration to share a story? Perhaps the tragedy of the event has stuck with him for this long and caused long term problems in his life. Through this narrative, I feel as if I got to know Blake Stone more than I did Jeramey Kraatz. Possibly he writes narratives of his fantasies instead of himself for the same reason he started the fantasies in the first place. Or could it be that he learned that it is better to live life in your conscious self than to live it in a fantasy? God only knows how many hours, days even, he spent stuck in his own thoughts and fantasies. Many life experience opportunities might have passed him by. That is the moral that I pulled out of this story. It is better to live life, no matter how bad it is, instead of living in a fantasy because, at the end of the day, all fantasies must come to an end. What is left is the world that the fantasizer let pass by; Incomprehensible to them, they are left socially inept and stranded in a barren wasteland.

In Class: All the Wasted Time, All the Million Hours

1. Sealing Grout
2. Surviving a Fire
3. Defense Against Blade
4. Phasic Relaxation
5. MMA No Holds Barred Fighting
6. Post Driving
7. Musical Theatre Music
8. Sleeping
9. Making It Seem Like It's Raining Using a Water Hose
10. Chillaxing
11. Emotion Control
12. Listening
13. Cooking Any Types of Meat
14. B.S.ing my way through anything

Phasic relaxation is a process used by actors to, well, relax into their characters. It eases tesion in the muscles and clears the mind of any personality other than the character that is being focused on. I was taught this for the first time by Michael Newberry while doing the show Electra in 2005. I was young and impressionable, and this definitely left it's mark on me. It was a useful tool he used to focus his student actors. After asking how to seek further information on this method, he handed me a book. "The Actor at Work" by Benedetti. This book revolutionized my juvenile methods of acting and transformed them for the better. My skills have tranformed even further since then, but I see this as the starting point. After reading this book in it's entirety, I started practicing methods from the book, mainly phasic relaxation, at home. My junior and senior year, I was allowed to practice this method on my theatre peers during shows, having the power passed down to me by my director.

In Class: Ballenger's Ideas

writing as inquiry... wow. what was I thinking while I was reading this? I remember thinking I was hungry, and then I got up to get a bottle of water. I sat back down with the book and and stared at the words before me. The everlasting sound of wind between my ears distracted me from the words in front of me. If I can remember correctly, writing as inquiry is to write to raise questions and get them answered. While writing, one discovers new ideas about their subject, not before in an overveiw. Now, all of these questions raised in one writing may be answered in another essay, yet the next essay will bring more questions. Just so, as questions are raised in one paragraph of an essay, they may be answered in the next paragraph. It is all part of the discovery. To write as inquiry, one must take off the filter from their brain to their fingers. Disreguard their thalamus and power forward. Good god I have no idea what to talk about next. I'm extremely fatigued and want to go back to bed. However, I would forgo a nap for some freaking food. Well, two minutes to finish up some bad writing turns into two seconds.

Introduction

Hey there. My name is Dax and I am a freshman BFA Theatre major at TCU. If I were chancellor of TCU I'm not sure that I would change anything. It would be near hypocritical for me to want to change much for I chose this place out of free will. I chose to be a horned frog and agreed to stand by what that entails. I believe a good teacher changes their students in some form or fashion. If a student is left unchanged by the class they take, then they have learned nothing and might as well not take the class. A good student allows for the teacher to mold them. An ignorant student is not a student at all.
If I were to have dinner with three people they would have to be Billy Porter, Elizabeth I, and Thespis. I would invite Billy Porter because he is my number one idol in the arts. I would invite Elizabeth I due to her strengths and wills that she put forth through history. Finally, I would invite Thespis to acquire more historical knowledge of my profession. For those of you who don't know who Thespis is, he is considered to be the first actor. This is where the term thespian came from.
Three things you should know about me... This question is a bit perplexing. I am an overly blunt and open person so you could really know anything about me. I suppose that could be counted as one. I am overly open and blunt. Another could be that I am extremely devoted to the arts. I forwent luxurious sport scholarship offers just for my sheer size for my more measly theatre scholarship offers. Lastly, I feel as if there in no such thing as "too many friends". You may have too many bad friends, but never too many friends. If there are three things that I'd like to know about you, my questions are most likely answered in your introductory blog. If I want to know something, I'll ask, no holds barred.
I would actually love to get out of this course. It's not that I hate the professor or anything about the course. I just find it merely redundant. I went to a small private school in the area where a course with this exact structure was taught. I love to write, don't get me wrong, I just feel that after taking a course, to take it again is no help. Nonetheless, I'll go in with a positive attitude and give it a shot. Speaking of writing, I usually write short stories. These stories are more than likely about mental illness. I'm not sure why. I think because the two things in the world that scare me most are spiders and mental illness. Maybe I find it intriguing.
I, Dax M., understand and agree to the terms in the course syllabus.