Category: Culture

Where I’m From

Kyle 4 Comments

The following is a multimodal poem remixing George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” for MSTU 5002: Culture, Media, & Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. If you’re interested, you can read my reflections here.

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I’m from hand-painted sheets
thrown over PVC frames.
From costumes
questionably fastened to
quavery frames and voices
finding themselves
for the first few times.

I’m from the cult of Rube Goldberg,
nuts, bolts,
knots, lashes
—and minor lacerations,
hidden under damp sleeves
in damper basements.

**

I’m from who/what/where/why
‘cause when matters less for a monthly.
I’m from pica spaces and double trucks,
and eye strain from
late-night layout sessions.

I’m from jam sessions
cut not short enough
by parents who are
saints but not gluttons
for punishment.

**

I’m from giant monitors
when that meant
your advisor meant business.
From bathtub lab apparatus and
hoping against hope
to extend that damn debugger.

I’m from trip the light fantastic and
unleash The Hacker Within,
From ill-advised cups of coffee
and swearing off Microsoft Word.

**

I’m from amateur hour
drowning, floundering,
faithfully, gratefully.
I’m from nerds
making mousetraps—
not better,
but ours.

It’s hip to be genuinely square

Kyle

Just in case the blogosphere fails to produce any non-election-related material today (an absurd notion, of course, but do me a favor and grant the damn premise), I wanted to pass along an article my friend Erica posted recently: “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.”

Don’t get me wrong, I hate the “oh, kids these days” mentality. I hate it in the middle third of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, I hate it when it rears its head periodically in the composition literature (every ten years or so, if I remember a couple of writing center scholars’ talks correctly), and I hate it because I hate being referred to as a kid.

So apologies in advance for sending along what is essentially a “kids these days”-style rant. That said, it strikes me as pretty much the most wickedly fun rant I’ve read since Jon Pareles declared Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade.” It also strikes me as true, but I would appreciate some insight from anyone who understands the situation better and can deliver me from what I suspect is an oversimplified view. Genuineness and originality are out there somewhere, right? Hipsters, help an engineer out.