“The first draft of anything is shit.” -Ernest Hemingway

"I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." —Truman Capote, Conversations With Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, 1985

English 366H: Literature and the Other Arts

or the class more informally known as #Boostlit

Dan Anderson’s #Boostlist is not your ordinary english class. Full disclosure, I’m a senior double majoring in political science and english so I have taken my fair share of english courses here at UNC, as well as one with Dan two years prior. I have written my fair share of essays and been through the “read x number of chapters and take this short quiz” routine. This course is the antidote to the rudimentary english class.

In this course I wasn’t assigned a single essay, you technically never have to put pen to paper. So what are the two quotes at the top of the page doing here? Hemingway and Capote were novelists, all they did was write. Well in Boostlit you explore the conventions of writing, the piecing together of ideas, of arguments, of finding ways to explore the beauty of a poem, a sentence describing the ocean, and you revise. You revise a lot. This course creates a new avenue for exploring ideas in an English course, outside the boundaries of classical reading comprehension and argumentative essays. Boostlit turned everyone in the class into an inventor. Exploring a quote for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, well instead of analyzing it in an essay this class asked you to explore it through audio-visual relationships. The computer screen became a workshop for vocal narration to describe the power of a specific word, while simultaneously a 3 video clips are fading into 2 more still images, then the narration transitions into a popular song, and by the end of the video the viewer FEELS the message. Boostlit turns the routine english assignment on its head and makes it an experience.

Imagine you are given an assignment to describe a poem’s relationship with a contemporary cultural concern. Well traditionally you would analyze the poem, find out what each word means, what metaphors are most powerful, and then write your heart out. On the other hand, Boostlit forces the left side of the brain to work overtime. In Boostlit you find the poem and you tell a story, but now you can bring in sound effects to turn the analysis into an experience for the listener.

In Boostlit the first idea was wonderful, that audio-visual work is the most creative file ever saved in your MacBook’s “school work” folder. But this class isn’t about first ideas and settling for initial success.  Hemingway is correct, the first draft is always worse—albeit he may be a little more crude than myself. No matter how great it was, the first draft can become better.

Boostlit reflects how one learns in real life. Learning in life isn’t something you turn in one day and never engage with again. A person is continuously learning, every new experience changes you, every piece of information can influence your learning. Boostlit allows for this. Every project is tinkered with all semester, every project becomes a part of your identity. The music in the background of audio projects and video projects reflect the personality of their creators. Every project is open ended, every student puts a piece of themselves into the work. I know I did when I made these projects. The Soundlist reflects my favorite TV show—The Wire. Not only does it reflect my interest but it also reflects my passions. I chose the character because he is indicative of the unfortunate situation The Wire explores. My audio essay was an attempt to describe the political chaos of the Syrian conflict. Instead of writing an essay on it you can hear the passion in my voice, a powerful and unique feature of this course. The list continues with each and every work I did, but also the work the rest of my classmates did. There were times in class where I wanted to drag my work to the trash, simply because Dan had played a classmate's video that was stunning.

I would like to quickly run through what this portfolio, or as I titled it—my journey, entails. The first creation is a soundlist exploring the psyche of Bodie from HBO’s The Wire. He is a drug dealer, who comes from a bad situation, and his journey is one of persevering through obstacles in order to achieve the American Dream. My next work is an audio essay detailing the political and humanitarian tragedy of the Syrian civil war. I attempt to 1) show why we need to empathize with the refugees who are being used as a fear mongering device by the Republican party and 2) describe the political complexity of the conflict itself. My third work is a performance e-poem, captured using Camtasia, regarding the ban of Mexican studies courses in Arizona schools and the protest movement that is fighting back against the whitewashing of history. The fourth work is another e-poem, this time pieced together on Camtasia (instead of only being captured) dealing with African-American history and Barack Obama’s eventual rise to the White House. And finally, my last work deals with The Road and the dystopian future in the contemporary context of industrialization and climate change.

My final thought of this opening letter is an appreciative note to Dan. He is the Bill Simmons to our Grantland (RIP to the best website of our time). He is the moderator of our creativity and gives us the time and space to try our best at putting together a successful product. Frankly, he knows this is hard, this is not something we are used to, and he facilitates that with a gentle hand and an encouraging voice.