This is a revision of my metacognitive essay with refocusing on personal changes, name dropping and clarity. While it is not the best example of my work, it shows personal style, growth and influences while meeting the needs of the prompt it was responding to. For the record, the lack of cited works is due to the common app form not having space for a works cited and me not wanting to break the honor code for Gettysburg on my application. Anyhow, the literary influences it draws and comments on makes me feel it is appropriate to post here.

The True Expression of Art

James Z. Taylor III

At about one in the morning sometime during the winter of 2006, I was given an invite to a private online music community known as #it. After reading reviews in the pop category, I came across an album by a little known Seattle band called Math and Physics Club. It sounded wonderful, a warm and twee thirty minute record to sit by a fire and listen to. Intrigued, I queued a download. As the program popped onto my screen, I noticed an earlier download had finished; a digital purchase of Tom Waits’ quintessential work, Raindogs. My music player was immediately open and processing the album, playing it as soon as the ID3 tags were analyzed. It had been purchased for the exact opposite reason of the Math and Physics Club recording; this was supposedly a seminal experimental work, a Trout Mask Replica, an NYC Ghosts & Flowers. The album started playing, and I hated it. I hated the opening pseudo-polka of Singapore, the high moaning and low talking of Big Black Mariah. It was not experimental in the sense I was expecting, some sort of Metal Machine Music clone; it was instead experimentalism with older forms of music featuring modern augmentation. The idea of a door scraping against the ground accompanied by a man singing through a megaphone is never one of those musical ideas that sounds immediately appealing. So, at the time, I discarded Waits in favor of Math and Physics Club. I would return to Waits in about a month though, an urge to try him once more, and it was then something clicked. It was an ephemeral desire for his work, it was a newfound respect, and it was finding that perfect album of years of searching. I started hoarding Waits. Going through his entire catalogue, I became fascinated with his abstract personality and influences. I began examining them, the absurdist Beefheart, the realist Mailer, the counter-culturist Rechy. I became most intrigued however, by Waits’ most cited influence, the beaten down trodden realist Charles Bukowski. It would be the works of Bukowski and Waits that would define my perception of art, framing it in a never before realized way.

Waits has never achieved mainstream success, and perhaps it would ruin him if he did. A major label would never allow his human beat boxing and spoken word tendencies to be released, and Waits could never be limited in this way. He thrives as an outsider, a man more welcome at a junkyard than a music shop. In this way, he can write music representative both of his perspective of the world he can only look into and the outside world where he thrives. His music evokes emotion because it is emotion, primal urges put into notation. Waits’ ability to make people feel something, even if it is disgust, when they hear his music is more powerful than any piece of over-produced pop.

Bukowski works in the same vein, with the idea of music being replaced by the written word. It has been said there is no author who polarizes his audience more so than Bukowski. There is no middle ground in feelings towards him among those who have read his works; he is either despised as a misogynistic, tired man with a superiority complex or hailed as a brilliant poet who found a muse in the dark world around him. I agree with the latter. Again, the ability to evoke such feelings even on the first reading is more powerful a writing technique than will ever be known to the general public.

It is this idea of emotion as art that changed my entire view of art as a whole. It is with scorn that I now see generic works being hailed as great and timeless; if a piece cannot divide or unite a populace, it is rarely timeless, it more likely is a non-offensive best seller. While these pieces may have great formal writing (or perhaps a lack thereof), they lack the style that so marks seminal and powerful works. While it is wonderful to see great technical writing, technical writing alone should not be the voice of a generation. Technical writing strains itself to work in the past; it can never be modern as no modern style will be accepted as true technical writing until thirty years down the road. For example, it is only now that that the brilliance of Burroughs’ chopped up prose has become recognized by technical writers, before dismissed as stylistic masturbation by the forebears of those who declare its worth now. Burroughs set an idea for his peers, and slowly it is becoming standard modern technical writing for the abstract set. This causes it to now enter the mainstream, only because of wider acceptance of the source piece as technically powerful and not its powerful style. To me, this is a sin. Technical writing should be left in the places of learning where it is important, to businesses and colleges. To look at a book now, a piece of music even, and to consider it art, a new voice must be expressed. It is through the innovation of style and expression that an artist may call himself an artist; it is from these new voices that a generation may be defined.

It is the influence of artists who follow these ideas that has defined my own writing. Seeing technical prowess as being a matter reserved for grammar and punctuation, I attempt to focus more on presenting new ideas and theories rather than restating well-worn ideas in precise and calculated ways. While this meets with mixed success, I will always prefer it to writing in the rhetorical; the idea of using stylistic models seems a cruel joke. Inevitably a piece of mine will match up to an older model, primarily because in many assignments one way of writing becomes the immediate thought of everyone receiving the assignment. Perhaps this is because the rhetorical is so heavily spoken of in the educational system, causing our minds to jump immediately to the standard ways of presenting information based in various criteria. In an educational environment though, this seems best, as so much of what is assigned until the latter years of high school and college is retelling information, and in many cases there is no other way to present. In fields which do not ask a specific question though, or when the answer to the question varies immensely from person to person, the rhetorical only enforces the idea of technicality over creativity.

So Waits’ experimentation with banging on garbage cans and obscure allusions is for me a statement of the true power of art, the power to call emotion in people, the power to say something in a different voice. Without Raindogs, without What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire, I would still be pursuing a computer science major. I would still read only the only classic. I would have never found the brilliance of the modern Dickensian style of John Irving, or Joan Didion’s ability to tell a thrity-year-old story and make it sound new. Art is new expression, and art will always be in my mind.