Back in Fall of 2006, or the beginning of my "Medieval Dark Ages" year at the "deathly age of 25--dearest me, the Quarter Life Crisis!" I fell off my own log and decided I wanted to record a song at a music studio... as I ultimately wanted to learn how to compose, record, and mix-n-master my own songs. I fell into the hands of LAP Records, a studio that was about five miles away from home. Though I had to leave the studio due to some awkward transactions that I found to be violating my own personal space, I did learn a few things, and at one point I was inspired to write a melodic poem entitled "Legacy," which was also partly influenced by the studio owner's creation of jazz music.
After reading the poem again... nearly three years later... I found most of the stanzas to be preachy, cliche, and overall unpoetic. Only two stanzas remain standing and worth revealing:
Legacy
To be alive
and to know
that you're alive
is the greatest thing
you could ever
realize.
To carve a new trail
beyond your own home,
beyond your own life,
beyond your own space,
beyond your own time.
Referring to quotes from the metaphor essay and CHESS Book of Poetry. Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Once again. "One of the greatest dilemmas of modern environmental problems is the individual human's failed ability to assign and imagine a role--a sense of self and place--in systems of greater scales beyond one's own immediate needs, surroundings, and lifespan."
I guess the "good news" is that I walked away from LAP Records learning how to record, mix-master my music with the most basic system: Yamaha touch sensitive keyboard from Costco, Samsun microphone, a really crxppy computer soundcard in this Hewlett Packard PC, and a really crxppy software program called "Sonar Home Studio" which has more than enough quirks in it.... Music creation is a whole other can of worms. I'll open this can of worms... or barrel of snakes (the music industry is the King of Corruption after all!) another time.
A tangible product of winter quarter, finally manifested! "CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change." After being filtered by the mind of Barry Spacks, I feel confident enough to present to the world a suite of poems which essentially serves as an "outline" to a longer piece I must inevitably write. Above is a widget that serves as a "Mini Storefront" to my Lulu identity on http://lulu.com/questionreality. Below is a little "buy it now" doohickie from Lulu. I guess the essence of this entire blog and this form of self-publishing is the do-it-yourself mentality. You don't need to be endorsed by a mass-production corporation such as Penguin in order to create and distribute great writing... not to say that my writing is great at all... a bit of an overstatement, I should say.
Below is a profile that I placed on Lulu to summarize the book. It's just a sketch. I am assuming that this will be the "first version" of CHESS. The second version will (1) be peer-reviewed... errr... legitimatized by several individuals who already received stamps of approval on their forehead, and (2) also include a few more poems... perhaps... that I wasn't able to include in this round because I am buried in my own mismanaged file systems and pressed for time.
“Stokastika!” Victoria Minnich, a Ph.D. student in environmental science and management/ environmental media at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a chronic seeker of order from chaos. A bold and daring exploration of scale and metaphor through the unconstrained means of poetry, Victoria asks timely questions, and in the process, surges an influx of grand themes of environmental philosophy and artful scientific dialect into the realm of literature and the humanities. CHESS is a debut collection of poetry.
It is difficult to write my own abstract, because I have to be in a mode of "self-glorification... within relative moderation." I don't want to toot my own horn, but the marketing system requires me to do so.
"CHESS: Poetry of Human-Environmental Change" Hugging / Formatting / Sandwiching a Manuscript to Make a Book. Writing and hugging a manuscript requires a lot of patience and precision, which required a "time out from life," or experiencing the world. I actually hid for a few days in Buellton, California (Pea Soup Heaven!) in order to work on the detailed nuance of editing the poems and formatting the book... which includes a book cover (front, back, spine), title page cover, copyright page, devotions, table of contents, introduction, parceling up poetry into chapters (I have seven chapters, I think!), and some form of conclusion page, adding page numbers, formatting with pdf (that was a battle!), and a few other residual items on the list I don't have on the top of my head...
Above is a collection of images involved in the formation of the logo / symbolic illustration for CHESS, entitled "Oak Tree Mind / Emerging Transcendence." Still not sure which title should be used, but I write down both to capture the attention of the search engines. I showed the illustration to my friend, Shannon, and she really liked it.... It can potentially be used within the literary magazine!
Below is a list of links of major documents available for FREE to paruse through:
This is not an all-inclusive blog. What I would like to summarize in a future blog is (1) What is CHESS all about? Where do all the ideas come from? What is the context? (2) Where am I heading next in the world of poetry? and (3) Some fundamental Life Principles that I learned from Barry Spacks' course... and any other miscellaneous ideas....
Poem / Song called CHESS of Fish. I placed it first because it's the shortest and the catchiest of the three documents in this blog. I wrote it right before I wrote the final draft news journalism article on Dr. Chris Costello's research "Sharing Fisheries Wealth for Ocean Health." Oooh! It rhymes! And... I read this poem to Dr. Barry Spacks' poetry class last Monday. It was fresh off my plate, so I was excited about it. In the scheme of the three poems I read: Matrix of Metaphors, Purpose or a Process, and CHESS of Fish, it was well received. Dr. Spacks informed us that we should assume the highest of intellect of our readers, and we shouldn't footnote anything in the poems, but "CHESS" is a splended exception, since it's such a cool acronym that does not stand on its own. I quickly asked Dr. Spacks about my "knowledge set" for poetry. I didn't know who Burkowski was (some bar-based poet, women, the whole Hollywood of poetry), but most of the students don't even know what a tunicate is. So, can anyone give anyone a guilt trip for knowing anything or not knowing anything. Should I know existing poets, or should I know knowledge of the world that can feed into novel poetry? I will continue to invest in learning about tunicates and rhyolite, but some investment of being exposed to existing poets. I would rather expand my palate beyond the literature of existing poets.
Short Story / Screenwrite Scene in the Grocery Store between Terra, Buz, and a bag of "organic" Oreo Cookies. The piece is entitled "Humans are Connected to the Environment? A Discovery of the Obvious." I wrote this after I wrote the Fisheries Information Network (FIN) first set of notes. I sent it to a few of my friends in the lab and my father. My dad, knowing Terra and Buz very well, had a huge belly laugh. He said the "oreo cookie" situation really worked and amplified and tangible-ized the absurdity. *Whew* He also felt very bad for Buz who had to deal with Terra's out-of-control existentialist rant in the middle of the grocery store.
PDF FILE for the screenwrite for "Discovery of the Obvious" is right here:
It's funny. I am putting all this material on my blog. It keeps coming out. I work very hard. One day it will have a "better" place, "better" meaning other people may put it somewhere other than this blog. Maybe one day some people will absorb to some degree the things I think about. Like I said, a writer's work is only appreciated after he or she is dead. Going based on that null hypothesis, I need to continue to work, because that is how I survive. That is how I stay mentally sane.
At the root of all of this, it's only for sanity and survival... through the desire to care and attach myself to others and my surroundings.
Please help with Question Reality / Biologically Incorrect environmental media projects!
All proceeds go toward graduate school funding!
UCSB's Blue Horizons Film and Environmental Media Blog
Please check out my journal entries/blog from July to September 2007 and March 2008 that documents my participation in the new Blue Horizons program at UC Santa Barbara!
Hello, my name is Victoria, and I am a power-scaling moleculo-cellulo-neuro-physio-behavioral-geoevoecological artisticophilosophiscientist. Basically, that means I'm a Common Senseologist (at the local pubs and coffee shops) and Ecopistemologist (around university campuses) in pursuit of a Ph.D. (or more appropriately an Fud) in Survival: for the short and long term, for her Self and this human-built system derived from existing non-human life-earth elements surrounding her, that as of this moment, resumes to remain her life support. Though, if this ecological system (the author was born and incorporated into without choice of agreeing to its contradictory, consequently irrational terms of membership) crashes and burns (always best to expect the worst and hope for the best!), there is indeed plan B for Self-Survival: the initiation of a hunter-gatherer club in the boonies of Santa Barbara. All well-rounded, like-minded folks are invited to join! We do not hold Old Boyz-Frat-Girl Club policies. Okay, please laugh now, if you haven't yet :-)
Great Problems Can Also Equate to Great Opportunities...
Blogging Biologically Incorrect: An Urgent Response to Larry Page's Request
In February of 2007 at the annual AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Meeting, I witnessed Larry Page, one of the co-creators of Google, frankly state what had been subliminally aching inside me: "Scientists have some serious marketing problems." Since this time, Dr. Page (he's got more than a Stanford Ph.D to me!) has inspired me to manifest my suppressed, subliminal concerns into a solution: the creation of this blog and use of wizywig, button-pushing internet services to start constructing a multi-media reality of my mind's perception of Reality: which is a mix-bag of philosophy and several elements of the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Since then, I have returned to graduate school from leave of absence in pursuit of film and applied/theoretical multi-media research in communication and application of science to the matrix of human ecology (far beyond the university). All for seeking a common grounds value system-perception-understanding-language-and future vision to deal with the gestalt of modern-human environmental crises. Thanks to Dr. Page for validating my internal turmoil and idealistic pursuits! :-)
"Hyper-creativity comes with fairly severe consequences." (Self-Admitted)
"I like it how you are able to hold conversations with yourself." (Sister Jenny to Victoria, a compliment or an insult!)
"You seem like the type of person who would rather be homeless than get a job that you don't like." (Sister Jenny to Victoria, a compliment or an insult!)
"I'd rather work with a graduate student who has too many ideas than too few."--Victoria's Current Ph.D. Advisor at Bren, UCSB
"Your films are so much more convincing and enjoyable than Michael Moore's. You're not attacking specific people. You're not attacking specific organizations. You're attacking, challenging ideas, principles, and values, and with direct humor and a coherent thesis that sets up a bullseye for feasible solutions. "--Film Editor Guru in Santa Barbara
"I started reading your blog, and then I started to think about my thinking."--Anonymous UCSB Graduate Student
"Sometimes certain individuals project their traditional knowledge into new academic territories --like a physicist into the realm of biology--and then some of these individuals, seeing with a new pair of shades, can entirely revolutionize a field."--Anonymous UCSB Professor (paraphrased)
"Victoria, you are truly an original writer. No one writes like you. Your work takes many bold and unexpected leaps. You should give yourself a pat on the back sometime."--My Favorite Poetry Professor (paraphrased)
"Victoria, you are too smart to be a scientist. As a creative writer and artist, you should consider yourself someone who exploits the materials of science for your craft and business of multi-media storytelling. You're lucky: as a scientist, you by default have a much richer, deeper inventory of metaphors than the average writer, which leads to contributions of the novel and the unexpected. "--My Favorite Poetry Professor (paraphrased)
"Every time I meet with you, you are a very different person--your mind is in a very different state. Sometimes inwardly, poetic and artistic, other times outwardly and systematic, and analytical. You can operate so diversely, so laterally... as if you have a bunch of switches in your mind that go on and off!"--Anonymous UCSB Graduate Student (paraphrased)
"Reading your blog is like eating a dense piece of European bread." --Local SantaBarbarian Craigslister (Thanks! I'll take that as a compliment and an insult!!!)
Biologically Incorrect Ideas for Syndicated Multi-Media Columns (Eventually!)
Biologically Incorrect Cartoon Series (currently underway with a portfolio!)
The CoffeeShop Hobo (column on meeting random interesting people at the local coffeeshop, based on a North High School student's senior thesis: "I've learned more in one month just talking to random people at a coffeeshop than I have learned in all four years of my high school education!")
Unburying the Undiscovered (column on discovering someone in history with profound ideas who never saw the light of the public's attention though he or she was very deserving of a collective discourse)
The Biologically Incorrect Guide to Unethical Human-Environmental Experiments... that are actually REAL!
