English 474

In Sarah Polley’s documentary, The Stories We Tell, she examines her family’s history, specifically her mother’s history in the family. She interviews a man who her mother had had an affair with in the late 1970s. As Diane Polley was married to Michael Polley, the affair needed to be kept secret for the benefit of Diane and Michael’s relationship. But Harry, Diane’s lover, wished there were more witnesses to his affair, to give it some sense of existence.

That got the class thinking about applications of this idea nowadays, specifically the idea of pictures on Instagram and Facebook. For some, the need to show their friends pictures of their trip to Hawaii or to take a picture of the Mona Lisa is just too enticing. Recently, a few studies have come out on the subject. One stating that posting to Facebook encourages narcissism and another says that “neurotic and extroverted people tend to upload a higher volume of photos” than everyone else.

This could explain another part of Harry’s attitude in the movie. Sarah Polley discovers that Harry Gulkin is in fact her biological father when she meets with him to discuss her mother. He decides he wants to write an account of the situation, from meeting Diane, to the present day story with Sarah reconnecting with him. But Sarah doesn’t want him to publish it. She feels that all the interested parties are already privy to that information, but Harry wants to publish it to the public. It still isn’t enough for him to just have the knowledge that Sarah s his daughter, he needs that gratification from the public. Even when Sarah asks him in her documentary what he thinks about her interviewing a bunch of people about the situation, he’s against it. He feels that it’s his story to tell, regardless if it effects Sarah just as much or the whole Polley family. That’s a narcissist if I’ve ever seen one.

Work Cited:

Bereznak, Alyssa. “Study: People Who Post Lots of Photos on Facebook May Be Neurotic.”Yahoo! Tech. Yahoo!, 8 Aug. 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014.

Nevada, Maria Bianca.”Frenzied Picture-taking in Front of Mona Lisa – Louvre, Paris.” Fading Ad Blog. 9 July 2010. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

“Facebook Profile Picture Ratings Are Predictors of Narcissism: Study.” NDTV Gadgets. 15 July 2014. Web. 21 Nov. 2014.

David Homel has been translating Dany Laferriere’s books from French to English since the late eighties. There needs to be an enourmous trust between the two writers for an author to consent to having their works translated into another language, especially when that work is so focussed on language as Laferriere’s is. But translation is more than just being able to plug in the words. Words and phrases that have a certain political or aesthetic context may not have the same weight with the word’s counterpart in a different language. Sometimes words don’t exist in the new language. Therefore, translation must be a creative process.

The Canadian translator Sheila Fischman believes that translating “is like writing but with someone else’s hand”. In a National Post article entitled “The Forgotten Mimics“, Fischman argues that “[translating is] not a technical process, it’s an aesthetic process”. They are most certainly “Forgotten Mimics” to the general reading public, but the authors sure appreciate their work. Recently on Reddit, a user named Shizo211 had a question as to whether he should read a John Green book, Looking for Alaska, in English as Green had originally published it, or in the user’s native tongue, German. John Green amazingly replied to the question and willed Shizo211 to read it in German because “[t]he translation, by Sophie Zeitz, is extraordinarily good. I know this partly because readers who’ve read both have told me, but partly because … The book got better reviews in German than in English, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sophie made it better.” It’s understandable that a writer would be glad to have his book published – for revenue’s sake – but to persuade someone to indulge in the translation instead of the original is a true appreciation of translation as an art form.

Work Cited:

Medley, Mark. “The Forgotten Mimics.” National Post Arts. National Post, 24 Sept. 2010. Web. 6 Nov. 2014.

Shizo211.”Should I Read My next Book (Looking for Alaska Bz John Green) in English or My Native Language German? • /r/makemychoice.” Reddit: MakeMyChoice. Reddit, 27 Oct. 2014. Web. 6 Nov. 2014.

In class today, we were asked to look at Wally Oppal’s Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. Specifically, we were asked to look at the portion that gives a description of each of the missing women’s lives (if the information was available). Many of these descriptions gave a very colourless description of their lives: when and where they were born, when they moved to Vancouver, when they became involved in the Downtown Eastside, when hy were last heard from, and if Robert Pickton was charged with their murder or not.

All I could remember thinking was that if I died, would this be how I was remembered? The date I was born, graduated, moved to Vancouver, my cause of death? It was their personal history, but it seemed awfully impersonal.

It reminded me of a concept Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss in their book, Reading Autobiography. They discuss Stephen Spender’s idea that “a life writer confronts not one life but two” (Smith and Watson 6). The first kind of life is the one that is the Oppal Inquiry biographies seem to cover: the apparent events of someone’s life. But Spender argues that there is also a second life, the “self felt from the inside” or a “record of self observation” (6).

That second life is missing in most of these biographies. In some, they include poems or other creative works to give that second life a voice. They also had family members write a more personal biography. None of these, however, give voice to that second life that Spender describes.

For me, I hope I can write my own obituary before I die. I’d really hate to have to die and have some hack try to determine the important bits of my life history. What does he know?

Work Cited:

Oppal, Wally. “Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Inquiry Volume I.” BC Public Inquiries. Government of British Columbia, 19 Nov. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.

Smith, Sidonie . and Watson,  Julia . Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.Project MUSE. Web. 9 Oct. 2014.

In class today, we were asked to look at the peritextual elements (basically everything that makes up the physical copy of the book, cover to cover) of Missing Sarah, a book written by the sister of one of Robert Pickton’s victims about her life in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. While the writer, Maggie de Vries, is forced to reflect on the life of her sister and find out more about her life after she left the family because she is missing, the book is focused on Sarah de Vries as a person, on the relationships with her family and others, and as a reflection of the writer on how the two sisters went down very different paths in life. But as the peritext would suggest, the focus of the book is on the crime that was committed, not on the person who would become a victim of that crime. This is a marketing tool.

On the back of the book near the bar code, the book is labelled “Memoir/True Crime”. I don’t have much of a problem with the label “Memoir” (especially as the sub-heading is “A Memoir of Loss”), but the label of “True Crime” irks me in this context. In his book, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, Mark Seltzer explains certain conventions of true crime. Ultimately, they come together to create a product that turns “crime fact into crime fiction.

The salacious material that is often associated with the True Crime genre does not appear in this book. In essence, True Crime deals in trying to recreate a crime to emotionally encapsulate an audience. This book’s author chooses not to spend much time recreating the crime, but instead recreates the life of the victim. Of course there is an emotional effect on the reader’s part, but it doesn’t exploit the subject.

The True Crime billing is not accurate for this book. While it could be possible that this book is hard to put into a marketable category, it’s more likely that this label was used to market it to a readership more interested in the Robert Pickton case than one of his victims lives.

Work Cited:

After reading through all the blogs, one of the threads that came up the most was the question of whether one’s Facebook profile is just an illusion of their actual self (a term that Callie Hitchcock uses in her blog), and the moral implications of consciously creating an identity. Although there were a lot of posts dedicated to the discussion of this topic, the ideas people had about the government of ethics for one’s online identity varied completely.

Overall, the most common response was skepticism to the format that Facebook provides for one to create their online persona. As someone brought up in class, many were concerned about the strict, positive dimension that Facebook “likes” give to the story of their lives and the seeming validation we as posters receive about these events from other users. Kira Nordhoj brought up a great point in her blog about validation of our online selves with the term “Facebook Official”, referring to how some view their romantic relationships only official when they’ve posted them to Facebook.

Some were more accepting of this form of personal narrative. Kendall Blenkarn, in her post, accepted the idea that “authenticity of online narratives may not be so different than questions of authenticity of more historical narratives/diaries”.

Others felt personally responsible for the way that they portray themselves to others on social media. In a post entitled “Lie Feed”, Quincy Arthur admits that his online identity “by no means reflects my inner self, or outer one for that matter” and has worried in the past about Facebook’s capability to “expose me as the fraud I am to all my ‘friends’”.

In her article “Be who you want to be: The philosophy of Facebook and the construction of identity”, Katie Ellis describes her actions on Facebook as a “performance of gender and social identity”, one she participates in to build an “online identity based on how, and as whom [she] want[s] to be perceived in both the online and offline world. She’s frank that there is a distinction between both worlds, but the online persona and the real world one are both linked.

I tend to sway the way of acceptance that my online persona is consciously constructed. I tend not to share too much information about my identity on Facebook, such as my work history or relationships, but I still enjoy being able to broadcast whatever I want on the form. And of course, while I’m not explicitly giving much information about my real world situation online, I am implicitly creating an identity by putting my best foot forward in my posts. Ultimately, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with engaging in the performance of your online persona.

Work Cited:

Arthur, Quincy. “Lie Feed.” Memoirography: A Blog about Life (Narratives). UBC Blogs, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Blenkarn, Kendall. “Post #1: Online Profiles and Created Narratives and Identities.” Contemporary Lit 474. UBC Blogs, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Ellis, Katie. “Be Who You Want to Be: The Philosophy of Facebook and the Construction of Identity.” Screen Education Winter 2010.58: 36. Web.

Hitchcock, Callie. “Facebook and the Cult of the Individual.” Callie Anya. UBC Blogs, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Nordhoj, Kira. “Facebook as Self-Validation.” English 474. UBC Blogs, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.