The Virtual Peace Garden

I just finished Slavoj Zizek's Violence and am wondering where it fits into my thinking about war and peace in the global village.

I don't want to be a harsh critic of the logos I find, but I think this one could use a good deconsulation.

The globe and ring are very abstract and not particularly inviting. I wonder if designers use the half-moon, open ring as a kind of convention for groups that have inclusivity as a goal--the PeaceMakers Institute used a similar design.

One of the most important aspects of Graduate School in English for me has been an ongoing search of sorts for the perfect audience and outlet for a secret (perhaps very secret!) passion of mine: Poetry. I would have never thought that I would find so quickly such a perfect English-related circumstance into which to insert some of my poems and to perhaps even create new ones, but I have found precisely that circumstance in the MEmorial. In fact, the MEmorial is kind of like a poem; it is certainly an artistic expression of sorts.

Amazingly, a poem I wrote some seven years ago coincides and reinforces perfectly the underlying message of my own MEmorial, and I cannot help but notice that a few other students have used poems in their MEmorials well.

Regarding my own (i.e. “Dreadful Fantasies”) poem: It serves to set the tone for my entire MEmorial, which is a bit serious and yet is simultaneously artistic and highly creative. It also serves to establish a great motto, “Defend from the End.”

Again, the MEmorial project (as well as the anti-essay one as well, come to think of it) have truly served to lift my spirits as I look forward in my academic career. Prior to this semester, as I have alluded to earlier, I was simply under the impression that North Dakota State University, as well most other colleges for that matter, had simply turned the page on poems and poetry and were going in different directions. It has been my greatest relief to realize that I have not only discovered a realistic stage and audience for my poems in the anti-essay and MEmorial, but that I have also discovered that poetry is not a dying art form at all. I now realize that poetry is so intertwined with English Studies that the two cannot ever be completely separated.

I was looking for Ulmer's mystory, Noon Star, and came across this interview with Joel Weishaus. "IMAGING EmerAgency: A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer."

I'll let you know what I can extract from it.

http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/postmodern_culture/v009/9.1weishaus.html

You'll have to visit the WISER website in order to see their emblem, because this group has taken full advantage of the web: their emblem changes slightly when you roll your mouse over it.

http://wisergirls.org/about/

This group is also tapping into the power of acronyms. WISER stands for he Women’s Institute for Secondary Education and Research. The group does not seem to use a slogan as part of their logo, although they have a picture on their website of a chalk board with the slogan "Live, Learn, Be Wiser."

If there is one overwhelming element regarding my writing and the unique power of the rhetorician that I will take away from this Topics in Rhetoric and Writing class (as well as all the assignments that we have all done over the course of this semester) it is the simple fact that writing less truly works. Of course, the idea is a paradox; but simply because the idea is itself a bit complicated, that does not mean that the idea is not worth thinking about. I know that I have been thinking about the power of writing less ever since Dr. Brooks first shared it; and I admit it, I was a bit skeptical of the notion at first myself. After all, it just didn’t seem to make any sense: Writers writing less? Where was the logic in that? I think as English students we all (I should say “I” and not “we all,” since I cannot speak for everyone obviously) have always been encouraged to write more, and we have often been criticized for writing less. Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that writers indeed need to write less sometimes; and doing so usually strengthens their own writing.

The concept of writing less has certainly helped me in developing my own MEmorial, since I initially had so much content squeezed onto one page. I quickly realized, however, that too many words and too many images was weakening the overall effect of my project; therefore I started to cut and edit and eventually realized that I was in fact strengthening my MEmorial. I hope the results speak for themselves.

Again, I would have never thought that “writing less” would indeed strengthen my writing. But it certainly has.

A paragraph more or less summing up the whole MEmorial project:

I'm no graphic designer, so I rely on the design skills of others. Then I just add a few things. See what you think of this logo, and then perhaps suggest a slogan or three. If Einstein were more relevant to our project, I would suggest "We'd like to C U spend some relative time with us." I have also been thinking about Ulmer's line: "The Internet . . . [is a] living, dynamic, thinking and feeling monument."

The Peacemakers Institute emblem is much more abstract than most of the ones I have been sharing with you. The obvious images around peace are doves and olive branches, the peace symbol itself, but this emblem seems to be gesturing towards a circle that is not closed.

What do others make of it?

The motto, by contrast, is quite concrete.

I haven't run this by Bob yet, but I hope he'll be on board with it since I've built it into our MEmorial. I added this motto to our emblem to signify the message our MEmorial. I know it doesn't get the point about the forgotten children, but really points to the greater societal problem that is the underlying cause.