Papyrus: what was, is and I wish would be...

Papyrus: Egypt, Greece, and Rome. While I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but contemplate the juxtaposition between the product “paper” then and now. In our day and age, paper is taken for granted; it’s an underappreciated necessity for the recording of ideas, theories and beliefs but not much more. But, in ancient times, it was a privilege, nay, and an honor to have a scroll that you worked for weeks to earn. A single scroll could represent the culmination of hundreds of man-hours, becoming a precious and sought after commodity. A larger amount of time went into the production of paper, just as it went into the writing upon it. In other words, the craftsmanship created it’s worth and the price of the blank scroll increased or decreased proportionately to the amount of work it took to created the medium. Now, this concept of such a simple product being worth so much because of the work put into it’s creation, not necessarily because of its intrinsic value, inspires the question: what is my homework worth? Yes, as frivolous as it may seem, the same principles could be applied to the productions of numerous papers throughout ones education and yet, they are not. I spend hours upon hours brainstorming, contemplating, studying and, indeed, creating long pieces of personal literature that hold no monetary nor bartering value yet, the final product, say, and eight pager paper analyzing and utilizing the writing styles of the late Harriet Jacobs’ The Life of a Slave Girl holds no real world credibility. This paper simply sits in a cybernetic limbo, collecting data dust despite the fact that I poured myself into every syllable I wrote. In fact, I had to pay someone else for the simple right to created this piece of literary fodder. Now, there are those who’s craftsmanship or literary prowess gleans them in come but those people have to jump through hoops, impress a board of publishers who represent only a fraction of the people to which they will inevitable sell t the product, and then, by some stroke of incredible luck, they have to hope that enough people are interested in reading their w2ork to defuse the cost of creating it in the first place. I understand that all of this is an accepted paradigm that most people, including myself, lack the interest to question. My point boils down to this: value lies in such a different place now than in ancient times that things that can bring joy solely because of the work involved barely exist anymore. Value is in how much better, bigger, faster or stronger your “stuff” is, no in what you can look at for yourself and say, “this is beautiful simply because it is; simply because it exists and a human hand and human heart made it.” The hand-on value of products hasn’t necessarily gone down in relation to price, but the demand for, the requirement for “the human touch” has all but disappeared. True, it was a necessity for humans to create papyrus by hand in those times for lack of machines but even in such a field, the artisan was valued as much as the product he created. Machinery has replace the human heart and, I must say, I wish it hadn’t. 

Tricia's "Noise"...

When I sat down to read Tricia Rose’s piece on rap music, I wasn’t sure what, precisely, I expected. The first few sentences pulled me in and I found myself subject to the intriguing points made about rap music and its derivatives. I have studied a good deal of African American/African culture over my past years here at WSU. These studies were both purely academic as well as related to Work and Projects that I have been a part of. One of the topics that have come up a number of times throughout my endeavors is the underlying and nearly constant “rhythm” of African people. In my first show here at WSU, I was part of a play called The Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of God, directed by a woman named Aku Kadogo. She has had extensive experience with different peoples across the globe, having travel so much for her work and she brought her knowledge with her into that production as we brainstormed for the underlying meaning of the script, the rhythm of the work, etc. In her lectures, she would make a point to refer to that same “rhythm” of the people she has studied. Each ethnic group, she stated, had a different sense of melodic living, a way that their very existence created their own personal dance of life. This reading brought that to mind immediately. It spoke of rap music’s harkening back to African drums, call and response and the varying uses of tonality in voice and rhythm. Watching my director do her work, even simply moving from one point to another, is as if one was watching melody and rhythm embodied in a visible entity. That thought and realization inspired me to watch other people much more closely and, indeed, every person has a repetitive flow to their gait as they walk through life, a sort of rhythmic beat. I’ve said all this to preface my comment on the idea that rap music isn’t music at all, but noise. Of course I join the ranks of people who defend rap music in that, in my opinion, music exists autonomously, without the need of human analysis or control. Music needs neither to be created or control, but exists in the very ebb and flow of life on earth. So, by virtue of being of the earth, and of musical creatures, rap is automatically music, just, perhaps, a kind of music some people cannot hear, in a register to low to recognize.