Academic Plan

Through the work done this semester, I have gotten a better idea of what I want to do. My literature review about the dialogue between post-modernism and Zen Buddhism helped me to think about the issue of language and its limits. My interest seems to be in understanding what is on the outside (or inside) of language. What cannot be expressed in language. And the kind of faith we need to be effective thinkers and speakers. Not faith in a traditional religious sense, but in an everyday sense. My feeling is that we all use this kind of faith to live our lives everyday. It takes faith to communicate something successfully, to make that leap in thinking that allows one to believe one human being could truly understand another.

I think this applies to the current situation in our culture, where people often have a hard time communicating. In the mainstream media, dialogue can often be stifling, as it sometimes works not to open new possibilities but to polarize the disparate camps of thought. To a lesser degree, Academia seems caught up in this too. I have found Derrida and post-modernism to be an interesting way to clarify our understanding of this problem. To work towards strengthening our perception and asking better questions, to open up new ways of understanding problems, whether they be intellectual or otherwise, seems to me to be very important work right now.

I think this work applies to all languages and media. The difficulty people have in adapting to new media seems to me to be a metaphor for the difficulty found in understanding and opening to the Other. My interest in this is not, I hope, abstract, but rather continues my interest in the language of symbols and in cultural metaphors as a whole. Where this will lead me is still somewhat uncertain.

Certainly, there is a lot going on in even the most unsophisticated of movies and video games that is worth looking at closely. A look at the ontology of video games would be an interesting project, given the medium’s use of first and third person perspectives and its use of non-linear and player-directed narratives.

But what about money? I have a job right now, but it is not very satisfying. I get to use a limited set of skills in print and Web editing, but it certainly is not enough to satisfy my creative side. Will I work in production someday? Quite possibly. Perhaps on some PBS show, a non-fiction show with a small budget. And then we’ll lose funding and I will attempt to sell my skills wherever I can. Ah well…

Plans for the Immediate Future

I plan to broaden my skills. I want to learn to design things, whether on the Web or elsewhere. I would like to continue my writing and perhaps work on a screenplay. Will I be able to synthesize my interest in semiotics, movies, and video games? It will be a challenge, but I look forward to it.

I enjoy writing and telling stories (mainly to my kids) and I will take a course in screenwriting at some point in this program. My plan is to write a thesis exploring some of the themes I have written about this semester. I will continue to take six credits per semester, as I will still be working full time and busy as a father of two children. I plan on taking “Media Practices: Design,” “Cinematography: Art and Technique,” and a video editing course. Next semester, I will be taking “Cinema Theory and Analysis,” along with “Media Practices: Concepts.”

As I think my visual abilities have gone somewhat untapped in my life; it will be exciting to see if I can tap those now, whether in screenwriting or some other visually rich field. I am most excited to get a chance to do my own design and video work in the “Concepts” class. I would like to make some short video pieces dealing with some of the themes I mentioned earlier. I enjoy some of the more experimental videos on YouTube, especially those that mix the spoken word with interesting visuals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xmqz38QtSU

I also find short animations very inspiring, like this one from two of the animators from “South Park.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4&feature=related


I will take design and short film and video classes to augment my understanding of this type of work.

Right now, for my “Ideas” class, I am working on a paper concerning Heidegger and McLuhan’s views on technology. I find this topic to be extremely interesting. Heidegger has this concept of technology as “revealing.” But what is being revealed? This type of question seems to be worth asking, as we are in a bind with technology in western society. To think about media in its social, political, and spiritual implications makes a lot of sense to me. How can we improve our use of it in this culture? Why is McLuhan’s “global village” the site of so much intolerance and bloodshed?


I have a sense that my emphasis on signs and language could be an attempt to understand why it is that members of the same species are so intent upon destroying each other. Why it is we cannot understand each other, the Other, on so many levels. Despite our technological and scientific “progress,” we as a culture are far more violent, cruel, and perverse than any primitive culture could imagine. An inner journey is needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SnfxItXe7s


While at times it seems as if combining the theoretical and the practical in my work will be difficult, the challenge is worthwhile. And I think I am in the right place – as combining theory and practice is the aim of this program.

My intellectual journey is taking me more and more towards a synthesis of the different kinds of thinking I have learned to use during my life. I'm not quite sure what this will be like. I am still developing the skills I need and a stronger sense of theory. I do know that I am interested in a critical understanding of media and of the culture we live in.

The first words I ever heard that had something transcendent about them came from the pulpit of the Bible Baptist Church in my hometown. Our preacher had a deep, rich voice and he liked to intone his sermons slowly, putting emphasis on the important words. While I understood nothing he said, I responded to the sound of his words, and the silence of the congregation. This silence spoke of respect for both the man and the message. And it spoke of power. The power to make others silent, to make them listen.

So, awkwardly, I began my own studies of the Bible. I started to read the Bible through when I was about 10 years old. I plodded on, as difficult as it was at times with its genealogies and lists – and the occasional burst of anger and violence. The god of the Old Testament seemed cruel and oddly blind to the suffering of his chosen people. I managed to get to the Book of Jeremiah, and then gave up. A few years later, I read the New Testament. I found its message of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation much more inspiring than the hopelessness and anger of the Old Testament.

From that point, I moved on to modern Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge. This afforded me an entrance into English Literature and I began to learn what good writing was. Crisp and clear, language used with grace, humor, and pathos. You have to understand that I was always striving to understand my place in the world, while staying within the limitations of my world, as defined by fundamentalist belief and fear. Then I read “Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton and my mind graduated to the next level of awareness. Or, as Henry Miller put it, “another layer of the onion was peeled.” Now I was in the land of the transcendental, the land of the poet. This was a place where words mean more than they mean. The land of the metaphor. In this world, I was free of the restraints of my reality.

So, language, and specifically the higher language of metaphor, was the freeing of my mind from fundamentalism. Things and actions didn’t always mean what they equaled in the concrete sense. This realization delivered me mentally from the harsh dialectic of belief and fear that I knew from church and home.

One key experience was seeing Glenn Gould play the piano on television. I describe that experience elsewhere on this blog. Another, visual, influence would be Orson Welles. I was excited as I watched Citizen Kane for the first time. Up to that point, my movie watching had been pretty mainstream, simply consisting of the occasional movie at church or school, including a movie I have loved ever since, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. But mainly I had looked at movies as a form of entertainment, a way to pass the time, a bit like television. Citizen Kane was not like that. This movie had a vision; everything mattered, visually, aurally, in the narrative. But mainly, this movie had a maker. Orson Welles had put his mark on every aspect of the film, had stamped it with his identity. I had never seen a movie made in that way. It was as if Welles felt as important to his work as any great novelist of the 19^th century did; he was the author of this movie and demanded to be known by his audience. I saw several of his other movies and read a number of books about him.

It was exciting to think something this specific, this “artistic,” could be done in the medium of film. I was used to accepting images as they were, without any sense of who was making them. I think this was the first step towards a critical visual sense where I was aware of what the filmmaker was saying and thus could begin to do more than merely accept his values and aesthetics. I could think and talk about them, analyze them and then see how I felt about the subject. I began to think about how I would tell a story in the medium of film. I remember how as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy I kept imagining how I would shoot this story as a movie. I thought about actors, tone, style of editing, etc. I was a bit upset when the Peter Jackson movies came out, though I enjoyed the first one greatly. The next two movies looked so different from my own vision that I found them hard to take, though out of jealousy more than an informed criticism.

I also had a period of fascination with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which may have been more of an adolescent crush on both the maker and the actor Peter O’Toole. Leaving one’s boring home, the “fat people of a fat country” as described in the movie, and having life-altering adventures, while nearly bringing freedom to an entire people -- it seems like a respectable adolescent myth to me now. I also found something of Lean’s aesthetic “clean” in a way similar to Welles and Gould. It was an approach to art made free of any filler (that’s the way my adolescent eyes saw it). These artists shared a formal precisions. It seems interesting to me now that all of these artists have at times been accused of being obsessed with the form of their craft.

********************************************************************

Fast forward 10 years: I go to a small liberal arts college in Vermont. There I take a class in Greek and Roman Classics taught by Jim Doyle. A short, wiry man of Irish descent, a troubled yet committed Catholic, a man of great brilliance, humor and feeling. He becomes the only mentor I have had up to now. We mostly communicate through my papers and his corrections. I pull, trying to remain within my constructed world, and he pulls back, trying to draw me into reality. We read The Iliad, Sophocles, Aeschylus. He talks about faith and meaning, metaphor, death, escape, silence. He screams at us for our lack of feeling for what we are reading. He makes sharp jokes. He sometimes plays a whirling bit of Beethoven on the piano. The fact that he is recently diagnosed with terminal cancer informs every word he says.

When I leave that school, I go through a period of great change in my personal life and have to take some time off from school. I eventually finish with my Bachelor’s Degree and move to New York City. There I start work as an editor at a small publishing company and read Marshall McLuhan. Something clicks and I decide that Media Studies at the New School would be the right place for me.

Early Inspiration

I first saw Glenn Gould playing piano on Channel 6, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Living in the hinterlands of Vermont, near the Canadian border, had its perks. I was about 13. I was immediately swept up in the intensity and emotionality of his playing. I had never seen anyone so completely at one with what he was doing. It was as if the piano was an extension of his body. There was no trying, no straining, just absolute confidence; it seemed effortless.

Of course, it wasn't effortless. But Gould had risen to such an advanced level technically that all that was left for him was expression, and this expression happened spontaneously. As he swayed his body, sometimes lifting one arm to conduct the playing hand, he seemed to be in a state of, well, ecstasy.

I was literally rapt with attention throughout the entire performance of Beethoven's Cello Sonata in A major, with Leonard Rose on the cello. What I had always found odd and vaguely unmanly was now fascinating to me. I had watched bits of the Sunday arts show that the recordings were played on, but had always been bored with the classical music, especially the piano styles and flamboyance of the wankerish virtuosos who I would see from time to time. But with Gould I was swept up into it; the beautiful melodies of the mid-period Beethoven didn't hurt.

Before long, I had purchased Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations. Hearing him play Bach was a revelation. His speed and clarity of tone were perfect for this piece. I could hear each line of the piece with total balance and symmetry. And yet, it wasn't all about the technic. Once again, I found his playing to be almost unbearably beautiful. As restrained as his style with Bach could be, there was always the same emotional intensity that you heard in all his playing. It sounded like someone who was restraining very powerful emotions and only letting them seep out in the slowest, smallest way possible.

Though I would go on to buy many of his records, it was always these first encounters on CBC television that inspired me the most. I think it was the visual aspect. Here I was not only hearing gorgeous sounds, but was seeing their expression by a beautiful young man, who, it seemed, was caught up in his work like, well, a young saint of the piano. His spirit I could only compare to mystics I have read about like Francis of Assisi. It was as if Gould was seeing God. And I, watching him see God, was sharing in that experience.

Resume

Jayson Sargent
jaysonsargent@msn.com


City University of New York, Hunter College, graduated 2003
B.A./English

Areas of Concentration: creative writing, ancient history.


Skills
CompTIA A+ Cerification in Computer repair; PC & Mac repair; laptop repair; hardware and software upgrades; data backup & security; Proofreading; copy editing in several fields; writing; Mac and PC literate; Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint; HTML; internet research; digital photography; photo research, Web editing, Blogging.


Experience
Redemtech, Bronx, NY
Computer Technician
Repairing computers for refurbishing and recycling company. Earned CompTIA A+ Certification during this time. 2010-2011

Assistant Editor/ Thirteen/WNET, Educational Publishing,
New York, NY
Proofreading teacher’s guides. Writing copy for guides.
Extensive databasing for outreach projects. Photo research.
Web editing using WordPress. 2007-2009

Freelance Editor/ worked for Society of Neuroscience, Washington, D.C., Thomas Publishing, NYC, etc.
Editing the “Short Courses” science journal. 2004-2006

Copy editor, office assistant/ New York Academy of Sciences
New York, New York
Copy editing scientific journals; office duties. 2002-2004