Module 2

For my module 2 project, I did a portion of a song by Bright Eyes called, "Bowl of Oranges." The first half of the song is a story, and the second half is basically the author's analysis of the story he just told. The portion I am working with is the analysis. The text I'm working with is:

So, that is how I learned the lesson that everyone is alone
and your eyes must do some raining if you're ever going to grow
but when crying don't help and you can't compose yourself
it's best to compose a poem;
an honest verse of longing or a simple song of hope
that is why I'm singing, baby don't worry 'cause now I got your back
and every time you feel like crying,
I'm going to try and make you laugh
and if I can't, if it just hurts too bad,
then we will wait for it to pass
and I will keep your company
through those days so long and black
and we'll keep working on the problem that we know we'll never solve
of love's uneven remainders, our lives are fractions of a whole
but if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall
then I think we would see the beauty
then we would stand in awe
at our still lives posed
like a bowl of oranges
like a story told
by the fault lines and the soil.

I really enjoyed working with this text because it was so interesting to play up certain words with fonts and colors. I thought I would struggle to convey the way I decoded the text without being able to use images--but I found that font and color substitutes for images surprisingly nicely. I was able to employ imagery in my text, too, by drawing out the word "long" and by turning the line, "could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall," into a square-like frame. I also turned the two lines, "at our still lives posed/like a bowl of oranges" into a bowl-shaped text. Originally, this was the only color I used in the whole piece--I made this text orange, so that both the imagery of the oranges and the bowl was in tact within the text. Later, I changed the colors on other words, too, because it seemed fitting.

My favorite fonts I used were the broken-up and distorted fonts I used for the phrases "uneven remainders" and "fractions." I wanted to really express that these were uneven, broken, and not full--as opposed to the bold and full text of "whole" in the words, "fractions of a whole." The font I used later on for "fault lines" was similar, but slightly different. I wanted my audience to decode all of these words as being unsteady.

As I revise this draft, I will play more with creating shapes out of my words. Some of my classmates really employed this technique, and it worked very nicely. I hope to incorporate some of that method into my final copy.