i apologize for not posting yesterday...

But I had an interesting experience. I had a meeting with Dr. Burton yesterday and on my way home had a couple of good ideas, but no computer. 

So I finally pulled out the memo app on my phone for the first time and started writing. 

I rewrote my whole introduction on my phone via texting. 

Alright, I know that's nothing new for people, but it's such a big step from where our culture was not that long ago. How's that for digital culture?

[And if anyone has great ideas for a way of getting all this stuff off my phone without having to type it again, let me know! I tried Evernote, but it's not giving me what I need because my phone is not compatible.]

Creating Mockingbirds: Harper Lee, Boo Radley, and the Importance of an Authorial Online Presence

"For Harper Lee, [To Kill a Mockingbird] rolled out beautifully, it sold beautifully, it took on a life of its own, and its success had very little to do with the fact that she had to be out selling it. The book stood for itself. It would be nice to have that kind of a culture today, but we don't anymore." - Adriana Trigiani in Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird

After the first day of Writing Literary Criticism in the Digital Age, I knew exactly what I would do for my final project, and it would be the most exciting BYU had ever seen. The 50^th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had just passed and I wanted to talk to this celebrated author. I would compose such an enthralling and complimentary letter that when Nelle, as her friends call her, opened her mailbox she would weep then offer to fly me down to Monroeville, Alabama, where we would sit and talk for hours about her novel. Or, worst-case scenario, at least we would visit pleasantly over the phone.

It never happened. Firstly, I’m not a brilliant writer. Secondly, after some snooping (a.k.a. Google-ing) I discovered that Harper Lee has not granted an interview since 1964 (a mere four years after publication) nor published anything since Mockingbird (“About the Author”). I was stunned and disappointed, then curious. Lee wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on her first try, a beloved novel that spent 88 consecutive weeks on bestseller lists, then abruptly dropped out of public view (“About the Author”). Why? My further search garnered intriguing results. In her final interview, Lee admitted that the attention was unexpected, overwhelming, and almost “frightening” (Madden 162).  Alice and friend Reverend Thomas Lane Butts have said that the exploitation of her words and works, specifically misrepresented interviews and autographed books, was disheartening (Murphy 71, 128). Even more intriguing, however, were accusations that To Kill a Mockingbird was in fact the work of renowned author and Lee’s longtime childhood friend and colleague, Truman Capote.

In 2003, Archulus Persons, Capote’s father, claimed to Ben Windham that “almost all” of Mockingbird was written by Capote (Windham 5). Of course Alice, Lee’s close friends, and the majority of Mockingbird scholars and readers plead otherwise (Block, Windham 5). But because neither Lee nor Capote has explicitly said otherwise, a few diehard Capote fans still believe. Though today greatly outnumbered, these believers have pushed their opinions into the spotlight, posting on blogs and forums across the internet. 

Mysteriousness, absence, and incomplete stories generate rumors; and few have told this tale more clearly than Lee herself. Arthur Radley, known to Jem, Scout, and Dill as Boo, had not been sighted since Scout could remember. It is unknown whether it was by force or will, but Boo rarely, if ever, appeared outside the Radley Place, and certainly never in broad daylight. Never having heard anything different, Scout believed Jem characterized Boo “reasonably”: “[He] was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were blood-stained.... There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time” (Lee 14). The children’s playacting was based on half-true stories, and much of their entertainment came from “the idea of making Boo Radley come out” (Lee 43, 9).

Very little time or creativity is needed to twist a story or description into a slightly less factual one, and it takes even less time to proliferate through a well-connected community.  The children knew only enough of the stories and descriptions which Miss Maudie believed to be “three-fourths colored folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford,” the town gossip (Lee 51). Jem, Scout, and Dill took for truth what they had heard, regardless of the source. They did not know what Boo Radley actually did or looked like, but because of “facts” circulating around their little town by those who were actively engaged in continuous conversation with their neighbors, the children did not know where to get the real facts, likely did not recognize that their perceptions were skewed.

The same can be said for literature readers on the Internet today. Just as Boo Radley’s history, appearance, and even personality were formulated in the minds of many by rapidly-spreading gossip in a tight-knit town like Maycomb, authors who fail to enter with a strong presence into the digital world (where information spreads even more rapidly) leave the door ajar for active members of the public to push in and create their presence for them.

When readers turn to the Internet to find out more about a book or an author, they most often Google it or try the most obvious domain name, usually the author’s name or the book title (Krozser 16, 18). Type Harperlee.com into the address bar and a fan-based website with this disclaimer appears: “Please note that harperlee.com is a private website, unaffiliated with Harper Lee or her representatives. Her reps cannot be reached through this site and we cannot forward messages to them.” Something similar appears under the domain name harperlee.org.

I echo bestselling author Adriana Trigiani who considers our digital age culture as one which rarely supports authors who are not marketing themselves (Murphy 184). No longer can authors release a book and go into hiding as Harper Lee did. Now it is necessary for authors to “participate in the conversation” about their work and make participation for readers easy, entertaining, and informative (Hyatt “7 Ways”). The Internet is an impressive, relatively new medium that is evolving daily, and as a result authors must also evolve. Buddying up to readers is now not simply a supplement to an author’s marketing scheme; it is a necessity.

Works Cited (unfinished)

Block, Melissa. “Letter Puts End to Persistent ‘Mockingbird’ Rumor.” National Public Radio. Web. 5 June 2011.

HarperLee.com. “Contact Us.”

Hyatt, Michael. “7 Ways to Build your Author Brand Online.”

-- . “Why Every Author Needs a Powerful Online Presence.”

Krozser, Kassia and Kirk Biglione. “Building Author Web Presence.” Web. 2 June 2011.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Print.

Madden, Kerry. Harper Lee: A Twentieth Century Life. Print.

Murphy, Mary McDonagh. Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. Print.

“To Kill a Mockingbird: About the Author.” National Endowment for the Arts: The Big Read. Web. 5 June 2011.

Windham, Ben. “Southern Lights: An Encounter with Harper Lee.” Web. 5 June 2011.

Alyssa Rutter is a Brigham Young University sophomore studying English and editing. She is a musician, a reader, a family enthusiast, and a lover of all things beautiful.

[Dear Readers,

Feedback is much appreciated. To get you started… Here are some questions:

How’s the title?

Do you think the writing is too “bloggy,” or not “academic” enough?

What didn’t flow like it should?

Anything confusing? Did it work to not pull everything together until more towards the end?

How do you cite forums and blog comments?

Would it be helpful to have headings, such as Harper Lee, Boo Radley, and The Importance of an Authorial Online Presence?

I can edit this piece until Wednesday, June 8.]

putting it all together... it's coming

The long post earlier today was more for me than anyone else. I've been struggling a little bit the last couple of days because of a sudden change in topic. Suddenly, my previous research is rendered useless, and I'm left to find all new research and write a chapter for a book [albeit a rough draft] in two days. I failed on that account. I spent way too much time at the library on Thursday finding way too much research, finding over forty quotes when I only needed three or four. So please bear with me as I scramble to put together a cohesive chapter on a subject which I am really interested in...

working draft: boo radley, harper lee, and creating an online presence

I apologize for the extremely rough draft; this is more of an outline with ideas and quotes. Good organization is still in the process; I'm open to any ideas!

Boo Radley

  Why? 

    * "I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time... it's because he wants to stay inside." (Lee 259).

        - Compare to Harper Lee (see second quote)

  Personality, physical description, actions as seen by everyone else

    * "Jem, naturally, was Boo: he went under the front steps and shrieked and howled from time to time. As the summer progressed, so did our game. We polished and perfected it, added dialogue and plot until we had manufactured a small play upon which we rang changes every day." (Lee 43). 

    * "That is three fourths colored folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford," said Miss Maudie grimly. "Stephanie Crawford even told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and found him looking in the window at her. I said what did you do, Stephanie, move over in the bed and make room for him?" (Lee 51).

        - Very quickly, descriptions and stories transform into new stories. Jem, Scout, and Dill in reality had not idea what had happened in Boo's life or what he actually did or looked like, but because of the stories circulated around the community by those who actively engaged in conversation with their neighbors, the children had a skewed perception about what was going on.

    * "Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were blood-stained-- if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time." (Lee 14)

        -Compare above quote to what he really looks like: "I looked from his hands to his sand-stained khaki pants; my eyes traveled up his thin frame to his torn denim shirt. His face was as white as his hands, but for a shadow on his jutting chin. His cheeks were thin to hollowness; his mouth was wide; there were shallow, almost delicate indentations at his temples, and his gray eyes were so colorless I thought he was blind. His hair was dead and thin, almost feathery on top of his head." (Lee 310).

  Is there a problem? 

    * "What Mr. Radley did was his own business. If he wanted to come out, he would. If he wanted to stay inside his own house he had the right to stay inside free from the attentions of inquisitive children, which was a mild term for the likes of us. ... What Mr. Radley did might seem peculiar to us, but it did not seem peculiar to him. Furthermore, had it never occurred to us that the civil way to communicate with another being was by the front door instead of a side window?" (Lee 54).  

    * "Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad." (Lee 320).

        -Authors are writing books that aren't being recognized because they aren't marketing them well enough, especially over the internet. Furthermore, when we enjoy a piece of work, we have the opportunity to say something, find their website and contact information and send them an email. Are we letting authors without those things go unappreciated because other forms of communication are just too time consuming?

    * "even from the first, when Boo is most terrifying, he is not an alien totally removed from their lives: Boo is closer to them than they first suspect. He is from the first metaphorically kin to them, a part of them even before he enters their minds and imaginations, and he has lived on the street with them for as long as they can remember. He is always there, near them, in a house that at one time was white and not unlike their own. In befriending Boo, the children are confronting a hidden part of themselves." (Johnson 85).

Harper Lee

  Why? 

    * "Nelle Harper Lee 'comes from a generation of writers who never appeared on Oprah, people who were fairly private. And as we've made stars and personalities of our novelists, we can't understand why anybody would want to keep their private lives private. Everybody wants to be on TV.' --Professor Claudia Durst Johnson." (Madden 21).

        - This is one particularly common point of view. The majority of our community has their own Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blog, and other websites which are seen by some as exploitation. But why not use those resources for good?

    * "It was like being hit over the head and knocked out cold. You see, I never expected any sort of success with "Mockingbird." I didn't expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected." -Harper Lee(Madden 162). 

        - This quote came from Lee's final public interview.

  Who is she? 

    * "If you want to know what's in her heart, in her consciousness, then go open the book. The truth is, you just open that book and you just start pulling things from it that you spent a lifetime thinking about." - Rick Bragg (Murphy 60).  

    * "I once referred to Nelle Harper as being conservative, and she corrected me. She said, "I'm not conservative. I'm independent." - Reverend Thomas Lane Butts (Murphy 70)

    * "A lot of people think that she's recluse, which is absolutely untrue. She's a person who enjoys her privacy like any other citizen would. She's not reclusive; it's very different from that. She's open, she loves to be around people and associate with people. She does not like to be exploited by people. And she does not like to have her works exploited for profit by people." - Reverend Thomas Lane Butts (Murphy 71).

    * "For Harper Lee, her novel rolled out beautifully, it sold beautifully, it took on a life of its own, and its success had very little to do with the fact that she had to be out selling it. The book stood for itself. It would be nice to have that kind of a culture today, but we don't anymore." - Adriana Trigani (Murphy 184).

  Is there a problem?

    * "She may not grant interviews, but she is still singing away via her 1960 masterpiece." (Murphy xiv). 

    * "Reverend Thomas Lane Butts... has been a friend of Lee's for more than twenty-five years. ... 'She has controlled her own destiny. She doesn't have a PR person. She doesn't need one. I think she has led a happier life and certainly [a] more contented life because she has chosen how she relates to the public.'" (Murphy 10).

    * "'Maybe for Harper Lee there was nothing else to play," James McBride said. "She sang the song, she played the solo, and she walked off the stage. And we're all the better for it. We're very grateful to her for the amount of love that she's given us.'" (Murphy 41).

Online Presence: Personal Branding [specifically for authors]

    *When you don't create your own online presence, someone else will do it for you

    *Create a website domain with your name or the name of the book.

Bibliography [not complete]

    Johnson, Claudia Durst. "The Danger and Delight of Difference." To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries.

    Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 

    Madden, Kerry. Harper Lee: A Twentieth Century Life.

    http://www.slideshare.net/kbiglione/building-author-web-presence

[Dear Readers, I'm looking for some kind of research that shows the results of not having an online presence. Have you heard of any authors who have had a harder time marketing their books because they didn't have a strong online presence, such as other people creating websites in their names?]

should i tell you, or leave you hanging?

My first question as I finally begin to focus in on a research topic and thesis is this: would it be most beneficial for you, as the audience, to know exactly where I'm going with my research, or to have it all connect in one [or more] beautiful posts towards the end?

There are a pros and cons to each side, as far as I can see it.

Telling you, my audience, straight out
Pros: with no guessing game, you will know whether or not you would like to keep reading or are completely uninterested.
Cons: I would like to try something new, something a little unconventional. But maybe this project, the way it's set up is unconventional enough already.

Holding off
Pros: there will be the element of surprise and suspense. If readers want to know what is going to happen next, they will have to come back to my blog.
Cons: do I actually have the skill to write in a way that will engage or interest my readers so fully that they want to "follow" me or put me in their reader?

What do you think? Would you prefer to have me publish a sort of "hub post" at the beginning of research and writing or at the end?

ebooks. what kind of content?

I should have thought about what I was getting myself into when I signed up to do this research. Very little straightforward information has been given on the internet [at least where I'm looking] about what is produced specifically to be an eBook or literary works that have been reformatted so they can be read on a Kindle, iPad, etc. 

As you can see, our class finally decided on a final project. We're still working on unified content between all of us, but it's been decided that an eBook is the answer. Each of us was assigned to do some research about eBooks-- publishing [like on Goodreads-- a great idea by Ashley Lewis], formats [by Bri and Nyssa], length [by Taylor], use in education [by Amy and Carlie], consumption [by Rachael], . My assignment-- types of content. 

Because there was so little research already, I did some analysis of my own. I went to  Amazon.com Bestsellers in Kindle Store to see what audiences have been choosing. Of the top 20 paid bestsellers, one is a game, two are autobiographies, and the rest [17] are popular novels. Of the top 20 free bestsellers, one is a collection of biographical short stories, one is a cookbook, one is an iPad how-to, four are games, and 13 are novels. A good number of these novels [both in the paid and free bestsellers] look like trashy romances.

Obviously, our class is not going for a game, a cookbook, or a trashy romance novel, but a good number of the popular eBook buys are autobiographical. Especially as a child I would go through LDS magazines to get straight to the stories sent in by every day people. And even today those autobiographical stories are the most engaging. I don't know how we as a class could make our literary works relate to our own lives, but I feel that for many audiences, including autobiographical information in relation to whatever we're writing would be much more exciting than plain literary criticism. [This may go against my hope for "legitimate literary criticism" the last paragraph of this post, which I never thanked Dr. Burton for so completely addressing.]

antiracist pedagogy in Huck Finn using project muse

Bri Zabriskie, one of my classmates, is researching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I decided to try to help her out in her research because there are many similar themes in our two books. From what I know, she's interested in relating Huck Finn to education, so I used the database Project Muse to look for an article that may help her.

In the advanced search boxes, I put "Huckleberry Finn" AND education and after looking through a page or two of results, found this article:

Barrish, Phillip. "The Secret Joys of Antiracist Pedagogy: Huckleberry Finn in the Classroom." American Imago 59.2 (2002): 117-139. Project MUSE. Web. 27 May 2011.

This article talks about the difficulty for white liberal professors to teach in an anti-racist way in classrooms with mostly white students. In a way, while trying to be anti-racist, racist backgrounds and sentiments are very likely to arise, generally subconsciously. He talks specifically about the "oft-discussed dilemmas" brought up by Huck Finn, especially using the n-word in classrooms.

Hopefully this relates in some way to Bri's research. I found it especially interesting to read a professor's personal thoughts on the subject and the way he was dealing with the issues he bring up. There may even be an opportunity to contact this professor, if Bri is interested.

[bri, i'm not sure that this is exactly what you're looking for, but it's an idea. i hope you get something worthwhile out of it! also, while i was looking i found an article by Kenneth Kid called "Boyology" that talks about the problems young boys have and how we should educate them. it only barely mentioned huck finn, but i thought you might be interested because you are having a boy :)]