Lab Exercise #1: Da Vinci Exercise

As an introduction to this exercise, here's my favorite rap song of 2012.  If you want to listen, make sure you plug in your headphones before you press play.

What I love about this song, and the video, is that he objectively, figuratively, and abstractly describes certain items in the Thrift Shop in order for the audience to understand why these items are great to show off in the club. In this exercise, you will do something similar by taking your object  and describe it three different ways:

1. Objectively--In a strict journalistic fashion, ie, who, what, when, why, where, how, totally objective. These are concrete attributes you can see, smell, taste, etc. Here's an example:

“It’s a small farm town in the San Luis Valley, down by the New Mexico border. High and dry, flat and windy, ringed by mountains—Sangre de Cristos to the east and south, San Juan, La Garita, and Conejos-Brazos to the north and west. White frosted in winter, dirt brown in spring, green in summer. The cottonwoods that it’s named for turn gold in autumn, and the air is thick with the damp earth smell of potatoes, piled at the edges of fields, stacked in bins and boxes, truckloads and railroad cars full.” (Judith Ryan Hendricks, Isabel’s Daughter).

2. Figuratively or Metaphorically—what does it look like? What does it remind you of? The house looked like a ship docking, etc.

“Even our father is pressed into dancing, which he does like a flightless bird, all flapping arms and potbelly.” (Michael Cunningham, White Angel).

3. Abstractly—relating it to the emotion you feel when you see it. Poetry is full of abstract description, relating an object to a quality apart from itself. Example:

“And Dawes was restless because it was August, and August wasn’t a month, it was a short afternoon, an executioner leading directly, without jury, and finally toward the school where they chained him to dull rooms…” (Dow Mossman, The Stones of Summer).

4. Finally, when you're done with the three different descriptions, I want you to combine it into one description of the item.  Here’s a brilliant descriptive passage that uses all several different kinds of description:

“The daughters march behind her, (concrete) four girls compressed in bodies tight as bowstrings, (figurative) each one tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. (abstract).” (Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible).

Once you're done with this exercise (it should be at least one page), print it out and make sure me or one of the other tutors sign off on it before you leave.  After we sign off on it, keep it for next class and send a copy to yourself/save to google docs before you leave.