Final Blog Compilation
by StephanieMayne on Apr.29, 2011, under Weekly Topics
At the end of the semester, the collection of each student’s blogs will be graded for participation and content.
Template: Spring 2011 Discourse Blog Compilation Template
Compilation will be due by noon on Tuesday, May 10th (email to smayne@thenojo.com).
May 10th, 2011 on 10:14 am
Want to be a Cultural Icon? I don’t.
The course “New Orleans as Discourse “given by professor Irvin Mayfield is a dialogue, a cultural dialogue, a rare chance for students to converse via questions with people who have achieved a high-level of visibility on the cultural scene or popular media. Students are provided with the opportunity to listen to interviews with people who have made it. These celebrity interviews reveal how the selected celebrities believe they made it, what obstacles they overcame, and what in their estimations were the critical success factors, or in ghetto parlance, “how they got over.” The demystification of their success, it is assumed, will necessarily provides students with the inspiration to pursue such careers and success themselves, that is, goad them to aspire to such high visibility professions since very few students attending public universities generally have the tenacity or even opportunity to pursue such careers. But in general, it is true that most high-profile painters, musicians, journalists, chefs, etc., are indeed products of elite institutions such as Berkeley, Harvard, Tulane, and others– and not mundane public universities like UNO. In general, run-of-the-mill institutions produce the anonymous technicians and technocrats that shape and run our society behind the scenes. As a result, the course “New Orleans as Discourse” is designed to offer UNO students the opportunity to think about whether they want to settle for careers behind the scenes or whether they might consider it worth the risk to pursue the more scarce, highly-coveted, and risky careers in the Art, Humanities and Music.
Personally, my reaction to the course “New Orleans as Discourse “ is quite sobering, if not depressing, since I am trapped at a mundane university and have no opportunity to attend a Harvard, Tulane, or Berkeley, which is almost a requirement for achievement at the level of our guests since specialized training is a must. As a Black woman, I feel in the marrow of my bones that such scarce high-profile positions, like those held by our guests, are beyond my reach at this stage of my progression. To achieve such a high-profile position, I would have needed an inordinate amount of talent and have started such a pursuit at least 15 year ago. As it turns out, almost to a person, each of our guests had extraordinary experiences, talent, education or just plain luck since achieving even moderate success in the creative professions entails risks that the average student in general, and myself in particular, would be hard-pressed to engage. In my estimation, being successful in such high-profile careers is incontestably rare and highly improbable for most folks. In addition, to make matters worse, one need only go to Youtube to view literally thousands of individuals with extraordinary talent, (in many cases, talent which rivals contemporary artists), but who, nevertheless, have no venue for their talent other than Youtube. Being a news anchor, a preeminent chef, or a selling painter is no easy trick.