For those freshmen lucky enough to be in NYU’s favorite accoladed writer-slash-professor Jonathan Safran Foer‘s “Impossible Writing” Collegiate Seminar (well, okay, Junot Diaz is teaching this semester too…), the first assignment was to create a site-specific writing piece. Some students left a marked-up phone book in a phone booth, and some wrote love letters in Washington Square Park.
Freshman Ari Lipsitz used five floors worth of windows at Third North to create his piece. “It’s the story of a relationship gradually deteriorating; the clocks on the left are symbolic of the couple getting bored and eventually splitting,” said Lipsitz. Sounds more fun than your average Writing the Essay assignment, right?
I did this for a creative writing class once, too! My prof was a masters student of JSF. I made a fake plaque on a park bench, but this is way more involved/cool.
What was the actual text of the piece though?
wait– FRESHMEN get to take JSF classes? :’(
He actually used my window for this project! Woot! He was really nice.
The dialog is basically towards the top them meeting, the next floor is them getting together, the next is them breaking off and the last is them speaking to each other again, not necessarily getting into the relationship again, but being friends. I may have skipped a floor by accident though.
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