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In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.
Jane Austen’s depictions of musical performers and listeners in her novels suggest her belief that musical performances should strengthen intimacy between people, both between listeners and performers as well as among listeners. Austen commends music for its power to increase intimacy through honest expressions of taste, which more often arise in private performances, but she warns against its power to decrease intimacy through pretentious displays of taste, which more often arise in public performances. Austen’s belief that music allows for this healthy intimacy indicates that music has great significance in society. Austen suggests that music has a greater importance to everyday life than many may originally suppose, as it is a universal connection between people. Ultimately, Jane Austen’s perspective of music’s great power both to expose pretentiousness and to cultivate intimacy should lead all of her readers to recognize and respect music’s true power and to consider seriously the importance and role of music in their own lives.
Informed by Pope John Paul II’s life and writings, this project takes a faith-based, humanities approach to addressing the issue of homelessness. The thesis combines writing, music, and Catholicism to inspire audiences and motivate them to make tangible changes for those in need. Through poetry, creative nonfiction, and letters, the written portion of the thesis depicts true, individual encounters with people who are homeless. These stories are connected by themes of nature, simplicity, beauty, humility, and human dignity. The creative portion of this thesis is a music video with an original song called Unspoken Words. The song includes violin, ukulele, and vocal tracks, lyrics rooted in Pope John Paul II’s poetry, a strong emphasis on the importance of acknowledging and affirming human dignity, and a call to action at the end. The call to action invites audiences to, if possible, donate financially to organizations within the Diocese of Phoenix, which are linked in the video description. These organizations include the Office of Mental Health Ministry, the Humanitarian Aid Fund for Ukraine, and the Charity and Development Appeal. The video also invites all audience members to be kind with intention in order to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually brighten the lives of those around them.
Most protein-coding mRNAs in eukaryotes must undergo a series of processing steps so they can be exported from the nucleus and translated into protein. Cleavage and polyadenylation are vital steps in this maturation process. Improper cleavage and polyadenylation results in variation in the 3′ UTR length of genes, which is a hallmark of various human diseases. Previous data have shown that the majority of 3’UTRs of mRNAs from the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans terminate at an adenosine nucleotide, and that mutating this adenosine disrupts the cleavage reaction. It is unclear if the adenosine is included in the mature mRNA transcript or if it is cleaved off. To address this question, we are developing a novel method called the Terminal Adenosine Methylation (TAM) assay which will allow us to precisely define whether the cleavage reaction takes place upstream or downstream of this terminal adenosine. The TAM Assay utilizes the ability of the methyltransferase domain (MTD) of the human methyltransferase METTL16 to methylate the terminal adenosine of a test mRNA transcript prior to the cleavage reaction in vivo. The presence or absence of methylation at the terminal adenosine will then be identified using direct RNA sequencing. This project focuses on 1) preparing the chimeric construct that positions the MTD on the mRNA cleavage site of a test mRNA transcript, and 2) testing the functionality of this construct in vitro and developing a transgenic C. elegans strain expressing it. The TAM assay has the potential to be a valuable tool for elucidating the role of the terminal adenosine in cleavage and polyadenylation.