Final Post...maybe?

So, we come to the end, heh? School is like Christmas--you never remember what you were given then in July. So, the most important question to ask (of any class) is what have I learned? Nothing, is the correct answer. Aside from learning the dynamics of orality, I have learned that it is possible to understand the universe inside myself. We realized these possibilites with our memory theater, but I truly enjoy entertaining the idea that I can know everything if I put my mind to it. More importantly, I've enjoyed seeing this possibility materialize in each of you. There is always something bigger in Dr. Sexson's classes. Often, the overarching theme is making the ordinary extraordinary (which no doubt can be applied to this class, and has been through Groundhog's Day), but for this class, it seems that we can make ourselves extraordinary by interorizing the outside world of both orality and textuality. "If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first recreate the universe" (Carl Sagan), and this is what seems to have taken place in this class, with Shaman as Pastry Chef. To understand the universe, we have created within ourselves the universe.

My Presentation

An applehead bahlness wearing a tow sack with schtriwwelich hair was gretzing about dippy ecks. So I tolls her, madam, I’ll switcher yer a polecat fer dem dippy ecks, if I getsuh bulbenik wid it. She certainly was schmegegge. She said her hoonanny was in buck pasture, but it aint why she was a moldoon . From these few short sentences it is not difficult to ascertain how the typographic mode of communication has also lent itself to a collective, yet unconscious, sense of alienation. I am too far steeped in my own decadent generation to fully engender primary orality within myself, but from my campfire experiences and time spent with my dogs I might be able to assume some of those underlying premonitions that might be felt if you were to place a being of oral antiquity in a visually illuminated and defined world such as our own. All semblance of niche united knowledge—gone. The tiniest expression or nuance or individual thought—not to be found. The chances of phonetically communicating in such a way that everyone around can understand—slim. Yet the urgency to correctness and conformity will heavily impose themselves on this wayward traveler as not only does typographic space demand staunch coherency (especially if nationalism is to prevail) to its rigid, grammatical formulations, but that space becomes so expansive and specialized that it becomes impossible for this oral alien to experience the cultural tradition as a patterned whole.
To first understand how expansive print has made the [American] cultural repertoire, simply walk into your nearest bookstore. There is, upon immediate entrance, an overwhelmingly vast amount of material to read in too little time that one cannot feel, as he reaches his life’s decrescendo, that he has learned or experienced all that was available to him. This scenario is entirely the opposite of an oral era where “every social situation cannot but bring the individual into contact with the groups’ patterns of thought, feeling and action: the choice is between the cultural tradition—or solitude” (Goody, 59). What has become so decadent and lamentable about my generation is the immediate gratification and the infinite amounts of personal selection available to a young boy or a girl. If Tiny Tim does not want to be a laborer he can go to school and learn another trade that, although lacking the social utility that a tight-knit, patterned oral community would necessitate, might earn him far greater riches and joys in life. The advent of print, and its production of textbooks from which Tim can study, enabled these choices. If Dainty Daisy decides she wants to study the pooping patterns of ungulates west of the Great Divide where the regional air quality is dense with Legionella, she may also specialize in this field. Yet this notion of specialization is fundamentally at odds with those of daily life, common knowledge, and an oral culture’s need immediate social utility. This conflict, teases Jack Goody, “is embodied in the long tradition of jokes about absent-minded professors” (Goody, 60).
Professors, though, are not the only ones who forget. Due to the size and unchecked propagation of the literate gamut, the amount of information that relates to a cultural, patterned whole that any one present-day individual knows must be miniscule in comparison with our Wayward Oral Alien. His culture is homeostatic whereby an equilibrium is achieved by “sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (Ong, 46). Print’s sheer producing and recording power has with it no system of elimination, and produces what Goody describes as “structural amnesia” which “prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society” (Goody, 57). Consequently, this system fosters a strong sense of alienation from one’s own culture. Nietzsche himself felt alienated after attempting to converse with Tiny Tim and Dainty Daisy, but resorted to small talk and calling them “Walking Encyclopedias” after realizing that, because of print, they were bratty, know-it-all, undergrads.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries epitomize this accumulation of knowledge found in modern, literate persons. The enormous lexicon of information and vocabularies produced within the endpapers of these printed behemoths—the 1909 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary contains over 400,000 entries—comprises what Einar Haguen termed and Walter Ong describes as the “Grapholect.” The written language of the grapholect arises from dialects—varieties of a language that are characteristic of a particular group of the language’s speakers. Though the United States does not have an official language, our grapholect is distinctly [North] American and from it a standardized, national language has emerged. The modern grapholect reestablishes connectedness throughout a nation once divided by various oral speech forms. Ong asserts that because all other English dialects are interpreted in the grapholect, that “those competent in the grapholect today can establish easy contact not only with millions of other persons but also with the thought of centuries past...”(Ong, 106).
This all speaks well and fine of a literate person today, but what of an illiterate person living in such a highly textual environment, or simply someone not as well-versed in the grapholect? Though Father Ong seems relatively optimistic about the emergence of the grapholect, Marshall McLuhan seems less than willing to accept print as a tool of human progress and emancipation while quoting Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication. “Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century” (Marshall McLuhan, 216). The consolidation of unique vernaculars into the dictionary which is to be our principal typographically communicative source creates “special classes of readers with little prospect of communication between them” (McLuhan, 216). Sadly, the dialects that have given our grapholect character, as well as those pockets of America that continue to use them, have been ousted, marginalized and are subject to constant complaints of “Grammar Nazis”.
Jack Goody brilliantly states that, unlike in an oral culture when the decision is either cultural tradition or solitude, “the mere fact that reading and writing are normally solitary activities means that in so far as the dominant cultural tradition is a literate one, it is very easy to avoid...” (Goody, 60). Thus, from a literate culture arises a new type of alienated man—the Byronic Hero who marches to the beat of his own drum, shuns appearances and the edicts of the unwashed, consumer-oriented society, and sounds his own dialect and “barbaric yawp”. McLuhan describes these Whitmanian characters as not only marginal, but also as oral and as having great appeal to the new, visually oriented literate crowd. “For the marginal man is a centre-without-a-margin, an integral independent type...The new urban or bourgeois man is centre-margin oriented. That is, he is visual, concerned about appearances and conformity or respectability” (McLuhan, 213). These qualities of marginality, orality, unrestraint, and adherence to nonstandard, and therefore quite possibly magical and certainly intriguing, vernaculars make, for the small collection of other washed and marginal characters who allow negative capabilities, artists such as Faulkner and Joyce a pleasure to read.
The new urban image is all about glamour and it has permeated our culture through every possible agency, as witnessed when perusing magazine stands or channel surfing. This commercialized ideal of glamour and the overarching importance of appearances take root in the literate instigation of grammar. In a world dictated by appearances, the need (as Kris of the Laughing Rats has demonstrated) for conformity, correctness, and an observable sense of Nationalism, makes it is hopeless for literates to live “without dictionaries, written grammar rules, punctuation, and all the rest of the apparatus that makes words into something you can “look” up...” (Ong, 14). Wayward Oral Alien is attempting, but unable, to decipher the sound two dots held in vertical alignment makes, to communicate the gutturalness of a line that tapers to a dot, to voice the agitation of a dot held over a dot with a tail or resonate the hesitancy of a squiggly dot, ampersand or an ellipses. “It is presumably impossible to make a grammatical error in a non-literate society, for nobody ever heard one” (McLuhan, 239). When the ink is firmly stamped and set, that which makes Mongolian Throat Singers spellbinding and a little flyting or stichomythia so scathing subordinates what is readily apprehend by the reader on the page, only to be imagined somewhere between the lines; and the second, intoned language that accompanies dialect and grapholect alike is relinquished to the realm of appearances, all true meaning lost.
Print permanently altered the conscious and unconscious realities of the literate individual since the invention of the printing press in 1440; until just recently, in an era of unrelenting, global, electronic stimulation, are we beginning to think on a more oral, socially intuit level—but only after we have disregarded spontaneity and succumbed to heavy introspection. We become more globally up-to-date through the urgings of textual media, more socially aware because that is every citizen’s responsibility according to the book. First we turn inward to the solitude of literature and print, which then tells us to turn outward to our community. It is this first step which Wayward Oral Alien and all marginal characters find unnecessary.

A Blog for Lynda Sexson

Hi everybody. This blog is more or less intended for Lynda Sexson in relation to an assignment for our "Text and Image" class. It is Carl Sagan relating the murder of Hypatia to the loss of the Library of Alexandria. We may understand his point in relation to our class by seeing Hypatia as Giordano Bruno, or someone who tries to understand infinity but is killed for it. This clip is from Cosmos. I watched an hour of this series last night and within the first 5 minutes Sagan had demonstrated the "mis-en-abyme" idea by holding a mirror on each side of a candle, explaining that there is an "infinite regress" in the infinites of the very small and very large. I see Carl Sagan as being very kindred to the like of the people we have been studying, such as Joyce or Lull or many other writers the Dr. Sexson(s) would deem as "good", in the sense that they do not limit themselves only to what they can see or readily attain in the world but constantly seek other-worldly and even God-like wisdom, always tring to incorporate infinity.

A concise explanation of our presentation

Our group used "Maps" as a jumping off place for our ideas. Because we didn't have much time, we all decided to write our own little stories within the context of a larger one, hence invoking the idea of frames. Numerous allusions to texts such as F.W., Ozymandius, and the Divine Comedy were made to also enhance the mis-en-abyme effect of our story. We did not know what the other stories were prior to reading them, but if they had not fit together that would have been fine because so many of the myths in Kane jump from place to place that you start to get the idea that theme connects the events rather than cause and effect. We told the story of a man who had been drunk the previous night and was in search of a book he had lost. The only hitch was that he had no literate means of re-tracing his steps. We figured that an inebriated individual was the closest thing to a primary orality we could effectively and believably write and personify (except for maybe a dog), yet there is still some "residual textuality" left in our story and in the perceptions of our protagonist. The biggest qualm that anyone has, including Plato, is that we cannot express oral perceptions in a textual way.

So off went our adventurer retracing his steps, using everything un-texual to find where he was going. In this way we were easily able to use Kane, who explained that oral myths were rooted in the land, and that "what holds the whole elaborate structure of stories fresh in memory is the likeness of the patterns of story to the life of the land." As such, we also wanted you as a class to use the "lay-of-the-land" to try to determine where we are going. Each place on our route was, as Kane would describe, a "place of local meaning where mystery is felt". Because myths use maps, but not of the chirographic kind, it would seem that one must incorporate elements of synesthesia into his or her natural way of life. You need to develop different sensory ways of perceiving the same material.

The route went as such: Library, Spectators, Stadium, Montana Hall, Duck Pond, Cooper Park, The Barmuda Triangle, Pita Pit, the "M", Bozeman Beach, GV Mall, and back to Renne Library. I'm am positive that there were things I didn't catch in our story, but each locale had a certain association, or maybe mnemonic device, which made the map like a memory theater. Jose Arcadio Buendia's suicide smelt like the gun powder they use to blast off the cannon when the Cats score a touchdown, MT Hall is where the moocow was led but unable to walk down. I think one of the larger themes that we tried to exemplify was a way of telling a story, understanding history, and organizing ideas through agencies other than text, because, it would seem, once text gets involved in these processes the possibility of their manifestation has "gone to shit". There is no socially coherent way of mapping (the origins, limitations, mores, etc.) a community when typography makes that community expansive and global. But, when we use non-textual devices to try to describe where we are in Bozeman, it becomes something known only to locals, it becomes esoteric.

I'm going to end there. So much for conciseness. Read Melissa, Robert, Karrie (sp*, sorry), and Parker's blog because I am sure they had different ideas about our objective, but nonetheless they presented wonderful versions of the whole that surprised and entertained me as much as you (I hope).

Class test questions...explicated

Hi everybody. We all have the same notes for class (I copy and pasted these from Chris's blog, so thanks), but I thought I'd expand on them just a bit. Not that any of the expansion will be on the test, but it might help to jog your memory if we can make a few connections and get past the esoterica of abstractions. One question I would have like to have seen is "If you want somebody to grow up to be a thief you call them a.....thief! A question that represents the power of suggestion in either a primarily oral or a literate culture--or a secondarily oral culture.

1. Nietzsche says we are all walking dictionaries
I never actually got this question from the Ong text, but from Jack Goody's "The Consequences of Literacy". You'll notice that Ong often cites Goody. The idea behind the fact that we are all walking dictionaries can be found throughout Ong, most notably on page 104 and 123ish, where he describes the modern vocabularies as "magna-vocabularies". There's so much information out there in the print culture that no longer are our means of communication aggregative, but actually very exclusionary. There is a lot of individual choice involved in reading--what you want to learn and read, and what you don't. As such, this can be an overwhelmingly alienating feeling because, as opposed to an oral culture where everyone in a particular milieu know the same things, the print culture read and relates only one the individual wants.

2. Off Sutter's Talk of Ramone Lull, name these terms for given to him: Motion, No Images, Non-Corporeal, Ladder, Tree.
Brandon's initial question was what are Thomas Acquinas's four rules of memory, and which ones were used by Lull. On Yates pg. 85, Acquinas's rules are: that the man trying to remember should dispose those things which he wishes to remember in a certain order, the second is that he should adhere to them with affection, the third is that he should reduce them to unusual similitudes, and the fourth is that he shuld repeat them with frequent meditation. Lull focused on this last rule of memory, in addition to introducing motion to memory. This is important because rather than the similitudes being stagnent, Lull uses the 9 attributes of God arranged in a circle (like an alethiometer) and moves the circle like you would a combinatorial lock. The stairs Lull uses to ascend to heaven and his tree to help memorize the abstractions. The stairs and the tree are images in and of themselves, but they are used to memorize not individual items, but Lulls memory schematisation in general. The memorization of abstractions, not similitudes, becomes visual.

3. Ong Chap. 6 - Triangle vs. Box (questions will go along these.... remember Fritag Triangular form as reference to Aristotle's Poetics vs. Mis-en-Abyme (into the abyss) Box within Box form of Orality)
This is probably one of my favorite questions that we could ask. The narratives of a literate culture form a triangle with a rising action, a climax, and a denoument (sp*). The box within a box tells the story of frames, infinite reflexivity, and endless allusion. Mis-en-abyme literally translates to "into the abyss", but, more generally, represents endless reflection and interplay between multiple narratives. It is a story within a story. For those of you who are unfamiliar or encountering this term for the first time, get to know it well--with all great literature you should find yourself in an abyss.

4. The Protestant Reformation = Printing Press
This is Snake-haired Kayla's question and its a great one. I just finished reading a book called "Wide as the Waters" by Benson Bobrick--very enlightening, with an overall point that the translation of the King James Bible from Latin (originally translated into Latin by St. Jerome) was an integral part in the founding of American Democracy. But, interestingly enough, why was the printing press so important to the Protestant Reformation? Because THE BOOK became THE WORD. No longer was faith placed in the church (as the clergy themselves couldn't hardly read Latin), but people bypassed unfrequented churches and went directly to the book and everyone was able to have a special relationship with God through text rather than use the corrupt clergy as the middleman to salvation. The Protestant Reformation essentially symbolizes faith in the book, in literacy.

5. Mandala - Squaring of the Circle

6. Democratic/Alphabet

7. Ong 142 - Gesang ist dasein. (Means "song is existence" in German)

8. Ong 130 - Finality and Closure (print)
This one is pretty self explanatory. When you put something on a page, it remains. When you say something orally, it vanishes, gone forever with the wind (but, after all, tomorrow is another day), lost as soon as its spoken. By being closed off, a work of print and text seems to be an entity unto intself, unable to interact with the reader or carry on an antagonistic, flyting tone. However, I do think there's is plenty of free play in text--websites are under construction, and by the time you read this I will probably have corrected myself a few dozen times. These corrections are allowed in text, but tend to be counter-productive in speech whereby the speaker loses credibility each time he corrects himself.

9. Yates 224 - The Memory System of ______ would require the memory of a divine man, the Magus. Bruno
In one of my previous blogs (2/24/09) I have a video of comedian Bill Hicks. Watch it and I think he really explains what happens to people like Bruno when they have come up with something great. No man is allowed to attain God-head. Let us recall the fall of Babel, where God banished man into different languages to confuse him because he aspired to be God. But I say go ahead and try...its not like you would cause one tenth of one tenth of one percent of the destruction and chaos God does.

10. What does alithiometer stand for? A Truth Measurer
Quite literally, the prefix A-LITH means an "unforgetting". You'll recall that lethe (lethal) means a forgetting. If you ever happen to be in Hades, stay away from this river or you'll become a zombie. If you read blogs by Phillip Pullman, who wrote The Golden Compass in which an Alithiometer (as well as a subtle knife and an amber spyglass) is used to find the truth about dust. I'd love to go into this for a while, but I can't, but, like I was saying, Pullman used Francis Yate's book as a primary inspiration for his epic fantasy. An unforgetting is somehow different than remembering in that you are undoing your forgetfullness, preening your angel wings, ready to take flight through experience--and to forge something special in the smithy of your own soul.

11. 7 Pillars of Solomon's House of Wisdom - Camillo (The 7 Planets of Yore)
After Lull I needed a break and haven't worked with Camillo yet, but this is on Yates page 138. Its all about astral science and the celestial world which I know nothing about...yet.

12. Iliad - "Such was the funeral rights of Hector, The Tamer of Horses"
I keep a horse on my patio. Not really, but it reminds me of this line, as well as the first and last lines of Richard III, which Wise Wandering Shannon knows well. Ask her, she'll recite some lines for you, she's really good at it.

13. Ong Chap. 4 - How many times was the alphabet invented? Once

14. What are the chances of something happening? 1 in 3 (The longer you live and the older you
get, you just realize that coincidences are always happening because you realize they do.)

15. What did Tai and Robert use for their memory systems? Their Bodies
Does anybody know Jesse Stolba, or anyone else with wonderful sleeves of tatoos and worded limbs? If my father would let me, I might get corporealities tattooed all over myself.

16. FW Article - Before writing their was speech, and before speech their was gesture.
The bottom line: reading preceeds writing.

17. Yates 188 - Lull and Cabala - System that arose from this
I believe the Cabal is all about word mysticism

18. FW Article - Hypertext & Portmanteau - (James Joyce and Cyberspace language)
Great question. A Portmanteau is a compartmentalized suitcase, or a word that means multiple things. If you ask Humpty Dumpty about it, he'll tell you that one word can have multiple meanings (or in Joyce's and the internet's case, dozens of meanings and links) because he "pays it extra" when it has to do a lot of work. Click here for some examples of portmanteaus as well as a link to Jabberwocky..."Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe!"

19. Ancient Hebrew language was lacking what? Vowels. LTRTR NGLSH

21. Yates 203 - What is Bruno doing when he's said to be crazy and unrestrained? Bruno rushes out of convent/Divination of Man through memory

22. Ong 126 - Tristram Shandy's Silence - Blank Space
23. George Herbert's Poem "Easter Wings" (Hourglass Shape + Butterfly Wings) - Ong 126
We're talking about the exploitation of the typographic space. Blank lines on a page meaning silence, a new meaning given to the phrase "read between the lines". Click here to read Herbert's poem.


24. The most notorious book that nobody reads? FW
This is a fine question. Dr. Sexson asked if anyone has read FW and everybody raised their hands. Actually, from what I understand, no one "reads" FW, they sing it, they dance it. Dr. S said that all literature aspires towards FW, but we know that all art aspires to the condition of music. So, when we say "gesang est dasein", life and are are music. Nietzsche also said he would never worship a God who didn't dance. The words of FW dance of the page, and each time you reread a word it does a different dance. I can't wait to graduate so I can spend the better part of my unemployment singing FW. Like Brandon wants more question from Kane, I would have liked a few more from Sexson's article.

25. Myths are repository for practical knowledge.
Brandon felt compelled to do Kane justice. If I were Kane, I'd appreciat it. In an oral culture in which there were nothing but myths, the knowledge had to be practical or else it was thrown out and unneeded by the community. So there is no reason why an oral culture with mythologize something that was not of use to them.

26. The ability to hears colors? Synesthesia
Don't think you don't have the ability to hear colors, taste movement, or feel sound. I was once walking with a friend and he said, "I hear music." and I said, "You're not special, there's no other way to apprehend music." I love to be wrong.

Grapholects

Today I randomly chose a page in Ong to explicate for my paper. There's just too much to be able to decide on my own, so I let Fortuna decide. I put my finger on page 104 and I'm very happy with it. I was telling Dr. Sexson a few days ago that with the internet it is impossible to get a good deal or haggle with anyone because people know too much. Back in the day (a day I wasn't there for, but my dad tells me about it) you could get a deal because people didn't know as much. My dad says, "Some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing". So continuing with this idea, Ong talks about how huge the modern grapholect is. Like Nietzche says, were all walking dictionaries with magna-vocabularies, and, as such, according to Jack Goody, this leads to an overwhelming sense or alienation because we can pick and choose what we want to know. In an oral culture it was all right there. Everybody knew what everyone else knew, there was no superfluous material or esoteric material. But it was also aggregative, and in today's literate world, some people know some things while other people know different things. Ong even mentions that the modern day giant sized grapholect has led to the rise of "grammar Nazis" because where grapholects exist, "correct grammar and usage are popularly interpreted as the grammar and usage of the grapholect itself to the exclusion of the grammar and usage of other dialects. So...that's what I'll write my paper on. I'd love to write it about electricity, but maybe I'll save that for my Ph.D dissertation.

I'm not conflicted, I'm interested

After Dr. Sexson told us that we can understand the universe through our memory theaters, I don't think its fair that we be asked to write a finite paper. It should go on for infinity and infinity and infinity. I am writing my capstone paper tonight and I can't seem to get away from some of the things we have talked about in class. So I'm going to write part of my paper about how Walt Whitman uses lists and uses corporeal similitudes to evoke a mythical sense of origin in an alienated society that is spinning off into the outer reaches of global oblivion. That's that paper.

For this class, as I am for all of Dr. Sexson's classes (and Mrs. Dr. Sexson's too), I can't figure out what to talk about because there's just too much. In one sense that is a very deflating and hopeless feeling, but it also gives me hope that I was the beneficiary of part of my tuition and not all of it went to funding the athletics program. So here is what I am thinking for this paper. I'd like, like Kevin, to know what you guys think. After all, you're going to have to hear about it.

I like the idea of electricity. That either a physical (as in science) or a metaphysical (as in the romantics) shock can excite, inspire, and recall. I like the idea that Frankenstein, a bricolage of so many body parts, can come alive with electricity. I'm interested in how electrical stimulation, in the form of television or the computers, can incite new ways of reading in each of us, but moreover, I'm interested in how we can create these simulations within ourselves--to find new way of reading and inspiration that might not come from simulacra, or outside sources. How we can have that "ah ha!" moment, when that LIGHT BULB flicks on above our head when we get an idea. I was inspired during the memory presentation when everyone looked to the sky, searching, then came back, each item of 50 a little "ah ha!" moment in itself. Maybe I'm not looking to retrieve the lost arts of a primarily oral culture. Maybe I'm just tyring to get back to the 1930's, the depression era. Things were good then--we had the economic bust we have today, but we didn't have the TV. To think back to a primarily oral culture is unfathomable, so I'll work with the last 80 years or so. I'm interested in the why, what, where, who, and how people decide to do something, like read for instance, without the pressure and insistence of the television. How did people read before the scrolling marquee across Times Square, and how did they begin to apprehend the same words differently when the lights got turned on. How do we read in the dark. There are some electrical simulations that can even help a blind person see.

I don't even know if I can write a thesis statement that is contained within a set number of pages, or even contained on paper itself. I want to make my ideas and my thesis statement light up in your brain without you actually having to read it. Like green blood, we're going for and intravenous transfusion of knowledge and inspiration...moderated by a piece of electrical equipment? I'm lost, help. When you start to imagine the world as a vortex, you can't help but find yourself in it, not knowing where youre from or where youre going. Lost. (maybe I can watch an episode of Lost and write my paper about that?)

brief thoughts about frames and the power of suggestion

Quote of the day: "If you want somebody to grow up as a thief, you call them a thief"--Dr. Sexson. Indians (though I didn't write down which ones) don't have a word for stutter, and as a result, stuttering does not exist. People always called me Stutter or Stuttering Sutter, but I never did stutter. Why is this so interesting? I think it lends itself to the power of suggestion. In Don DeLillo's White Noise, the poisonous cloud causes symptoms such as nausea or vomiting in those who have been exposed, but people do not feel these symptoms until the radio or television tells them that these are their symptoms. It's all about the power of suggestion, and I would add to this by saying that we as free-thinking individual humans (though I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that generalization) are indeed just the opposite of that because rather than being suggestive of anything, it seems that we are only a suggestion of the words and simulacra that we are exposed to. It is another way of understanding how writing restructures consciousness. Here is a link to a previous blog I did that was also part of a paper: metanarrative escape.


Also in class Dr. Sexson spoke briefly about frames. The idea of frames and metafiction is somthing that is very interesting to me, and I think that is mostly because I think it is possible to see our own life as a framed story (such as the movie The Truman Show). When we are granted the ethereal divine gift of recognizing our daily lives as such, it makes them mythical, and often very obscure, weird, and intriguing. I guess its another way to look at life. The French refer to the idea of frames as "mis-en-abyme", a term which basically means an infinite abyss. It is a term Dr. Sexson told me about last year, I was able to discuss it with a Frech psychology student travelling in Argentina, and now understand that infinite abyss, those vast unending reflections and innumerable links between everything, as the cave flown through by St. Augustine. Here is a link to a previous blog post I did a while ago concerning frames and Alice in Sunderland, a graphic novel our children's literature class was reading. I intendend only to provide this link, but, like frames, the story and the conversation can go on forever in innumerable tangents, like our memory theaters. Tangents are good, Dr. Sexson will tell you. Literate people, however, will tell you tangents are bad...

Cribs...Memory Style

Hi everybody. Here is a tour of my memory crib. One movie by itself is too large a file to fit on the blog, so I had to break the tour up into three different movies. Also, the uploading of these movies required that I create a YouTube account, which I was not too thrilled about. As such, I'll probably only keep this blog post for a week or two as I don't want any incriminating evidence surfacing years later as a result of a YouTube broadcast. Try not to hold me to too many indescrepancies along the way, but I did want to point out that the crawlspace is where the "underground man" lives, and that the title of the novel is Notes from Underground and not The Underground Man. So enjoy the tour, thanks for watching.

Today's memory palaces

I enjoyed being the photographer because, at one point or another, everyone rolled their eyes into the back of their heads to take a walk through their memory mechanisms. I enjoyed Za Zen Zach's top 50 non-fiction books and especially the way he recited them. His head was tilted all the way back and his eye lids were closed and twitching...maybe he needed an exorcist! It was cool...it looked like he was in his R.E.M. (rapid eye movement) of his sleep cycle...the time of your sleep when you dream most heavily. If you read Zach's blog he is very happy with his accomplishment, as everyone should be, and found the assignment to be rewarding and fulfilling. But, if you look in his past blogs, he was nervous about giving the presentation, as I imagine we all were, when Dr. Sexson told us we were going to perform some extraordinary feat of memory like it was no big deal. And, though I'm not going until Monday, I think everyone is in agreement that building a memory theater, learning some of the mechanics of artificial memory, and performing your own mini-feat was actually quite easy.

I also like Keen Kenning Ben's recitation--subject matter which will come in nicely during his parenthood. I'm curious to know what his memory theater was like because his list of 50 things is similar to mine in that they are not single discreet items, but 50 sentences. Does each word have an image, Ben, or does each sentence have an image, or neither?

Secondary Orality and an "unoral" setting

From page 134-135 of Ong:

Our culture has now developed into "secondary orality" according to Ong. Secondary orality, like primary orality, generates strong groups sense because listening to words forms hearers into a group or an audience. But secondary orality also, unlike primary orality, generates a sense for a groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture. This is described by Marshall McLuhan's "global village". Also, I was asking my dad, with regards to the economy, what has changed about entrepreneurialship. Dad said that in the 80's and early 90's people only competed locally, but now we compete globally. It's harder to get a good deal or bargain these days because people know too much, there's so much information. Like Nietzche says, were all walking dictionaries, which certainly leads to a sense of alienation. Anyways, continuing with Ong, he says that as a result of being part of a global villiage, that the individual must be "socially sensitive", like those All State Insurance commercials that show people doing good deeds. Ong says that "we are turned outward because we have turned inward," and that "orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing." I couldn't agree more, and this works very much along the lines of post modern thinking, which believes that we are told to act spontaneously by simulacra.

Ong uses presidential debates as an example to support is claim about the differences between orality of today (secondary), and orality of yesterday (primary). Radio and television, Ong explains, has brought "political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments." But Ong doesn't think that these debates are in the old oral tradition like the antagonistic Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Instead, modern presidential combatants, rather than speaking out of the primary oral style which made itself additive, redundant, carefully balanced, and highly agonistic with intense interplay between speaker and audience, do the opposite. Ong says "the audience is absent, invisible, inaudible. The candidates are ensconced in tight little booths, make short presentations, and engage in crisp little conversations with each other in which any agonisitic edge is deliberately kept dull. Electonic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism."

Of course there are possible arguments, exeptions and additions to Ong's supposition. Obama's innaguration speech used addition and parataxis of the old oral tradition and I'm sure someone could make some sort of argument about reality t.v., which can be antagonistic and only appear to be spontaneous.

An amended list of 50 things to memorize (by Wednesday(ish)!)

A project of social utility: A list of 53 memorable first and last lines of Literature.

First Lines
1) Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
2) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
3) Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
4) Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-Ta. At the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three down the palate to tap, on the teeth, Lolita —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
5) Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
6) Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
7) It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
8) Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial
9) You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
10) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
11) Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
12) Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
13) Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses
14) Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary--'The Raven', by Edgar Allen Poe
15) Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. The Divine Comedy, The Inferno by Dante Aligheiri.
16) To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The Grapes of Wrath
17) Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
18) My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. Ovid's Metamorphoses
19) Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
20) The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer
21) I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
22) All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
23) For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
24) I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
25) Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
26) He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
27) It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
28) In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
29) I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius
30) The Candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he wandered the hall and again when he shut the door.—Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses
31) Now is the winter of our discontent—Richard III
32) Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe—Carroll, Jabberwocky
33) April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of dead land, mixing memory and desire—Eliot, The Wasteland
34) Dear God, I am 14 years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
35) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness—Ginsberg
Last Lines

36) ...you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
37) P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise. Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America
38) Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.—Don DeLillo White Noise
39) Thus they buried Hector, Tamer of Horses—Homer, Iliad
40) But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.—A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
41) After all, tomorrow is another day.—Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
42) But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.—Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
43) Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
44) It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.—A Tale of Two Cities
45) I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.—Lolita
46) A way a lone a last a loved a long the—Finnegans Wake
47) And you say, “Just a moment. I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino—Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
48) They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time: the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houseds, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.—Proust, Swan’s Way
49) Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.—Salinger
50) I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.—Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
51) I think of the Bunny.—Greg Keeler (not Updike!)
52) And the dish ran away with the spoon
53) Then there are more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second.—Brautigan, a Confederate Soldier from Big Sur.

Ong chapter 5 and letter hotels

Some provocative things in Ong's chapter 5, "Print, Space, and Closure"

Ong notes on page 116 that in a manuscript culture "the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur." But, with the advent of the printing press and the culture that ensued, "words are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute".

Continuing on, Ong says on page 119 that "print locks words into position in [this] space. Control of position is everything in print." So, essentially, in print, letters come before the words and are locked into place. These are only two points chosen out of the infinite of chapter 5, but I would like to illustrate how we apply these ideas in everyday life.

There was a recent Simpsons episode in which Lisa discovered she was a "cruciverbalist", or a crossword enthusiast. She shared this love with her grandpa, who said "we used to call them letter hotels because each letter got its own room." Also, what a staple game show Wheel of Fortune has become. Call out a correct letter and it gets its own lighted box. The idea is that in each of these instances, the letters precede the words they constitute. Even with crosswords, you can often figure out the answer without knowing the word.

Corporeal Similitudes and Freaks

While making a few notes in preparation to talk about Ramon Lull tomorrow I came across some interesting things in Yates that we had already discussed but were revealed to me in a new light. Also, I managed to abscond with a large stack of books from a very magnanimous and well-read couple last weekend. One of which included was Freaks, by Leslie Fiedler, which relates back to corporeal similitude, a matter which I am now going to divulge.

In making the distinctions between Ramon Lull's art of memory and that of the classic memory of art as outlined by Tillius in the Ad Herennium (chapter 3), a primary difference is that Lull's memory system is void of "corporeal similitudes" (which, if you refer to the index, is mentioned a number of times). Essentially, Ramon Lull excludes images as part of the artificial imagination, whereas people like Acquinas used often grotesque and bodily ("corporeal") images ("similitudes") as a way of inciting a visceral action towards remembering. Instead of these corporeal similitues, Lullism is more scientific, algebraic, and mechanical. For the classical memory systems, the creation of a corporeal similitude is also the creation of memorable images in accordance with the rules of artificial memory. Ramon only includes the fourth rule in is memory system, describing the artificial memory as either drug induced or practiced through repetition, as a "cow chewing on his cud". Thomas Aquinas's rules for the artificial memory are on pages 85-86, and they are

1)the first is that he should dispose those things which he wishes to remember in a certain order.

2)The secod is that he should adhere to them with affection

3)The third is that he should reduce them to unusual similitudes

4)The fourth is that he should repeat them with frequent mediation.

So what does this have to do with Freaks? On page 104 of Yates, I quote "Can memory be one possible explanation of the mediaeval love of the grotesque, the idiosyncratic? Are the strange figures to be seen on the pages of manuscripts and in all forms of mediaeval art not so much the revelation of a tortured psychology as evidence that the Middle Ages, when men had to remember, followed classical rules for making memorable images?"

Leslie Fiedler's book talks about a culture's fascination with the maligned, deformed, obese, hairy, mutated, etc. In the chapter entitled "Freaks and the Literary Imagination", Fiedler says that the "improbable and marvelous" are "embodied not in Freaks but grotesques...exploited to titillate the reader." Just like the corporeal similitudes meant to titillate the imaginer to heightened senses of memory. Fiedler also talks about Victor Hugo's obsession with Freaks (hence Quasimodo), which implies an inherent connection to the concept of freaks and corporeal similitudes as Kevin cited that Victor Hugo recognizes that the book will destroy the memory palace. Hugo knew the importance of corporeal similitudes, the utterly grotesque, as a method of memorization.

The Roast...An Oral Setting

Where can I find a truly oral setting, if one still exists, in today's textual culture, I wonder? I need a setting in which there are participants rather than objective observers, so a speech by a president, though it may harken to the oral tradition, is not what I'm looking for. I want something fun, agonistically toned, and definitely with some flyting, clusters of insults, old jokes that are still funny, and maybe a little stychomythia. Aside from Kevin Costner sitting around the tepee smoking a peace pipe in Dances With Wolves,the best thing I could think of is a roast. I'm sure we're all familiar with the roasting concept (and not that of pork). Roasting somebody involves the friends and colleagues of an honoree to spend a laughable evening insulting him or her, often being insulted in return, all in the spirit of good faith and camaraderie. It's a fun way to give people a chance to say what you really feel, because, "If you're going to tell people the truth, you had better make 'em laugh or they'll kill you for it." Celebrity icons are roasted on Comedy Central all the time. They are usually older and wasted up celebrities in their senescence, like William Shatner and Bob Saget, but this seems to make for the perfect combination. They are old enough to honor, but young enough to take a joke...because that is what they have made of their career. Politicians often roast each other for the fun of it...they are all doddering old fools anyways. The word senescence, from above, is from the Latin "senex" which means doddering old fool. Also where the word senate and senator, as a senate is a council of elders and a senex is someone who is old.

I just recently learned how to put movies on my blog, so bare with me while my excitement lasts. This clip is Don Rickles roasting Bob Hope on the Dean Martin Show. It's a live haranguing and the people laughing remind me of groundlings in a Shakespeare comedy. I much prefer the sense of humor of the 1960's and 70's than the vulgar lasciviousness of the roasts today. Anyways, here is an oral setting that might be worth contemplating.

Memory Trick - posted by R.Blogger

Take Note: Doodling Can Help Memory

By HealthDay - Fri Feb 27, 8:48 PM PST

FRIDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) -- You might look like you're not paying attention when you doodle, but science says otherwise.

Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message's details than those who didn't doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
"If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream," study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said in a news release issued by the journal's publisher. "Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task."

"In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process," Andrade said. "If that process is important for the main cognitive task, then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade."
In everyday life, Andrade said, doodling "may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing."

Re-membering Finnegan

Here is the link to Dr. Sexson's essay Re-membering Finnegan. I'm not going to try and explicate the essay, you really have to experience it for yourself. Dr. Sexson makes so many connections that the essay itself becomes hypertextual, an anchor to hang onto as we are led into the electrified abyss of knowledge and remembrance; and the overall effect of the essay left me feeling good about floating around in the depthless vastness of an electronic world. I would, however, like to swirl my foot around in the waters of the second paragraph on page 6. Here is the first stanza of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll for your delight. Tangentially (which, after reading the essay, you will have learned that tangents are a good thing. The internet and Finnegans Wake are full of them!) I watch Jeopardy most nights with my neighbors. Two nights ago the final Jeopardy answer in the category "Invented words" was, "Its the made up word for Four o'clock in the afternoon: the time when you begin broiling things for dinner." I, of course, knew from what Dr. Sexson has taught me that the question (or answer) is Brillig. A day of despondency and disappointment punctuated by a brief moment of triumph!

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Carroll used portmanteaus to create multi-dimensional words. One word that means two things. Joyce, in Finnegans Wake also used portmanteaus, but his one word might mean three, or four, or fivesixandseven different things--which of course makes the novel unnavigitable, but also different each time we read it. The internet is, according to Dr. Sexson (and I hope I'm not be too presumptuous) one big portmanteau, like Wake, but the internet is Wake electrified. Electricity is the lightning bolt that pilots all things! The lightning bolt incited visceral responses in pre-oral, mute cultures, and it is the thing that brings Frankenstein's creature to life. Now, I always figured that memory is the lightning bolt that pilots all things, but now I learn that it is actually a lightning bolt. I was hoping for more of a metaphor. Wordsworth, in his poem Daffodils, says the image of the daffodil flashes on his inward eye, so maybe I'm still not far off. Especially when we consider that the "re-membering" part of the essay is actually suggestive of remembering as corporeal activity whereby one pieces together different parts of a body. The book, in a Joycean sense, is a body that can, like Frankenstein's creature, rise to life from a bricolage of appendages.

Referring to some of my other blogs and Dr. Sexson's introductory quote, Marshall McLuhan believed technologies and mediums to be extensions of ourselves. Clothing is an extension of skin, housing extends the body's heat-regulating mechanisms, and the bicycle and car are extensions of the foot. Media extends communication and also our senses. Thus, it is not difficult to imagine remembering a book with a bricolage of simulacra, the stuff of the everyday, and appendages extending through, around, and over the caves of memory and communication.

The Prophet of the Airwaves

It's midnight, later, 2 a.m. I look at the digital red clock numbers. It tells me its' 4 a.m. If I go to bed now I can still catch a few hours of sleep, can't sleep, the television told me I might be one of the millions that can't sleep due to restless leg syndrome. Finally American's get the itch to start walking around and they diagnose it as a medical problem--they want to numb the itch. My friend Marshall once told me that we are like Narcissus, entranced, fascinated, and immobilized by the technologies that extend and amputate our senses. The TV fluxes and refluxes my silouhette against the dark cave of my solitary dispensation. Reruns of Lost, Are you smarter than a 5th grader?, Glamor Girls and the View. If I were smart enough to recognize what was happening to me by the "mosaic mesh of light and dark spots"...I realize what Marshall [McLuhan] said [in Understanding the Media] might be true. That "Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterened and imploded society" and I can either confront this on a conscious level or repress it unil "some violence releases me from the entire burden."

The ride of your life

Bill Hicks, a prophetic comic who died in the early ninetys, usually ended his shows with this bit. Interestingly enough, the late Hunter S. Thompson was often quoted for saying "you buy the ticket and you take the ride." Life, the iconoclasts are saying, is only a ride. You can get off, or change your ride at any time, because, it isn't real in the first place. One thing we often find about myth is they too aren't real. They are great stories, but ordinary stories too, made up of the stuff of the repetitive and daily--everyday is "epic", every tiny, minute detail is of mythical proportions. The parallel between a ride and myth is that by doing both, by riding and mything (I'm expanding English verbage. We should all by mything on a daily basis), we are living each day as if it were your last. Bill says we can get out of the myth and off the ride that has become so repetitive to the point of convincing us that its real by making the choice between fear and love, alienation and cosmic oneness. I'm not going to argue with him, but from my own cumulative confusion of everything that we've read, it is that repetition that makes us a cosmic whole. The twists and turns of the ride, though undoubtedly illusory, are the stories we use to tell ourselves who we are. We use myth and cliche as a way of understanding our own culture. It's late and I'm rambling, but I think we should all find our own ride. Keep the lines down and create your own myth.

Meno's Paradox and Ramon Lull

On Friday I really enjoyed the Meno's Paradox discussion. It is the dialogue between Plato and Socrates that discusses how, though anamnesis, experience, and proper inquiry we can regain the eternal knowledge we had before the shock of birth. Before being expunged from the warm confines of the amniotic sack we flew around like chereubims in some ethereal place, but the fall to earth made us lose our angel wings. I feel like I have a special connection with this story because my dear and wonderful mother has always called her shoulder blades her "angel wings". So, when we have an itch on our back we scratch our angel wings--Plato says that each time we recollect what we have lost from drinking from the river Lethe our shoulder blades itch and grow new feathers. When we acquire somthing new, or re-member something, our wings grow just a little. Francis Yates divulges this on page 36, "Plato believes that there is a knowledge not derived from sense impressions, that there are latent in our memories the forms or moulds of Ideas, of the realities which the sould knew before its descent here below." Because this theory seems so germane to my life, you might consider me a neo-platonist.

Ramon Lull was also a Neo-Platonist, and his art of memory is described in chapter 8 of The Art of Memory. I've been spending the last couple days trying to understand more about him (merely because I stumbled upon him and I am not approaching this book from front to back). Around 1272, after he had an "illuminative experience...in which he saw the attributes of God" designed a method, which he published as his Ars Magna (the "The Ultimate General Art", published in 1305). His system was intended to win Muslims to the Christian faith through logic and reason. He invented numerous 'machines' for the purpose of conversion in which, through this system, a reader may ask a question (like an alethiometer!!!) about the Christian faith. One methodm the Lullian Circle, consists of two or more discs inscribed with alphabetical letters or symbols that referred to lists of attributes.

Designated as BCDEFGHIK, they are the dignities of God, or the 'nine' forms of art: Goodness, Greatness, Eternity, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, and Glory. Llull knew that all believers in the monotheistic religions - whether Jews, Muslims or Christians - would agree with these attributes, giving him a firm platform from which to argue. The discs could be rotated individually to generate a large number of combinations of ideas. Lull's art of memory differs from classical and Socratic methods in that it is not imaged based, but combinatorial, moving disks like a compass or a safe lock to create different meanings. This is also, according to Yates, a principle difference of the Lullian Art--LULL INTRODUCES MOVEMENT INTO MEMORY. Figures are not static, but revolving. These combinations were said to show all possible truth about the subject of the circle. The divine attributes are a reflection of the Trinity in man: intellectus--an art of knowing or finding out truth, voluntas--an art of training the will towards loving truth, and memoria--an art of memory for remembering truth. His art was to be used by these three powers of the soul, which are very similar to the same powers we exercise when our angel wings itch!

For a few Lullian asides: as some of you know, Joan and I had to memorize innumerable amounts of lines for a recent production of Measure for Measure. How did we do it? Lull would say that we used our artificial memory. But not the part of the artificial memory that uses "medicines and plasters for the improvement of memory' (like opiates for Coleridge), but by "frequently going over in memory what one wished to retain, like an ox chewing the cud." This is Lull's only rule for 'artificial memory'. Constantly repeating what I want to remember is part of the Lullian Art and all its procedures. Giordano Bruno, the next chapter, uses the Lullian method on concentric, combinatorial circles as part of his memory system which I will read more about for my next blog.

Also, as we are working with combinations (refer to layman diagram above for easier understanding of how Ramon's art works) I am reminded of a Watling slot machine I have at home in Reno. My dad collects antique slot machines (he must have at least 70 by now, he has no meaning of the word moderation!) and there is one particular one that has three slot reels and each image (a bell, a cherry, a bar, etc...) has part of a sentence in it. So no matter what reel combination comes up (determining if you're a winner or a loser), it creates a unique and funny sentence that also tells a fortune. The picture on the right is not very good, but you can just barely make out that there are some words in between the reel symbols.

(Revised) Auction Estate Catalogue

Here is a list of 50 things to memorize. It is, essentially, a made up estate auction catalogue.

1) Liberty ½ dollar
2) Porcelain figurine
3) Lap desk
4) Jewelry box
5) Aliethiometer
6) Olympus OM2 35mm camera
7) JG Schroeder Mandolin w/ case
8) Antique opera glasses
9) Antique gumball machine
10) Royal cash register
11) Pair of Ruby Slippers
12) Sofa table
13) Black laquer armchair
14) Eames molded plywood chair
15) 1935 Caille “naked lady” slot machine
16) A looking glass
17) Set of sterling silver candle holders
18) J&B coats sewing cabinet
19) Subtle Knife
20) Radio Flyer wagon
21) Lot of miscellaneous tools
22) Dinette set
23) Pair of Buerman Spurs
24) John Deere 7030 Small frame tractor
25) One red hunting hat
26) 1992 Honda Civic
27) Walk in Freezer
28) Brunswick pool table
29) Antique carousel horse
30) Lot of 6 antique wagon wheels
31) Set of 20 bar stools
32) Italian Leg Lamp
33) “White Album” autographed by Beatles
34) Belt grinder
35) Hydraulic Lift
36) Subtle Knife
37) Lot of fine chine
38) Magi-cater portable grille
39) Hobart Pizza Oven
40) Lot of 6 vintage “Rat Pack” pictures
41) Faberge Egg
42) Medieval suit of armor
43) C.M. Russel’s “The Hold Up”
44) 2 outdoor heat lamps
45) This is not a pipe
46) Mickey Mantle autographed ball
47) Round of Golf with Tiger Woods
48) Large lot of cougar skins
49) 1996 Ford F-150
50) 2500 sq.ft. memory palace to keep everything in

A couple of class notes

Groundhog's Day, the movie, is on FX, channel 23, tonight at 7. We all know that today is Groudhog's Day, but it is also Cassi Clampitt's birthday (who was born in Grand Junction, CO, where the three roads meet), it is James Joyce's birthday, it is Dr. Sexson's 45th wedding anniversary (congratulations Michael and Lynda), it is also the Aztec New Year today and the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Quite a day!

But what is so important about Groudhog's Day, the movie? Let's talk about it in relation to the Myth of the Eternal Return. Written by Mircea Eliade, the blurb on the back of the book reads: A luminous, profound, and extremely stimulating work...Eliade's thesis is that ancient man envisaged events not as constituting a linear, progressive history, but simply as so many creative repetitions of primordial archetypes. It is the ability to return to myth, to exist simultaneously with the events described in myth. It is suggestive of a cyclicality, an "ashes to ashes" sort of thing, where we need the endless repetition, things always come around. Everything becomes important, a parataxis of events. Check out this philosophy blog to see what Nietzsche and other philosophers have to say about Groundhog Day.

Phil, the character played by Murray, is also, according to Dr. S., the type of character we need in a story about change and redemption. Phil is forced into paying attention to this day, to concentrate, and eventually he orchestrates everyday. Additionally, all the people in the town are literary characters, but I will learn more and report later after the movie tonight.

A conversation with my classmates

I would like to start out trying to answer Alex Emery's blog. He was wondering why, and understandably so, one would want to create a mnemonic device such as Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate when it could be easier to cut out the middle man and just remember Melpomene. Ong, on page 69, says that "colorless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics", that in myth we create heroic and bizarre figures in order to "organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form." This idea is the basis for Helena's Memory Palace, who said that it takes the ordinary and makes it something imaginative and different. In this way, everything is a parataxis as Kevin made a brilliant reference to, everything is important and nothing is subordinate. In John Nay's blog he talks about James Joyce's novel Ulysses and about the annual celebration in Dublin called "Bloomsday". John, in what I think is a memorable, if not genius, thought, connected Bloomsday with the Bill Murray movie Groudhog's Day, where everyday is memorable as each is effectively his last. James Joyce, says John, says that we are living in myth, whether we know it or not, and it is about making the ordinary extraordinary and mythical. James Joyce understood this, and recreated his own myth. Joyce made colorful personalities and places that organized experience in a completely memorable form. Tai mentions Marshall McLuhan, and in Understanding the Media, McLuhan says that Joyce orgainzed Ulysses "by assigning the various city forms of walls, streets, civic buildings, and media to the various bodily organs. " Kary Bowles in her blog mentions that the closing chapter of Ecclesiastes uses a house as a metaphor for the body and soul (which is why we want to keep our memory palaces clean!). What McLuhan said that was provocative is that the current technological man "prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less inclined to accept his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house...as a ritual extension of his body." Considering this, I would have to tell Steve Crawford not to be apologetic for leading the class on to believe the glow in the dark stars on his bedroom ceiling were "fabulous". They really were because it is symbolic of you, Steve, trying to become a part of the cosmic oneness of an oral culture, a valiant attempt to accept your house as a model of the universe and an extension of your body. McLuhan also says that an oral culture is an "open system" whereas the textual, technological culture, whose tools are but extensions of sense, constitute "closed systems" which are incapable of interplay (as we have learned of the constraints of textuality and writing).

But it is the interplay of an oral culture which makes it so mythical. On page 134 of Wisdom of the Mythtellers, Sean Kane calls "dreming" the larger mental entergy, saying that "myth vibrates with this energy of life which is felt to be mental." At the end of my somewhat particular and overwhelmingly sensory version of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage there is the Caterpilar asking Alice "Who Are You?", with Alice responding "I-I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." McLuhan uses this as an example of the effect the media has on our notion of individuality, saying that there is "no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters-massages-every instant of our lives." Pair this up with Kane, who on page 134 says, "[physical beings] flash in and out of [consciousness] like animals caught in a headlight beam at night, just as, in the larger unconscious Dreaming of the world, the animals flash in and out of existence. But their enduring mode of being is in the spirit, which is to say the state of dreaming" one might say, like Alice did, "Life, what is it but a dream?" We are living in perpetual myth, like Joyce and John Nay say; but it is about structuring and organizing our homes, our memory palaces, and ourselves in such a way that is memorable, and, ultimately, exists as a dream punctuated by brief momements of the recognition that you are dreaming . At this point in time, the media, our hyper-textuality, would suggest that nothing is real anyways.

Some thoughts in the memory palace

Here are some interesting things that I have found in some extracurricular reading. Lynda Sexson lovingly gave me a book by cultural anthropologist Jack Goody called The Technology of the Intellect. Here is what I thought was interesting in terms of how orality and literacy affect me.

He says, "What the individual remembers tends to be what is of critical importance in his experience of the main social relationships. In each generation, therefore, the individual memory will mediate the cultural heritage." Goody here is basically saying that in an oral culture, people remember what is most important to their individual lives, and as time passes those individuals mediate their heritage through only a selection of images.

But was is most interesting is the ultimatum he poses several pages later, which he relates to Nietzche's idea that we are "wandering encyclopedias", it goes, "literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no 'structural amnesia' prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society...it becomes apparent that the situation fosters the alienation that has characterized so many writers...The literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of patterened whol...THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN THE CULTURAL TRADITION--OR SOLITUDE."

I relate this to the way I feel when I walk into a Barnes & Noble. I feel lost, stranded, given the feeling that there is more information in these books than can be leared in 100 life times. Where do I start. I know I'm going to leave out something important, something intresting. If I were in an oral culture, however, there would not be such astronomical amounts of information because only so much can be passed orally and through memory. Isn't this interesting stuff? Ong says on page 106 "Into it [grapholect] has been hammered a massive vocabulary of an order of magnitude impossible for an oral tongue. Websters Third New International Dictionary states in its Preface that it could have included 'many times' more than the 450,000 words it does include.

Also. I built my memory palace this weekend. Its the current house I live in. Its primary rooms are the garage, laundry, entrance, bedroom, office, living room, kitchent, bathroom, bedroom. I have found that the technique really does work! I'd like to do an infomercial about buying your very own memory palace at a great introductory price. Anyways, here is a video that explains how you can build you memory palace. It's very modern and very brief and very helpful (click the video link). My little brother, who is not so little any more, as a toddler had an interesting time with the letter "B". Instead of saying "because" he would say "b", so a typical sentence of his might sound like, "We gave the dog away b he taked big poops!" He said "b" so frequently that it caught on with my dad without him ever knowing it. We also liked to play the "Obserbe" game. You can play it anywhere you like. First tell someone to "obserbe". Give them a few seconds (10 seconds max if its a kitschy room) and then tell them to shut their eyes. Once shut, ask them a particular question like "What color are the flower near the fountain?" If they get it wrong it proves that they are unobserbant and need some obserbe skills.

renegade blogger

** Hi my name is Samantha Clanton and I accessed Sutter's blog because I'm jealous that he has a blog and I wanted to blog about something I thought might have some relevance to the class. **

Even though I am not in the Oral Traditions class I cannot help but see things that I would blog about if I were in the class. I don't know what you have been discussing, but I was reading chapter one, From Folklore to Technology, from the book The Origin of Writing by Roy Harris for Dr. Lynda Sexson's class Text and Image. I couldn't help but want to blog some of what I read in relation to Oral Traditions. Within the chapter it talks about whether writing came into existence as an extension of speech or as an extension of drawing. Roy Harris favors the idea that writing developed as an extension of drawing, but you will have to read it for yourself if you are curious about the writing aspect because we want to talk about oral traditions. What are the pros and cons of the oral traditions vs. writing?

Roy Harris refers to Socrates in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, specifically when he tells the story of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth who invented various arts, including writing, Thoth said: 'This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.' The king was not impressed and replied: '....For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant...." (page 19 of The Origin of Writing).

To some extent the arguments against writing here from the king reflect the incompacity of written words alone to convey ideas. Do we get more meaning from the spoken word? How does that happen? The problem is in order to make this argument.....it has to be written down in Phaedrus to make it an argument that survives beyond the lifespan of Plato that we can talk about today.

Just a little something I read that made me think of the Oral Traditions class.

Memorable Thoughts from Tintern Abbey...

Are thinking memorable thoughts and creating memorable thoughts the same thing? You can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the ephemeral to be mythological--and therefore memorable--by writing it down and immortalizing it throught the tactile and erotic arts of painting or writing or whatever. But how do you make a memorable thought through the art of memory? A thought that is, from its origin, naturally memorable and not made artificially memorable by contractualizing it, further removing it from the ideal? A thought that is memorable as soon as you think it, like an epiphany. A thought that is, perhaps, spontaneous. For this, let's go to the Romantics.


Though absent long/These forms of beauty have nott been to me/As is a landscape to a blind man's eye/But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart/And passing even into my purer mind/With tranquil restoration...Nor less, I trust,/To them I may have owed another gift/Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/In which the burthen of the mystery/In which the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world/...Therefore let the moon/Shine on thy solityar walk/And let the misty mountain winds be free/To blow agains thee: and in after years,/When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/Into a sober pleasure, when they mind/Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms/Thy memory be as a dwelling -place/For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh!

I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd/A host of golden daffodils/Beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze...For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils.

The first poem is part of William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbery. In this poem, where he actually goes to an unfrequented church, he recalls, among other things, how, though it has been 5 years since he has been here, he remembers its natural beauty of Tintern Abbey when he is feeling blue in the city in order to make him feel restored and fresh again. The second poem is from I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Picture a guy walking around the English Country side (as Wordsworth was reported to have walked many thousands of miles in his life) and he sees a sea of dancing daffodils. So he remembers the scene that later, when he is alone, recollecting emotion through tranquility, the image of the daffodils flashes on his inward eye. I notice how these poems both consider memory to be ignited. as in certain flashes, or "fluxes and refluxes of the mind". Well, two years ago in Classical Literature Dr. Sexson asked a philosophical, rhetorical question, "What is the lightning bolt that pilots all things?" I would say, Dr. Sexson, that the lightning bolt that pilots all things is memory. The flashing of the sea of daffodils upon the inner eye allows Wordsworth to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or...a memorable thought.

To Everyone, especially Lynn Doyle

Lynn, I know that you watched the inauguration at some point yesterday, and most likely the evening post-coverage with Stone Philips and limited commercial interruption (I hope I'm not assuming too much?) Did you, or anyone else who watched the "historic" coverage notice something about this event as with all other important events in American history that happened over our life time? "We always remember where we were when this happened..." The media stressed this point, unrelentingly at times, that we, or at least my parents, not I in particular, know where we were when JFK was assinated (my mother was as Catholic boarding school in California), where we were on 9/11 (I was in my first class, history, of my second freshman year in high school at 9a.m, at a boarding school in New Hampshire. Where were you on this inauguration? I was in the most nondescript place I have ever known, my Denmark, Wilson Hall.

In order to remember the event, we remember where we were. You think to yourself, "Obama is being inaugurated right now, and this is important stuff." And you look around you filing the elements of this bureaucratic mausoleum into the Loci of your brain so you wont forget this unprecedented day: pale mustard colored walls, no windows (which took me three years to realize), a lectern, a chalk board with residual textuality smeaked across it, some speakers with their flagellum wires in a tangle, and lots of chairs with no lumbar support.

Tongues and Simulacra.

A couple of semesters ago I did an independent study with Dr. Minton where I wrote a 30 page paper on what it means when someone gets their tongue sliced out in Renaissance drama. And I'm writing this post in utter befuddlement that I am referring back to any of this. In Carla Mazzio's Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England, one of the most informative articles on the subject, she says a few things about the tongue during this time. Because it is responsible for directly communicating the self with society, it is often an "unruly member", unstable and able to hurt and slander, among other things. But Mazzio's final point is the most interesting and revelant to this class:

"The invocation of the mobile and independent tongue (the agent of speech) in printed texts and contexts, I want to suggest, constitutes less what Walter Ong has termed "residual orality," the rhetorical traces and aftermaths of an oral culture, but an aggressive orality, an anxious response to the unsettling dispersion of languanges and identities in an increasingly textualized culture, a response to the movement of representation away from the body."

Residual orality is essentially the orality that is left in a culture that is becoming a textual culture. As a culture embraces and adopts the technology of literature and computers, the "oral residue" diminishes, but it never vanishes completely. (A literate culture does, however, produce shallow relationships between people, with text messaging, lol). Carla Mazzio believes that the tongue is excised from the body not to mark the shift from orality to literacy (as I said in a previous blog that Shakespeare certainly straddls that line), but it marks hwo nervous people in the 1600's were becoming after realizing that feelings and emotions of the individual are becoming textual in an ever textualized world. The problem with writing, Plato said, it that it does not have emotion, you cannot have a conversation with it. Certainly we've all experienced these types of anxieties. When I lol, am I laughing at you or with you? It is difficult to unterstand the intonations of a conversation, like the cooler conversation, when it is written; but when it is spoken it has the true meaning, the meaning that comes from the speaker's own conscious and is not just another far removed description in writing of a bed.

I also mentioned simulacra earlier as a post-modern coinage. Here is something I know now that I didn't know before I had read the Ad Herennium on page 6 of The Art of Memory. In describing artificial memory, the memory that is improved and not natural, "Images are forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember." In the hyper-textual world in which we live we do not choose the simulacra to remember, but it comes to us, unavoidably so, principally through the images on our TV screen. I might suggest, were I to write a term paper without any further reading, that our artificial memory is becoming our natural memory. I bet we could all describe the inside of a MacDonalds and probably could have done so since we were very young because though we do not make a conscious decision to remember these places, they impose themselves on us. Our memories, our realities, our consciousness is now a result of the constant barrage of simulacra that force themselves into our memory, making it natural because it is a part of our environment which we have not chosen to memorize, but that has memorized itself.