Though I don't consider myself to be a veteran of Dr. Sexson classes, this will be my third class with him. For those of you who are new, here are a couple of things that might help you this semester:
1) Write down everything he says! Amidst the chaos of information it is all connected and it provides good blog material.
2) Keep up on your blogging. It is easy to forget about, but it is usually the only homework we have. Explore the little abstractions he mentions in class, go off on tangents, and engage the material and the rest of the class.
Here are a couple of thoughts about our first class. The Muses are the 9 daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory. The daughters, and you can wiki their names are, for the most part, the muses of some type of oral communication. They are the muses of heroic poetry, lyric poetry, erotic poetry, singing and rhetoric. We might have to evoke them later in class when discussing any one of these forms of communication. As with alliteration, we can make our stories and words poetic and florid to make them interesting.
This is an interpretation of the goddess Mnemosyne. Her counterpart is Lethe, which means forgetfulness. Alethe (like the aletheometer in the Golden Compass) means an "un-forgetfulness.
We will at some point discuss Primary Orality, which is not a term exclusive to the unwashed masses, but it denotes communication with the spoken word rather than with text and images (other than those we imagine).
We need to go to an unfrequented church in order to create a memory system. The developing of a memory system is the LOCI, which means location.
And "It is all about the stories". Stories obliterate time. This might be something to come back to later in the class: how do oral stories obliterate time? How do these stories conceptualize time as they are passed from one generation to the next?
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