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.