Notes 1-30

Blog: engage Walter Ong in chapters 1-3 on a point you find interesting.
For midterm, memorize 51 items that will be useful to you in memory theater.

The Homeric question: what is the Odyssey and Iliad, and who authored? Both are works of high oral literature and collaborative works--no single Homer.

Chirography: study of penmanship and handwriting
Typography: the style and appearance of written matter

When memorizing poetry, pay attention to assonance and consonance (Kubla Khan). It will help.
You are what you remember--memory moves into the realm of the ethical

Two memory palaces

Nine Muses Memory palace:

C: In the living room sitting on the beige loveseat, a ripe cantaloupe is calling her mom on the phone while reading Homer: Calliope, epic poetry.

CUTE: Leaning up against the counter in the kitchen, Cleopatra is reading a textbook opened to a page about mummies: Clio, history. Next to her, Urania is leaning out the kitchen window with a telescope, examining Uranus in the night sky: Urania, astronomy. In the opposite corner by the oil and wine rack, Terpsichore is twirling and gyrating in a kiddie pool of turpentine and rubber ducks: Terpsichore, dance. Sitting on the floor next to the kiddie pool, Euterpe is reciting the lyrics to her favorite song “Creep” by Nirvana, but she keeps replacing the word creep with the word twerp: Euterpe, lyric poetry.

TEMP: In the dining room sitting in my chair, Thalia has set her book on Thailand aside and is laughing at a Calvin and Hobbes strip while wearing a jester hat with jingling bells: Thalia, comedy. Erato is sitting at the bottom of the stairs reading the inside of a U2 vinyl cover, “One”: Erato, love poetry. In the middle of the stairs, Melpomene is crying because her parrot deserted her shoulder in favor of her more virtuous sister: Melpomene, tragedy. At the top of the stairs, Polyhymnia is reciting her hymns with a parrot on her shoulder interrupting (Polly want a cracker?): Polyhymnia, hymns.

Twelve brothers/tribes of Israel:

Directly before the gate to our forest by the basketball hoop, a soggy reuben sandwich is being eaten by Simon Cowell, wearing levis, atop an ox. Juda is wearing a cowardly lion suit and chasing him away from the rest of the group. By the hay shed, Zebulan is blasting off in a spaceship. Issachar’s ass gets spooked by the spaceship and runs into Dan’s serpent and tramples him. “Oh my Gad you trampled him!” Dan screams, but Asher, his rich friend, offers to buy him another one. Naphtali exclaims that a deer makes a much better pet, but Joseph gets cross and reminds him that Naphtali’s deer ate all the fruit from his fruitful bough. Meanwhile, the full moon rises over the mountains and Benjamin turns into a werewolf and jumps Naphtali’s deer.

Notes 1-27

For next meeting: Eavesdrop on a group of people talking and blog about the cliches. Read ch.1 of Art of Memory.

Why flyting exists: transfers aggression and energy into words instead of physical aggression
In the oral tradition, you are never given a straight answer for directions
One of Ong's 9 traits: agonistically toned, combative--taken out on a linguistic level so it doesn't have to be acted out

(pg 37) Ong: Oral tradition is highly additive: for example, parataxis (the repetition of "and"). Look at Genesis.
Oral tradition does not use words to indicate subordination (when, while).
Parataxis lends equal weight to everything in the sentence--like a child breathlessly storytelling
Lends urgency

Aggregative: reliance of formulas to implement memory

Notes 1-25

For next meeting: change the name of blog site to reflect epithet and blog list of insults you exchanged with a sibling
See Tia of the Crawling Ants, Nate the Enigma's blog for examples of architectural floor plan
Flyting: the exchange of insults.

Memorize the twelve sons of Israel (using following epithet):
1. Reuben:water
2. Simeon: ox
3. Levi: ox4. Juda: lions
5. Zebulun: ships
6. Issachar: ass
7. Dan: serpent
8. Gad: trampled
9. Asher: rich
10. Naphtali: deer
11. Joseph: fruitful bough
12. Benjamin: wolf

Mantra for the class: I can do this.

Bedroom

The wall across from the door to my room has an enormous Starry Night poster and a long rectangle painting of a magpie perched on a long thin branch I did in high school (it has a yellow-green background), as well as various cards and quotes and sticky notes I have taped up or visitors have taped up for me. There is a picture of my brother and I sitting on a coach. We are very young, and I am unaware that he is attempting to steal a sandwich from my hands while I am distracted, deviously, with an outthrust lower lip. There is a drawing of an owl. There are the metal silhouettes of mountains my brother milled on the plasma cam and hand pounded. There is a stick eaten away by worms. “Tuit” has been written on it in sharpie (get it?). There is an orange acrylic skier and doodles of flowers and my favorite quote by Martin Luther King Jr. My bed is covered in the jean quilt my Gramma Joy sewed for me in high school. The pillowcase is black with neon colored ski boots. My desk is dark blue and dominates the right corner, the shelves at least four inches too deep for practical use (I designed and painted and my dad built it for me. I still get blue marks on my sleeves if I sit with my elbows on it for too long). The carpet is brown and covered in scraps of paper and crumbs and dirt (we don’t own a vacuum…I try to pick up by hand the more noticeable debris). The top of the desk is littered with Kerr jars, sunglasses, water bottles, my bike helmet, my bike gloves, loose change, two of those ski holder thingies I don’t use but Gramma keeps sending back with me, and containers housing various types of loose leaf tea. The second shelf is books, mostly from last semester, as well as a 3D paper stegosaurus, a rock, some SassySours from last semester, and a yam. The last shelf is books from this semester, more tea, a package of ziplock bags, honey, and a large obviously homemade purple and blue spiral mug. The wall above my desk has a Rossignol poster of Micah Black, a pastel drawing, a hairy shirtless man on a motorized bike on a highway (“look into the now”), a yellow submarine calendar (for 2011, still open to December), a picture of two men in tuxes on a tow rope at Bridger (the sky is aqua marine, their hands raised in twinned triumph). Snowshoes lean against my desk. Gloves are usually on the floor, under the heater that seems to blow more cold than warm air, and always with a kind of spontaneous aggression that surprises me. My ski boots are in the closet, my liners removed and drying under my mirror. The windowsill is lined with rocks. Most of them have been drawn on with sharpie. Next to my bed is an old wooden Carnation crate. Hats and mittens and headbands live inside the crate, and a blue ceramic lamp (nine dollar super steal) sits on top of it and clicks ominously when it’s turned off.  Next to my closet is a box full of canned food—but mostly canned mandarin oranges and cranberry sauce because I dislike these sorts of things in cans. On the opposite wall, there is a Spy Optic poster, a hedgehog card, some ski maps, doodles of trees and leaves, a burlap sack from costco that used to house rice, a Calvin and Hobbes comic, sticky notes, a pink card with a care bear that says “you make my heart happy”, a mustache named Murphy, and a blue triceratops. The shelves above my head hold books, hemp, a baseball mitt, art supplies, two Lost Trail hats, and snacks. The last thing I see before I go to bed is either a small Eric Carl illustration of a butterfly and sun next to my head or the blue light from my computer charger.

Notes for 1-23

For your next blog, give an architectural design of your memory theater.
Please memorize something that will be important or useful to you for your 100 items.

An ongoing list for memorization:
Chapter 5 in Moonwalking with Einstein: the grocery list of 15 items
9 Muses
Know everyone by their epithets
Kubla Khan
9 Characteristics of Orally Based Thought

Notes for 1-20

Notes for 1-20:

Please see Rio’s blog site for recorded lectures. For your next blog, you may reveal the secrets of your memory palace (for the nine muses, etc) and describe your bedroom.

Group 1: Maps

Jennifer of the falling water

Cassidy Euterpe

Down the Rabbit Hole Jacky

Louie Armstrong

Ski Captain Kyle

Rio

Group 2: Boundary

Megan Mother of the Muses

Abby

Breanna of the fidgeting whales

Spencer

Group 3: Dream

Ashley

Craig the Grump

Cameron the Terminator

Glover Ghetto Prophet

Group 4: Complimentarity

Jennifer

Seth

Angel

Group 5: Tradition

Tia of the crawling ant

Quentin the Inquisitor

Nick of Poptart

Shelby

Patient Parker

Group 6: Context

Levi of the Lost Marbles

Atypical Angela

Tearful Tristia

Nate

Gage

Is forgetting really so bad?

Foer states that the old desire for a trained memory was not to provide internal storage of information, but to strengthen the moral character of the person in question: “What one memorized helped shape one’s character…the secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts” (Foer 110).  Simply by virtue of completing a task that is inherently very difficult, the individual embarking on this gargantuan task would become a more complete person regardless of the religious or literary merits of the text memorized. While the pursuit of difficulty for the sake difficulty is worthwhile, I am nonetheless a little haunted by the descriptions of the mental athletes that Foer describes as well as the lifestyle that Foer himself maintains in training. But of course, mental athletes should perhaps rationally be upheld as an extreme rather than an ideal. Is our reliance on external memory so terrible? Should we change our lifestyle to include more strengthening of our inherent abilities? Is forgetting really that bad?

“We all do the same thing when we try to recount conversations, because without special training our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture” (Foer 124). Foer writes that the whole point of our nervous system is to best perceive what is happening in the present and predict what will happen in the future; in the simplest concept of the organ, the brain is primarily “prediction and planning machines” (Foer 124). It is incredible that the range of our human abilities can include the kind of memory feats describes by Foer. If all we are in essence is the sum of our memories, I can’t help but wonder if our increasing dependence on external memories means that we are becoming a culture whose brains will eventually begin to adapt to our lifestyle of quantity over quality.