Notes 2-22

For friday, please blog a multiple choice question from Moonwalking with Enstein, Yates 1-4, Ong, class discussion/blogs.

Notes 2-15

Memory Presentations start next class period! From the bottom of the alphabet up.

notion of many scripts but one alphabet
Writing restructures consciousness
bloriate--talk at length, especially in an inflated or empty way

Difference between script and alphabet:
Script is picture language (ex: Egyptian hieroglyphs)--aesthetically rich
Alphabet is connected to units of sound (Phonetician invention)

Hebrew language with vowels (DR MTHR, SND MNY: still readable)
Vico said: the best language was images, the language of the Gods--and then we descend into language of aristocracy, then the language of money
Rhetoric used to refer to purely oral speech, now refers almost exclusively to writing.

What kind of writing activates right brain?

Memory becomes a part of virtues (prudence)--not to connect with the divine, but as an aid to help you avoid problems that will happen to you
Bosch--painting of what will happen to you in the after life if you are not patient and virtuous

please see alphabetgoddess website for timeline

The primary religion of humankind is the female who creates all by herself, but with literacy--turned upside down
Woman creates world by herself, man speaks it into being (And God said)

Greek--word for speech is logos (logic) creative ordering principle of the world--the right brain.

"The Enigma of Kasper Hauser": boy raised in Germany without speech (a similar example "Wild Child")
If you get a chance, watch "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Literate language is a fall from grace. We learn to forget, we learn to remember and another kind of consciousness comes into being

Read Nick's blog--Goddess and the earth. Agriculture brings the plow to the earth, rapes Goddess

Notes 2-13

Test on February 27th
Please find a one liner from Ong to add to the list for next class
Look at Tristian and Nick's blogs
Presentations will start Friday from the bottom of the alphabet up.

Nick's blog: Calvin and Hobbes--stuffed tiger that becomes real in imaginal space but in writing turns into mere toy.
With the rise of literacy, we have put away childish things

Memorable thoughts encompass all senses.
People in oral tradition have multiple words for things we have two or three for (for example, "snow"--things that the culture is intimately interested in)
In the oral tradition, there is a lack of interiority and self reflection--not as rich an interior life as literates, who have internalized the writing technology

(pg 80) Ong: All three texts tell same story--dialogue from Phadrus--the account of the Egyptian invention of writing and Socrates resulting horror

How does writing restructure consciousness?

In the oral tradition, dreams are important--psychically real.

One liners from Ong

A literate person can never fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people (12)
Sound exists only as it is going out of existence (32)
Think memorable thoughts (34)
Writing separates the knower from the known...(45)
You find what color bears are by looking at them. (52)
Judgement bears in on the individual from outside, not from within (54)
Sight isolates, sound incorporates (71)
The centering action of sound...affects man's sense of the cosmos (72)
Corinthians 3:6 "The letter kills but the spirit gives it life" (80)
Technologies are artificial but artificiality is natural to human beings (82)

Notes 2-10

Read Nick and Tia's blogs
Memory presentations start Friday
Have one liners from Ong for next class

Final project: Musey Room (museum)--room filled with actual presence of muses and her mother, Mnemosyne. Poster presentations are a simple labyrinth, but rather a cabinet of curiosities with secret doors leading to other rooms--not only unleashing the memory stored in the musey room, but the brave reckless gods--same goal.

Imaginal: imaginary friends as children were not imaginary. We retained awareness that they were not a part of the real world, but that they were real because they occupied real space.
"If the soul is to be truly moved, it must be a tortured soul"--the business of soul making involves torture.
The brave reckless gods are in your head but you have room to contradict yourself.

psychosomatic--a condition caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as internal conflict or stress.
We have become isolated in the writing world.
"care" and "cure"--in order to cure, you must invest with care
Be a curator for you musey room. Care for the items in order to cure the terrible situation of being an ant.
Alchemy--the purification of the soul of its impure elements so as to become perfect

Writing restructures consciousness--Ong takes something of the noble savage in his attitudes toward primary oral culture
Writing culture is the written law
When you put that mark of ink on the blank page it is an act of rape. You have deflowered it.

Notes 2-8

Dr. Sexson has replaced the term paper with a poster revealing your memory palace and its secret passageways.

(pg 47) Yates "Behold in the plains and caves..."

Read Nick's blog: we enter a state of self hypnosis when we read books.
Renaissance humanism--viewing men's powers as divine powers

Imagional: completely and wholly real because it is imagional, mean it truly exists.
Charlotte the spider was a good friend and a good writer--a rare combination.
Niccolo Machiavelli believed that it was better to be feared than loved (see "The Prince"). He held parties for people who didn't exist in the real world.

Iconoclasm--is the deliberate destruction of religious icons and other monuments, usually with political/religious motives

The spoken word is ephemeral, moves out of existence the moment it exists.

51 items and a goal

I would like to memorize these 51 Best Novels (according to Modern Library) and read them in order.

1.     ULYSSES by James Joyce

2.     THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.     A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce

4.     LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

5.     BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

6.     THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner

7.     CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller

8.     DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler

9.     SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence

10.  THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

11.  UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry

12.  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler

13.  1984 by George Orwell

14.  I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves

15.  TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

16.  AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser

17.  THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

18.  SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut

19.  INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison

20.  NATIVE SON by Richard Wright

21.  HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow

22.  APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O’Hara

23.  U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos

24.  WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson

25.  A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster

26.  THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James

27.  THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James

28.  TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald

29.  THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell

30.  THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford

31.  ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell

32.  THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James

33.  SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser

34.  A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh

35.  AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

36.  ALL THE KING’S MEN by Robert Penn Warren

37.  THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

38.  HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster

39.  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin

40.  THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene

41.  LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding

42.  DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

43.  A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell

44.  POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley

45.  THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway

46.  THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad

47.  NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad

48.  THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence

49.  WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence

50.  TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

51.  THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer

Notes 2-6

For next meeting: blog about one of Ong's memorable one liners (the alphabet was only invented once, sound envelopes while sight isolates, etc) and/or go forward to recapture that lost moment as a child.
Be able to say what your 51 memorized items will consist of.

(pg 270) Foer: "It's about taking a stand against forgetfulness...its about nurturing something pprofoundly and essentially human."
Memory (mneme) and recollection (anamnesis)
Hermetic: becomes airtight, something you isolate from other things

Lethe is the river of forgetfulness...root of word Lethal, because the most lethal thing you can do is forget.
This, the subject of memory, is what you should become obsessed with.
Jesus said you must become as a little child--go forward to become what you were.

Look at Nick's blog--painting of Picasso with memorable images is a mnemonic of war? Startlingly original.
When we are three years old we see things better than other people.
Puff the Magic Dragon--dragons live forever but not so little boys...and Charlotte the spider lives on in her web of writing.

Everything was fresh and new in childhood. To anything as it really is is startling (look at Ashely's bedroom blog)
Annie Dillard--best way to spend your life is reading stories.
Memory itself is the mother of the muses, the nine women that are so integral to inspiring us at age three.
You already know everything, you have just forgotten it.

If you get a chance, read "Re-Visioning Psychology" by James Hillman about Renaissance humanism.

Notes 2-3

For next meeting: read Yates Ch. 2

If you get a chance, read Art Bingham's review of Ong's Orality and Literacy
Exam is February 22
Go to Rio's blog to watch Waking Life online

(pg 36) Yates: entire history of memory, Platonic information--importance is beyond the mere experience of it
anamnesis: the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence
According to Plato, you already possess all the information you need to know: you just need to remember it.
The true function of rhetoric is to persuade men of the knowledge of the truth (Plato's Phaedrus)
All knowledge and learning is to recollect the true forms.
Sound envelopes while sight isolates.

Follow Tia and Nick's blog examples--please don't see this as schoolwork, but become obsessed with something. Say the ant things--the cliches--to survive daily life, but find a way to get off antpilot (or autopilot) by becoming obsessed.
If you get a chance, read The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin: Australian dream quest, singing up the land--the landscape they roam through is a musical score

Taking Flyte

There are so many fantastic blogs! I think I had a similar reaction as many of our classmates while reading Spencer's blog; it was extraordinary to see the human brain's amazing potential illustrated so clearly. I was also really intrigued by this thought from Parker's blog: "The oral tradition promotes mental processes that are integral to our past, while the exploration of literature serves as a catalyst for the development of our future". Parker's blog helped me cement my own motivation for why we should study the oral tradition, or why literature students (or everyone) should seek a balance when studying orality and writing. As he states, humanity should strive to avoid straying to one side of the extreme and allow the two to complement each other in a reflection of our own nature.

After rereading that wordy paragraph, I suppose I should reflect on this passage from Ong: "With writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and reorganize its more normal, redundant processes" (Ong 40). It is a little unnerving to read about the artificial linear and analytical creations that we force our thought process to conform to, "structured by the technology of writing". While the thought process of a person raised in a primary oral culture appears foreign to our own, in reality we share the same fundamental ways of thinking shaped by our past traditions of orality. As Seth pointed out, "How do you know what you think until you see what you say" is usually a phrase repeated by Sexson in his classes (and by repetition, eventually etched into his students' memories). I always understood this in reference to the amazing capability of writing to organize chaotic thought into coherency. However, the word "say" itself suggests that there is more than one mean to achieve our desire for order.

On a side note, while I don't remember engaging in many flyting battles with my brother (I don't think we were smart enough for that...when presented with a power struggle, we were more prone to hucking Legos than verbal dueling), for insults I would usually string together words that sounded insulting. For example, I would tell him that he was being a Pedantic Putz and let him make up whatever horrible meaning for the unknown word. Without the ability to read, the word only existed in sound for Brock. He could not “look up” pedantic and discover society’s accepted meaning for it. Instead, he was left to assume that pedantic was used to describe an individual who sh**s his pants in public (or something like that...I can only assume from his reaction, which was usually pretty entertaining). Although I didn't realize it at the time, I mispronounced pedantic something like “pen-dant-tic” because for me the word only existed on a page; I could identify it by sight, but possessed no understanding of its pronunciation or sound.

Guess the joke was on me.

Notes 2-1

For next meeting, write about a classmate's blog that knocked your socks off.
Also: find a passage from Ong/Yates that is provocative.
Watch Waking Life and read Tia of the Crawling Ant's blog, Swift Footed Seth's blog, Patient Parker's blog.

(pg 21) Ong: "What are some of the deeper...hexameter line?"
Walter the Ghetto Prophet's work is so astonishing because: speed, worked it all out in his head, and improvisation (which is never truly improvised).

exigency: an urgent need or demand
onerous: involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively difficult

The movie (and book) Fahrenheit 451: in a world where physical books are burned, everyone memorizes a book and goes around introducing themselves (Hello, I'm Alice in Wonderland, etc). At the end of the movie, an old man is reciting his book to a boy and the boy is repeating it back to him.
Repetition, repetition, repetition is important to oral culture.

TEST QUESTION: (pg 21) Ong: Oral poets do not memorize verse verbatim.
Belonging to an oral culture, oral poets are empathetic and will occasionally enter the poem himself in first person--not objective.

Homeostasis: equilibrium--oral culture sloughs off memories that no longer have relevance.

All of Ong's nine qualities come back to one concept: practicality.

Sesame Street game "Which one is not like the other?" can not be played by oral cultures...(pg 51) Ong: "illiterate subjects consistently..." choose practical use and situational thinking instead.

(pg 37) Cain: Ostracize people for being illiterate...what have we gained by becoming a literate culture? What have we lost? Can't smell our way north anymore...

Word made flesh by giving it the oral dimension: look at Swift Footed Seth's blog.
Sight and literacy and writing isolate...sound and harmonics do the opposite, communal.
Patient Parker's blog is a model for engagement with the books.

51 items in memory palace: should be able to recite backwards as well as forwards.