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.