The Oral Tradition

Sherman Alexie: Storyteller

2005-04-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

I attended Sherman Alexie's lecture last week and it was awesome. Very funny and pretty insightful. I found his comment that "Political Correctness has made racists into poets" interesting, and I can understand what he means. At some point, every euphamism becomes just as hateful as the term it replaces. As a non-involved white person, I thought the comments about the Crow were a little harsh, but then I don't have any cultural context. On the other hand, my aunt is Chippewa-Cree and she can't stand the Crow, just on general principle, so I suppose there is a certain amount of historical tribal warfare still at work.

Of course, I'm an outsider looking in, not being a member of the Ameican Indian community, but this in no way detracted from Alexie's storytelling abilities. He was a master of digression and diversion, and managed to weave what was essentially one stroy through the entire evening. "So I'm on the airplane" reappeared every fifteen minutes or so after a pretty substantial discussion of something else. For instance: cheekbones, poetry, sickness, and the possibility of regurgitating a whole and perfect cantaloupe ball despite the fact you can't remember eating cantaloupe any time recently.

Ultimately the main story was about memory as well. He told the story of his efforts to get his grandfather's war medals reissued and how the memory of a man he never even met so affected his life and that of his father. The emotion when he discussed recieving the medals was incredible. My life is very different from Sherman Alexie's. Very different. But my dad's is remarkably similar to some of the stories in Alexie's family. My father lost his dad when he was 5, not to war but to a heart attack brought on by weakened heart muscles caused by consuming tainted milk as a child. Mr. Alexie was right when he said there's no childhood after that .

My dad grew up really poor. They had an outhouse until he was four. He was the man of the house as soon as his father died, at the age of five, because he was the only one bringing income into the house through veteran's benefits and Social Security. It became a personal battle for my dad to prove he could over come. My dad grew up poor and has become the most educated and wealthiest member of his family. I have a cousin in Deer Lodge with a proclivity for meth labs. I could relate to Mr. Alexie even through our lives were so significantly different. That is probably the truest gift of a magnificent storyteller.

Jabberwocky

2005-04-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

I struggled, big time, with what to do for the paper in this class. It needed to be entertaining- to me at least- and informative. I couldn't decide on anything. Finally I started going through my books and remembered I had always intended to memorize Jabberwocky.

Not only that, but the poem, upon closer examination, is an eminently oral text. Doing research, I even discocvered that Carroll originally concieved of the poem as a faux fragment of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. How perfect.

Alliteration, onomatopoeia, kennings, preformance, portmanteaus, hypertextuality: it's all there baby! The paper seem to come pretty easily, though I don't know HOW I'm gonna present it.

As Alice said "It seems to fill me with ideas. ONly I'm not quite sure what they are."

Memorization

2005-04-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

Having watched everyone's performances, I want to give you all a big hand! Congrats! You were all magnificent. Also, Jennie, no one ever read "Oh The Places You'll Go" to me despite the fact that I did graduate high school, so thank you for filling that deficiency. All the poems and stories were amazing, and I was impressed that no one duplicated on topic for Top 50. However, Stephanie is in trouble. How am I ever going to know the top 50 German cities now. If I got lost, it's entirely your fault.

We're reallyu winding down here (Papers on Thursday! AHHH!) So I want to thank all of you for making this such a memorable (get it? I'm so punny... Stop, now...) class. Looking forward to all your presentations!

Rolling Stone's Top 50

2005-04-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

I chose to memorize the Rolling Stone Top 50 for a couple basic reasons: I love music and I thought it'd be easy. And I was right, it was easy. My memory theater was setup at my workplace this time, each artist designated as a foodstuff, topographical feature, or appliance. David Bowie was a blender. I especially liked that one.

As with the first time, I did not really begin the process until the day it was due. Now, part of this is attributable to the fact that I had no time, but I was also curious to see if something could be memorized so quickly. Undoubtedly the experience would be different with a story or poem, but this list only took me 3 tries to go through smoothly. Here's my process:

1. Attach loci to each item. Set aside until 2-3 hours before presentation.
2. Read over, and then hand to a friend or colleague.
3. Recite the list through, pausing for cues when the answer is elusive.
4. Recite the list through again, hopefully this time with fewer cues (Neil Young and the yogurt machine gave me a lot of trouble)
5. Recite the list through in reverse order
6. Have your partner pick, randomly, a loci and then continue from that point through the cycle.

This has worked really well for me. I only spent half as long on this recitation as I did for the MSU Top 100- which makes sense really...- but I think part of that was just having a good system.

Digital Photography

2005-04-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

I've never really been one for the snap shot. I enjoy them, like looking at them, approve of the memories they preserve, but I can never bring myself to take them. I have film I haven't developed from many years back and I consider it no real loss.

However, this past Christmas, I recieved a digital camera. I'd asked for it, so it wasn't a bolt out of the blue. I decided that since I was going abroad, and I'd be taking many, multiple pictures, a digital camera made the best possible sense for enjoying and sharing my photos with friends and relations. And I certainly have been taking more pictures. They present such instant gratification and there is no wasted film since decisions on quality can be made in camera.

But this has made me profligate with photos. With a standard camera I can always decide that I really don't need a picture of the artfully draped and quickly fading Valentine's decorations. So a digital camera is far more like the human eye than that of the traditional camera which takes in images but has no ability to eliminate those images which prove poorly designed, badly shot, or- horrors- boring. In the eyes and mind of a human being bad shots, unappealing locations, everyday detritus are wiped away by the necessity of remembering other visions. A traditional photo developed will exist until its destruction- not necessarily so with a digital camera.

So to say that technology leads us farther and farther from the path of pure memory and orality its patently false in the case of the digital camera. The digital eye takes in an image, judges it, and then immortalizes or discards that image. Just like the natural eye.

Boundary

2005-04-07T20:17:00.000-07:00

I'm working with the Boundary group to present the Kane text. Of the chapters I've read in their entirety (admittedly only Pattern and Boundary) this is by far my favorite. It opens with an old Irish poem and then tells the story of "The Wooing of Etain". The chapter proper talks about the importance of the boundaries between the world of gods and mortals in all its various incarnations.

For the presentation we have decided to act out the wooing and then delve into the various aspects of boundary in the tale. It should be a rollicking good time.

I'm really interested to see what the other groups present, and I'd warn you all to take good notes as these presentationa are almost CERTAINLY what the final is going to be over- provided the test isn't cumulative. And even if it is, these will feature. Luckily, just like the classmate epic poems, these should stick in our memory even with out the aid of any kind of tangible theater.

Ghosts and Memory

2005-04-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

Searching through the modules list of my prospective university next year- Exeter- I came across a class titled "Ghosts, Death and Memory in Renaissance Drama". In a stroke of kismet, I'm also studying Hamlet currently, no doubt a play that would come up EXTENSIVLY in a class of that description.

There are a couple basic theories on ghosts- all of which appear in one for or another in Hamlet.

1. Ghosts are the spirits of dead people trying to communicate with the living, i.e. Hamlet calling for Hamlet to kill Claudius

2. Ghosts are demons sent to trick people, i.e. the guards' belief

3. Ghosts are illusions or hallucinations, i.e. Queen Gertrude's belief

--------------------OR---------------------------

4. Ghosts are the trapped energy of former occupants and operate as a kind of full motion memory- a camcorder version of events on a loop. This appears mostly as the effect that the ghost has on Hamlet. He must avenge his father, he must secure the kingdom against the usurper Claudius, but most of all, says the ghost, "Remember me."

Most interstingly of all, ghosts act like a kind of mnemonic device. An event with a ghost attached will be remembered long after the story's sordid history would otherwise be forgotten. So if you ever see a ghost, and I can't say that I have, try to remember whatever it is your supposed to remember :)

The Art of Living Backwards

2005-03-31T20:08:00.000-08:00

In Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" Alice is introduced to the White Queen who lives her life backwards and must run constantly to keep from losing her place. Alice thinks the idea of living backwards is unbearably strange, but the Queen assures her:

"'...but there's great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.' 'I'm sure mine only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.' 'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked."

And the Queen is quite right. It is a poor sort of memory. And it is for precisely this reason that stories have been created. Stories, both oral and written, provide a way to remember things that are, have been, will one day be, are not, have never been, and will never be. And while we may not be able to pinpoint the future with quite the needle-focus certainty of the White Queen, we at least are provided with an overview of what may be.

Wordswallower

2005-03-24T20:32:00.002-08:00

Here, for your general preusal, is Justin's epic poem:

O Sing in me Muse/ of He-Who-Just-Enrolled-
Read./ He who consumed/ words with such intensity/ it brought comment from/ the grizzled shaman./ Justin Wordswallower./ He who read to the/ depths of the ocean,/ the height of mountains,/ the width of broadest/ valleys 'til his word/ wandering brought him/ to his own land of/ the Great Outerborn.

Wordswallower trod/ the mists of his thought/ and built a new world./ He husbanded the/ plains and grew fresh words,/ green lines, paragraphs/ of fertility/ and chapters of great/ worth that sprang up sweet./ The new world bloomed /under the vigil/ of Wordswallower/ until the evil five/ brought a plague upon/ the dwellers of the/ Outerborn city/ of the Golden Leaves./ Here the alderwraths
attacked and battered/ brave Wordswallower./ The battle raged for/ many days and nights,/ neither advancing,/ neither retreating.

Then the cool winds of/ inspiration came,/ reviving the stricken/ Wordswallower and/ blew the alderwraths/ away. Cleansing the/ land of dull ideas/ and hackneyed writing,/ Wordswallower claimed/ his throne as king and/ creator and ruled in/ peace 'oer Outerborn/ forevermore. And/ this is where the sweet/ Muse abandonded me.

Googled Memory

2005-03-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

I couldn't really think of anything to write for today's jornal so I decided to do a Google search on memory in general. Here are the top five links (Okay, somewhat edited. For instance- no duplications and no pages for buying memory for your computer, etc.):

American Memory from The Library of Congress

The Memory Exhibiton at The Exploratorium!

The Memory Hole: Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information

Learning and Memory: An Online Journal

Mind Tools: Essential Skills for an Excellent Career

So it's a pretty intersting mixed bag. Hope you enjoy preusing the sites as much as I have!

The Heart of Darkness

2005-03-13T07:50:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" (Loci: driveway) which is written as Marlow's yarn to his fellow travelers about his encounter with the mighty Kurtz. What I find particularly interesting is the storyteller's tricks he uses. For instance, as the narrator berates Marlow's story style when Marlow states, "'I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,' he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear..."(141).

While the narrator sees this as a defect of the storyteller's, I think it clearly shows the storyteller's art! He's got the audience intrigued as much about what he wont say as the tale he is about to spin. And a very good tale it is.

A Brief Interlude on Reality...

2005-03-08T20:45:00.000-08:00

Mr. Rushdie discussed during both the master class and the lecture the fact that readers and journalists are unwilling to let fiction be fictional. They always call out for textual loci and physical places in the "real world". This made me think of a Patton Oswalt routine on reality tv. This is a complete digression from the class topic, but then again, I can just claim I'm an oral storyteller and digression and diversion are my birthright!

I couldn't find the transcript for this special which aired on HBO in 1999, so what I place here is a paraphrasement from memory. Wish me luck:

"There's no reality left anymore, we've filmed it all! Everything is getting big and dramatic. Pretty soon there gonna start adding ninjas to the reality shows and big explosions and stuff to keep the audience interested. After that people are gonna go to the movies to relax. Pretty soon we're gonna start swinging back the other way and there will be shows like "Man Eats Breakfast". And then all the snotty indie film kids will be like 'that's not reality, where are all the ninjas and explosions and stuff!'"

And all because people aren't willing to let fiction be fiction and just enjoy it... Sad times ahead...

The Rushdie Lecture

2005-03-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

I was entranced by Rushdie's lecture last night but found his discussion of the difference between storytellers and novelists particualarly fascinating (as well as particularly applicable to this class).

Rushdie discussed how popular storytellers are in his native India, how they get huge audiences, and their amazing oral abilities keeping numerous narrative balls in the air. This can not be accomplished by a novelist. Novelists can not indulge in the songs, poems, and diversions of the storyteller because of the restricted structure of the novel form. And, as any storyteller knows, oral stories are never really over and can be infinitely expanded.

Novels are over- barring sequels, prequels, and fan fiction- at the end of the pagination. Even the longest novels feature a strictly ordered set of events that are fixed. When the last page is flipped the book is over. The End. Khattam Shud.

I agree with Rushdie that the novelist can not extend their works the way a storyteller can, but I admire the middle ground he has found with the reintroduction of new and refurbished mythologies and the liberal sprinkling of diversions that make his novels as close to oral stroytelling as written literature can get.

The Recitation

2005-03-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

I was very impressed with everyone's ability to present the memorized materail. I myself, and I wouldn't mention this if I wasn't so impressed with the memory palace system, didn't actually start memorizing the list until an hour and a half before class. (On the note, many thanks to Beth Patterson for her help in my memory palace.) So I'm now a tried-and-true devotee of the memory palace system.

And I'm interested to learn about all y'alls memory palaces, and so here is my challenge to you: post, as a comment, what you chose as a loci for the following texts- Shakespeare, The Manuscript Found At Saragossa, and There Eyes Were Watching God.

It won't be a comprehensive view of your palaces, but I'm interested all the same. Thanks in advance to any and all who choose to answer!

2005-02-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

One of Rushdie's best known novels...

Tai the Boatman

2005-02-24T20:44:00.000-08:00

" 'Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read.' Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand."
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

At this point in the story Tai, the speaker, and Aadam, his young listener, are great friends. However, when Aadam returns from Germany where he studied medicine there is a huge gulf between the two. Tai is unwilling to excuse the new doctors Western ideas and love of literature and Aadam is unwilling to give way to a foolish, superstitious ferryman.

In many ways Tai is a stereotypical member of the oral culture. He is one of the wise elders, so old that no one can remember a time BEFORE Tai was old. As noted in this quote, Tai has forgotten the location of the temple, but he remembers the location where water demons pull suicidal foreign women down and drown them. This information is more germaine and therefore remains. Homeostasis at work. Also, Tai has a general dislike and disregard for western thinking, especially western medicine because it means invasive, unnatural procedures. And of course, he's not illiterate- he simply can't read. He's a remnant of oral culture, not a failed literary scholar.

I came upon this quote while doing some for-pleasure reading and preparing for the Salman Rushdie master class. While reading Lolita I came upon a lot of interesting quotes on memory, but nothing quite as specific and demonstrative as this. Clearly it's kismet!

Some concerns...

2005-02-22T17:30:00.000-08:00

I always fret over the first test and today's was no different. I especially had trouble with Ong's 9 ideas and the allegorical figure wearing parts of speech... In any event, I can't really seem to think clearly about the place of orality and literature in today's society, so this is gonna be a short post... But that is not my primary concern. So here goes, prepare yourself for a Conspiracy Theory style tirade...

When we had to list out the mini-memory palace activity Kory led us in on that second day of class I blanked for a minute. Probably less than a minute. Seconds. And then the words came barreling into my head like a mantra. It spilled out on to the paper, no trouble at all. Which is all fine and good since it was a test question. But what if They (you know "They", best friends of "Them", brother-in-law to "The Man") are simply using this course as a training ground for indoctrinated college students. What if, the next time someone manages to string together the phrases "dog, grapefruit, bottle of wine,etc" we get the uncontrollable urge to recite Joyce at some one and then go buy a copy of The Art of Memory? This is all a set up! And this seems a lot more sinister than when the KGB tried to contact me through a burn I got from a hair dryer, which may have been my imagination. Possibly. But not this!

Revel in your ability to memorize 100 hundred titles in your memory palace now, becasue soon you'll be a walking, talking, Ong-toting memorization super soldier with a dog-grapefruit trigger!

The Memory Poetry of Simon J. Ortiz

2005-02-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to attend Mr. Ortiz's poetry reading tonight, and it was amazing. First of all, kudos to everyone who came out, I'm really glad they had to open up the second ballroom. Too often a great speaker gets a small audience and then EVERYONE loses out a little.

But back to main point: The reading was amazing. Ortiz's poetry deals FREQUENTLY with memory. Te two poems that stick out most for me were "My Mother and My Sisters" based on a mempory of his mother's from 1910 or 1911, and "A New Story" based on his own experiences during the mid '70s.

The poem about his mother gathering pinon was beautiful and very straightforwardly about memory; the memory was captured as an image of a dark valley and an older way of life. "A New Story" on the other hand was about a memory as well- here the memory of a silly woman asking indelicate questions and treating native peoples like float decorations. Throughout the reading of the poem, I was humiliated for every stupid white person who ever- even in a spirit of kindness- asked a native to join their parade for authenticity as a kind of curio. This poem was much more about feeling and emotion, but still couched in the memory form.

"My Mother and My Sisters" could have been written about the Acama-Pueblo people at anytime in the last two hundred years. It features pinon gathering in a very traditional way. On the other hand "A New Story" seems very clearly imbedded in the Native Power movement of the mid '70s. So the memories in these poems are both community oreiented and personally grounded. Which seems fitting for a poet who bothe writes in English and his native tongue and reads in both English and his native tongue. A merging of the literate and oral cultures in a single individual.

Lolita

2005-02-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

Memory is a big deal in Nabakov's Lolita. Humbert is attracted to Dolores/Dolly/Lolita not on her own merits, after all he thinks her a disgusting example of improper hygiene and dull wits, but because she represents the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have. And even the little girl on the Riviera he couldn't have, Annabel, was simply an exercise in his own ability to dominate and control.

Throughout the early stages of the novel, Humbert states that he loses interest in little girls after the age of, say, 15-16. However, Humbert is still obsessed with Lolita when he finally finds her two years after she ran away. She's seventeen, married, and heavily pregnant. She is in no way like the twelve year old he first claimed from Camp Q, but his passion for her remains. Humbert is in love with an Annabel/Lolita amalgam that has everything to do with his memory of them, his power over them, the Svengali-like image he created for them, and nothing to do with the girls themselves.

Humbert gives Lolita four thousand dollars and begs her to leave her squalid life with her husband and rejoin him. She refuses of course. Humbert rages against Q/Cue/Quilty for stealing Lolita away and for tainting her innocence, which is truly bizzare, but in reality he has lost nothing from his long absence from Lolita. Lolita is not even a real person; she is simply a construction of Humbert's psyche. Lolita is not her name. She is without history beyond how she met and was mastered by Humbert. After she disappears from Humbert's day-to-day life she is preserved as he last saw her, and even after seeing her Humbert refuses to realign his vision of Lolita with Dolores "Dolly" Schiller.

Humbert's memories allow him to keep alive a memory of the perfect nymphette, composited out of several girls, and truly corresponding to none of them. As Humbert says, "Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischevious of muses!"

The Alice Cooper Story

2005-02-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

Dr. Sexson was talking about the stories we hear again, and again, and again... In my house that number one oft-told tale is "The Alice Cooper Story". As in most stories passed on by family (This one is my mother's... She's a great one for stories) this one has a moral. The story goes something like this (Try to figure out the moral if you can; I'll include it at the end, so no peeking.):

At the beginning of the story my mom is still living in Chicago, which probably places this particular episode of The Phil Donahue Show in '74 or '75, and she's watching TV and Donahue has Alice Cooper on the show. He comes out dressed in full regalia, with all his makeup on, and preforms one of his songs for the crowd. The crowd is aghast, of course. Little old ladies all over the country are SHOCKED!!! Now mom never includes what that song IS but based on time period and my own whimsy I always imagine "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (which segues nicely into the interview as you will see). Anyway, the performance is followed by a commercial break and when the show comes back on Alice has changed into regular clothes and is sitting on the little central dias for his interview. His hair is long, but he looks pretty normal and he says, "I'm just a regular old Jewish kid" etc. etc. and all the little old ladies are comforted and by the end of the show are saying he's a very nice young man, etc. etc.

If you hadn't parsed it out yet, this is the "don't judge a book by its cover" story. I don't know how many times I've heard it over my lifetime, but I do remember when I started glossing it as she would tell it. I started to listen to a lot of music, to read a lot about music, etc. and in so doing I learned a short biography of Alice Cooper. When it comes to the part where Alice says he's Jewish I always slip in, subtle-like, that he's actually a PK (Pastor's Kid, making it a little unlikely he's Jewish)and my mom just goes, "Oh, that's right, a PK," like that's how the story always went.

This last summer we're on Going-To-The-Sun Highway up in Glacier Park when she starts telling the Alice Cooper story again, and I slip in the PK thing, and suddenly she stops and asks us: "Have I told you this story before?" The car is dead silent, my sister and I falling apart with silent laughter and I say, "I think I've heard it a few times." She'll probably tell it again with this same surprise that we've heard the story before. But that's my mom for you. Ask me about the Osteoporosis story if you want a quick, silly insight in to my mom.

My Memory Forest

2005-02-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

I've decided that I'd do a much better job of memorizing my book titles if it was tied not to my childhood home, but rather to my childhood yard.

I lived in a higly forested area in LP Michigan (I'm sure you all know what LP stands for). The whole area has Odyssey-like associations for me as there are specific games, some of them lasting years, tied to virtually every memorable tree, bush, or thicket in the area. I get warm fuzzies thinking about it, so I think as a whole my memory forest will work better for me than a tour of my house.

Had I lived in Montana I'd need the whole state to have a enough trees to make a memory forest. Shakespeare is the clump of junipers on the property line, the Bible where we found the dead squirrel, Don Quixote where I made the leaf chains... And so on, and so on, ad nauseum. I'm inordinately pleased with my memory forest, which is going to make this task infinitely easier.

Celtic Poetry and the Decline of Oral Traditions

2005-02-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

My group's chapter is titled "Boundary". It opens with the poem "The Wooing of Etain" from the Irish myth cycle and documents a goddess who through various misfortunes must live as a human being for a while. Being a goddess she can cross that boundary between the god's realm and that of human beings, but inevitably she must go back. This idea of liminality seems to be a favorite for the Celtic poets and bards since it appears frequently.

The poem Buile Subhine, OR The Frenzy of Sweeney, is an excellent example of this liminal borderland. Written down, which we later find out is sadly ironic, in the 11th with vestiges reaching back in to the 9th. Sweeney is a king situated between the burgeoning Catholicism of his kingdom and the old traditions, between the horns of oral and typographic literature, and most obviously between the extremes of maddness and sanity. Because Sweeney can not reconcile himself to Catholicism and "literature", the hallmarks of civilization of course, he is condemned to live the life of a bird, perching in trees and spilling out mad verse.

Sweeney can't hack the border between classical Celtic orality and the encroaching Literacy, and so he's forced to hover on the periphery until his death and renunciation of the oral values he fought for. Read Seamus Heaney's "Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish" to see the fight between orality and literacy encompassed in the body of a single individual: the Mad Bird King.

Signifier and the Signified

2005-02-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

I've read Sassure before for various literary criticism classes and papers, but I still enjoy his thoughts on the nature of the sign as an abstract concept. To this end I chose an Orality and Literacy passage in Chp. 4 on the relationship between words and visual signifiers titled "Words are Not Signs" which gets to the heart of the passage in a stunningly stright forward manner.

My underlined piece begins by observing that even fairly lately, alchemists and other learned peoples would use a symbol, frequently in the zodiac, to denote the contents of a particular bottle. Why? I thinks this ties nicely in to what we have been learning about the place of memory. A zodiac symbol brings up infinite allusions that illustrate a far more descriptive histroy than simply a word. If one were to label a bottle with the word "Mercury" you would now that the flask contained mercury, but the word is empty beyond that designation. If you employ the symbol instead, now the bottle contains Mercury, the essence of the Greek god; created by the planet as it sends out rays that bury themselves deep in the Earth. Allusions of fluidity, movement, travel are instantly bestowed upon the containd element. While these designations somewhat depend on an awareness of the alcehmists' understanding of the properties of Mercury and its development on this planet, much of the allusion remains to this day. (For more on the history and classical allusions of Mercury I suggest everyone read The Baroque Cycle, a series of three books by Neal Stephenson that detail the development of Natural Philosophy, Trade, Politics, and much more through the metaphor of Mercury. If this all sounds boring there is also grand adventure, romance, and pirates. Can't beat pirates. Total pages is something like 2500, but the whole trilogy only took me about two and a half weeks all told. They're that good.)

Visual symbols have largely been replaced with words as designations. This is very probably a more efficiant, clear way to communicate with our fellow literate peoples, but the loss of layered meaning has truncated the meaning of "Mercury".

P.s. I was also really interested to learn about the ivy bush as a desginator of the tavern. I knew about the pawn broker's golden balls and the barber's pole, but the bush was new to me. If I ever have a tavern I'm totally going to plant an ivy out front!

Kinky Books

2005-01-27T21:07:00.000-08:00

Dr. Sexson was talking about all the kinky things we do with books, all the touching, etc. While I've never intentionally done anything kinky with a book, I thought the discussion of touching and speaking (oaths, spells, etc.) was interesting. Words when combined with physical contact some how seem to have more impact.

Case in point: I was about thirteen when I joined my church group on a trip to Tacoma for a confrence. One night in Seattle (we stayed various places on the trip to and from) a fellow eighth grader, Molly, apparently was wandering around incoherent and hallucinating. Which according to her friend was something that happened "occasionally". Molly was/is a drama queen, so I regarded her preformance with a grain of salt. In any event, we also had three Costa Rican students with us who preformed a laying on of hands to purge Molly from the evil spirits. I don't know if it worked or not, but Molly has not had any more episodes (to my knowledge) since.

Placing a hand on the Bible when giving testimony, laying on of hands, the power of contact in casting a spell, even rubbing the lamp to release the jinn- contact when combined with words creates a powerful bond to enlighten and inform.

Classmate Journal

2005-01-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

kmvHere is a quick listing of the journals so far, alphabetized because I'm hopelessly enmeshed in our literary culture. I'll keep updating as more people get up and running:

Brian D: www.geocities.com/fenwayfan80
Brian J: http://rememory.blogspot.com
Cara: http://dineenc.blogspot.com
Cindy: http://spaditions.blogspot.com
Courtney: http://www.livejournal.com/users/wilsoncourt/
Dustin: http//:dythonoraltradition.blogspot.com
Debbie: http://oraltraditionsdeb.blogspot.com
Ed: http://trex2.oscs.montana.edu/~eshanley/index2.html
Hanna: http://precontamination.blogspot.com
Hanna's Notes: http://killernotes.blogspot.com
Kelly: http://galacticgerbil.blogspot.com
Kristi : http://saffiatu.blogspot.com
Jennie: http://buttersickle-la-la.blogspot.com
Jennie's Class Notes: http://oraltraditionsnotes.blogspot.com
Jennifer: http://jst-oraltraditions.blogspot.com
Jeremiah: http://guywiththecowboyhat.blogspot.com/"
Jeremy: http://www.adamlamb.com/webPages/
Josh: http://www.livejournal.com/users/jgerdes
Juliet: http://julietno.blogspot.com
Justin: http://oraltraditionsengl337.blogspot.com
Lauren: http://oraltraditions337.blogspot.com
Mick: http://msuenglish337.blogspot.com
Nikole: http://www.geocities.com/nikoledidier/index2.html
Opai: http://www.geocities.com/apabritabasu
Ryon: http://RyonSR15.blogspot.com
Samantha: http://originaldrivel.blogspot.com
Shauna: http://ideasandramblings.blog.com
Sophie: http://oraltradsophie.blogspot.com
Stephanie: http://stephurban.blogspot.com
Tracy: http://assignedjournal.blogdrive.com
Valerie: http://thefirebird2005.blogspot.com
Wayne: http://www.wayne.blog-city.com
Zac: http://zaxoraltradjournal.blogspot.com

My First Words

2005-01-20T20:44:00.000-08:00

I don't have any pre-oral memories. My earliest memory is of me and my parents sitting around a lake with a pebble shore and broken cinder blocks. I'm wearing my pink windbreaker and we're eating green grapes from a big bag. The reason I'm fairly certain this is a "genuine" memory is because my parents identify this as the trip to Mystic Lake in Wisconsin, and although I have pictures of the pink windbreaker which may influence that, I'm certain they were green grapes. Positive about it in fact. This is important because my mom doesn't like green grapes. So while we certainly might have grapes on a trip, they would most likely have been red grapes, and if the story had been told to me the detail would probably have been skipped or they would have been red grapes. This was before my sister was born, so I'm probably about two and a half.

All the same, the memories include me being able to communicate more or less satisfactorily with my parents. According to my parents, my first word was book. I don't remember this, but I don't know why'd they make that up. I don't have any pre-oral memories although I do have a number of pre-literate memories since I didn't really read on my own until I was five or six. One of my other earliest memories is hearing my mom reading my Cinderella book to herself after I went to bed. The next day, Mom gave me a casette of her reading the book complete with "Now it's time to turn the page" notices. I don't really remember, but I must have run her ragged asking her to read me this book. That or she wanted to be able to make dinner without me bugging her to read to me. I have very few memories before my sister was born, but a wealth of memories before I could read.

Dog, grapefruit, bottle of wine...

2005-01-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

Toothpaste, left shoe, eyebrow. Today's class was really interesting, and furthermore, very varied in its topics. Talking about literate and oral societies seems to pull in facets from all kinds of disciplines. I'm really intrigued by Yates' text too. I like the idea of training my brain to act as a giant filo fax. I'm not really sure what to expect from this class yet, but I look forward to learning!

The Oral Tradition

2005-01-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

This is just my first post. I'll edit it soon with a more thoughtful and complete examination of the Ong text.