Sigur Ros

I love Sigur Ros, they are the soundtrack to many special moments in my life, so when Sexson mentioned them in class the other day my heart fluttered a bit. Last year Sigur Ros came out with a new album, their fifth, which was I would say a little more rock than the others, which have an ethereal, ambient sound that lulled me to sleep many nights. They sing in Icelandic- their country of origin- but also in a language called "Hopelandic" that they made up (to date, only one songs on all 5 of their albums is sung in English, although they have a huge fan base in the US and UK). Sigur Ros says that their music is meant to convey the beauty of their homeland; a "sound-scape". And As you can see in the video link to a song off their album "Takk..", the sound does seem to be tied to the earth, perhaps in the rhythm and movement of the earth and the volcanic landscape of their country. It makes me think of what Sean Kane was saying in "Wisdom of the Mythtellers" about how originally, myth served to express the emotions of the earth. To me it seems like with their music, Sigur Ros is expressing the majestic volcanic beauty of the landscape of their home country. In that sense, they are making mythical music.

http://sigur-ros.co.uk/band/disco/takk-glosoli.php

(Oral) Tradition and the Individual Talent

My Paper:

As a poet and a critic, T.S. Eliot filled two seeming opposed roles in the literary world. In both his poetry and his critical works, Eliot expressed a belief that the nature of time is cyclical, and that the past, present and future influence each other. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is one such work of literary criticism, wherein Eliot argues that a poet does not write in a vacuum, but rather with every new piece of literature he writes, he dips into the tradition set before him by the literary canon of the past. That is, his new work would not be possible without the old. However, Eliot, in writing about the inevitable all-inclusive nature of poetry, excluded something very important. In referring to capital T “Tradition” in this essay, Eliot confines the term to the literary canon, ignoring the fact that without the Oral Tradition set before it, the literary tradition could not have possibly came into existence.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot seeks to define the notion of “Tradition” as we know it. While he acknowledges that an “existing order” constitutes capital T “Tradition”, he fails to mention an essential part of that order: the Oral Tradition on which it was built, the Oral Tradition which we delved into in class this semester.
“Tradition”, Eliot explains, has historical connotations. However, it doesn’t limit “history” to what’s behind us: “it involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot, “Tradition”). Why would Eliot stop at literature? The reason why a course like “Oral Traditions” is offered for English majors and why the topic of “Orality and Literacy” has been analyzed by a multitude of scholars is because our oral past is so very pertinent to our literate present: a vital part of that “simultaneous order”.
We spend the majority of our studies as English majors being trained and taught in the tradition of great authors like Shakespeare and Milton; the authors of great literature whom Eliot pays homage to in his essay. We take survey courses in order to discover “the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors” (Eliot, “Tradition”), courses wherein we encounter works like T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. Most of the time the tradition we study in pursuit of our English degree is, like Eliot’s concept of tradition in the essay, limited to the chirographic and typographic canon. We don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the unnamed storytellers for which the literate tradition arose in the first place. We need to continue in the interest of this class and keep investigating into the Oral Tradition, extending our definition of Tradition beyond Eliot’s, and rediscover our oral roots.
One might ask themselves why, in a class called “oral traditions”, have we ended up devoting so much time to memory theatres, memory systems, discussing the phenomenon of memory and traditions of memorizing. The answer would be because memory is something we own as individuals, but also collectively, on a cultural scale. The way remember can be a personal thing- reflecting on our lives memories, etc- but it is also something we experience collectively as human beings. In remembering our oral roots, we gain deeper insight to our modern minds today, as well as where we are going. And when all this is considered, we can see time, memory, and tradition as Eliot saw it: completely infinite.
Every piece of our culture needs a memory device to keep going; to progress. Data is kept and history is recorded so that we have something to refer back to, so we don’t lose the knowledge we’ve established, so we can keep moving forward. Without the past in mind, we couldn’t exist in the present or advance into the future. We are perpetuated by memory. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot makes this assertion in the context of authorship.
What Eliot didn’t say in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he made up for in “Little Giddy”, the fourth poem of “The Four Quartets” where he acknowledges the interconnected nature of the written canon he analyzed in that essay. “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning; Every poem an epitaph” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”). He closes the poem with some of the most important words to any English major: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”).
This statement shares the theme of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in asserting that the past is not confined to history, the past is in our present and our future. In all that we read, and learn, and do, the goal is to “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (Eliot, “Four Quartets”). This is the deepest essence of remembering: to recall, in light of our most current selves, in our most current mindset, notions of the past. We bring the past to the present.
The past, the present and the future play off of each other in all aspects of human existence; “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new” (Eliot, “Tradition”). We have learned that our current transition from a literate culture to a cyber one mirrors the initial transition from orality to literacy. In studying that long-sense crossed boundary between oral consciousness and the literate mind, we better understand the modifications that are currently taking place in the literate world. It’s all relevant. Past, present, future; Oral, literate, technological: it’s all relevant.We are on the verge of completing a course in “Oral Traditions”. At this time I, like Eliot, feel the desire to analyze what constitutes this “Tradition” that we refer to. When Eliot defines “Tradition” in his essay as “the existing order” I think he leaves something vital out of the order he refers to. In speaking of the literary canon and the literary tradition that haunts any new author, he fails to mention that this order began in the oracular and progressed from there to the literate world as we now know it.

Cleaning up my rhetorical act

One of the many ways that this class has forever changed me will be in my word choice. iIt has been months since I have used the word "literally" when I am speaking. I cannot do it! Every time it springs into my mind, I must replace it with "actually" or another substitute before it leaves my mouth. I guess I have gained a new understanding of "literal" in Oral Traditions, and suddenly statements like "That book was so good, I literally could not put it down" just sound silly to me.
Unless it's on paper, of course.

March 5, 2009

I was working at the coffee shop thursday morning when a man came in (an eccentric art proffesor of a man) announcing "Boodles blew up". My co worker and I looked at eachother confused. He said "Yea, I just drove by there. Shook my car.There's a big crater where Boodles and the Rockin R Bar used to be". From there on out every person who came in was talking about it: "did you hear there was an explosion downtown?" From the windows of the coffee shop, we could see a huge smoke cloud coming from the downtown area. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach the whole morning, thinking that there was going to be more bad news to come. In an explosion that demolished 8 businesses, surely there would be various casualties. Also, thinking about how this could have just as easily happened 12 hours later- 8:00 at night- when those bars would have been jam packed. That really made me feel sick.

My coworker brought up how this made her think of September 11. Imagine how we are feeling now hearing about an explosion in downtown Bozeman, how many times that would be amplified if we were in downtown New York City when we heard the planes crash. That the twin towers exploded rather than a local bar. I remember where I was when I heard about the crash on the news. Imagine being in the immediate vacinity.

The first day I was in class, we talked about how something that we wanted to work on in this course would be to remember every day like we remember those days when history was altered. I will always remember thursday morning, finding out about that gas explosion while I was working. And an event like that happening sparks the memory to other times when we felt the same sinking feeling of tragedy taking place: September 11th. I think that all of us will remember where we were that day.

Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Julian Jaynes asserted in his book "The Origin of Conciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" that we can pinpoint the distancing of human beings from their innate bicamerality to the invention of the alphabet- which happened only once- around 1500 bc. What is bicamerality and what does it have to do with "voices" in the mind? Where did those voices go upon invention of the alphabet?

"Bicamerality may mean simply orality" states Ong at the very end of chapter 2, on page 30. He has not made further reference to bicameralism since then. Jaynes description of ancient bicameral humans makes them sound something like a modern day schizophrenic: hallucinating and hearing voices that they would have to obey. These voices were actually their own internal stream of conciousness, of which they were not aware, heard as the voice of gods or spirits. For example, the nine muses that we have memorized for our class. We understand them to be a symbol or a personification of erotic poetry, history, sacred song, etc. Jaynes believes that ancient people actually heard the muses, passing on their powers of dance, song and poetry.

Some evidence of bicamerality and these voicings which Ong talks about in "Orality and Literacy" is found in the Illiad. The Iliad lacks the inner thought processes and introspection that are evident in the Odyssey which was written centuries later. This suggests that in the time period in which the Odyssey was written, human beings had not yet developed accute self awareness.

The breakdown of bicameralism means the aquisition of human self-conciousness and awareness. The Odyssey is evidence that a breakdown occured between its creation and the Iliad because there is an emergence of introspection in the hero and absense of "voices". This mentality seems crazy to us, a literate culture, who puts people that hear voices away in mental hospitals. But we have never had a chance to develope an oral mentality. The mentality we claim, that of literate people, came into existense centuries before we did. We will never experience the bicameral mind.

Speak, Memory

from Nabokov's "Speak, Memory"

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park —as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement.
Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl's bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something —perhaps the nutcracker. In the place where my current tutor sits, there is a changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs; the pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling, transformations is repeated.
And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties —smiling, frivolous duties —some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.

Synaesthesiacs

I mentioned that in the fall of 2007, I took my first class, American Lit 2, with Dr. Sexson. It was the first class I took within the English department, and probably the one that led me to declare an English Literature major that same semester. I remained relatively disengaged with the material (as I was accustomed to being in class at MSU, having only enrolled in CORE classes up until that point). Until: Lolita. From the first words of the first chapter "Lolita, light of my life, fired of my loins. My sin. My soul", I started engaging. We could probably say that my decision to devote the rest of my education to studying literature was spawned in that moment: before Lolita, I don't remember much about American Lit 2.
As if the sensous writing of Nabokov were a mystery to be solved, I felt like I had cracked the case when Sexson mentioned in class that Vladimir Nabokov was a synesthesiac. When I looked up "synaesthesia" on google later (i believe Sexson told us to look it up on wikipedia with that mention), I had a defining "ah-ha" moment. Of course! It makes so much sense that a person who "suffers" a disorder like this would write as Nabokov does. I felt envy for him, for all synaeshesiacs. Look up the terms of this illness and I think you'll understand what I mean:
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/synesthesia/main.html
What I would give to experience the world for a day (no, a week, at least) as Nabokov or other synaesthesiacs do. I would spend the entire week writing I think! Or painting, or widdling, or something! I found an interesting website that states that all art is a manifestation of synaesthesia, a "blurring of the senses". In this way, all art has a "synaesthetic origin". It makes sense to me, check out more about this theory at the following site:
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art2/index.html

Well, the reason why I am bringing up synesthesia again, 3 years down the line in Oral Traditions, is because this book I borrowed from Dr. Sexson, "Why Life Speeds up As You Get Older" by Douwe Draaisma, mentions a case study of a man with extraordinary memory who was also "synasthetic in the extreme". "The impressions of his various senses ran together" he writes of the man, who was a mathematical genius with almost absolute memory. It brought my mind back to American Lit and I wondered, how do synasthesiacs remember?

In my memory theatre, I have associated the names of the gods with visual pictures of objects in the coffee shop. If I were a synasthesiac, I would have associated the names not only with visual pictures, but also with sounds, smells, or tastes. That would give me a whole extra set of associations. Imagine the capacity for memory, then, that these people have. The man in this book, when trying to recall mathematical calculations from 10 or 15 years earlier, could reproduce the equations in moments because he recalled the "sensory impression of the original test"; the "taste" of the occasion.

Think of how powerful of a memory aid smell is to us. How sometimes a certain smell brings you back to an experience you had at, say, the beach when you were a child. Well, what if you could recall math equations by the stimulus of a smell. Or poetry. These people have 5 different overlapping storage units of memory. I wish I could experience that!
When you think about it, memory happens by sensory associations: by synasthetics. We all have the ability to remember, so we all have something of a synasthetic in us. To be a person who experiences life in a constant state of synasthesia, memory is all the more powerful. For as strong as our memories are, there are humans with almost absolute memories as a result of psychiatric disorders (that makes it sound like a bad thing!). But it's interesting to think that in all human beings there is something of a synasthesiac, in the "blurring of the senses" that memory is.

My "Testimony" to the Oral Tradition

Yesterday Mr. Sexson came to visit me in my memory theatre- the international coffee traders- the place where I decided to put my 50 characters from Ovid's Metamorpheses because, after four years of working there, I can say I know the nooks and crannies of the place as well as if it were my own house. Well, it was an incidence of synchronization when Mr. Sexson showed up, because I had Ong's "Orality and Literacy" sitting out on the counter intending to read it in the down time at work. i ended up talking about it instead, because the first customer who came in that morning spotted it and started interrogating me about the topic. This is a regular who is a writer stationed in Bozeman writing a book. He told me that if this topic interested me I should look for a book called "The Bicameral Mind" or something to that effect. I told him we just had that a question about the bicameral mind on our test (still, I was provoked to return to that section in Ong for a reread). That was only the first instance, throughout the morning, I'd say about 5 more customers commented on the book. Some asked what it was about, others had something to say on the topic. In any case, I was surprised at people's interest in this topic, and that our Oral Traditions class is not the only demographic that ponders issues concerning orality and literacy. Many people seem to be aware that we're making a shift right now into the digital age that is equivalent to the dawn of literacy and the printing press in human society.

Likewise, it was convenient that syncronicity that Mr. Sexson came by because all this success in memorization (which I testified to today in class) sparked a new question in me that only he could answer (because I don't know anybody else who can quote from such a wide range of classic literature): I see how the memory theatre works for namings off lists of names, spices, top 40 hits, etc. But what about for those long quotations from James Joyce or Nabokov that Sexson has been reciting word for word since my first class with him- American Lit 2- almost 3 years ago ("Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins..."). I wondered, is the memory theatre technique his esoteric method for this type of memorization as well. Sometimes these lines from literature plant themselves in our heads simply because they are so beautiful and... unforgettable. I haven't forgotten those few lines from Wallace Stevens "Sunday Morning" that moved me to tears, especially when I walk down feeling "gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights. All pleasures and all pains. Remembering the bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul". But in every class I've taken, he has always been able to repeat passages from the books we read without referring to the text. How does one do this?

I think of how I went about assigning names to objects in my memory theatre. Originally, my intention was to assign the name to something that would remind me of the story. But I only hold true to that in a few cases... for example putting Jason and Medea together because they share a story in ovid or Achilles and Agamemnon. But those were only vague associations... i know they appear in the story together, but i can't retell the story for you verbateum. It just didn't work out as I was moving along in my memory theatre. But see, I realize now that I could have done that. I could associate names with objects in the coffee shop that remind me of the stories, and use that as means of memorizing the stories of Ovid. So I can see how in this way, literature and stories can be memorized.

The customers who inquired about "Orality and Literacy" ended up getting a testimony similar to the one I gave in class today. I explained how it was a required text for the Oral Traditions course that I am taking right now, which is turning out to be the most fascinating and useful (read: practical) class that I've ever taken because I am discovering a mental capacity that I didn't even know I had, that I wouldn't have known that I have. That is I'm discovering my own capacity for memory, my own divine connection, a place where I find myself "trafficing with the gods".

-"Trafficing with the gods" on Mt Olympus-

Making my Memory Theatre

Before and Afterthoughts on the memory theatre: I anticipated that memorizing 50 names without a written list to fall back on or act as a security blanket would be very challenging. I decided to follow the suggestion I read on the wiki article, and first create my memory theatre and walk through it without assigning anything I was memorizing to different places. I ended up choosing the coffee shop that I work at because I have a routine there when I go in to open, and also there are lots of places to put things. I walked through there a few times in my imagination, then let it go for a while. Yesterday, I started assigning names to different points in my memory theatre. Right now I've gotten through the first 30. When I ride up to the coffee shop on my bike, I put my kickstand down with my foot, and that is achilles (achilles-heel, most obvious connection) I pust my bike into the bike rack which is Agamemnon, because Achilles and Agamemnon have a faceoff in Ovid's Metamorpheses. Then I look up at the moon, Apollo. I go to open the door, I see a spider, Arachne. I put my handle on the brass handle to open the door, brass reminds me of Atlantis, Atlanta. Inside the first thing I see is the world map. Atlas. I go over to open the door on the opposite side of the shop and notice the first light of the dawn. That takes care of two- Aurora Boreas (instead of Aurora Borealis). I look at Joe's Parkway market, a seller of fine wine, Bacchus. And on and on like this until I get to Mars (our coffee roaster) which is where I left off. But what was absolutely fascinating to me about this whole process is that I didn't need that written list for a security blanket at all. After the first time I initially put a name in its place, it stayed there in my memory. When I walk through the first thirty names, at no point do I get stuck and I don't leave anything out either. This is really fascinating, its as if a force beyond my control is at work. The best way to describe it is as a phenomenon much like flying through an infinite cavern, to quote St. Augustine.

Intimations of Immortality: Wordsworthian Memory

I thought that "Tintern Abbey" was the poster poem for romantic memory. " Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" contains the whole idea in its title: Immortality, Recollection. Remembering makes us immortal. This is Wordsworth platonic mind writing, calling us to remember, because as Plato would lecture, to forget is lethal. In rememberance, we live on.

http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" -Wordsworth, "Intimations"

Loci and the Memory Palace

Interesting finding, this is what I got when i wickied "art of memory". This isn't the outline I expected to find for the Yates book, but this is still very interesting. Our classroom memorization technique has a name, its called "The Method of Loci". Now, i know this is the method we are all expected to implore in order to memorize our 50 lists. And I'm going to do it, I feel especially prepared after reading this write up in wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

But I have to admit, for me (as I imagine for the rest of the class as well, save Claire) this is unchartered territory. When I have had to memorize anything before- my Abc's or "The Idea of Order at Key West"- I've always gone about it literally: by gazing at symbols or words on a page. A is for apple. Rereading a line of poetry over and over in my head until it sticks. This is like putting a blindfold on, memorizing 50 things without imploring a piece of paper. And I am really going to try not to, for the sake of orality!

And FYI, when constructing a memory palace and your "loci", it is advised that the place be well lit and architecturally complex, providing many rooms and compartments in which you can stowe your memories. It should be set out in a particular order, and each loci should fall at moderate, set intervals.

Also intersesting, it says that the images you associate with your loci can be replaced with new ones. It's all part of a "working memory". Like what we've done with the 9 points in our classroom: they went from muses to Ong's 9 points, and I have a feeling we're not done with them yet....

Ong's 9 points

Some thoughts on Ong's 9 points: 9 ways in which the Oral culture is distinct from the literal

1) Additive not subordinate
thermostat
Literature changed the style of storytelling from additive to subordinate. In oral cultures all the details of the story had equal importance. When the "ands" were removed in translation, some parts and details were implicitly more important than others. Oral cultures do not like to subordinate.

2) Aggregative rather than analytic - chalkboard
Instead of simple integers like "soldier", we are given epithets that pay homage to his nature. Basic "soldier" becomes "brave and valiant soldier". As in this example, the epithets can sometimes being repeating the same idea twice. But thats better than leaving out the fact that he was brave all together, drawing the line at simply "soldier".

3) Redundant or copius - Quiet Desk
Because in oral cultures a phrase dissapears as soon as it is uttered, it is important to repeat details that were already said to keep the listener and the speaker on track in the course of the story. In a literal scenario this would not be necessary: you just turn back a few pages if you feel you missed some important detail. In an oral epic this is not so. It requires constant repetition.

4)Conservative or Traditionalist - Screen
Since oral storytellers are constantly repeating what they've been saying for ages, they tend to hold onto the ideas of the past and maintain a conservative sort of mindset.

5)Close to the human lifeworld - Overhead projector
Without manuals or lists to rely on as a memory aid, oral cultures must create elaborate schemes for recalling lines of lineage and names of persons, places and things.

6)Agonistically Toned - Brown Desk
This is what we have called "flyting" in class. Writing "seperates the knower from the known" (Ong 44). This is still considered an art form today, "Stylized verbal tongue lashings" (Ong 44).

7) Empathetic and Participatory -
I think we have all experienced those moments when you get to the end of an assigned reading having no idea what you just read. Your mind wandered. When someone is talking to you, telling you a story, we feel more obliged to listen and have a response (although not always). Because oral cultures are more engaged in the stories told, there is a deeper sharing and understanding of the teller's and listener's emotions.

8)Homeostatic - Snowman
The snowman can adjust his body to never melt. Memories that no longer have relevance to the present, in an oral culture, are no longer mentioned and thus forfeited. Like we explained in class, the past without relevance to the present, disappears. Ong's example of the dictionary in this section was interesting I thought. There is no need for a dictionary in an oral culture, because words are only defined by their relevance to the immediate situation. Word meanings come continually out of the present. They are retained through current use.


9)Situational rather than abstract -
I forget which item in the classroom is supposed to mark this point, but what I will always remember is that this is the point Sexson used the phrase "like, uh, bitch" to explain. Although re-reading this section in Ong, I'm not totally sure how we got there in the class conversation?
Anyways Oral tradition is exceedingly concrete. In a written culture, you live continually in abstraction. Objects are concrete, the terms that we apply to them are abstract. Oral cultures use frames of reference that are close to the human lifeworld and thus, less abstract. I understood this difference better after reading the findings of A.R. Luria, who gathered extensive data on the differences between oral and literature cultures by interviewing subjects in different stages of literacy. Illiterate subjects identified shapes by objects that took that form, say, a plate rather than a circle or a door rather than a square. Circle is an abstract term that can be used to describe a wide range of circular shaped objects: thus, it is a very abstract word. A word like "circle" comes out of a literal, and thus, abstract culture.

And those are some very obvious psycodynamics of orality, in briefing. This is a topic in which extensive research has been done: comparing oral cultures to literate cultures. Mainly, the pysycodynamics of an oral exist and are linked to the fleeting nature of sound, which "exists only when it is going out of existence" (Ong 71). This makes an oral culture a very situational, up to date, existence.

My Top 50

I haven't decided in which order i'm going to do this (probably by books), but for my 50 items to memorize I want to memorize the names of 50 characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. I might need some help in pronunciation, but here goes...

1)Achilles

2)Agamemnon

3)Apollo

4)Arachne

5)Atlanta

6)Atlas

7)Aurora

8)Bacchus

9)Boreas

10)Caeneus

11)Calliope

12)Cornix

13)Cupid

14)Daedelus

15)Daphne

16)Diana

17)Echo

18)Europa

19)Galantea

20)Hercules

21)Herse

22)Icarus

23)IO

24)Iphis

25)Jason

26)Juno

27)Jupiter

28)Latona

29)Lichas

30)Mars

31) Medea

32)Medusa

33)Mercury

34)Midas

35)Minerva

36)Narcissus

37)Neptune

38)Orpheus 

39)Pan

40)Paris

41)Prosperina

42)Pythagoras

43)Saturn

44)Sybil

45)Tiresias

46)Triton

47)Ulysses

48)Urania

49)Venus

50)Vulcan

Idle Minds and Mythtelling

Sean Kane admits in the introduction to "Wisdom of the Mythtellers" that "I am aware that I am an individual shaped by modernity, an outsider to myth" (p. 15). That is how this class is making me feel.

It is difficult to really grasp myth in the age we're living in, centuries outside the time of oral traditions. Kane condemns literacy as "inactive reading", on the grounds that it is pathetic compared to the mythtelling tradition, where telling involved action, telling is doing something. I just can't bring myself to accept this sort of condemnation. The way that Kane refutes literature echoes my feelings about the media today. Whenever I watch movies, I do so with a sense of guilt (with a few exceptions, of course) because I think: "I should be reading". Mindless movie watching seems so bad for me and my mind because I'm not intellectually challenged the way that I am when I read. Watching movies and TV is isolative and easy and presents me with no intellectual challenge... and I can't imagine somebody truly feeling the same sort of resentment towards reading. If reading is inactive and unengaging (how can reading be unengaging?), then what our we subjecting ourselves to when we put on the television?

Kane explains that storytelling and myth require a kind of performance that engages both the reader and the teller. Reading and writing stories, by contrast, is done on an individual basis. But I, reading alone, still find myself intellectually engaged. I just wonder, if reading and literacy are second to storytelling, what can we call the multimedia entertainment that is taking over? Is it the same, effectively, as reading? We can't possible equate watching a movie with reading a book can we? Just because they are done individually?

We said in class today something that was a little daring, something I never thought about but is an interesting way to look at things: To literalize is to materialize. Like Citizen Kane's house in the movie, which was a literal memory theatre, a collection of all his life's memorobilia. Literature takes something that was oral, and thus invisible, and makes material out of it. We can't deny it. And I think that is something I really dislike about the media and hollywood, it is the culture of a very materialistic society. A very literal society. But I can't say that I dislike literature or its values- I am a literature major for crying out loud! I love literature, and I'm getting worried here that we're putting it in the same category as film, television and technology. Are we?

some of us may connect the term "Myth" with myths of the greek gods- "today they lend their names and aura to makes of cars" (p. 32 Kane). Oh well, at least that's a "starting-point" for an exploration of myth time.

autobiographical memories

I found this little briefing on different types of autobiographical memory, i thought it was an interesting way of classifying them. the full article is on this site:

http://bfc.positscience.com/brain/autobiographical_memory.php

But here's the interesting excerpt:

What’s clear is that we have many reasons for remembering our past.
Sometimes we intentionally reminisce, for example when we want to share old stories with friends and family. The retelling of the past in social settings is an intricate dance taught to children early in life.

Some events are so surprising and important that they become flashbulb memories. For example, many people can remember exactly where they were when they heard the news John F. Kennedy was shot, that man had set foot on the moon, or that airplanes hit the World Trade Center.

On other occasions the memories pop up out of the blue, summoned by something as fleeting as a familiar feeling. “(T)he smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us,” is how the French novelist Marcel Proust described it.

Studies have also shown that autobiographical memories aren’t necessarily accurate, that they are creative constructions that may change over time to keep up with new circumstances. And that illness or trauma can affect the ability to recall who participated in remembered events, the details of the events, and the life periods in which they occurred.

autobiographical memory

I left Friday's class feeling very satisfied, thinking to myself how content i was to be in this class, and how valuable such a course is. I have been thinking about memory a lot, last semester it was something I would constantly journal about personally. The ways that memory manifests itself in us and functions are mysterious and intriguing. I think a class like Oral Traditions, where we really investigate the mind's capacity for memory, are infinitely interesting because memory is a phenomenon that pervades our entire human existence. So no wonder the same topics keep on coming up again in Dr. Sexson's courses between the years (other topics that came up last semester that I distinctly remembered from my courses with Sexson two years ago included William Blake, "Dead Man", Lycidas, and of course, the ever returning "Idea of Order at Key West"). The mind, our memories, keep taking us back. It is a force beyond our control.

My thoughts were echoed (and better articulated) on page 12 of the book I borrowed "Why life speeds up as you get older":

"Between our first memories and the forgetfullness of old age, between the formation of the memory and the erosion of memories, between the not yet and the no longer being able to remember, lie questions that are bound to arise in each of us simply because we have a memory. It is impossible not to look astonished at something that has been our companion all our life" (Draaisma 12)

That's what makes a course like this, and a book like Draaisma's, so exciting and fascinating. This is the phenomenon of memory. We all have questions and curiosities about how our memories function. Why it is we'll be sitting in the classroom, taking notes on a completely unrelated subject, and suddenly see a visual flash of, say, a narrow street in Murcia, Spain, where we studied the year before. Not a street with any particular significance, like the street you lived on, just a street you would walk down from time to time on your way to a friend's flat or the grocery store. And then the places your mind goes after that unexpected visual, the emotions attached to it, the notion of nostalgia.

A fascinating thing about flash memories is the mood swings they can induce. Apart from feeling a general sense of nostalgia, sometimes, we find ourselves laughing or smiling remembering a happy moment in our lives. Or ackward and embarrassed. Or guilty. Or all of it. Sometimes for no particular reason I see a scene of my spanish life played out again in my head, I feel happy remembering it, and then sad or even devastated, that I only have those moments now as memories; that's its all over. That time in my life has been condemned to the past, to the realm of memory. It's funny because memories should be like gifts, souveniers of the good times to remember how happy we were, but I find they're most always accompanied by a sense of loss, loss for that time in my life. There's something tragic about it. And those moods that memories evoke make the study even more fascinating...

A preview of things to come:

Somebody mentioned the memories of a lakehouse that a smell can evoke in class on Friday, and Sexson promised us that a discussion on the links between the olfactory sense and our memory is yet to come. He then referred to Marcel Proust's "Rememberance of Things Past" (also translated as "In Search of Lost Time")and the madeline scene. It seems no discussion on memory could miss this scene in Proust's book, in which the narrarator tries to recreate memories of his childhood via the smell of the mini sponge cakes (depicted above, called "petite madelines") and the routine of dunking them in a cup of tea, a routine established in his childhood. The book I borrowed from Dr Sexson now, called "Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: how memory shpaes our past" references the scene in the chapter on Smell and Memory. And Sexson has referred to it in courses I've had with him before....

I'd like to exercise my own visual memory, as I look at these cakes and recall a scene from 2 years ago, when I was enrolled in Micheal Sexson's "Foundations of Classical Literature course". We were talking about Mnesoyme, the muse of memory, which led to a discussion of classic lit and the power of memory, and I was assigned, with a $20 bill that Sexson gave me, to go out in search of this cookie, "the petite madeline", with no prior knowledge as to the significance of the treat or even what it looked like. Since he directed me to Safeway, I went there first, where I quickly discovered, this is an expensive cookie! They had it on a display of wedding desserts, and there weren't many. i asked the lady if she had more, but all they had was what was on display, so i bought them out, and returned to class, my mission complete, with a bag of packaged petite madelines. WEll, we went to commence the experiment, each student with his or her cookie to unwrap. And as we took the first step in opening them, there was a unified expression of disgust: what we could not see from the outside of the package, was that these madelines were OLD and thus, GREEN. We checked the expiration dates (something I didn't think to do in the store, usually packaged cookies off the shelf aren't in danger of growing mold!) and sure enough, they were a month or two past the expiration date. So our experiment stopped there, and while we weren't able to exercise our memories via the madeline that particular class period, from now on I will always associate any image or mention of that cookie with my mission in classical literature two years ago. The memory lives on.

British Flyting

I wanted to offer up some good English Insults I picked up on a recent trip to London in class on Friday during our discussion of "flyting", but I thought I'd save it for the blog so I could talk to my british boyfriend first and compile a more complete list. Here are a few good ones to start with:

Arsehole: Asshole
Minger: a girl who hideously unattractive
Pillock: another word for idiot (there are many)

Twat/Tosser/Wanker: more vulgar words for asshole or idiot

Muppet: dimwit, nimrod

Nutter: crazy person

Pikey: a low class or gangster type person

cabinets of curiosity

I googled "Cabinets of Curiosity" like Sexson suggested we do in class today, and I was surprised to find out that Cabinets actually meant "rooms", not like the cabinets that Sutter drew on the board today. But after reading the entry in Wikipedia, I had trouble seeing the connection between "Cabinets of Curiosity" and the memory techniques we were talking about in class today. The introduction alludes to them as a synonym for memory palace, but beyond that, the definition/description sounds makes the cabinets out as something of a natural museum, rather than a "memory theatre". Maybe we will discuss this further in class...

I also looked up the names and jobs of the nine muses and will be on my way to memorizing them using the methods that our classmates demonstrated on the board. I read that Mnemosyne- the mother of the 9 muses- was very important to them because before there were books, before literacy, poets had to carry their work in their memories. Today in my reading of Ong, I read some fascinating passages about the Homeric poets and the debate about how and who is responsible for these epic poems. His assertion is true that "fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like" (ong 31), myself being an example of that. It never dawned on me that a person who never had contact with literature or writing, like the homeric poets, would have a different mental capacity for memorization. Perhaps even to the extent that they could hold volumes of epic poetry in their minds (with the aid of mnemosyne, of course). I think the most shocking thing that I have read in the book so far was in the section on "oral memorization" that begins on page 57. An oral culture is an illiterate one, and "learning to read and write disables the oral poet" (p. 59) because he would begin to rely on text as the controlling device in memorization. In light of all this, I think, so we don't stand a chance then, as the offspring of a literate society, at performing these impressive feats of memory. Our minds are constructed differently.

My first day in oral traditions...

and i am looking forward to what is to come! I was particularly intrigued by the use of a synagogue to memorize the names of the nine muses? I'm looking forward to finding out how this is done...
Page 79 Orality and Literacy. Its fascinating to think that the same objections were cited originally about the printing press that we ponder in regard to the computer culture we live in today. I think we have to admit that the immediacy of technology undoubtedely "enfeebles the mind, relieving it of too much work" (ong p. 80). Reading Ong's words makes me consider this truth even more deeply and i wonder, how many wise men have been lost or never realized because they were never challenged to exercise their minds to question information beyond what some technological device could quickly and easily provide for them.
Yet Ong goes on to say in the same chapter that, while it is difficult for us to think of writing as a technology akin to printing and computers, it is actually the most drastic of all three, having "initiated what print and computers only continue" (p 82). But even after reading this whole chapter, and all of the differences Ong cites between orality and writing that puts them on completely different wavelengths, I still cannot equate writing with computers in my mind. While the process of writing I think demands high mental involvement from the writer, i think computers really do weaken our minds, demanding much less of us. I wonder how much our minds must be capable of that we aren't even aware of because we constantly default to technology to avoid overthinking: there's no need to memorize the times tables any more because every device we own - cell phones, ipods, computers- are all equipped with calculators that do it faster. To think that at one time people were objecting to the printing press and the publishing of books for fear that it would do just that- weaken our minds. And now we live in an age where people don't even have the patience to read. I just wonder if the human race is still capable of the memory feats our ancestors could perform, or if collectively our minds have deteriorated over the ages. I guess we will find that out in this class.