Obama 06.19.09

i'm just joking ... i know where my bread is buttered ...

no place for empathy on the bench? i understand what you're feeling ...

FOX? you get AIG

i'm not the salesman-in-chief ... come'on people, work with me here ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"that looks like me ... look at those ears"

a priest, a scholar and a judge




.

Obama in Cairo, June 4, 2009

"... There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world.

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples – a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today.

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.”

The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God’s peace be upon you."


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KOKO Taylor, September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009

Koko Taylor


Chicago Tribune: ... Growing up on a sharecropper's farm outside Memphis, young Cora and her three brothers and two sisters slept on pallets in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity. By the time she was 11, both her parents had died. She picked cotton to survive, and moved to Chicago in the early '50s to be with her future husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, who died in 1989. She found a job working as a domestic, scrubbing floors for rich families.

... on weekends would attend the blues clubs on Chicago’s burgeoning South Side scene, the heyday of Chess Records and such stalwarts as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. She would occasionally sit in and caught the ear of Dixon, who approached her...

"I didn't know Willie Dixon from Adam's house cat," Taylor recalled in an interview with the Tribune. "But he says to me, 'I love the way you sound' and, 'We got plenty of men out here singing the blues, but the world needs a woman like you with your voice to sing the blues.' ”

Eduardo Galeano: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

GRITtv : Eduardo Galeano the author most recently of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, published by Nation Books has spent a lifetime reflecting on the lives — political, cultural, and historical — of the people of the Americas. Back in April Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America.

"Impunity is the daughter of oblivion. ... we are afraid of thinking, feeling, remembering ... the owners are the owners of a great factory of fear ... fear of words, fear of memory, fear of the Other one ...
every year chemical pesticides kill three million farmers, every day workplace accidents kill no fewer than ten thousand workers, every minute poverty kills no fewer than ten children ...

to recover human history from the point of view of the invisibles"



also: Democracy Now interview: John Berger: "To publish the work of Galeano is to publish the enemy -- the enemy of lies, indifference, forgetfulness ... his tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness, furious."

Frankie Manning: Never Stop Swinging

"I just danced"

Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought

Science Daily: "The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that."

The Power of Myth 6: Masks of Eternity

the Quest
in your deepest identity, you are God
you are radiant of the Spirit
different masks

“I don’t have to have faith -- I have experience”

Brahman

when will kingdom come? the kingdom IS and men do not see it
relegio -- linking back to the One source

the connecting circles of Jung
labyrinth, ourobouros, wheel, mandala
camp, horizon,
spatial and temporal aspects
Alpha Omega experienced cycles: year, month, moon, day, sun, hour
home --> adventure --> home
womb tomb

Navajo pollen path the center -- beauty before me ...
my life and the great life connected
Tibet sand paintings

the images of myth are the many masks reflections of human potentialities
archetypes of unconscious in dreams and myths

clowns/ tricksters are often creator gods no sober image
reversals, spreading strife is great joy becoming not being


Jung: “religion is a defense against religious experience”
we are all of the same
identification with your own divine being
Maslow peak experience
Joyce epiphanies

aesthetic does not move you to possess (porn) or criticize (didactic)


the beautiful or the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel)

the timeless moment
they are still with me
Eden was not Eden will be Eden IS
heaven is just everlasting!!!!

that’s why poetry - radiance
the Kyoto gardens
the rhythm the radiance the Christ coming thru
the harmony of being

Shiva
circle of flame dance of universe
in one hand tick of time, the other the flame of eternity
skull and new moon in hair
find the fearless burning point of becoming

Word made flesh
Goethe all things are metaphors

the sound of Om -- the sound of the universe
open fill close and then the silence
consonants are interruptions of

you don’t need to die you can become aware

The Power of Myth 5: Love and the Goddess

“the eyes are the scouts of the heart"

12th century troubadours -- the seizure of romantic love
Love in the western world
courage to affirm against tradition -- Tristan Isolde
“you have drunk your death”
“if you mean eternal damnation, I accept that”

ultimate affirmation of life
libido over credo
have faith in one's experience

spiritual life is the natural bouquet of the physical life
authentic life encompassing pairs of opposites

The Grail (what is attained by living one's authentic life) brought by neutral angels

God is Love, Love is God

Agape: love your enemies, rain on just and unjust
pluck the beam from your own eye, put up your sword Peter

Muslim: Satan as God’s greatest lover -- God asked angels to serve Man, Satan could not because of his love for God -- therefore hell is the absence of the Beloved -- he remembers the echo of God speaking

China 1959 destruction of Tibetan monasteries -- no word of condemnation, a recognition of the inexplicable ways of life, suffering inevitable -- how to bear, interpret it

be a servant unto death
Abelard at-one-ment
it is the suffering which evokes the compassion of the human heart

love is the burning point of life, the pain of being truly alive

reverence for the female
Gaia
Mother Earth magic -- she is the universe, the creation
the personification of the energy which gives birth to myriad forms (Kantian Time and Space)
planting and agricultural cultures


Nile Tigris Euphrates and Indus Ganges -- world of the Goddess
then come the invasions of herders/hunters -- killers -- warrior gods Zeus, Jahweh Jahweh: in Hebrew, Goddess = The Abomination --> patriarchy
Zeus: male female face to face

woman potent in Hellenistic times and in Virgin Mary 12th c. - Notre Dame
Luke was Greek only one who mentions virgin birth -- Leda, Persephone, ...

India: kundalini, chakras, psychological centers up the spine

Goddess as Redeemer
Madonna
Nut Iris/Osiris

the sanctity of earth

The Power of Myth 4: Sacrifice and Bliss

mythology is the song, the flight of imagination inspired by the body

the sacred place is an absolute necessity
for some, the whole earth

Chief Seattle: “we love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat” “the end of living and the beginning of survival”

seeds, rhizomes -- death not death -- individual not individual

Algonquin: boy's visitant, you must kill me and bury me --> maize
Polynesia: moon maiden, you must kill me and bury my head --> coconut

1) human psyche, like body, the same everywhere
2) diffusion, historical

hunting cultures: the sacrifice is a bribe
planting cultures: the death is the resurrection

the fruit of the tree
tree of life --> eternity
tree of knowledge --> duality

die to the flesh, born to the spirit
art reveals radiance and unity to which religion points

the Jesus dance -- acts of John
the lord of death is lord of life, dance, sex
“it’s a good day to die”

death/life
being/becoming

the metaphysical breakthrough of a realization that you and the other are one
marriage -- sacrificing to the relationship, not to the Other
marriage is not a love affair but an ordeal
motherhood is a sacrifice

death as return
“it’s a good day to die”
life is always on the edge of death


Sir Gawain and Green Knight
tests -- lust for life and fear of death -- courage

prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra the young camel loaded, becomes lion, which slays the dragon, the name of the dragon is Thou Shalt, a child is born
a wheel rolling out of its own center
follow your bliss, go where your body and soul want to go
invisible hands

stumbling around looking for water when water is right there wherever you are

The Power of Myth 3: The First Storytellers

the image of death is the beginning of myth

the inward darkness of the shamans, within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep
memories wake and stir when we venture into wilderness

myths as powerful guides to life of spirit
echos of the first story(s)
we too enact ritual
our body’s destiny of death
myths and rites to harmonize mind and body, how to live in this life

stages of human development same today
the transition from childhood to maturity and on to autumn of life

the task of middle age: identify self NOT with body but with consciousness which will rejoin consciousness, of which body is but the vehicle

the image of death is the beginning of myth

burial caves and animal shrines (covenant, atonement, appeasement, gratitude)
an invisible plane supporting the visible, unknown supporting the known

participation mystique: buffalo, salmon, eland, whale
recognition of dependency, the hunt becomes a ritual, ceremony, more than respect, the animal is a messenger, carrier of divinity, a model of how to live; guilt wiped out by myth, by ritual -- you are part of nature, the animal is in many ways superior

Blackfoot buffalo: we’ll teach you our dance of death and resurrection

the sacramental violations of 1880s slaughter
from Thou to It

Lascaux: temples, cathedrals/caves/wombs/tombs -- landscapes of soul -- spiritual images -- relation of time/eternal
beauty of art -- beauty of spirit, instinctual? beauty of intention, conscious, aesthetic?


initiation rites/rites of passage
Bushmen


artist/shaman/storyteller: modern artist function to keep myth/mystery alive -- Joyce, Klee, Picasso

Axis mundi
whose center is everywhere, circumference nowhere


Black Elk Speaks

And the Voice said: "Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage."

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

... as I lay there thinking about the wonderful place where I had been and all that I had seen, I was very sad; for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me, little as I was, for I was only nine years old. Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.


And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, - you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. Black Elk

The Power of Myth 2: The Message of Myth

myth calls us to awareness of the mystery, teaches how to live in this world
not seeking the meaning of life but rather the experience of life

vivifying

Buddha: what’s the meaning of a flower?

myths are clues to the experience, the rapture, of being alive -- referents to the transcendent

God is a thought, a name for the Transcendent

Heinrich Zimmer:
the best things can’t be told (transcend thought)
the second best are misunderstood (thoughts which refer to transcendent)
the third best are what we talk about


the mask of eternity
moving from the transcendent to all the pairs of opposites

Caves of Gharapuri (Elephanta Caves)

put oneself in the middle

Christianity from Near East - awareness of pairs of opposites - man v God, man v Nature, God v Nature and vv
D T Suzuki -- “very funny religion”
nature is corrupt, must be corrected
OR nature is manifestation of divine

Hinduism, Buddhism - Japanese garden - where does nature end and art begin

cooperation and coordination with nature

instruction which will allow us to see the divine within the world AND self

hospitality -- recognition of divine identity of Other -- two aspects of the One Identity

Creation stories tell of the Presence of the Transcendent

The One Forbidden Thing
Bluebeard, Genesis -- the forbidden is where one begins one's life
blaming the serpent
kissing the cobra
snake as the symbol of new life, shedding one's skin, throwing off past

Christian inversion - a refusal to affirm life, life is evil, natural impulses sinful

Zorba: Trouble? Life is trouble.

We must say Yes.
who are we to judge -- we are here to affirm life, the eternity of this moment
the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life

not to withdraw, return, participate
this horror is the foreground of a wonder
all life is sorrowful -- loss loss loss
Joyce -- “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”
don't be afraid, recognize that what is is a manifestation of the transcendent
i will participate in the game, the opera DECENTLY (heroically, not rancorous, the samurai must not act in anger)

teachers answer questions!!!!!!!!!!

mythology is homeland of muses -- inspirers of art/poetry
life as a poem, not prose, in accord with transcendent

mythology liberates from cultural definitions of inherited metaphors
myths throw you a line to connect with the mystery which you are

Thomas gospel: we are all manifestation of divinity, heaven and hell are within us (Upanishads)

myth/dream: symbolic images of inner conflicts
we are the source

myth must provide life models, for each time; the world changes, religion must be transformed

Middle East conflict -- stuck in old metaphors -- we must separate the truth from the temporal inflection

Star Wars: will the machine serve or dominate, the making of tools (computers are an Old Testament God, all rules, no mercy :)

Indra

here's the place to have the experience, not after death

The Power of Myth 1: The Hero’s Adventure

"mythology is the song of the universe"

GAIA: the whole world is consciousness, all life is meditation

we are not alone in our journey, others have gone before, "the labyrinth is thoroughly known"

two types of heroic deeds (sacrifice of life to Life):
physical: saving a life or giving one's life
spiritual: departure into unknown, fulfillment, and return

Otto Rank: The Myth of the Birth of the Hero "myths, originally at least, are structures of the human faculty of imagination" "gratitude toward the parents ... and revolt against them" "The hero himself, as shown by his detachment from the parents, begins his career in opposition to the older generation; he is at once a rebel, a renovator, and a revolutionary. However, every revolutionary is originally a disobedient son, a rebel against the father."
everyone heroic: every birth, every child, every mother

the journey: drawn into it | consciously undertaken | thrown into it
serendipity
the trials and revelations lead to transformation of consciousness

the mind is a secondary organ of the whole body -- it must serve the body, not dominate it; intellectual systems Darth Vader

will we say yes or no to the adventure of life

the myth is the expression of the inexpressible, the mysterious edge of the known/unknowable

the CENTER

heliotropism
the heart that has truly loved never forgets
But as truly loves on to the close
As the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she'd turned when he rose Thomas More





CHARTRES: Campbell was invited by the bell-ringer -- the seesaw in the bell tower -- the ringer's tiny living space behind the choir screen -- a little bed, a lamp -- looking out to the black Madonna -- living in a meditation


From a distance Chartres floats on a hill above green fields

The Power of Myth

Bill Moyers' series of interviews with Joseph Campbell first aired on PBS the summer of 1988

Early on in the first episode, Moyers mentions Campbell's story of an Occidental scholar approaching a Shinto priest and saying,"I don't get your ideology" to which the priest replied, "I don't think we have an ideology. I don't think we have a theology. We dance."

Troubadours

NY Times: Rafael Escalona, Colombian Folk Balladeer, Dies at 81

"... Escalona, who absorbed the ways and wisdom of wandering troubadours ... inspired the novelist Gabriel García Márquez ... a singer of vallenato, the folk music of Colombia’s remote Caribbean region ... [which] goes back to the time when news, gossip and legends were passed by traveling minstrels. ... Escalona was a longtime friend of Mr. García Márquez, who once told Mr. Escalona that his novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' was nothing more than a 400-page vallenato."

NY Times: "In One Ear and Out the Other"

did you say dance ?

rhetoric

Obama speaking about Lincoln and government and the common good

eloquence and humor

Lincoln: "[you got me elected?] ... I forgive you"
Obama: "to those of you who brought me here ... we're takin' names"

this made me laugh the way I laughed the other day when Michelle Obama, told by a young girl that she wanted to grow up and be First Lady, replied "It doesn't pay very well"

also: the strange synchronicity of Lincoln and Darwin born on the same day 1809 ... Shakespeare and Cervantes dying on the same day 1616 ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Land of Lincoln

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Stanley Fish on Obama's Prose style -- parataxis, incantation

.

notes 02.09.2009

Wed Feb 11: Yates ch.3 Plato and Aristotle

Ong ch. 3 amnesia, dancing and passing tests
pp. 37-56 nine count-em attributes of oral cultures

1. additive
2. aggregative
3. redundant
4. conservative (sit down and hush up McCain)
   
5. close to human
6. agonist
7. empathic
8. homeostasis
9. situational/concrete, not abstract/logical

cf. plots to ruin our lives:

• Sesame Street syllogism -- A, B, therefore C
  
• Strunk & White

Shakespeare is speaking to a COMMUNITY of listeners, from the top hats to the cheap seats

Jack Goody: The Domestication of the Savage Mind

face the music
or ...
let's face the music … and DANCE!

Nat King Cole sings Irving Berlin

There may be trouble ahead, but while there's moonlight and music
and love and romance, let's face the music and dance

Before the fiddlers have fled, before they ask us to pay the bill
and while we still have the chance, let's face the music and dance

Soon, we'll be without the moon, humming a different tune, and then ...
there may be teardrops to shed, so
while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
let's face the music and dance, dance
let's face the music and dance

the dancers? Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse,
Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart ...




.

epithets and cliches

keen-kenning Ben
gossamer von Goss
quick-wit Nick
zazen Zach


from Greek epitheton, epi ‘upon’ + tithenai ‘to place.’ (OED)


cliches: boy, did this drag me back into my childhood! -- who knew my mother was a master?

every cloud has a silver lining
always darkest before the dawn
can't win for losing

a stitch in time saves nine
many hands make light work
were you born in a barn
it'll all come out in the wash
half-baked
three sheets to the wind
the price of tea in China
pot calling the kettle black
from the frying pan into the fire
bring home the bacon
waiting for your ship to come in
money doesn't grow on trees
wrong side of the tracks
wrong side of the bed
water under the bridge
nothing ventured, nothing gained
circle the wagons
face the music
get a word in edgewise
preaching to the choir
all dressed up and nowhere to go
stuffed shirt
if the shoe fits
diamond in the rough
back to the salt mines
back to the wall

spitting image
all ears
all thumbs
bite your tongue
big head, mouth, heart
pain in the neck, ass
an arm and a leg
see eye to eye
as plain as the nose on your face
keep your nose to the grindstone
shoulder to the wheel
turn a deaf ear
out of the mouths of babes

tail between his legs
like a bat out of hell
snug as a bug in a rug
horse of a different color
can of worms
frog in my throat
hare-brained?
hold your horses
horsing around
useless as tits on a bull
take the bull by the horns
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed
curiosity killed the cat
the cat's meow
look what the cat dragged in
when the cat's away, the mice will play
more than one way to skin a cat
let the cat out of the bag
crazy like a fox
beat a dead horse
birds of a feather
playing possum
hornet's nest
good for the goose, good for the gander
no spring chicken
counting your chickens before they’re hatched
like a chicken with its head cut off
chickens come home to roost
until the cows come home
monkey see, monkey do
the worm has turned
wolf in sheep's clothing
what a zoo

don't let the bedbugs bite (which reminds me of a scary nightly prayer from my youth: "... if I should die before I wake ... " !! needless to say, I discontinued this particular family tradition)

young enough to be his daughter
skeleton in the closet
absence makes the heart grow fonder
the lights are on but nobody's home
damn with faint praise
head in the clouds
poetry in motion

and, last but not least (painfully apropos at this moment in history):
laugh all the way to the bank

notes 02.06.2009

1. epithet your group (cloud-gathering Zeus, wily Odysseus, grey-eyed Athena)
2. list your cliches

Kayla Calliope
Chris oral comp techniques: repetition, formulae, cliches, epithets, expletives
Zach Plato’s cave -- in the dark
Ben lit <--> myth

• performance -- memory -- active imagination -- lying
• “music of the earth itself”
• The Book --> authoritarian, intolerant, bounded

Zach Hermes -- liar -- Oscar Wilde
Rich Ong cliches and proverbs
Claire Ariel, attention “I see (not think) …”
Jared comic books
Tai practical navigation
Robert
Nick
Chris? where are you?? there you are : rats

• Ruskin’s Pathetic Fallacy
• Splinter
• B. F. Skinner
• Do Elephants Cry?
• Koko
• John Lilly’s dolphins

the theatre of the skull

sham_an Sexson

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy.
--. The Medium is the Massage.
Calvino, Italo. Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Lord, Albert. B. The Singer of Tales.
Draaisma, Douwe. Metaphors of Memory.

MSU Top 100 books

notes 02.04.2009

fascinated by others' 50-lists -- what am I going to do ... ???

more better notes:
Chris
Kari
Helena The Cave of Routine
Nick Yates 3 and Aquinas
Brandon cycles and reciprocity
John wisdom and ignorance, teachers and students

past present future
ouroborous

Groundhog Day
Richard Francis Burton
Parataxis
Miranda’s attendants Muses history/myth archetypes
passive recall/ active imagination

Yates

• images
• p. 41 memorizing discreet items
• scientific method

Ong

• orality/literacy
  

stations of the cross
magus

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame.
Lord, Albert B. Singer of Tales.
Vost, Kevin. Memorize the Faith.
Sexson, Michael. Memory, Medievalism, Cyberspace, And the Soul. Soundings, 1994

The poet judges ...

Walt Whitman

The poet judges
not as a judge
judges
but as the sun
falling around
a helpless thing.

.

Life is what happens ...

John Lennon, November 1980, Double Fantasy
last album
he was shot December 8



Close your eyes, have no fear,
the monster's gone, he's on the run and your daddy's here,
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer:
every day in every way, it's getting better and better --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Out on the ocean, sailing away,
I can hardly wait to see you to come of age,
but I guess we'll both just have to be patient.
Cuz it's a long way to go, a hard row to hoe,
yes it's a long way to go, but in the meantime:

Before you cross the street, take my hand.
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer:
every day in every way, it's getting better and better --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy --
darling, darling, darling, darling Sean.

.

poems are like dreams...

Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision

"... poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know."

Jiminy Cricket

Pinocchio's conscience, a gift from The Fairy with Turquoise Hair











Sara Fanelli, cover for Pinocchio (author Carlo Collodi), London, Walker Books, 2003

Roy Blount Jr: Alphabet Juice

NY Times: first chapter Alphabet Juice
BookTV: Roy Blount Jr at the 2008 Miami Book Fair

technology and violence

Thomas Paine
William Blake
Shelley
Suffrage
Lincoln
Whitman
Douglass
The Molly McGuires 1870s
Haymarket 1880s
Wounded Knee 1890, 1973
Sacco and Vanzetti 1920s
Gandhi 1930s
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State 1940s
Rosenbergs 1950s
Simone de Beauvoir
Beat
Blacklist
The Atomic Cafe (1982)
COINTELPRO 1960s
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Opposition to the Vietnam War
Black Panthers
Chicago 8
Camden 28
The Weather Underground
The Murder of Fred Hampton
American Indian Movement
Waking the Dead (2000)
USA PATRIOT Act 2001
Opposition to the Iraq War
(so many invaluable works available -- biography, novel, history, painting, music, film, documentary and otherwise -- some on Netflix Instant) -- do your research!!!! :)

E. L. Doctorow:

• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Bush: The Unfeeling President (September 9, 2004)

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul.

... He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president [George W Bush]?

He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

Toni Morrison, from her Nobel Lecture, 1993:

... For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. ...

.

retrospect

aggravated by some rather vacuous responses to the Inaugural poem, which I liked, a lot

Ian McMillan said, prior to the event: It has to be a poem from an oral tradition and not from a written one.

the poem stands on its own, whether you agree w/ McMillan or not ...

"... words to consider, reconsider."



-------


Charlie Rose: An appreciation of John Updike with Judith Jones (his editor for 40 years)


Arts & Letters Daily: John Updike, novelist, man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce, and life’s adventures, is dead... AP ... NYT ... Telegraph ... Guardian ... NYT ... London Times ... WP ... New Yorker ... LA Times ... Guardian ... TPM ... Boston Globe ... London Times ... National Post ... WSJ ... LA Times ... Guardian ... Forbes ... SF Chron ... Slate ... Guardian ... Philly Inq ... TLS ... Independent ... Weekly Standard ... New Republic ... Guardian

BookTV: 2006 BookExpo America with John Updike, Barack Obama, Amy Sedaris, and Marie Arana

notes 01.30.2009

I missed class today :( many MANY thanks to the following:

Chris: Hash for january 30
Kari: Much ground traversed today
Lisa: 5 Canons of Rhetoric
Nick: Link Between Oral Culture and Free-Style Rap
Zach: Connections

Housekeeping

from Marilynne Robinson's extraordinary novel Housekeeping, p. 194:

There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse them and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit on porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.


.

Sutter, Sexson, Solitude, Solidarity ...

So much happens every day!

to Sutter: as you suspected, I was in fact glued to technology all day Inauguration Day (online, C-Span, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, even Fox! for demented dittohead factor) ... brief interludes of walking around the back yard in the windy cold to grok what was happening (a friend said she "kept feeling like Europe must have felt at the end of WWII as their countries were liberated by the Allies" :) ...


and remembering:

1960
JFK Inaugural I was ten

1963
June Medgar Evers assassination he was my father's age
September Birmingham bombings I was their age
November JFK assassination I cried in the cloakroom and a classmate laughed at me




1964
June Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner the laughing men who murdered them haunt me to this day

1965
February Malcolm X assassination

1967
October Che assassination

1968
April MLK assassination
June RFK assassination
August Chicago

1969
December Draft lottery
Fred Hampton assassination I had just met him

1970
May Kent State

1972
McGovern/Nixon my first vote

1973
September 11 Salvador Allende
September 23 Pablo Neruda

1980
December 8 John Lennon
.
.
.
i fell in love ... a daughter and a son
.
.
.

1999
my father died

2000
Gore/Bush

2001
September 9/11 I was getting ready for work
October 12-26 Patriot Act

2002
Paul Wellstone former professor

2003
Invasion of Iraq

2006
my lover, the father of my children, died

2007
obama
i return to college

2008
obama
Unjust Deserts
by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly

notes 01.28.2009

Patrick H. Hutton: History as an Art of Memory
Dominic O’Brien: Learn to Remember
Dame Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Dame Yates: Theatre of the World

remember 50 discreet items, not verse or performance

theatres as memory palaces
marginal/underground history
the occult -- the practical
the interior

things you’ll need to know for the test (use the unusual):

• cooler -- plastic, blue, white lid, ice inside 2 feet wide
• Nay b-day
• Sutter’s Melpomene -- Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate
• Michael Sexson’s blood drive date -- March 17 St Patrick’s, green blood

“I saw it in my mind”
Erin and liberal studies

system of locations -- 9 items

• thermostat
• blackboard
• projector screen
• quiet desk
• overhead projector
• old desk
• bulletin board
• snowman 3 push pins
• weird symbol F 7 pushpin

Coleridge: 30 days hath September -- metrical form
iambic pentameter
cabinet of curiosity -- cure, care

Kane
32 myth, poor remembrance
41 oak and ash -- Moon East increase West rest

Yates
4 heightened sight -- Ulysses ch 3 “ineluctable modality of the visible”
p.11 ram’s testicles -- testify, testimony, tests

Sexson “it’s all poetry in the oral world”

provocations

Kane ...............................................................................

33 “tell”ings from nature semi-wild, paths
34 Myths in their original form -- it was a form very much like improvised music -- opened their tellers to the proper subject of myth. The proper subject of myth is the ideas and emotions of the earth.
38 frog-sweat
39 Myths are repositories of practical wisdom
40 foretelling
41 Nature is full of these patterns (information theorists call them "redundancies") [...] these overlapping patterns are the sites for myths and proverbs.
45 ... ecological patterns which elude, or should elude, human manipulation, and are therefore coded as sacred.
189 when people talk, they dance w/ one another
191 “before coming to life in music, the fugue or sonata already existed in myth” Levi-Strauss


Ong ...............................................................................

11 Written words are residue. Oral tradition [not] ...When an oft-told story is not being told, all that exists is the potential in certain humans to tell it. We are … so resolutely literate … such "monstrous concepts as oral literature”
12 Writing is “preemptive and imperialist” "the horse as wheel-less auto”
text~weave rhapsody to stitch songs together
13 Frye -- epos vox voice
14 literacy -- dictionaries, grammar, punctuation
32 "... sound has a special relationship to time ..."

Yates ...............................................................................

8-9 Cicero “memory is the firm perception in the soul of things and words"
10 in invention nature is never last, education never first
11 ram’s testicles
16 the awe inspiring ability to recite backwards ... Pointless though they may seem to us, the illustrate the respect of antiquity
29 Simonides: 1) pay attention 2) repeat what you hear 3) place it
32 Aristotle: perception thought
35-6 Aristotle, Plato, Socrates WAX
37 Phaedrus the soul's true knowledge consists in recollection of Ideas

...............................................................................

I don't have it memorized, but I know it.

...............................................................................

suggested by Michael Sexson

two fascinating pieces

1. The Chronicle Review: The End of Solitude
2. The NY Review of Books: Google & the Future of Books

notes 01.26.2009

assignments:

1. the page # of the most provocative thing in each book
2. be an architect, build a flexible memory theatre w/ at least 100 places
   

systems (idiosyncratic) for muses:

1. MS: 2CETmup
2. Sutte: garage to back bedroom
   
3. Tai: synagogue, sanctuary thereof
   

Method of loci
sacred <--> practical
the liberal arts: education proper to a freeman (Latin: liber) as opposed to a slave

* the Trivium
1. grammar
2. rhetoric
3. logic

* the Quadrivium
4. geometry
5. arithmetic
6. music
7. astronomy

or: G GRAMLAD

Cabinets of curiosities (Wunderkammer)
"encyclopedic collections, ... precursors to museums"
Bruno , burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 (Hamlet in London)

More recent assessments, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, suggest that Bruno was deeply influenced by magical views of the universe inherited from Arab astrological magic, Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism.

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence
The Gallery of Memory by Lina Bolzoni
The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain

You Bet Your Life, 1950-61, Groucho Marx

notes 01.23.2009

TESTS: February 20 and April 8

Ivan Illych & Barry Sanders: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind
James J O’Donnell: Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace

Group 5: Traditions
Ben, Joan, Nick, Lynn, Zach
Dashboard > Layout>Add a gadget> Blog List
more at Chris's How to Create a Blog!

1. earliest memory
2. blog on passage in Ong
3. the mansion, palace, theatre of your mind
4. the 2 or 3 most memorable parts of Ong, Kane, & Yates
   

------------------------------------------------------------

A W A R E N E S S
the ability to pay close attention
defamiliarise the "ordinary"
poetry prose
every day is 9/11
what is memorable? what is sacred?
giving voice, flesh
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ...And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." John 1

Ong p.79 Plato's Phaedrus

1. writing is inhuman
2. writing destroys memory
3. a written text is unresponsive
4. a wrtten text cannot defend itself
   

Chris's blog
Ben's cabin simulacrum
John's birthday
Kevin's Muses
Shannon's earliest memory
Sutter's renegade Scheherazade


She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

01.21.2009
Brandon
Chris
Erin
Helena
Jana
John
Rich
Sutter

Inaugural poet

Elizabeth Alexander the inaugural poet -- the fourth in history

UK Independent: Obama's Inauguration Day poem

"It must rank as the grandest poetry gig on earth, with a potential audience of billions. It may also terrify the lucky – or unlucky – author into terminal blandness or toe-curling bombast. In spite of her window of worldwide exposure, few fellow-poets will envy the task that faces Elizabeth Alexander ... after musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma and singers such as Aretha Franklin have done their turns.

... Among the poets she's been reading for guidance are Auden, Hughes, Heaney – and Virgil.

... What kind of poem might best fill that vast inaugural stage? ... Ian McMillan, perhaps the best-loved of British public bards today, says: 'An inauguration poem can't be small in any way. It can incorporate intimate moments, domestic images, fleeting memories, but it has to be like a political speech in that it must be based on rhythm, on repetition, on phrases that can be manipulated and spoken again and again. It has to be a poem from an oral tradition and not from a written one.'

... Picked to speak the words that will lead America from one age to another, Elizabeth Alexander, wisely gave little away beforehand. She dutifully noted that her 'joy' at landing this job from the president-elect stems from 'my deep respect for him as a man of meaningful, powerful words that move us forward' ... 'poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation' ... and 'I won't carry on at length.' "

a sense of humor! :)




Praise Song for the Day

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.


.

Obama

from the Poetry Foundation
Obamapoetics: Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry.

Conductor Noel Powell guides Obama onto the train in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Melina Mara, Washington Post

Ray Charles: America the Beautiful

John Mortimer

NY Times: John Mortimer, Barrister and Writer Who Created Rumpole, Dies at 85

BBC: Rumpole's creator Mortimer dies

Guardian UK: How Rumpole helped John Mortimer change the world

Mortimer (left, w/ Leo McKern who played Rumpole) was a wonderful, hilarious, writer ... and a passionate defender of free speech and civil liberty ...

MS: "People of the Screen"

Christine Rosen, senior editor of The New Atlantis, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center:

The book is modernity’s quintessential technology — “a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?

... Every technology is both an expression of a culture and a potential transformer of it.