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."



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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