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

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

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”

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

notes 01.16.2009

Why is memory important?
Why is writing important?

Mnemonics

Jesuits ( Jesuits.org )

Ephemera
"Have you emptied the cooler by the window yet?"

Ong ..............................
p.7 the percentage of languages which are also written
p.9 apprenticeship
orality and literacy debate

Yates ............................
the Centerfold -- Giulio Camillo: The Memory Theatre
gathering, storage and retrieval of information

Kane ..............................
existential
myth

storytellers die
music/amuse/museum

Corona

"The totality of the Solar eclipse of February 26, 1979 passed only through the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. Many visitors traveled to the Pacific Northwest to view the eclipse, since it would be the last chance to view a total solar eclipse in the United States for almost four decades [next one August 21, 2017]" -- Walter Ong was visiting at MSU during the '79 eclipse ... little did I know ... I was on a hill outside of Livingston ... when it got dark, the horses began running in a large circle with their manes and tails flying, flowing, rippling ... the hawks wheeled in the air ... when the light returned, everything became still ...

Corona, Corona (disambiguation)
Gutenberg

Arts & Letters Daily : Veritas odit moras "Truth hates delay" ~Seneca
audible.com

the paradox of the oral tradition syllabus

Corinna, Corinna...

notes from first class

how lovely to see everyone!

oral tradition primary orality
oral/written, concrete/abstract

memory teacher
Ars Memoriae: loci as architecture and the "Memory Palace"

our texts:

1. Frances Yates The Art of Memory
   p.113 Peter of Ravenna, The Phoenix
   tools of memory: loci, image
   "an unfrequented church"
   Quintilian
2. Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers
   prologue and chapter 1 (group work on ch 2-7)
3. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Mnemosyne and her daughters the Muses

The Tempest, Prospero the storyteller
Walter Crane engraving

Act I Scene II

PROSPERO
No harm.
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am ...

MIRANDA
More to know
Did never meddle with my thoughts.

PROSPERO
'Tis time
I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me. So:
      Lays down his mantle
Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely ordered that there is no soul--
No, not so much perdition as an hair
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;
For thou must now know farther.

MIRANDA
You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding 'Stay: not yet.'

PROSPERO
The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;
Obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not
Out three years old.

MIRANDA
Certainly, sir, I can.

PROSPERO
By what? by any other house or person?
Of any thing the image tell me that
Hath kept with thy remembrance.

MIRANDA
'Tis far off
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO
Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?...

PROSPERO
... Dost thou attend me?

MIRANDA
Sir, most heedfully.

PROSPERO
... Thou attend'st not.

MIRANDA
O, good sir, I do.

PROSPERO
I pray thee, mark me.
... Dost thou hear?

MIRANDA
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

Mazursky, Cassavetes, Rowlands, Sarandon, et al.
Tempest (1982)

Elizabeth Alexander (the poet for Obama's inauguration): "I remember a particular afternoon in the spring of my sophomore year, being blown away by the visceral impact of Seamus Heaney's [Nobel 1995] poem 'Digging'. I felt transported by the sounds of language and compelled by the ways in which looking closely and remembering rendered an almost cinematic kind of transformation."