'Trashing Old Technologies'. A human pasttime.

I've just finished reading chapter four in Ong and his section about 'writing is a technology' where he mentions music got me to thinking about the effects that technology has had on music.

I went to Dropkick Murphy, whom is a very big Irish Punk Band From Boston (The song playing in Scorsese's Departed all the time is called I'm Shipping up To Boston). Anyone who's ever been to a concert will tell you if they think they're any good in person our live our however you'd like to call it. Which brings me to the fact that electronics have allowed musicians to vastly change their own voices as well as how well everything sounds.


I, personally, Love live music; there is no other way to listen to it. I've been to huge concerts, small concerts, I've sat in a room of twenty other people while a band, after the crowd had left, unhooked anything electronic, stepped off stage and everyone formed a circle around them and sang 'The Throes' a six minute ballad word for word with the band. The thing is, music's loosing it's human touch or so it would seem. Literally though. fingertips no longer need touch anything to produce the same effect. Clubs play "techno" or technological music that's just beats put together amongst other things. Music seems to be slowly slipping more and more into a new electronic technology where it's not only duplicated but created inside of the electronics. Catch my drift?

What I'm wondering is what is the effect on Writing going to be? Sure there is text messaging which is leading to horrible spelling that's becoming very easy to discern, but is that a bad thing? Perhaps were just heading back to how the Hebrews did things?

-like how a writer goes through his letters, stories, or essays and takes out all the useless words, phrases and sentences.

-who's to say technology's not just weeding out the things that mainstream media doesn't need to survive.......or to be bothered with for the time.......

And this 'trashing of outdated technology' reminds me of what ong says in the last paragraph of chapter four;


"By the sixteenth century rhetoric textbooks were commonly ommiting from the traditional five parts of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery) the fourth part, memory, which was not applicable tow riting. They were also minimizing the last part, delivery. By and large, they made these changes with specious explanations or no explanation at all. Today, when curricla list rhetoric as a subject, it usually means simply the study of how to write effectively."

-

QUIZ ONE Review

People sites to look at for information on past lectures are Chris, Jana, Rich, Kari

Quiz #1 review

Kane
1. Moonbone-Repition
2. Property-Read Prologue
3. Agricultue
4. White Berries
5. Carribou and Frogs
7. Definition of Myth-"the song the earth sings to itself"

Ong.
1. Primary Orality-No contact with literacy
2. Secondary Orality- not using literacy in a literate culture
3. Chirographic- Writing Culture
4. Typographic-Typing
5. P.72 Vision vs. Sound-read.
6.P.79 and (p.38 of Yates)

Yates
1. Simonides of Ceos
2.Rhetoric to ethics to cosmos
3. Saint Augusting (p.47 confession and The Cave)

Student Questions
1. Liberal Arts-Grammad
2. Neoplatonism-mysticism
3. John Nay's Birthday on the 20th of Feb.
4. Anamnesis-opening the gates of recollection
5. 1600 bruno is burned for heresy
6. Parataxis-stringing words together
7. Bicameralism
8. Esoteric-(I CAN"T TELL YOU WHAT THIS MEANS...ITS A SECRET)
9. Imagination-one hour photo for memory
10. Who is shahar azad (1001 nights)
11. Artificial Memory vs. Natural Memory
12. Collective vs. Personal conscious
13. Phaudreus- write it down, look it up
14. March 17 Shaman sexson's giving green blood
15. Memory, imaginination and soul.
16. Brave Soldier, Beautiful Princess, Sturdy Oak. also Keen Ketting Ben, Kate of the beautiful eyes,


MAKE SURE YOU KNOW YOUR MUSES!

Somethings that help memorize

Some helpful hints about memorizing'

1. if you think you'll remember it you will and if you think there is no way i'm going to remember this your mind isn't going to store it in a place that's memorable.

2. the best writers use a series of images to explain what characters are doing. Like wise we will remember things if we put coherent images together and form stories for the memories we want to keep.

3. If you are able to get the concrete memories from the images you have in the stories you've created you can use many different words to tell a single stanza, paragraph or chapter of your story.

4. Reciting stories outloud or to yourself better enables you to remember them.


+ also artificial memory is not real, it's a human creation. Madam Yates is only giving us the basics of how people created and enhanced thier own artificial memory skills, likewise we all should be able to pick apart what works well for us, what we need to work on, and those things that haven't been mentioned that aid our memories.

WHATS GOING ON WITH THE MUSES?

Room 1-119 just can't seem to get full enough for Shaman Sexson. He starts out the term by inviting a bunch of Muses into the classroom and what do they do? They start chaos!

Every Morning at nine O'clock i walk into to see Erato's fingers playing with the heat murmuring to herself "hot, hot, its needs to be hotter in here.......eooowh," while the whole time she's wearing an atrocious yellow polka-dot bikini! Shaman Sexson never even looks at her!

Erato's much better than Clio though, who just sits on the wall all day looking older by the minute; whisps of gray chalk that could only possibly be the remainder of what used to be hair (thats if she ever had any to start with). The funny thing is that Shaman Sexson won't even touch her. He's always sending up students to scratch and scribble all about her.

Than theirs Urania hanigng from the ceiling, tucked deep inside the folds of the roll-up screen. Everyday I come to class hoping that someone doesn't pull the screen down and there's Urania mooning us. It's enough to make you wan't to miss class isn't it!

And stop picking on Thalia, Shaman Sexson. Everyday we walk into class you already have put her in the corner seated in the quiet desk; the whole time she's laughing like a hysterically crazed person. Shaman Sexson just walks about the front of the class ignoring her for the most part, except for every once in a while you point at her and say QUIET! It's a little rude.

Polyhymnia Keeps standing next to Thalia. One hand atop Thalia's crazed head, the other atop the projector while the whole time she's humming hymns which aren't even audible over the wailing next to her. I cannot even understand how anyone can pay any attention during this class.

Which leads me to a question, why is terpsichore the size of thumbelina? Why is she dancing on the desk in constant ballet circles to Polyhymina's hymns? What is this world coming to?

Than their's Calliope guised as a bulletin board holding up two of her sisters in an attempt to show how "she's the boss". What a masochist. Yet their she is holding on to the wall while Euterpe for no good reason poses as a snowman, hoping against reality that polyhymnia will stop signing gospel and start singing christmas tunes.

Crazy Melpomene always trying to be the tragic and misunderstood hangs on the wall as a gaint double f leaning upon each other while Mel Gibson eats a pomegranite considering what new great Dramatic film he can unleash upon the world; made even more crazy by the fact taht both Melpomene and Euterpe pinned themselves with tacks to Calliope.

Shaman Sexson you sure are a master of the absurd.

There's enough memorial notes for you.

Yates Ch.2 Thoughts

All though i do understand Plato's reasoning that artificial memory will plaque humanity in the same way that writing cripples the minds of humanity in large. Writing does not cripple the minds of those who have been taught to use it correctly, jsut as artificial memory should not be used by those whom do not know how to use it. Artificial Memory is not a desecration to the memory if it is used to remember things which have not related to your life. it would seem a sin to create an artificial memory for remembering things about your children, but is it worse to remember a partial truth of your children or to forget about them altogether?

I beleive Socrates story on page 38 does justice to what I am trying to say. The last few line especially where Thamus critiques Theus upon his invention of words and how they shall spell the fall of humanity, for the weak among us will take such things as letters, and words, and moving pictures for credit. I say this for we are amongst a civilization of great achievement and technology that knowledge can by acquired at the tips of our fingers; we have the ability to go through this knowledge at a rate that has yet to be seen on this earth, yet most of us doing nothing with this ability. They fall into the troubles that have always been their to fall into only masked in different materials. They recreate, and recreate, and recreate, and thier misconceptions of realities are past onto those they've created and thus what we've created from knowledge is used for entertainment and relaxation by those whom shall never no what was put into all that they have, and want, and say that they need, and they shall overuse and addict themselves to things wish shall spell not only their doom, but the slow death of a nation that breeds itself upon using those whom do produce; those who create and know and thirst for knowledge. When all of these people have become so scarce by the spreading of the disease which has been spoken of-that is when the world things will fall apart, at the knowledge we have shall be lost, and another dark age shall be upon us, one much greater than those behind us.

That's what i got from reading that passage on page 38. Call me Psycho but I've got something.

Cliches and Dave Mathews

'Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, you're in the clear.'

'shit happens'

'Apple A day keeps the dentist away'

'That meal was awful....awful good.'

'no water before bed and you'll wake with a full head.'

'no refill, no tip.'

I guess i don't live my life by cliches.....i'm drawing a horrible blank.

As for story telling and the formulas they use to tell stories and what not, if anyone's ever heard Dave Mathew's band listen to 'Don't Drink The Water'-all of them-every one that has come out for the paswt twenty years. Every Live Song is different, some to the point where you don't realize it's the same song.

"To go by your words...." Review of Ong's ch. 3-unfinished

SOME PSYCHODYNAMICS OF ORALITY



Imagine a culture where no one has ever looked up anything.



Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.



Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility.



There is no equivalent of a "still shot" in sound.



Among ORAL peoples generally language is a mode of action and not simply a countersign of thought.



TYPOGRAPHIC folk forget to think of words as primary oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, 'out there' on a flat surface.



ORAL peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things.



First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name: without leaning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand.



Secondly, CHIROGRAPHIC and TYPOGRAPHIC folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named.



YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN RECALL: MNEMONICS AND FORMULAS



Sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.



How do persons in an ORAL culture recall?



What does or can an ORAL culture know in an organized fashion?



Sustained thought in an ORAL culture is tied to cummunication.



How could you ever call back to mind thoughts you had so laboriously worked out?



You would have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns,



in heavily rhythmic,



Balanced patterns,



in repetions,



or antitheses,



in alliterations and assonances,



in epithetic and other formulary expressions,



in standard thematic settings.



Proverbs are patterned for retention and ready recall.



Protracted orally based thought tends to be highly rhythmic.



Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right.



"Divide and conquer"



"To err is human, to forgive is divine"



"Sorrow is better than laughter, because when the face is sad the heart grows wiser"



"The Clinging vine"



Often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occassionaly in print.



For ORAL cultures they form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible wihtout them, for it consists in these.



A judge in an ORAl culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he can produce equitable decisions in the cases under formal litigation before him.



Heavily patterning and communal fixed formulas in oral cultures serve some of the purposes of writing in CHIROGRAPHIC cultures.



ORAL culture experience is intellectualized mnemonically.



Putting experience into any words can implement its recall.



In a primary ORAL culture, thought and expression tend to be of the following sorts.



1. Additive rather than subordinative



The oral cultures tend to use words as additives like 'and' repeatedly.



Writing usualy uses 'and' 'when' 'then' 'thus' 'while' to provide a flow of naration with the analytic, which is subordinative.



Chirographic structures look more to syntactics (organization of the discourse itself).



Written discourse(...) is more dependent simply upon linquistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential contexts which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar.



2. Aggregative rather than analytic



Oral folk prefer not the soldier, but the BRAVE soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.



Once a formulary expression is made as such, it is best kept intact.

Without a writing system, breaking up thought (that is analysis) is a high-risk procedure.



3. Redundant or 'copius'



Thought requires continuity.



Writing establishes in the text a 'line' of continuity outside the mind.



Context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selectively.



In oral discourse, the situation is different.



you must move ahead slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer suerly on the track.



Whereas sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.



With Writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and reorganize its more norma, redundant processes.



In oral delivery, though a pause may be effective, hesitation is always disabling.



It is better to repeat something rather than simply to stop speaking while fishing for the next idea.



ORAL cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility.



Early written texts often bloated with 'amplification', annoyingly redundant by modern standards.



4. Conservative or traditionalist



Oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned ardously over the ages. This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation.



The text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of its memory work, and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation.



(ORAL)-at every telling the story has to be introduced uniquely into a unique situation, for in oral cultures an audience must be brought to respond, often viqorously.



In ORAl tradition, there will be as many minor variants of a myth as there are repetitions of it, and the number of repetitions can be increased indefinitely.



(ORAL) to stay with the times the formulas and themes are reshuffled rather than supplanted with new materials.



5. Close to the human lifeworld



Oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all thier knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alein, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings.



Oral culture as no vehicle so neutral as a list.



Oral cultures know few statistics or facts divorced from human or quasi-human activity.



Oral cultures has nothing corresponding to how-to-do-it manuals for the trades.



Trades were learned by apprenticeship which means from observation and practice with only minimal verbalized explanation.



Primary Oral culture is little concerned with preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus.



6. AGONISTICALLY TONED



ORAl cultures striked literates as extraordinarily agonistic in thier verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle.



By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.



Standard in ORAl societies across the world, reciprocal name-calling has been fitted with a specific name in linguistics: flyting (or fliting). Growing up in a still dominantly oral culture, certain young black males in the U.S., the Carribean, and elsewhere, engage in what is known variously as the 'dozens' or 'joning' or 'sounding' or by other names, in which one opponent tries to outdo the other in vilifying the other's mother.



Not only in the use to which knowledge is put, but also in the celebration of physical behavior, oral cultures reveal themselves as agonistically programmed.



Violence in ORAl art forms is also connected with the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high-both attractions and, even mmore, antagonisms.



VITUPERATION in ORAl or residually oral cultures is the fulsome expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality



Praise in old, residually oral, rhetoric tradition strikes persons from a high-literacy culture as insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentios. But praise goes with the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villians and heroes.



The agonistic dynamics of oral thought processes and expression have been central to the development of western culture, where they were institutionalized by the 'art' of rhetoric, and by the related dialectic of Socrates and Plato, which furnished agonistic oral verbalization with a scientific base worked out with the help of writing.



7 EMPATHECTIC AND PARTICIPATORY RATHER THAN OBJECTIVELY DISTANCED



For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, or 'getting with it'.



writing seperates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity'. in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.



the "OBJECTIVTY" which Homer and other oral performers do have is that enforced by formulaic expression: the individual's reaction is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjectice' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'.



Plato has excluded the poets from his Republice, for studying them was essentially learning to react with 'soul', to feel oneself identified with Achilles or Odysseus.



The editores of THE Mwindo Epic call attention to a similar strong identification of Candi Rureke, the performer of the epic, and through him of his listeners, with the hero Mwindo, and indentification which actually affects the grammar of the narration, so that on accosion the narrator slip into the first person when describing the actions of the hero....In the sensibility of the narrator and his audience the hero of the oral performance assimilates into the oral world even the transcribers who are de-oralizing it into text.



8 Homeostatic



Oral societies can be characterized as homeostatic. That is to say, oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.



Print cultures have invented dictionaries in which the various meanings of a word as it occurs in datable texts can be recorded in formal definitions.



Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies.



(ORAL CULTURES) meaning of each word is controlled by waht Goody and Watt call 'direct semantic ratification', that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now.



Words acquire their meanings only from thier always insistent actual habitat [such as] gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real spoken worde always occurs.





Rhymes and games transmitted orally from one generation of samll children to the next even in hig-technology culture have similar words which have lsot their original referential meanings and are in effect nonsense syllables.



Part of the past with no immediatly discernible relevance to the present ha[s] simply fallen away. The present imposed its own economy on past remembrances.



ORal Traditions relfect a society's present cultural values rather than idle curiosity about the past.



Oral culture encourage triumpalism, (remember the winners forget the loosers) which in modern times has regularly tended somewhat to disappear as once-oral societies become more and more literate.



9. SITUATIONAL RATHER THAN ABSTRACT



All conceptual thinking is to a degree abstract.



if all conceptual thinking is thus to some degree abstract, some uses of concepts are more abstract than other uses.



ORAl cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of refernce that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.



Franz Boas believed;



primitice peoples thought as we do but used a different set of categories.



Whereas Lucien Levy-Bruhl;



concluded that primitve though was prelogical, and magice in the sense that it was based on belif systems rather than on practical actuality.



"IT TAKES ONLY A MODERATE DEGREE OF LITERACY TO MAKE A TREMENDOUS DIFFERENCE IN THOUGHT PROCESSES."



LURIA'S FINDINGS:



a. Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror,door, house, apricot drying-borad. Luria's subjects identified the designs as representations of real things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but rather with concrete objects. Teachers' school students on the other hand, moderately literate, idetified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on. THey had been trained to give school-room answers, not real-life responses.



b. [Illiterate subjects] revert to situational rather than categorical thinking. THey were convinced that thinking other than operational thinking, that is, categorical thinking, was not important, uninteresting, and trivilializing.



c. Illiterate subjects seemed not to operate with formal deductive procedures at all --which is not the same as to say that they could not htink or that their thinking was not governed by logic, but only that they would not fit their thinking into pure logical forms, which they seem to have found uninteresting.



Example;

the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the far north and there is always snow there. What color are the bears?



"I don't know. I've seen a black bear. I've never seen any others...each locality has its own animals"



When the syllogism is given to him a second time, a barely literate 45-year old chairman of a collective farm manages 'To go by your words, they should all be white'.



The chairman's limited literacy leaves him more comfortable in the person-to-person human lifeworld than in the world of pure abstractions:



Syllogism is self-contained: its conclusions are derived from its premises only. persons not academically educated are not acquainted with this special ground rule but tend rather in their interpretation of given statements to go beyond the statements themselves, as one does nomrally in real-life situations or in riddles (common in all ORAl cultures).



This fact dramatized the chirographic base of logic. The riddle belongs in the oral world. TO solve a riddle, canniness is needed: one draws on knowledge, often deeply subconscious, beyond the words themselves in the riddle.



d. There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.



e. LUria's illtierates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis. Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking. IT calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person.



An oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figueres, abstact categorition, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self;analyis, all ofwhic

Notes from Feb. 2nd

Page 41 in Yates. Last Paragraph- Learn about memorizing descreet items

+Albert B. Lord-Singer of Tales

+Kevin Vost- Memorize the Faith

Memorize fifty plus items frontwards and backwards with the nine muses.

Everyone should probably go to wikipedia and look at Erato without clothes.....it's kind of an assignment if you think about it....weird.

Look Through all the picture in Dame Yates book. They are memorization aids.

+Richard Burton- memorized 3 or 4 dozen languages. Set up a system to learn a language fluently in two weeks. One of the only white persons to enter Mecha.

Dr. Sexson wrote a book/essay sixteen years ago.

Memory, Mediavilism, Cyberspace, And the Soul.

+read Plato's allegory of the cave, if you haven't already!

ETERNAL FALL?

Quote from Sexson, "Sexson is not smart, he's old..."

Note their are 68 hybrids (deskchairs) in the classroom. Always two rows of nine, and 5 rows of ten. Always at 9 O'clock Monday, Wedsnday, Friday; and always at 12:45 Tuesday, Thursday.

Thermostat- HOT, NELLY HOT. Erato

Chalkboard- History, Out the pitchblack window. CLIO

Screen- Stars for 'tards, mysteries of the sky, 2:10. Urania

QUIET- Funny as in someone has to sit in the corner and be silent- THALIA

Overhead Projector- Busting out them hymns at church on the overhead- Polyhymnia

Browndesk- Elton John's Tiny little dancer envisioned as thumbelina dancing away- Terpsichore

Bulletin Board- Messages always telling you what to do kinda like- Calliope

Snowman- Calvin's ridiculous snowman always blocking his dad in from work or causing his dad to wonder about his parenting skills- Euturpe

2F- T FOR TRAGEDY- Melpolmene.


THINGS TO READ:

BLOOMSDAY by James Joyce.

-Leopold Bloom reminds me of Francisco D'anconia.... but who's John Galt anyway?

THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Return_(Eliade)
-all arrangements of matter in the universe must necessarily recur if given an infinite amount of time.

-Very interesting segment about power of origins and how knowing somethings origin gives the knower power.

-"Man's life only has value to the extent that it conforms to the patterns of the mythical age."

Does this bring to mind Adam and Eve inside a Garden (without the evil).

Sacred Time wouldn't have any correlation to a certain side of our mind that lets out Auditory Hallucinations now would it?

(on a side note what about the idea that instead of the myth of the eternal return, what about an eternal fall? What if what we're working up to we've already been too? What if we once had worked up the intelligince to discuss with other "spirits" or "gods" that is briefly explained off by Jaynes as an audiotry hullicination? What if it is that we're truly a fallen race that has keeps plummeting from "grace" or "some higher state of being" because we cannot universally handle it?)