A Journey into the Traditions of Orality

Wow, what impressive e-journals we have in class!

2005-04-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

So I've been cruisin' around the different e-journals goin' on in our class, and it's really interesting to see what things people take with them once we're set free at 3:25 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was especially intrigued with what Allison wrote back in January concerning the "kinkiness" of books. It's spell-binding to contemplate the effect that touching books, or somehow physicalizing them has on the ability to remember them years later. The mere possibility of taking a book with you, and incorporating it into the memories you have on a certain trip, where it became all dog-earred and tattered while simultaneously saving you from strangling one of your traveling partners... oh, is that just me? I guess I'm very grateful for the escapism that books provide. When I was about 6, I became enamoured by the adventures of two fictional characters named "Betsy and Tacey." I took these books with me everywhere, but namely into my leaf-fort with me. It was Autumn, and those books will always smell like dying maple leaves to me. We had 11 of these trees on the boulevard where I grew up. I had tunnels built into the walls, which served as my cubby-holes for anyone treacherous enough to come along and steal my Betsy and Tacey books, of which I was certain was going to happen on some unforntunate day.
Someone else commented in their journal about how "books should be smelly to be memorable," and although they put this line in quotes, I don't know where it came from. But they're right.
Another amazing thing about books is the transformation they assume when merely sitting on your bookshelf, patiently waiting for you to pick them back up, flip through them, discover old train passes, pressed flowers, coffee stains, possibly some drool. They remind you that the two of you had history together. Whether good or bad, it was there. That book is not inatimate, it is not dead. It's pages breathe the breath that used to belong to a beauitful tree in some unknown forest, in some unknown area, rained on and burnt with the glorious sunshine. Crawled on and tickled by countless little feet, pecked at and finally sliced from its place in the world, to be imprinted with ink that would create the form of words. Words that would eventually reach the imagination of countless and innumerable people. Whether read directly or heard about indirectly from someone who tells someone else, "I read this great book last week! it was about a man in Scotland who discovered a woman who was lost and had actually fallen through the standing stones of a futuristic age..... you have to read it!" books are by far anything but dead.

I think I'm going to take the time to hug more trees :) Even though my dad's a logger ;)

Who's Afraid of the Brothers Grimm?

2005-04-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

In case anyone's interested more in the brief blurb I gave you guys on Thursday about the Borthers Grimm, here's the paper I wrote on it. I found it to be a fascinating topic, and I'm stoked that I had the opportunity to learn more about it, while simultaneously receiving credit! :) Enjoy...

Who's Afraid of the Brothers Grimm?

Once upon a time, there were two brothers named Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were their names, and theirs was a life full of magic and fairy tales, luxury and splendor. Or was it? Many misconceptions have been made in the past two hundred years concerning the two brothers and their quest to record the tales and legacy of their country. Exactly how precise was their methodology in transcribing and retaining the information that had formerly been passed on purely by means of the oral tradition? Most critics seem to assume that the tales are genuine folk tales, but they, along with many children and adults, would be sorely disappointed to learn that the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm have been tweaked, misconstrued, edited and re-edited, and contain a definite agenda hiding in the shadows, right back there with the big, bad wolf.
Jacob Grimm was just eleven years old when his father died, forcing him into the role of the man of the house in helping his ailing mother raise his five younger siblings. Their drastic drop down the social ladder caused both Wilhelm and Jacob, the two inseparable brothers, to come to terms with the social injustices and cruelties that the lower classes faced. Their strict Calvinistic upbringing embedded morals and a rigorous daily structure in their lives. After shrugging off their life-long plan of becoming lawyers, the Grimms took to collecting folk tales. However, they were not simply collectors of these tales. Their agenda also included creating an ideal type for the literary fairy tale, one that sought to be as close to the oral tradition as possible, while incorporating stylistic, formal, and substantial thematic changes to appeal to a growing bourgeois audience.
Contrary to popular belief, the Grimms did not collect their tales by visiting peasants in the countryside and writing down the tales that they heard. Their primary method was to invite storytellers to their home and then have them tell the tales aloud, which the Grimms either noted down on the first or after a couple hearings. Memory played an important role in the Grimms’ transcriptions. Most of the storytellers during this period were educated young women from the middle class or aristocracy. “What appears to be natural in the Grimms’ tales was not natural in the oral folk tradition: the oral tales were not, nor are they today, as eloquently structured and thematically oriented around bourgeois values until literate members of the aristocracy and bourgeois began accepting them and adapting them for the printed page and for educated audiences” (Zipes 22). The Grimms took these products and infused them with their own psychological needs, utopian dreams, sexual preferences, and socio-political views. This deconstruction of the primary tales polluted what the brothers had originally claimed they wanted to do with them, which was to preserve, contain and present to the German public what they felt were profound truths about the origins of both German culture and European civilization. Instead, these tales have morphed into what they desired those truths and origins to be. The brothers made incredibly major changes while editing the tales, such as eliminating erotic and sexual elements that might be offensive to middle-class morality, adding numerous Christian expressions and references, emphasizing specific role models for male and females protagonists according to the dominant patriarchal code of that time, and endowing many of the tales with ‘homey’ or biedermeier flavor by use of diminutives, quaint expressions and cute descriptions. “In seeking to establish its rightful and ‘righteous’ position in German society , the bourgeoisie, due to its lack of actual military power and unified economic power, used its ‘culture’ as a weapon to push through its demands and needs. It was in the house and through household items that bourgeois character was to be developed” (Zipes 21). The consciousness on the part of the brothers concerning this particular effort is debatable, though the effects of it can clearly be seen. Fairy tales in their oral, literary, and mass-mediated forms have enabled children and adults to conceive strategies for placing themselves in the world and grasping events around themselves. They are a beloved addition to any childhood, and it is almost inconceivable for modern audiences to imagine a time when they did not exist.
But in their primitive existence, these folk tales did not always have a happy ending. On the contrary: it was quite rare indeed to hear a fairy tale that did not include commentary on society and the current government, as well as graphic, sexual content. These components had their functions, though educated audiences preferred to rule them out as unneeded vulgarities. “The violence and conflict in the tales derive from profound instinctual developments in the human psyche and hence represent symbolical modes by which children and adults deal with sexual problems” (Zipes 16). The removal of these components gave fairy tales an unrealistic rose-colored-glasses view of the world, which it consequently passed on to children, who, rather than dealing with the realities as they come and having a reference point from these tales, are given over to disillusionment and heartbreak when the world turns out to be a less-than-friendly place.
The Grimms, who stood up to monarchs, worked tirelessly and diligently to attain their social status and prestige, cannot be given the credit which has handed over to them so nonchalantly: the credit of preserving German folk tales in their untainted form. The brothers worked like tailors, for they kept mending and ironing the tales that they collected so that they would ultimately fit the patriarchal and Christian code of bourgeois reading expectations and their own ideal notion of pure, natural German culture. By tailoring the stories they intervened in their cultural heritage and actually projected their own present and futuristic hopes onto the past.

Work Cited

Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988.

Memorization takes many forms

2005-04-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

I think we can all safely say that we've all come to the awesome conclusion as to how varied and unique oral presentations can truly be. Last week, the presentations of the Kane chapters was more fun and educational than I have experienced in quite a long time. Before that, the poems to our "soul mates" were also highly entertaining and inspiring. I went to class today, after reciting my "50 Largest Cities in Germany" to Professor Sexson in his office, and I had been informed that we were merely hearing 3 more people recite their "lists" before we moved on to the presentations of the papers. I had no idea, as I'm sure many people didn't, that we were in for 3 of the sllllllllllllllloooooowwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeessssssstttttttttt memorization presentations of our lives. I'm not sure how these 3 people got away with taking 35 minutes of the class to do it, when it should have taken no more than 6 minutes, total...... but I have to admit I have better things to do than sit there watching Mick re-enact the 50 phenomenal moves of a chess master's game, included with a running commentary and cheating (by looking at his notes), but I think I'll use this time wisely, and start seriously researching the stuff I need for my paper.
Later ;)

Let the memorization begin!

2005-04-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

For my "50 Random Objects" memorization, I'm planning on memorizing the 50 largest cities in Germany, since I studied there last year and am planning to return for another semester next spring. Here's the run-down of what everyone will be hearing when my moment of glory comes on Tuesday:

Berlin

Hamburg

München

Köln

Frankfurt

Essen

Dortmund

Stuttgart

Düsseldorf

Bremen

Hannover

Duisburg

Nürnberg

Leipzig

Dresden

Bochum

Wuppertal

Bielefeld

Bonn

Mannheim

Karlsruhe

Gelsenkirchen

Wiesbaden

Münster

Mönchengladbach

Chemnitz

Augsburg

Braunschweig

Aachen

Krefeld

Halle

Kiel

Magdeburg

Oberhausen

Lübeck

Freiburg

Hagen

Erfurt

Kassel

Rostock

Mainz

Hamm

Saarbrücken

Herne

Mülheim

Solingen

Osnabrück

Ludwigshafen

Leverkusen

Oldenburg

Wish me luck! : ) I think this'll be something that will be useful to know during my time over there. It's always good to be something other than a "stupid American," I found. ; )~

Thoughts and research on polyphony

2005-04-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

After witnessing the awesome technique of blindfolding and captivating their audience for the performance given by Juliet, Opai, Cindy et al's group for the Kane presentations, I became quite interested in the effects of "polyphony." Actually, what really interested me was "hmmm, I wonder if I could do this for all the presentations I ever give again in my life so people will actually listen to what I have to say!" Which lead me along a train of thought and back to something someone was telling me last year about telephoning. There's a new technology out there that is called something like "deep suspension telephoning." The point of it is that people never truly "listen" to each other when they talk on the telephone anymore. They hear, but they don't listen. The way that this "deep suspension" telephoning works is that the person who is going to make a telephone call is strapped into a special suit that allows them to be submersed in a special tank that suspends almost all their senses, save hearing. Their sense of smell, taste, gravity and sight are temporarily stricken defective, in order for them to concentrate 100% on what the person they are talking to is saying. Obviously, this is not your average phone booth on a busy street, but a high-tech chamber that studies the relationship that the other senses have on our ability to listen as hard as we can when someone is trying to tell us something. This choo-choo-train of thought lead me back to polyphony, and how we experience it in our every day lives. Other than that, I googled it, and here's what it spit out:

Polyphony (polyphonic). From the Greek for "many-sounding." Music in which two or more "voices" are heard simultaneously; as opposed to monophonic ("one-sounding") and homophonic ("like-sounding").

Counterpoint. The art of combining two or more musical lines that are to be played or sung simultaneously. These lines may be said to be "in counterpoint" with each other. The term is in some ways synonymous with polyphony, although counterpoint is most commonly used for Baroque music; polyphony for music from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The rules of counterpoint were codified from the music of Palestrina by J.J. Fux in his 1725 treatise, Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus).
Polyphony (polyphonic). From the Greek for "many-sounding." Music in which two or more "voices" are heard simultaneously; as opposed to monophonic ("one-sounding") and homophonic ("like-sounding").

Some info on the Kabbalah

2005-03-31T21:11:00.000-08:00

Cabala (also caballa, kabala, kaballa, Kaballah, qaballah, etc.)
Kabbalah is Hebrew for tradition. But the Cabala has come to refer to a collection of mystical and ethical Jewish writings, mostly dating from the medieval period. It consists in good part of speculative and symbolical interpretations of Hebrew Scriptures.
There are several cabalistic traditions, some of which are noted for their messianic leanings. One of the more well-known messiahs was Sabbatai Zevi, who, in 1666 convinced a large part of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian world that he was the Messiah. His conversion to Islam is seen variously as a cowardly pseudo-conversion aimed at saving his life or as a necessary step in the redemption of the world.

Rabbi Michael Laitman said, "The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches a practical method to attain the upper world and the source of our existence. By realizing our true purpose in life, man attains perfection, tranquility, unbounded enjoyment and the ability to transcend the limitations of time and space while still living in This world."

Rabbi Yahuda Ashlag states that there are "several reasons for keeping the Kabbalah secret: 1. "There is no necessity"2. "It is impossible"3. "It is the private secret of the Creator"There is no single detail in the Kabbalah that is not covered by all of these three prohibitions. 1. "There is no necessity" This implies that there is no point to disclosing the secrets. This would only be possible if there was some immediate benefit to be gained by society. Otherwise, it would only be met with a reaction of "so what." This would be the reaction of people who believe that the Kabbalists deal with and make others deal with matters of no importance. This is why the Kabbalists took as students only those who were able to keep a secret and not disclose it unless absolutely necessary..2. "It is impossible" This means a ban on the disclosure of the secrets because of the limitations of the language. This language (ours) is not capable of conveying subtle spiritual concepts. All of our attempts to explain with words are destined to fail and lead the student astray. Thus in order to be able to disclose these secrets, permission from above is necessary.. Permission from above This is mentioned in the works of the famous Kabbalist named AR"I. There it is said; "Know that the souls of the great ones are filled with an outer (surrounding ) or inner (filling) light. And those whose souls are filled with the surrounding light have the gift of telling the secrets. They do it in such a way that an unworthy person will not understand them.". For example, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai had a soul filled with such an outer light. He had such power that even when he appeared in a congregation, he was understood only by those who had received the instruction from above to write in the book of the "Zohar". There were some Kabbalists before him who knew more. However, they did not have his ability to put spiritual concepts into words.So it is clear that the presentation of the Kabbalah does not depend on the level of knowledge of the Kabbalist. Rather it depends on the qualities of his soul. According to them, he receives his instructions from above to disclose a certain part of the knowledge. And so we cannot find any sort of fundamental work on the Kabbalah before the "Zohar". Those works that we do have include only vague and unclear hints. From the time of Rabbi Shimon the only one who was permitted to "open" another part of the Kabbalah was Rabbi Ari. Again it is possible that some Kabbalists before Ari knew much more but they did not get the permission from above. Since the appearance of Ari's books, all of the people dealing with the Kabbalah have left the other books and have studied only the "Zohar" and Ari's books..3. "It is the private secret of the Creator" The essence of this ban is in the fact that the secrets of the Kabbalah can be revealed only to those who are faithful to the Creator and who respect Him. This reason for concealing the Kabbalah's secrets is the most important one. Too many charlatans have used the Kabbalah in their own interests. They have made prophesies, given charms and have thus lured trusting people. The initial concealment of the Kabbalah was done precisely for this reason. True Kabbalists have therefore taken upon themselves to check their students very strictly. The very few people who were allowed to approach the Kabbalah in each generation were under the strictest of oaths. They were prohibited from disclosing even the slightest, most negligible detail which came under the three mentioned bans.We should not think that this division into three bans divides the Kabbalah itself into three. No, every part, every word, every term comes under these criteria for concealment. These three criteria are constantly in action in this science..However a question appears. If indeed this secret wisdom is so deeply hidden, how did all those different writings about it appear. The reason is that there is a difference between the first two conditions of secrecy and the last one. The last condition is the one that carries the greatest importance. The condition of "It is not necessary" too often can change because of external circumstances and become "It is necessary". For instance, this can happen due to the development of mankind as a whole, or because of the permission given from above. This permission was given to Rabbi Shimon and to the Ari and to a lesser extent to others. This is why we receive some authentic books about the Kabbalah from time to time.. This is also the manner in which I received my knowledge from my teacher. I received it under the same strict conditions, to guard and to conceal. However, because of the reasons that were mentioned previously in "The Time to Act " The condition of "It is not necessary became transformed to "It is necessary". And so I am disclosing one part while still concealing and guarding the other two, as I have been sworn to do."

Kabbalah Publications include The Magician, Kabbalistic Stories, The Dining Table, Tree of Life, and Kabbalistic Holidays

My tribute to Brian, the bastard boy born from an alligator's bosom

2005-03-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

My Epic Poem to Brian

Bequeath me, Muse

and bless me with the emboldening boast

that embodies Brian

the bastard boy born from an alligator's bosom

The boy who became a brassy, sassy bachelor

Beneath the big Montana sky.

From his birthplace in Florida

where the crocodiles smile their crocodile smiles,

Brian, the bastard boy born from an alligator's bosom

(once a bashful mama's-boy),

who was entrapped in an alligator lifestyle

had had enough.

He wanted to learn!

He wanted to read

things like thoughts on Orality and Literacy.

His brother Bob would beat him up

for having this love of lore.

But Bob, the brat,

was really quite a bore

and Brian would listen to him no more.

Mama Gator done told him,

"Baby Brian, college ain't fer yew!" and begged him not to go.

He bellowed and he bleeped

and he bludgeoned those crocs

who made him think he weren't bright,

and he beat it, lickety-split

to a barge that went upstream.

Brian, the bastard boy born from an alligator's bosom,

was determined to go

where no mama's-boy had ever gone before.

Between the bottles of beer he bought

from the bar-room in that barge,

he built a plan

beneath the decks

to blow his past away.

He bit his nails and cursed that croc

as he pounded those beers away.

His scales fell off!

His snout fell off!

Brian was born again.

Now a burley boy

with bright blue eyes

at Montana State-Bozeman.

He bit the bullet

and bore the brunt

and basked beneath the sun.

Presenting.... Salman Rushdie!!!

2005-03-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

For those of you who (unfortunately!) didn't have the pleasure of seeing Mr. Rushdie speak on the 7th, or maybe if some of you want to remember some of the things he said.... here are the notes I took. It was, by far, one of the most pleasant (academic ;) evenings I've spent in a long time.

You're doing a very strange thing: you've come to listen to a writer SPEAK!
There are some writers who are good at this (giving lectures); but it kills you! (like Dickens)
People don't believe in the fictionality of fiction anymore
Journallists always ask, "is your book autobiographical?" The right answer is to say that everything is completely autobiographical. Allll the things in every single one of my books happened to me, close friends or family ;)
The thing that's fascinating about books is that writers make them up!
If it were all autobiographical, wouldn't that be redundant?
Midnight's Children started off autobiographically
My parent's favorite joke about me is that I was born, and 8 weeks later, the British ran away
Are we able to shape our history, or does our history shape us?
Colonization doesn't end when the colonists leave: there is a long, deeply-felt residue that lasts a long time
The blood-letting all around the world is a testament to what people will do in the name of God
Bombay is a culturally impure city because it's a British city in India
Cleanliness is not next to godliness, it's next to fascism
Cultural purification = death
Dialect in Bombay is very unique, which I attempted to capture in my books
The world you come from shapes you

ORAL TRADITIONS is alive and kicking in India >>> story-tellers draw HUGE audiences. The themes can be anything from contemporary political to ancient tales. Singing, digressing, dancing can all occur in the middle of the story, and that adds to it!
The act of story-telling is also an act of juggling: multiple stories can all be up in the air, and if the story-teller is a really good juggler, he won't drop any of the "balls": they'll leave some of them up in the air, but in the end, they have make sure all the loose ends are tied up and accounted for. It's a pyrotechnic juggling act: how do you accomplish that on a page?
Oral story-tellers know when they're pleasing their audience: they get instant feed-back in facial expressions, restlessness....
Man him/herself is a story-telling animal! we're telling stories every single day of our lives, doing this in order to understand ourselves
Initiation in families occurs when the person who's marrying into the family slowly learns all the family stories, and this helps in making them feel like they belong
We tell stories to feel like we belong
The one real thing I can thank my parents for is that they excused me from religion. I never had it forced on me, because honestly, it didn't matter to them
The population of gods vs. humans in India is like, one god per 3.3 people!
Religion has become like a monster that is coming after us
If we don't fry this fish, it's going to fry US
The American idea of the frontier used to be honorable and hopeful: the boundaries used to be something we sought, now it's something we shrink from. That frontier is now a curtain that is permeable, and it's capable of letting in dangerous things
Now Americans want to close that frontier and build walls to protect themselves
Soviets built walls (i.e. in Berlin) to keep people in, now Americans want to build walls to keep people out.
Heraclites said that "character is destiny" but those people who were bombed in Dresden? it didn't matter if they were good or bad people: their destiny was out of their control!
It is a tragedy of our lives, no matter if we live well or ethically, that we have no control over it
How do you write a novel in that kind of atmosphere?
Novelists tell the truth using the agency of untruth
The difference between politicians and novelists is that novelists tell you to your face that they're lying!
Reality is no longer possible!
The fiction that we call our "ordinary lives" is not ordinary in the slightest! the stuff that goes on behind closed doors is fantastically bizaare! We all live grand narratives
People in power want to have power over the story of our "ordinary lives"
It is a type of freedom to assume that we have the ability to re-tell the stories which we live
When we see Religion get in the driver's seat, it's going to be a bloody ride
It's no trick to agree with Freedom of Speech when you're agreeing with what's being said
It's heartening to see that people, on the whole, have good sense
Letting the film that bashes me be released (when it was being refused a certificate) diffused the public's want to see it, which made a louder statement than refusing it's release did
"FOR GOD'S SAKE, OPEN THE UNIVERSE A LITTLE MORE!"
Don't stay in the safe middle ground: go to the edges and push
This role of Art is to open the universe
"Blasphemy is a victimless crime," infact, it played a BIG part in shaping the USA
Just because I don't belong or subscribe to someone else's belief systems, it makes me an immoral person? no, I don't think so
Once you terrify the populus, you can make them do anything
Places (like NY, CA, WA D.C.) where people were directly affected by terrorism voted against Bush! the people who weren't affected became terrified and bought his sales pitch: that's a profound statement, right there

Flyting, whuuuut?

2005-02-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

OK, so after listening to Brian and Mick go at with the "yo mama's so ugly...." jokes today, I was inspired to hop on the google and check out what the wonderful world of the Web had to offer concerning this topic. Good Lord: the web has everything!

Here's some shiz-nit:

1. The unique art of Flyting has been practiced by numerous cultures. It combines many elements of human nature and interaction. Conflicts are voiced and expressed using studied insults into a sometimes appealing format that display wit, insight and upmanship. In poetic exchanges it can provide and draw on inspiration by evoking deep emotion and adrenalin.The perhaps more appealing displays of this art can be found in surviving works from the Norsk mythological anectodes of Loki to the Scottish poet William Dunbar. Flyting can be seen in modern hip hop and many more cultures.
2. A popular pastime in which two people try to outdo each other in the richness of their rhetorical scorn. Often seen in disputes between vehicle drivers, in public houses and in families, it provides one of the bases for satire because the participants bind their hostility to the production of elaborate language, rather than to physical action. The dispute between Beowulf and Unferth in “Beowulf” is an example of a a flyting, as is, in more elaborate guise, Pope's “The Dunciad”.
3. Plato’s Flyting
Once Cephalus perceives that Socrates intends some sort of serious philosophical inquiry, he excuses himself from the conversation, at which point Socrates says that, since Polemarchus stands to inherit Cephalus’ money, it follows that Polemarchus will have to inherit the responsibility for the dialogue. Cephalus, responding to the flyting, laughingly agrees and leaves Polemarchus to his fate.

4. The medieval rhetoric of flyting is known as “wise-cracking” or “playing the dozens” in the United States. Socrates employs it in his allusion to Homer’s praise of Autolyclus; Socrates ironically says that Polemarchus is defending justice by arguing the case of a man who “was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.”
Once Thrasymachus engages the debate, Socrates flytes at him by arguing the example of Polydamus the pancratiast (Socrates again implying physical violence) in order to show the absurdity of Thrasymachus’ argument, at which point Thrasymachus is so flabbergasted by the flyting that he calls Socrates “abominable.” But Thrasymachus gets in his own digs at Socrates, saying that Socrates argues “like an informer” who talks out of both sides of his mouth. When Thrasymachus says that Socrates is cheating in the argument, Socrates pretends to be stupid (he “dummies up”) and says that he would rather try to shave a lion than to cheat Thrasymachus out of money. The flyting is successful because the sophist does argue for money. Thrasymachus subverts the logic of the debate by calling Socrates a cheater, again; Socrates flytes ironically by calling for an end of “these civilities”—the smiling insults the two have been exchanging.
The flyting becomes more bitter as Thrasymachus senses defeat in the dialogue. He suddenly engages an argumentum ad hominem (personal attack):
“Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?”
“Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering?”
“Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose … .”
And Thrasymachus concludes by calling Socrates a fool.
Midway in his attempt to define the nature of justice, Socrates flytes at his brothers in verse:
“Sons of Ariston … divine offspring of an illustrious hero.”
That epithet is funnily true also of Ariston’s third son, the man who is writing the dialogue in hand.
In thus discussing the rhetorical ploy of flyting as adopted by the speakers in the dialogues, I am not attempting any “system” of accessing the dialogues, nor am I attempting any sort of “cataloguing” Platonisms. But if any “stalled” student of Plato is curious enough to pursue the witty habit of classical insult, at least that is a kind of curiosity, perhaps the beginnings of philosophy.
5. "Flyting" is verbal contesting with an ad hominem orientation" and with martial overtones. Basic elements of flyting scenes in Homeric and Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry include The Iliad, Beowulf, and The Battle of Maldon.

Nowadays..... we've got homies like Chris Rock. Helllllll yeah!

I dunno about this memorization technique....

2005-02-24T15:36:00.000-08:00

So, I've been listening to Dr. Sexson tell us all what a wonderful technique these memory theaters prove to be, but I have to admit, I'm gonna be like Justin and stick with old trusty: the memorization narrative. To me, it makes things more graphic, more memorable, because I'm the one who wrote the story! If I really wanted to make things grotesque in my house in order to remember these Top 100 Book titles, I think I may get evicted, or have some serious problems with the roomies after this. Either way, I wish everyone the best of luck.... Though I DO believe it may become a bit monotonous listening to 30-something students recite the same list over and over and over and over and over..... 'you pickin' up what I'm layin' down? ;)

In my room.......

2005-02-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

As far as a female college students' bedroom goes, mine's nothing out of the ordinary. I've got your basic essentials: bed, dresser, computer desk, full-length mirror, night table. Instead of pictures covering the walls, I have..... post-cards, from 11 of the countries in Europe I visited last year. Of the three posters on the walls, two are parisian paintings advertising Le Moulan Rouge and another attraction in Paris. The other is the poster for the combined university choirs in Berlin, accompanied by a 125-person orchestra, to be held in the Berlin Philharmonic. I sang in that concert, and it was one of the landmarks of my life, thus far.
On my computer desk is a paper-holder shaped like a piano, which is bursting with envelopes covered with stamps from foreign countries, interesting versions of my address scrawled on the faces. They somehow miraculously arrived in my mailbox. A few photos of my grandparents and family, best friends and favorite places take up half the mirror of my dresser, one of these being a photograph taken from my apartment in Berlin of the facades of the buildings across the street at sunset, their individual features lit up and chiseled on my memory forever: the photo almost does it justice.
Between the dresser and my bookcase stands my guitar on top of a pile of piano music. The guitar has been neglected for too long, and the piano music I haven't played since all the free time I had at my parents house over Christmas break. That sucks. The bookcase is packed with both required and pleasure books. Unfortunately, as is the case of the musical instruments that used to be a big part of my life, the books I read for pleasure have been shoved to the back in order to provide easy-access to the required texts I eat, breath, sleep and converse with. Oh well, at least most of them are highly interesting.
On top of the bookcase rests my 27-inch TV. That, I think I've turned on less than 10 times since I've owned it. It's nice to have in my room if my roommate is watching the one in the living room, and I feel like catching a film... but that's rare, and I've discovered that if I fall asleep with the TV on, I have nightmares. The TV's creepy in that sense.
A free-standing fan provides some crucial white-noise for when I'm sleeping; watching my two goldfish (Ferdinand and Isabella) float around carelessly in their bowl before I reach for the switch to the night-table lamp reminds me to take some of the stress out of my life, to slow down and get some rest.... Behind their bowl is a photo frame shaped like a piano, holding a picture of a blonde girl in a pink tank top, wearing blue-lense glasses, and kissing a very happy-looking old man on the cheek as he sits in a lawn chair. Those people were my grandpa and I, the summer before he gave up on life. He called me his "smiles and sunshine."
The last object I usually look at before clicking off the light is a small globe, with Berlin's Brandenburger Tor, a huge gate with a chariot drawn by horses on top, an angel at the reigns. Around the base of the globe are other famous landmarks in Berlin, and when you shake it, it sprinkles down metallic-colored shards. I bought this globe at a time when that gate was as normal to me as the SUB is to MSU students. When I bought it, I knew someday I would be back in Bozeman, Montana, and Berlin would feel like another galaxy. Sometimes it does. But not always. ;)
The light gets clicked off, and the stars come out. Call it childish, but my entire ceiling and walls are covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. I got the tiny ones on purpose, to make them look further away. Dropping into the land of Winken, Blinken and Nod is much easier when I'm not staring at pitch black walls.

Links to Fellow Students' Blogs

2005-02-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

Allison Bailey- http://oraltraditions.blogspot.com/
Apabrita Basu (aka Opai)-http://www.geocities.com/apabritabasu/
Brian Johnsrud-http://rememory.blogspot.com/
Cara Dineen-http://www.dineenc.blogspot.com/
Cindy K Allison Bailey - http://oraltraditions.blogspot.com/
Courtney Wilson-http://www.livejournal.com/users/wilsoncourt/
Debbie Adams-http://oraltraditionsdeb.blogspot.com/
Jennie Newman-http://buttersickle-la-la.blogspot.com/
Jennifer Turcotte-http://jst-oraltraditions.blogspot.com/
Jeremy Warwood-http://www.adamlamb.com/webPages/Oral%20Traditions%201/Feats%20of%20Memory
Josh Gerdes-http://www.livejournal.com/users/jgerdes/
Juliet Osman http://julietno.blogspot.com/
Justin Burgard-http://oraltraditionsengl337.blogspot.com/
Kelly Stoll-http://galacticgerbil.blogspot.com/
Kristi Thane-http://www.saffiatu.blogspot.com/http://www.originaldrivel.blogspot.com/
Lauren Kaiser-http://oraltraditions337.blogspot.com/
Samantha Fife-http://www.originaldrivel.blogspot.com/
Shauna Kopp-http://ideasandramblings.blog.com/
Sophie Hoopman-http://oraltradsophie.blogspot.com/
Valerie Dowbenko-http://www.thefirebird2005.blogspot.com/
Wayne Berg-http://www.wayne.blog-city.com/
Wes Friske-http://www.livejournal.com/users/wesleyfriske/

"I don't want to believe I came from peasants!"

2005-02-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

Not only does my mom not want to believe our ancestry traces back to peasants, but she's gotten our family tree all the way back to Betsy Ross and Pope Urban the Fifth on my dad's side. Being related to Betsy Ross makes me a "Daughter of the American Revolution" which I suppose is kind of neat, but somewhat useless... And being the good Catholic woman she is, she only admires the Mormans for their amazing collection of geneological data from all over the world. Maybe, now that all these ancestors of ours are dead, she can kind of re-invent them to suit her own imaginative needs. If she knows little to nothing about what these people did or were like during their lives, then she can give them identities according to the facts that she does know, therefore justifying her current position in life. Whatever her reasons for this obsession are, I'm sure there are worse addictions. :)

One hundred images, undefinable

2005-02-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, Justin's display of memorization in class today was delightful. I remember learning that technique when I was young: if you want to remember a list, put all the ingredients into a story. That's the easy part. Remembering all the facets of the story is where the trick comes in. What I find really interesting about this technique is that if we were all to create our own stories to remember these hundred titles, we will all come up with drastically, phenominally different approaches and outcomes.
It's just funny to think of all of our synapses firing in different directions, which makes me realize how much more I learn from my peers now (in college) than I did in high school. Maybe that's because we're all just now learning how to think.... or maybe because people our age finally have the gumption to share what's firing around in their head. ;) Either way, I love it.

Anyways, random thoughts on a crazy Tuesday......

Cheers!

Bars and Hors d'oeuvres

2005-01-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

Pre-literacy was a long time ago for me. The really strange thing about literacy that I've been mulling over in my mind is that no matter if we ourselves are illiterate, we are constantly being influenced by those in our society who are. From birth to death, we are bombarded with things people heard or read on the news, debates about published works, the continuing evolution of the world we live in is always being recorded and conveyed to us in one way or another.

Pre-literacy for myself then, was very influenced (naturally) by my parents. Their influence on my opinions, beliefs, and points of view was phenomenal, seeing as how I was home-schooled from kindergarden through 9th grade, and both of these hard-core Catholic parents wanted to either make sure or correct any ideas opposing theirs from the outside world. So, not to bash on my mummy and daddy (they're really very well-meaning people, just a little stuck in their ways) I find it funny enough that after being read to every night by my dad out of either a book on one of the saints, or one of the Chronicles of Narnia (which I now know were written by an extremely devout Catholic allegorist), the first word I phoenetically "sounded out" on my own was on a road-trip, over the river and through the woods, to visit my grandparents: the flashing neon read "B-A-R. Bar!" I murmured. "Good job, Steph!" my Mom congratulated me. Yes, it wasn't that impressive a feat, and I would be much more proud if it had been something like "supercalafragilisticexpialidocious," but I find it slightly comical that the first word I read wasn't something having to do with religion.

Of course, sometimes it seems like the world used to be a safer place before I learned to read and write. Stories took on more magical qualities with my dad doing all the voices and building up the suspense from night to night. However, I have fallen in love with the written word (hence the English major and decline of my social life, due to copious amounts of homework) I should have learned to master English before I (innocently) tried moving on to French. Truckin' along through a book, reading aloud to my (critical) older sister, I stumbled upon a funky-lookin' thang called "hors d'oeveres." Since it made absolutely no sense to my developing eye, I sounded it out. "Whores dee ovaries." Made no sense, but it became a running joke with which my sister still likes to embarrass me. :)

Listening to the Eco

2005-01-25T15:52:00.000-08:00

Professor Sexson's repeated testaments to the genius and wisdom of Umberto Eco have made me a great deal curious as to who this author really was. I understand that he was Italian (and I loooove Italians), so I decided to "google" his name for more info. Here's what I found, which truly does tie into a lot of what we've discussed in class so far.

Umberto Eco (1932-)
- Pseudonym: Dedalus

Italian literary critic, novelist, semiotician, who gained international fame with his intellectual detective story IL NOME DELLA ROSA (1980, The Name of the Rose), a book about books. It extended the use of semiotics to fiction, and combined various genres, literary theory, mediaeval studies, mystery, and biblical exegesis. As a semiotician Eco is known for his contribution to the theoretical study of signs encompassing all cultural phenomena. Much of his study, including A Theory of Semiotics (1976), has been on the development of a methodology of communication.
"'L'Anticristo può nascere dalla stressa pietà, dall'eccessivo amor di Dio o della verità, come l'eretico nasce dal santo e l'indemoniato dal veggente. Temi, Adso, i profeti e coloro disposti a morire per la verità, ché di solito fan morire moltissimi con loro, spesso prima di loro, talvolta al posto loro.'" (from Il nome della rosa)
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria. He received a doctoral degree from the University of Turin in 1954 at the age of 22. His thesis dealt with the early philosopher and religious thinker St. Thomas Aquinas. From 1954 to 1959 he worked in Milan as a cultural editor for RAI, Italian Radio-Television, also lecturing at the University of Turin (1956-64). In 1958-59 Eco served in the army. He was a university teacher in Milan (1964-65) and Florence (1965-69). From 1969 to 1971 he was a teacher at Milan Polytechnic. At the early age of 39 Eco was appointed professor of semiotics at Bologna University in the north of Italy.
Eco's literary career started in the late 1950s, when he was a columnist for Il Verri, writing 'Diario minimo' (1959-61). He was cofounder of Marcatré (1961) and Quindici (1967), edited Versus from 1971, and was a member of the editorial board of Semiotica, Degrés, Text, Structuralist Review, Communication, Problemi dell'Informazione, and Alfabeta. Eco has contributed regularly to daily newspapers (Corriere della Sera), weekly magazines (L'Espresso), and artistic and intellectual periodicals (Quindici, Il Verri, et al.). Eco has written from the 1970s for quite separate audiences - general readers on the one hand, and academic specialists on the other. His articles have appeared in such books as DIARIO MINIMO (1963), IL COSTUME DI CASA (1973), DALLA PERIFERIA DELL'IMPERO (1977), and How to Travel with a Salmon (1992). In these books the reader can enjoy Eco's playful insights on such topics as militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, airplane food, librarians, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, express mail, fax machines, porno films, and football fans.
From 1959 to 1975 Eco was a senior editor of non-fiction at Bompiani publishers in Milan. From 1979 Eco has been a vice president of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. He founded and edits the journal of semiotics, VS. Although he has written a number of essays on mass media and modern culture, he has been always attracted to the mediaeval world, and published a study about the development of medieval aesthetics (1969) and an analysis of the Beato of Leibana's manuscript (1973). "The view that the Middle Ages were puritanical, in the sense of rejecting the sensuous world, ignores the documentation of the period and shows basic misunderstanding of the medieval mentality," Eco wrote in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986). He has received several awards, among them Strega Prize (1981), Viareggio Prize (1981), Anghiari Prize (1981), Medicis Prize (1982), McLuhan Teleglobe Prize (1985). He has also honorary degrees from several universities. Eco is married to Renate Ramge, a German-born graphic artist, who helped translate IL DENDOLO DI FOUCAULT into German.
"It has been said that narrative worlds are always little worlds, because they do not constitute a maximal and complete state of things... In this sense narrative worlds are parasitical, because, if the alternative properties are not specified, we take for granted the properties that hold good in the real world. In Moby-Dick it is not expressly stated that all the sailors abroad Pequod have two legs, but the reader ought to take it as implicit, given that the sailors are human beings. On the other hand, the account takes care to inform us that Ahab had only one leg, but, as far as I remember, it does not say which, leaving us free to use our imagination, because such a specification has no bearing on the story." (from Kant and the Platypus, 1997)
Eco's major studies in aesthetics, literature, communication and semiotics are OPERA APERTA (1962, rev. ed., 1972, 1976), A Theory of Semiotics (1976), in which he took up and developed various lines of research begun in the latter half of the 1960s, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1991). From the time of Eco's early writing semiotics has become central to a great number of disciplines. Eco sees it as a sign of success and health, but has confessed that writing an updated version of A Theory of Semiotics and producing a new systematization, would be rash.
However, in Kant and the Platypus (1997) he returned to the text again, examining how much our perception of things depends on our cognitive ability, and how much on our linguistic resources. And where, and how, do these two questions meet. Referring to Pascal, Aristotle and Heidegger, Eco starts with the problem of Being (Seinde and Sein in Heidegger). Pascal wrote in 1655: "One cannot begin to define being without falling victim to this absurdity: one cannot define a word without beginning with the term is, be it expressly stated or merely understood. To define being, therefore, you have to say is, thus using the term to be defined in the definition." There is no definition for being, but being it is that enables all subsequent definitions to be made and it underpins all discourses except the one we hold about it. Language does not construct being ex novo: it questions it, in some way always finding something already given. Eco accepts the idea that our descriptions of the world are always perspectival - the world as we represent it to ourselves is an effect of interpretation. Being sets limits for us and it is possible that there are regions of being of which we are unable to talk. But the language of the Poets seems to let us glimpse what could be beyond the limit. "What the Poets are really saying to us is that we need to encounter being with gaiety (and hopefully with science too), to question it, test its resistance, grasp its openings and its hints, which are never too explicit."
While taking over many of the fundamentals of the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jacobson and of the theories of structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, Eco differs drastically from them. In OPERA APERTA (1962, rev. ed. 1972) and LECTOR IN FABULA (1979) he criticized the view that meaning is the production of a structure, and saw that the reader uses two main concepts in the process of interpretative cooperation: the reader inserts in the text the 'possible worlds' and the 'frames', situations or sequences of action, in order to complete its meaning.
As an essayist Eco's writings oscillate between 'academic' and personal reflections. He opposes both the believers of a superior elitist culture and those whose are so fascinated by mass culture that they have lost their critical judgment. Eco has dealt with spy novels, comic books, serial novels by Dumas or Eugène Sue, objects of the popular culture that the traditional critic has ignored. In 1991 Eco's SGUARDI VENUTI DA LONTANO launched a new discipline, 'reciprocal anthropology' as a result of a convention held in Italy. The scholars from African and Asian countries carefully observed Western people, and came to the conclusion that Westerners are barbaric. One of Eco's theories is that modern art, especially in the forms of music, poetry and fiction, often expresses deliberately uncertain messages. This allows the reader or listener to take an active part in deciding the meaning of a work of art.
"We are frequently misled by a "mass media criticism of mass media" which is superficial and regularly belated. Mass media are still repeating that our historical period is and will be more and more dominated by images. That was the first McLuhan fallacy, and mass media people have read McLuhan too late. The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer-oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images. The new generation will be alphabetic and not image oriented. We are coming back to the Gutenberg Galaxy again, and I am sure that if McLuhan had survived until the Apple rush to the Silicon Valley, he would have acknowledged this portentous event." (Eco in The Future of the Book, ed. by Geoffrey Nunberg, 1996)
In The Search for the Perfect Language (1995) Eco examined the history of the idea that there once existed a language, spoken before the collapse of the Tower of Babel, which perfectly expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts. Belief or Nonbelief (2000) is an exchange of letters between Umberto Eco and Carlo Maria Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan.
Eco's second novel, IL PENDOLO DI FOUCAULT (1988, Foucault's Pendulum), was a mixture of detective story, introduction to physics and philosophy, and playful analysis of madness and wisdom, which encompass the whole history of mankind. "So it was not so much the earth to which I addressed my gaze but the heavens, where the mystery of the absolute immobility was celebrated. The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved - earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion - one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience." The narrator is a young philosophy professor, Causabon, who decides with his friends to make believe that the Templarians had elaborated a plan that was going to lead them to the control of a mystic source of power, greater than all the energy in the world. The friends begin feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer, and inventing a map and placing it under Foucault's pendulum in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The plan leads the friends to their deaths.
In an interview in 1989 Eco stated that "to write a third novel is like writing thirty of them, and it doesn't make much sense." However, in 1995 Eco's new novel L'ISOLA DEL GIORNO PRIMA (The Island of the Day Before) appeared. The protagonist, Roberto della Griva, a seventeenth-century nobleman, finds himself in the South Pacific stuck upon a mysteriously abandoned ship after a violent storm. With nothing else to do, Roberto recalls chapters from his youth, but finally realizes that he isn't alone. His elusive shipmate turns out to be Father Caspar, who has unlocked the very secrets of time and distance that Roberto was supposed to secure. Together Roberto and Caspar attempt to reach a nearby island.
Il nome della rosa (1980, The Name of the Rose) is a bestseller novel set in the 14th-century Italian abbey where the power of life and death lies with the Inquisition. A breakaway sect, the Fraticelli, threaten the wealth and political influence of the Church. William of Baskerville, accompanied by his novice Adso of Melk, try to prove that a series of murders is not the work of the Devil. They find that the blind librarian Jorge de Burgos - a homage to the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges - is behind the murders: he protects Aristotle's missing manuscript about comedy, the lost second book of Poetics. The abbey library and monastery burn down in an infernal fire and the manuscript disappears. "But there is general agreement that in the course of telling a rich and fascinating tale Eco also explores the diversity, contradictions, and complexity of the medieval world, and in the course of doing so raises questions about our own: not least, from the library, repository of past learning and current speculation, about what constitutes culture, what is transmitted, by whom and for what purposes." (Contemporary World Writers, ed. by Tracy Chevalier, 1993) - The book was adapted for screen and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. The film took place at Klöster Eberbach near Frankfurt, where time has stood still since the 12th-century. The outside was built on a hill near Rome, the largest exterior set Europe has seen since the making of Cleopatra. The Name of the Rose has been translated into more than sixteen languages. It won in 1981 two of Italy's main literary awards: the Premio Viareggio and the Premio Strega. - "In essence, the basic question of philosophy (as of psychoanalysis) is the same as that of the detective novel: who is guilty? To know the answer (to think you know) you have to conjecture that the facts possess a logic - the logic that the guilty party has imposed on them." (from Postille a 'Il nome della rosa', transl. by Michael Dibdin, 1993)

Source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ueco.htm