Notes 2/3/2005

Dr. Sexson recommends the "Memory Theater/Palace" for our memorization of the MSU Top 100. Construct the house that you grew up in, or live in now, and make associations between the contents of that space and each book in the bookmark. That which we remember best is that which is memorable. Make your visuals spectacular, grotesque, provocative, violent. Use your imaginations. The use of cabinets and drawers is somewhat helpful. Remember... "It's all in your drawers." Memorizations are due March 1st!!!

Why is geneaology interesting to some people? We generally don't like to read lists and lists of names, begat after begat. Why, then, do some people take such an interest in it? It is partially because the story of our families is OUR story. It is the story of where we came from.

The first appearance of writing was in bills and receipts, practical documents that were needed daily.

Nature is where myth comes from. Myth is the song that the Earth sings but that we cannot always hear.

Passages we liked in Ong
*pg. 14 Beth's Passage--> "Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedents and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too. Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all." Ong acknowledges that literacy is multifaceted. There are good sides and bad sides to it. Sometimes it can even restore something that a culture has lost.

*pg. 36 Wayne's Passage-->"Of course, all expression and all thought is to a degree formulaic in the sense that every word and every concept conveyed in a word is a kind of formula, a fixed way of processing the data of experience, determining the way experience and reflection are intellectually organized, and acting as a mnemonic device of sorts...in the sense in which the word 'sea' is not." Wayne made a connection between this passage and the 3rd Quartet of T.S. Eliot. Idea of returning to memory for meaning. We all have expereinces but miss the meaning initially, coming back to those expereinces through recollection allows us to find the meaning.

*pg. 43 Brian's Passage--> "An oral culture 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 expression." In an oral culture, the education is hands on and practical. In this practice, there is a passing of knowledge from one generation to the next in the form of an exchange.

*pg. 75 Allison's Passage--> "As late as the European Renaissance, quite literate alchemists using labels for their vials and boxes tended to put on the labels not a written name, but iconographic signs, such as various signs of the zodiac and shopkeepers identified their shops not with lettered words but with iconographic symbols such as the ivy bush for a tavern, the barber's pole, the pawnbroker's three spheres." image precedes the word. Quite a lot has changed now though. Images seem quaint to us now.

Pictures can bring on iconoclasm in their power. Idolatry can come from it. A picture cannot do justice to God because God is beyond what is imaginable.

Umberto Eco essay Macs vs. PCs. Macs are Catholic computers, PCs are for Protestants.

Secondary Orality: The reintroduction to oral culture after immersion in the literate culture.