We were assigned our groups for the class today, who will make presentations on individual chapters in Wisdom of the Mythtellers after chapter 1. I am in group number 1, and we will be doing chapter 2 entitled Maps.

We ended up enlighting upon something that Ben blogged about; he always goes back to, and reconstructs, a cabin in Juno Alaska. Apparently, we all have 'cabins in Alaska'. There what would be called memory palaces, or memory theatres; places we go to in our minds to reconstruct or rediscovery what we remeber. And if we don't have one we'll be building one for the class.

In chapter four of his book Ong summarizes Plato's Phaedrus which is an impassioned attack on the newfangled thing called writing. Plato has Socrates say "writing is inhuman...it establishes outside the mind what should be in the mind." And once more, it destroys memory, because supposedly once you've written something down, you don't have to remeber it anymore. This stance(remarkably similar to the dismissal of computers in our age, as Ong notes) has been supplanted by a piety towards writing and reading in our day and age. Which I think is often a moot point more than anything else, but never mind.

But this is also an intriguing thing that comes up; what does make something memorable? As Yates says, sometimes we remeber things because they are terrible. They force themselve upon our memorys, just as traumatic events in history do(ie. September 11, the Kennedy assisination). But then very often we memorize things that are meaningless(I should now; my mind is a plethora of meaningless trivia). But maybe this is alright, because it forces one's little memory-muscles to exercise and prevents us from having a one-minute long-term memory, as some inverbrate creatures are supposed to have. I've actually met a few homo sapiens for whom this could be true, but that's beside the point.