Something that will be of note for us to know: chapter six is the most important chapter in Ong, and the one which will be most important for the next exam. The contents of chapter six in Ong is the shaping of narrative.

He discusses, on pg. 144-145 Freytag's triangle, as contrasted with boxes within boxes. The former, which is a product and crux of the literary tradition, has a precise dramatic unity with a beginning, crisis and denoument. The latter is oral tradition influenced and has layers and layers of story and story details going on. As such, the boxes-within-boxes stories tend to sprawl on and on and seemingly go on forever. But, I've gotta say that I was heartened to hear this in class today, for its something I've felt for quite some time: lengthy novels give us something short stories can't. I know, the reverse goes for short stories as well. But the depths to which Les Miserables and Don Quixote can carry us!

It has been suggested that Sutter has to add the beginnings of The Crying of Lot 49 and Tristram Shandy to his memory theatre.

And, I now think I ought to read David Malouf's An Imaginary Life.

Sutter started us off with introducing a piquant little book entitled The Little Black Book of Colors. Which is completely black and yet still contains all the colors of the rainbow, predominately through its Braille text. This was offered up as an example of synaesthesia, or the melding together of senses--so, you read colors, or taste sounds or hear smells. Intriguingly enough, Vladimir Nabokov was a synaesthete.

We then proceeded into a discussion of how oral culture, in its treatment of stories, tends toward being open-ended and ongoing as opposed to providing closure. Schaherzade(sp?) in The Arabian Nights is the paradigmatic instance of this--the story had to go on for her life to go on--. And I've gotta say, it wouldn't have occured to me to consider day-time soap operas as related to instances of open-ended secondary orality but it turns out that they are. And I'm suddenly reminded of a really great line from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn which relates so well to this: "There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends."

We then ended up taking once again about Finnegans Wake and how, within it, we have the presentation of language almost as it was when babies make it--it makes no sense, it just exists for the mere sake of existing--, and the moving along of this to the application of sounds toward the names of things which one finds in the world, such as the one-hundred letter word attempting to be an onomatopeia of the sound of rolling thunder. Woweeeeee.

* the three members of Group 1 who were not present today in class were Checkmark Parker, Sweet Smiling Melissa and Brian the Eldest.

Matters of deadline first but not foremost: by Monday we must have decided upon the topic for our term paper and come prepared for the thesis statement for this paper. We have more or less complete free-rein with the choice of subject, save for one thing; the title must contain the phrase "oral traditions".

We then ended up discussing the oral culture's privelaging of sound over image--discussed by Ong on page 32-- and the fact that an elite hold-on language, which the advent of the printing press help to break, in fact is still with us, as evidenced by the difficult esoteric legal phrase "in testate, without issue".

We then had Jeff, Brandon, Christine and Gerad of the Open Plain explain the mechanisms of their memory theatres. They were, in order: a series of beaches, a numerical system with 10 groups of 5, an office building in Iraq, and a giant warehouse in Grand Forks North Dakota. It's really quite intriguing, the variety of spaces, tangible or no, in which people constructed memory theaters.

Having returned from Spring break, this session was devoted to the memory presentations of those who did not go the week before, both of them very impressive. Christine of the Laughing Rats who memorized the names of 50 Mishnaic(sp?)rabbis(which are really quite evocative names), and then had to do them again with the lights turned off, adding to the mystical encantatory nature of the recitation.

And Sutter the Sacker of Cities who memorized first and last lines of great books. Various classmembers were asked what books they recognized, and Sutter repeated the line from book in question again. It was impressive and surprisingly participatory, which of course is an apt adjective for the oral tradition.

Something else that these presentations brought out was the privelaging of the aural in 'oral' traditions. You frequently don't see something, you hear it instead, particularly with manifestations of the divine. In fact its quite possible that Yahweh, the Hebrew name of God in the Old Testiment, is the result of an onomatopeia(sp?) of the wind blowing. I find that very interesting.

Apparently the film Synecdoche New York relates very pertinately to this class.

It was yet another session devoted primarily to the power of names. Helena of the 10,000 lakes related the story of her "prayer" of family names, which including the names of past family members and pets, ends up being almost seventy in number. This in and of itself was intriguing to me, but ended up being even more so, because of the dual component of her recitation: in the oral tradition the speaking of a name conjures one in the flesh, and prayer is an act of name conjuration any way; Helena's prayer of names is sort of like the ultimate example.

We also paid great attention to the episode from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in which Humbert Humbert is entranced by the sixth grade class list because of Dolores Haze's inclusion in it. Here we have a banal list, on the surface of it, and yet it ends up being beautiful in the way it is spoken and in the allegorical way the names are shaped. I myself did not really catch the refrence to the Song of Solomon implicit in Dolores having "a bower of roses" around her. Really Nabokov fits into this class well, since the central theme of his work is memory.

Jaques Derrida, the patron saint of deconstuctionist literary criticism, has said that, even to this day, speech has been priveliged over print. This was then followed up by quoting Ong, who believes, according to page 119, that the typographic is more important ultimately than the cyrographic(ie. print is more important than writing itself). It was after all, the printing press that ushered in the Bible being written in the common peoples' language rather than Latin and thus transfering power away from the Church and onto the Book. However, we(and in particular Jana the tamer of horses in her blog) declared thus: Ong was wrong! And this is why: the dichotomy between the oral and literate culture really does not exist, much as it has been claimed otherwise thus far in this class. It really doesn't.

Presentations of our memory theatres will be next week, with the layout planned for Monday and Wednesday for the actual demonstrations and Friday for the explanations behind them.

Apparently the most important epithet in literature is contained in the final sentance of The Illiad: "Thus was concluded the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses." This great epithet has now been bestowed upon Jana. This also led into a very piquant discussion of the magic of names, discussed by Yates on page 177 of Art of Memory. This is also the basis for the school of Jewish mysticism called the Kabbala, which revolves around the names of the Divine and the magic carried by letters and words in the Hebrew alphabet(literary critic Harold Bloom's mode of criticism is based on the Kabbala). Kabbala's foundation is the Zohar a book written in Spain in the twelfth century, and was actually contemperanous(sp?) with Ramon Lull.

It's fascinating how, if words and names contain magic, then one's who wield words end up being the harbingers of powerfull forces(kind of like how in Celtic mytholigies poetic satire could actually kill, or how speaking 'the magic words' figures so predominately in fairy tales and the whole spectrum of fantasy fiction). Which is why it always falls to 'the scribe' to tell the story. And how when the final page of Finnegans Wake are recited, it becomes musical. It was Walter Pater who said "All art aspires to the condition of music". So when written up words become music, that says something. I'm actually wondering if maybe I wouldn't mind doing my term paper on this subject now.

And apparently the alphabet, outside of the Semitic tradtion, has a strong Celtic heritage. There's a book by Robert Graves called The White Goddess in which he traces this Celtic heritage, and how it in fact relates to trees. I did not know this.

Sutter presented the rest of his previously short-cutted(is that even a phrase)talk on the memory work of Ramon Lull, from whose system the alethiometer in His Dark Materials was taken. Interestingly, the aleth in Greek translates literally as "un-forget" (the river of forgetfullness is named Lethe after all). So "alethiometer" is literally a measure of un-forgetting.
Anyway, with regard to Lull, the only artificial memory technique he puts to use is that of frequent meditation. He does not use corporeal similitudes(ie. memorable because they are grotesque), but rather the nine attributes of God(which he says can be applied to anything) and names, which obviously can be applied to anything as well.

Speaking of names, we were granted our epithets in our groups today. I was pegged with Charismatic Kari of the Curly Hair.

We also must begin to brainstorm on a topic we feel affectionately for to propose for our term paper.