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.