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.