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.