Monday, January 26, 2009

Hash for January 26, 2009


Went over the Spring Schedule.

*Security Blanket = Our Schedule*

***Don't forget that our quiz on the 20th is also John Nay's B-Day.***

Classes these days are not written, they can not be. They must be produced electronically, then spoken about orally and then they are never copied again. You can never be taught the same as the one before.

Tai wasn't here to tell us of his theatre (but then he did when he showed up ;)

***2CETMUP - In the muses, there are 2 c's, 2 e's, and mup.***

Richard's idiosyncratic ways are his own, random. We're trying to work on systems that work for us all.

Sutter used his house to memorize the muses. He drives into his garage and there's a cantaloupe, laundry room has Miss Cleo in there, and Erato was posing in the entry way, then his computer room h.... Sexson cuts him off to write cabinets on the board and drew his cabinets.

****Need to google curiosity ~ "Cabinet of Curiosity" (That's what the picture is above - The Cabinet of Ole Worm)****

****"The 'Cabinet of Curiosities' was originally a personal collection of things of wonder (the cabinets were also referred to as Wunderkammer - or Cabinet of Wonders).These cabinets reached the peak of their popularity in the 17th Century; they were the personal and often idiosyncratic collections of individual, wealthy owners and contained both natural and man-made objects, as demonstrated in the following list of some of the items displayed at the Kensington castle of Sir Walter Cope:

... holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, a back-scratcher, and a canoe with paddles, all from "India"; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwoman's forehead, a unicorn's tail; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool, the Turkish emperor's golden seal ...
The picture on the left shows the cabinet of Ole Worm (1588-1654).


The main function of cabinets was to provoke a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer; in many ways they represented a world-view that valued the 'wonder' in an artefact much more than the need to analyse and classify that artefact. There were not yet universal systems of scientific classification and each collection sported its own unique organisational structure. The specimens in one corner of the Anatomical Museum in Leiden were grouped by type of defect. Sitting side by side were "separate pickling jars containing two-tailed lizards, doubled apples, conjoined Siamese twin infants, forked carrots, and a two-headed cat.

The cabinets displayed their owners' notions of Art (man-made artefacts), Science (natural artefacts) and Spirituality (sense of wonder at God's works) in a physical form. With the discovery of the Americas, affluent households were even able to send off explorers with 'shopping-lists' of curiosities that reflected their particular interests and obsessions; here is part of one dated 1625:

on Ellophants head with the teeth In it very large on River horsses head of the Bigest kind that can be gotton on Seabulles head withe horns All sorts of Serpents and Snakes Skines & Espetially of that sort that hathe a Combe on his head Lyke a Cock All sorts of Shinging Stones or of Any Strange Shapes …..Any thing that Is strang.

Through the 18th Century cabinets were mainly either broken up or transformed through the stricter standards of scientific classification and curatorship into the basis of museums - some of which still exist today. Museums tended to become public displays of the knowledge and artefacts that a culture most valued in its own history, rather than the private display of the idiosyncratic interests of an individual. The all-embracing nature of the cabinet as an influence on museums disappeared almost entirely during the nineteenth century, as museums increasingly specialised in particular areas of art, natural history, and technology.

The key concepts and notions that lay behind the assembling of Cabinets of Curiosities were: Experiencing a sense of wonder in all kinds of things in the world. Discovering new and extreme examples of the natural and the man-made. Making connections across the whole field of human knowledge. Experimenting with arranging, re-arranging and classifying parts of the world (and the connections between them) in many different ways.
As Samuel Quiccheberg (an eminent curator of cabinets) wrote:"The ideal collection should be nothing less than a theatre of the universe..keys to the whole of knowledge." "

-middlestreet.org****

-Talks about Marx brothers (their show) and whenever somebody said the magic word on their show, a duck flew down and gave them $100 bucks.

-Sutter continued on - Computer room is Euterpe (terp for turtle) , in his room is Mel Gibson eating a pomegranate, Polyhymnia (I missed), Terpsichore was sick of doing chores in his kitchen, Thalia is in the bathroom, and Urania is out the window in the end of his house.

-Sutter memorizes in his house, when he recited to us he wasn't talking to us, he was walking around his house going from room to room and looking at the muses.

****We will build a flexible memory palace that has at least 100 places to put things in.****

1600 - Year that Hamlet was on the stage. Giordano Bruno also was a monk who met with some great memory ideas and he was burned at the stake for this.

****Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600) was an Italian philosopher best-known as an early proponent of heliocentrism and the infinity of the universe. In addition to his cosmological writings, he also wrote extensive works on the art of memory, a loosely-organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. He is often considered an early martyr for modern scientific ideas, in part because he was burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition. However, others argue that his actual heresy was his pantheist beliefs about God,[1] not any idea we would today characterize as scientific.[2]**** -wikipedia.com

- Tai is here!

Books we looked at today:

*The Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Leonard Shlain "Very Controversial"
*The Gallery of Memory - Lina Bolzoni
*The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci - Jonathan D. Spence

"We're asking the magician to pull up his sleeves, and all of a sudden the magic is gone." -MS
We are all learning the tricks to the way we are able to learn a lot and keep it there.

Our classes own memory theatre:
Thermostat (That's about as far as we got)... I was focusing on the lights above. There are two in that room right in the middle, circular recessed lights. There are also 37 flourescent lights, one in the back left corner that doesn't work and is marked with red tape.


-Yates said there is a sacred element to the memory palace. Very different than practical guides for a way to remember where your keys are. The association of the religious.

-There are mnemonics that are practical. It is what we try to do. "What you are remembering is not just the bones in the body...", you are remembering where they are, what they look like, etc.

-G GRAMAD - An old grandma in a madhouse stuttering. It's how he memorizes the intellectually important things of medieval times.

*** Assignment - Bring in your provocative passage from one of the books. He will associate it with you. We all need one.***

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