Of Triangles, Circles, and Squares....

Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo
Il Saggiatore

For Bright Eyed Kevin....

Have not we too? -yes, we have
Answers, and we know not whence;
Echoes from beyond the grave,
Recognized intelligence!

Such rebounds our inward ear
Catches sometimes from afar-
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God,- of God they are.

-William Wordsworth
"Yes, It was the Mountain Echo"

Hash for April 01, 2009

Talking schedules:

***8th of April is Second Quiz... Monday of next week discusses the quiz. Responsible for 4,5,6 in Ong. Yates up to Bruno. Finnegan's Wake Article. Ramone Lull. Camillo. We contribute to the creation. Bring question.****

*** Assignment - Comment on Kevin's Paper***

Friday - meeting in class with groups

6th of April - Talk of quiz
8th of April - Quiz
10th of April - Holiday
13th of April - Review of Exam
15th of April - Group 1+2
17th of April - 3-4
20th of April - 5-6
22nd of April - Begin our Individual Oral Presentations.... getting in 10 people a day. Going to be asked to be scytsophrenic. Formal.... beginning, middle, and end. Clarity. Stick to literate rules (MLA, paragraphs, ya know! Then be crazy and redundant and informative in our Oral Presentations (papers due during presentations).
1st of May - Conclusions and Evaluations
7th of May - Thursday of Finals Week - 6 pm - Final Test

Strunken White rules - Tai's Presentation - talking of our papers and who said we need to write and write a certain way. Typographic space.

pg. 130 - Ong - 2nd Paragraph end with quote by Yeats - "More Diffuse Affects" - Learned tongues textualize the language of the world.

"The Debate between Orality and Literacy is kind of a fake one - as Ong sets them up." -MS

"Writing is something we come naturally by, speaking is something we learn." -MS quoting Jacque Derida.

Finishing our talk of Finnegan's Wake Article:

Explanations again of Ramone Lull, Camillo, Bruno.
pg. 204 Yeats- Bruno explanations. ":The Philosopher's Stone in the psyche..." Astral Images. Such a memory would be the memory of a divine man. "A Magus..." The Divination of man was considered occult.

"Joyce, like Camillo before him, found himself at a loss to explain what it was he was creating."
The squaring of the circle, the circling of the square... The Mandala... like no other book that ever existed and still a replication of every book ever made.
Trying to capture orality before writing even came about... before ever writing.
"Cock and Bull Story"... Tristram Shandy... A Shaggy Dog story... A story that has no point, no end, beginning or point.
Portmanteau - One word during double, triple whatever duties. Joyce uses Lewis Carrol's word to the utmost in Finnegan's Wake.
***Aegypt - To Follow Bruno out of this class. Use this book.***

Triangles vs. Boxes (Circles and Squares) once again:

Sophocles - Ong - Great person of the literate tradition.
Sheharazad for Orality

Book of Judges - Oral Tradition in Spades - Redundancies and Repetitions in original forms. More powerful in its pure form.

***For Friday come up with more things to put into triangle and box.***

Hash for March 30, 2009

- Passing around the term paper topics paper.

- Talking of Kevin's imagination, memory, and soul paper topics.

- Talking about "rough giraffes"

- ****Assignment - Give Kevin his criticism on his blog, because he asked****

- pg. 144 in Ong, Talking of linear, chronologic plots not coming from epics, but rather boxes within boxes coming from epics. It's Fritag's Pyramid (the triangle) + (beginning, middle, and end) + (model for the literate tradition) vs. frames within frames within frames (unrelated, repetitions, oral traditions).

- Reading of the beginning of Tristram Shandy.

- pg. 145 in Ong, singers plot narrative not by conveying information with the same way as a man of linear thought... singers remember in a public way... themes, formulas... that other singers sing.

- Discussing teachers and the square within square and how well it works sometimes with the right teacher.

- Continuing down the road of our "Finnegan's Wake Article"

- Inscription is when you go to the genuine museum and all of history is played out and you become a participant of all this history rather than an observer of it.

- Yates has three chapters dedicated to trying to understand what Bruno is doing in his memory treatises.

- In Article, he breaks Bruno and Camillo into one simple paragraph. If you uderstand Bruno's memory theatre, well, then you understand THE UNIVERSE. Stupefyingly complex. Imprisoned in terrible situation of forgetting.

- Jana the Tamer of Horses is dripping a red juice on her jacket, accident.

- We had drank from the great river of letha, and it is "lethal" because we forget.

- Though virtually forgotten today, Camillo was one of the most well known persons of the 16th century. Not content to theorize of memory theatres, he built one of wood. He built the Seven Pillars of Solomon's House of Wisdom. The arranged items in the bleachers became the show to the person on stage. You could give an amazing speech on what was in the pillars. "THEIR OWN DIVINITY" is what they reach for. This is something to remember for the test.

- Novel talked about in this class.... told we should go read it now (all about Ovid):

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

"Best book Zack has read in a long time." + "It's the imagined clash between a literate man banished to a land of oral people."

Everything is still with you, somewhere that can't be reached.

Hash for March 27, 2009

Synesthesia (sp?) - a person who hears colors... going back to primary orality

Walter Ong - pg. 122 - Print encourages closure. A sense of what is written has been finalized.

(Introduction, Body, and Conclusion)

Model for the storyteller is Shahara Zad. She figures out how to keep them going so she doesn't die. Her stories do not have a finalization.

Think about TV shows that never end.... Lost, Heroes, and such..... secondary orality makes them never end. With a literate society, things have endings. Where is society moving?

Websites, Blogs are all just like this... never ending and always changing. Always changing.

Kindle gets passed around. We talk about the amazing book technologies and how to keep hundreds of books with you.... your iphone, kindle, other phones, etc. Quite amazing now.

***Aristotle was the first to say that a story needed a beginning, body, and conclusion like Oedipus Rex, the first detective story.***

Finnegan's Wake now subject.... going back to his story, third paragraph...

Talking about grunts and moans... oooo... ahhhhh..... sounds. Linguists believe this is how language originated. Chain gangs and dwarves in the mine.

"Before books there was speech, and before speech there were mute gestures."

Echolalia - Sexson says that babies are wonderful at it. It is the joy you take in hearing any sound you make. Their gutteral bubbles and gurgles that they love to make.

When pure sound becomes carnal, it is echolalia.

****Assignment - Listen for Echolalia, study it and makle your own. Blog on it too.***

Joyce read Vico, who understood that thunder bolts change things. Joyce onomonopiatizes lightning many times with a hundred letter word in his book.

Musey Room - Joyce's word for museum.


"In order to remember, you have to be dismembered." -MS

A book is tactile. Lisa said she laughed at the "Black Book of Colors" because black is the absence of colors.

***Turn to pg. 203 in Yeats, she says something about Bruno. **** Important pg. for next exam.**** The Googlable Guy! (Next book title)

***BLOG ABOUT YOUR TERM PAPER FOR MONDAY. HE'LL WANT THESIS STATEMENT FOR IT.***

Rich is here, Kayla, Carly, Danielle, no James, Kevin, Bri, Tai

*****My boundaries group meets at 4:30..... Thursday next week....

Lynn, Alex, Brian, Claire..... not in class anymore...

Hash for March 25, 2009

- ***Term Paper Topics coming up*** By Monday... need topic and thesis statement.
"Oral Traditions" need to be somewhere in the title of your paper.

- Any subject in the Kane book related to the Oral Tradition is ok for term paper. Ong ok too. Yeats could get a little troublesome because it goes off our subject at times.

- In this paper I'm going to talk about... I'm going to talk about it by using the examples of... I will try to get this result in the end...

Passed around:

Great Beginnings: Great Endings

- Ong pg. 32 very important for Joan's "Word Magic" paper.

Talking about the connections between classes.

The bible was written in Latin, and since everyone was incapable of reading Latin, all the information from it was in the hands of the priests. The whole protestant reformation wouldn't have been possible without the printing press.

"Intestate and Without Issue"

Secondary Orality in the world - Is there no place where there is closest to Primary Orality.

pg. 136 - Ong - He talks to us about electronic technology and how they are fostering a new literary movement. He died before he could see the huge movement to electronics instead of writing.

Expalanations to the memory theatres:
Deep Sea Fishing Jeff - beaches back home
Bearded Brandon - an outline form
Christine of the Laughing Rats - a huge building worked at in Iraq
Jared of the Open Plain (will be remembered now because we discussed it)
- Parker of the Outback Steakhouse (didn't explain...just discussed his name)


I will not have these two pictures
Quick Wit Nick - Not Pictured
Christine of the Laughing Rats - Not Pictured

pg. 136 of Ong discussed at the end - Discusses Secondary Orality and how it applies to the electronic word. "Relationship between electronically published word and the polarity discussed in his book." (MS wants Carly to write the book)

- Talked to Zack of the Saving Bells about his retrograde technology of ordering movies from Netflix and having them sent.

- We all download movies now (most of us) for free from the net.

Electronic: Orality and Literacy will be my book. :)

Camillo and Bruno need to be addressed in class Friday.

Hash for March 06, 2009

- Chris is passing around the big book of Hebrew - The Gemara

- Helena is going to spout off a list of like 70 people that she memorized for her prayers before she went to bed.
- An experiential demonstration of what we have been discussing.

Ong - End of Chapter 5 - Beginning of 6 - ***No matter how we have rid ourselves of the oral tradition, it survives in the strangest places.***

***Rhetoric was thought to have to do with the oral tradition - but not now.***
***Typographic is more important than the Chyrographic.... printing press more important.*****

***Eisenstein - Printing press is the significant invention of last 1,000 years. No reformation without it in protestant church.... because no widespread bibles.***

- Defending the doctrinal dissertation - Privileging speech or print

Zach of the Saving Bells and Two Tongued Charlie are in the Teaching Option - Sexson wants them to do something in the oral tradition in their classes in the future.

Great Beginnings, Great Endings - A Book written by Sexson a long time ago about great beginnings and great endings in books.
- We are reading from it.

- Kubla Khan - Mantra in opening lines. Opius (Opium induced ;)

- "Sometimes what we only imagine is happening enough to satisfy us."- MS

- Pantomimes, important, period.

- "An authentic remembering gives the book back its body."- MS

Why no conflict between the book saying the same thing each time you come back to your book? You're never the same person coming back to it.

Isis remembering and recreating her husband to bring him back!