Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Here is my last blog entry for the class
wow!
Dreams and memory
Loved John of the Stripped hates presentation
Negative secondary Orality?????
I just finished reading a post at www.robertbleckman.blogspot.com and I am amazed at what myth passes for sound thought. Apparently, “Media Ecologists” are discussing the rise of a negative “second orality” which is a great deal of hogwash. The concept of a second orality is also raised by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. What he and media ecologists don’t seem to recognize is the amount of trash oratory the listening public was consuming prior to the advent of trash literature and the amount of trash literature the reading public was consuming prior to the advent of trash television. If the pareto principle holds true 80% of all the media content out there is crap including the internet and your blog and mine. What is actually occurring is the literati of the present are being replaced by the digerati of the future. Marshall McLuhan is probably spinning in his grave when someone wanes sentimental about literacy.
Digital technologies are relieving us of much of the effort required to communicate. Literacy is now only one tool in the toolbox. Our children will communicate in ways we cannot even imagine. And it will be better. Adhering to outmoded means of communication will only result in our young people falling behind. Instead of practicing literacy Luddism look forward to the evolution of digital ecology.
I just don't understand the term negative secondary orality I guess....I see secondary Orality as a beautiful thing.
Oral History intrigues me
Introduction (Perks, R. & Thomson, A.)
Definitio of Oral History: "The interviewing of eye-witness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction". For some practitioners however, OH has not just been about making histories, but also to empower individuals or social groups through the process of remembering and reinterpreting the past, with an emphasis on the value of process as much as historical product. (Very much what we are researching and trying to recommend).
OH can be a powerful tool for discovering, exploring, and evaluating the nature of the process of historical memory - how people make sense of their past, how they connect individual experience and its social context, how the past becomes part of the present, and how people use it to interpret their lives and the world around them. (Pg 2).
Chapter 2 - The Voices of the Past (Paul Thompson)
"All history depends ultimately upon its social purpose." (Pg 21). Through history, everyday people seek to understand the upheavals and changes which they experience in their own lives such as wars, social transformations etc. Oral history however is not necessarily an instrument for change; it depends upon the spirit in which it is used.
Oral history is limited by the number of interviews, the people interviewd, and also those who read the interviews. The group interviewed rarely fully represent the community. Stories heard are mainly those of middle-class background. Yet history should not merely comfort; it should provide a challenge, and understanding which helps towards change. A history is reuqired which leads to action: not to confirm, but to change the world (pg 27).
"The relationship between history and the community should not be one-sided in either direction: but rather a series of exchanges, a dialectic, between information and interpretation, between educationists and their localities, between classes and generations. There will be room for many kinds of oral history and it will have many different social consequences. But at bottom they are all related". "Oral history offers a challenge to the accepted myths of history, to the authoritarian judgement inherent in its tradition. It provides a means for radical transformation of the social meaning of history" (Pg 28).
Chapter 3 - Oral History and Hard Times (Michael Frisch)
Reading oral history depends, more than in most historical writing, on the deeper assumptions one has about the nature of the evidence and the form. (this goes back to our intial theme of 'truth'). (pg 31).
In Western society, where culture is so penetrated by literacy, communication, and self-consciousness as to make such notions of oral tradition of dubious application, oral history has not gone much beyond the traditional focus of historical work. Most of us therefore assumes that OH does one of two things: 1) functions as a source of historical information and insights, to be used in traditional ways in the formulaiton of historical generalizations and narratives; 2) a way of bypassing historical interpretation itself, avoiding all the attendant elitist and contextual dangers, to provide a way to communicate with the past more directly, to be presented with a purer image of direct experience. (pg 32).
OH is able to penetrate questions that most other fields cannot: what happens to experience on the way to becoming memory? what happens to experience on the way to becoming history? as an era of intense collective experience recedes into the past, what is the relationship of memory to historical generalisation?
Chapter 6 - What Makes Oral History Difference (Alessandro Portelli)
Oral history as narrative - Oral history interviews result in narratives in which the boundary between what taks place outside the narrator and what happens inside, between what concerns the individual and what concerns the group, become more elusive than in established written genres, so that personal 'truth' may conincide with shared 'imagination'. (pg 66).
Oral history is different from other tellings in that it tells us less about events than about their meaning. It tells us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. Oral sources provide much about psychological costs of events rather than material costs. The organisation of the narrative reveals a lot about the speakers' relationships to their history. (pg 67).
It is important to note that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. Changes in memory reveal the nearrators' effort to make sense of the past and to give a form to their lives, and set the interview and the narrative in their historical context. (pg 69).
The documents of OH are always the result of a relationship, of a shared project in which both the interviewer and the interviewee are involved together, if not necessarily in harmony. (pg 70).
Chapter 7 - Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method (Popular Memory Group: Richard Johnson & Graham Dawson)
There are two ways in which a sense of past is produced; throgh public representation, and private memory. With public presentation, what is presented is the dominant memory, illustrating the power and pervasiveness of historical representations, their connections with dominant instutions and the part they play in winning consent and building alliances in the processes of formal politics. However, all these representations are open to contestation. Truth is not the criteria for dominant memory, but rather representations that are most ideological , most obviously conforming to the flattened stereotypes of myth. To make a dominant memory dominant, it has sometimes been achieved by direct control such as censorship, and by a violent recasting or obliteration of whole feilds of public history. Today the more common sites are formal political debates an public media. This may make several monographs seem insignificant in comparison. Another way to see social production of memory is in everyday life through individual narratives and comparisons. This is a history under extreme pressures and privations, and is held to the level of private remembrance which is often silenced and not offered the occasion to speak. OH aims to recover these stories through popular autobiography and community-based publishing. But public representations and private memories are linked and neither can be studied alone. Private memories cannot be readily unscrambled from the efforts of dominant historical discourses. They are relational. (pg 76-78).
Popular memory is concerned with 2 sets of relations: 1) between dominant memory and oppositional form across the whole public field, 2) between public discourses in their contemporary state of play and the more privatised sense of the past which is generated within a lived culture.
Difficulties blocking popular memory from impacting on politics:
- epistemological - historical objects of study are defined in such a way that it blocks political progress. Not seen as related or relevant to each other.
- the problem with individual testimony , narraitve or autobiography - not representative, not objective, cannot be a basis for political decisions.
- object of history is identified as the past - no longer relevant, must look to the future.
- social relational difficulties - the power the oral historian has in reproducing and interpreting the story - the academic power. The researcher is recognised and rewarded rather than the individual narrator of his/her story. The narrator is left untouched and unchanged, not involved yet having given up a part of him/herself.
Lisa and her demand to pass on Oral Traditions
I wish I had another semster to take this class!
HONORS/ENGLISH 293A
MEMORY AS TECHNOLOGY/TECHNOLOGY AS MEMORY FROM PLATO TO THE MATRIX
TR 830-945, Armstrong 121
Professor Sandy Baldwin - Stansbury 359 - 293-3107x452 - Office Hours TR 120-220 – charles.baldwin@mail.wvu.edu
. . . a computer is nothing but a means for a memory to get from one state to another.
- Joachim Weyl
There is nothing more immediate and natural than our memory, or so it seems. At the same time, there is little to say about memory. We speak of memories recalled and not memory itself, obliterating the process involved. Rather than repeat and confirm the self-evident nature of memory, this course argues that the naturalness and immediacy of our memory is in fact the outcome of applying complex techniques or "arts of memory." The aim of this course is to understand memory as technology and technology as memory, in order to grasp the historical production of individual memory and the cultural significance of archives and memorials. Every culture is framed by an art of memory as the media by which it invents itself. While all technologies involve processes of inscription, archivization, and representation, this class argues that these processes function as arts of memory. All cultural artifacts are memory technologies or mnemotechnics. The question is whether mnemotechnics preserve and enable memories, or - to the contrary - if they produce memories prosthetically. Is memory the essence of being human or a cultural artifact?
Drawing on a range of sources, we will examine the art of memory concealed in our concepts of writing, literature, visual imagery, film, and digital interfaces, as well as in theories of mind and learning. At stake are competing claims for the mnemotechnics of new media technologies, contrasting the possibility of a kind of super-human memory with struggles over the nature of historical memory under digital conditions. Finally, we will examine significant memorials as memory machines -e.g. the World Wide Web, the Holocaust Museum, the Mormon "mountain of names," Disneyworld, The Human Genome Project - to develop a model of cultural mnemotechnology as the medium for historical understanding.
An apology to Sutter
My Shandian piece
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF BRANDON SPEVACEK….A CAR PARKING STORY
BY BRANDON SPEVACEK
WORD COUNT 1915
ENGLISH 342 PAPER 3
CREATIVE OPTION
CHAPTER 1
To be a bastard was a hard thing for such a fervent youth like myself to swallow when I was a young tike growing up in small town Montana. If only my parents would have planned out my youth, I would have not suffered the slings and arrows from society that I would have had to endure. If only they would have took the time to understand just what they were getting into, they may have changed there way of praising “God the almighty” in the fashion that they had done. See, being the youths that they were, my parents “put the wheat in the bin” during a sanctimonious prayer at a Catholic youth camp. “ Oh God! Oh God! Brad don’t stop” Prayth my young mother. It seemed that my mother could only do her humanistic duty during the most religious ceremonies at the time.
CHAPTER 2
I had often heard that an idle hand was the devils playground when I was reaching my peak of intellect around the age of ten. Now that I look back at that saying, I quite understand why Mr. Clinton was often busy attending to the countries most dyer needs with his interns. As for my adopted father, interns and world policy was not his hobby. No, his hobbyhorse was racing. When I was a young man, I often saw him intricately placing model racing cars together. He had a whole track and collection of cars; one such model was an actual replica of the funny car my dad would drive down the track before he would leave and park the car in my mother’s garage. No, it is a shame that when my dad parked his car in my mother’s garage, no little funny cars were to follow. Because society placed importance on the number of cars they produced, my adopted parents had to adopt another car into the family.
CHAPTER 3
I was truly indebted to my father’s lack of philosophical knowledge. In my life, most of the people who know philosophy that I have encountered are not the most wonderful people. My birth father for example, was an expert in philosophy but they only real gift he ever gave to humanity was helping my mother pray and assist her in bringing me forth into this cruel world on the 9th of September. I have met this man once in my life and he always tried to downplay our intelligence by his use of grandiose words. Even though he would talk about the discourse of Freud and other great minds of the time, his conversation was always about the same as my adopted dad’s the best way to park the car in a garage. As I had previously mentioned, my dad raced funny cars as a young man so his digression was about the most time-effective way of parking while my birth dad had to degrade him. My birth dad talked about the mechanics of parking, the philosophy of parking and most importantly, how to pray to God the Almighty while parking. Either way, as much as my birth dad tried to insult the intelligence of my adopted father and myself, the message was still the same. It is important to park the car anyway possible
CHAPTER 4
My birth mother, being of Catholic descent was distraught at the idea of being pregnant out of wedlock. My birth father, being the complete jackass he was, decided that he had to go help other woman find God instead of doing the noble action of continuing their religious journey together throughout life. Being the young woman of sixteen that she was and since she had no other person to pray with, thought it best that she do a Catholic tradition of putting her soon to be new car on the auction block. Thankfully my beautiful adopted mom and my racing minded father were on the lookout for a new baby car that they could buy without the pain of reversing their own new baby car out of my mother’s garage.
CHAPTER 5, AUTHORS INTENT
Even though I digressed a bit, I must inform the reader that I was the hero of the story I told thus far. Is it not obvious that I am the hero of my own life? I would believe that wit and judgment, when in use would give evidence to such a fact. Locke once wrote an intellectual discourse about how the use of wit and judgment were things that could not be used together. They are impossible to use together. Our former leader of the free world tested this hypothesis and found that hiccupping and farting at the same time was easier for him to do then to use wit and judgment simultaneously. But I digressed again. Let me tell the meaning of this whole paper. I am going to tell how I came into this world, which I live in.
CHAPTER 6
I did not understand the meaning of parking fast and driving at a young age so I tried to do both literally. Once at the age of five I was asked to move my dad’s pickup across the farm and park it in the garage out of harms way. I remember both my birth dad’s and my adopted fathers advice for the best way to park and tried to utilize both at the same time and I ended up parking my dad’s beloved pickup into the side of a barn instead of the garage which awaited the vehicle. But I shouldn’t have said that, I got ahead of myself.
CHAPTER 7
With my arrival out of the garage due any day, my birth mother being the naïve young lady she was decided that it was a wonderful idea to accompany her family on their annual ski trip to Red Lodge Montana. I had been told my whole life that I should sit on a pole and rotate so how ironic that I came into this world while my mother clutched two ski poles? Funny thing about ski poles, I still to this day don’t quite understand their use and purpose. They are meant to slow one’s self down and help control their speed as they progress down the racetrack of ice. Even with this as the purpose, I had tried this and found it as successful as our foreign policy and Iraq which is not been a success thus far. I wish to note that I do not speak ill of the soldiers risking their life over seas. No, I am only commenting on how the policy itself is as useful as ski poles.
How I was started on poles I shall never know but back to the story at hand. My mother was nine months pregnant and expected me to back out of the proverbial garage any day and decided that she could still attend the family ski trip at Red Lodge Montana. With my arrival fast approaching, my dear mother had already decided on a strong name to give me before she sold me to the highest bidder. She had decided on Scott. Scott was thought to be a strong name, a name a boy of high intellect and holy regard could be proud of. Alas, the time had come and I was brought into this world and was thus named Brandon by my adopted family, the proud owner of a new car who soon will park his car in some lucky ladies garage. This is not a story of my life I guess, just a story of parking cars.
Myths and memory
| here are many myths about memory. The first myth is, `It is possible to produce everlasting memories.' The fact, however, is that it is possible to learn things well enough to make itnearly impossible to forget them in lifetime. However,every long-term memory, depending on its strength, has an expected lifetime. Here are more myths. Myth 2: We never forget. Fact: All knowledge is subject to gradual decay. It is only a matter of probability. Strong memories are very unlikely to be forgotten. In the normal course one does not forget one's name. Myth 3: Memory is infinite. Fact: Memories are stored in a finite number of states of finite receptors in finite synapses in a finite volume of the human central nervous system. Even worse, storing information long-term is not easy. Most people will find it hard to store beyond 3,00,000facts. Myth 4: Mnemonics are a panacea to poor memory. Fact: Mnemonic techniques reduce the difficulty of retaining things in memory. Repetition is still needed, even though it can be less frequent. Myth 5: The more you repeat the better. Fact: The fastest way to building long-lasting memories is to review material in precisely determined moments of time. For long memories with minimum effort, spaced repetition should be used. Myth 6: Mind maps are always better than pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. Fact: It depends on the material. Text is compact and easy to reproduce. To memorise your spouse's birthday or the date of India's independence, a picture is not required. On the other hand, a video clipping of an operative procedure is easier to remember and recall than factual data. Myth 7: Learn new things before sleep - for, there is a widespread myth claiming that the best time for learning is right before sleep to ensure that newly-learned knowledge gets quickly consolidated overnight. Fact: The opposite is true. The best time for learning in most healthy individuals is early morning. In ahormonal sense, the brain is best suited for learning in the morning. It shows the highest alertness and the best balance between attention and creativity. The gains in knowledge structure and the speed of processing greatly outweigh all minor advantages of late-night learning Myth 8: Long sleep is good for memory. Association of sleep and learning made many believe that the longer we sleep the healthier we are. In addition, long sleep improves memory consolidation. Fact: All we need for effective learning is well-structured sleep at the right time and of the optimum length. Many individuals sleep less than five hours and wake up refreshed. Many geniuses sleep little and practise catnaps. The best formula for good sleep: listen to your body. Go to sleep when you are sleepy and sleep as long as you need. When you catch a good rhythm without an alarm clock, your sleep may ultimately last less but produce far better results in learning. It is the natural healthy structure of sleep cycles that makes for good learning (especially in non-declarative problem solving,creativity, procedural learning, etc.). Myth 9: Alpha waves are best for learning. Fact: It is true that a relaxed state is vital forlearning. "Relaxed" here means stress-free,distraction-free, and fatigue-free. You do not need "alpha-wave machinery" to enter the "relaxed state". Myth 10: Memory gets worse as we age. Aging universally affects all organs. Fifty per cent of80-year-olds show symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.Hence the overwhelming belief that memory unavoidably gets rusty at an older age. Fact: It is true we lose neurons with age. It is true that the risk of Alzheimer's increases with age.However, a well-trained memory is quite resilient and shows comparatively fewer functional signs of aging than the joints, the heart, the vascular system, etc. Moreover, training increases the scope of your knowledge, and paradoxically, your mental abilities may actually increase well into a very advanced age Myth 11: You can boost your learning with memory pills. Fact: We still do not know the exact biological basis of memory. Marketing of "memory pills" and their unfortunate endorsement by public figures is the biggest 21st century hoax. Myth 12: Learning by doing is the best. Fact: Learning by doing is very effective in terms of the quality of produced memories, but it is also very expensive in expenditure of time, material, organisation, etc. Naturally, in the area of procedural learning (example, swimming, touch typing, playing instruments, etc.), learning by doing is the right way to go. Myth 13: People differ in the speed of learning, but they all forget at the same speed. Fact: At the synaptic level, the rate of forgetting is indeed basically the same, independent of how smart you are. However, the same thing that makes people learn faster also helps them forget slower. |
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here is my term paper
Brandon Spevacek
Oral Traditions
Due: 4/22/09
The Marriage of Orality and Literacy: Music
“It is a larger mistake to speak of them as adversaries. Instead light is an aspect of the prior and enduring state which is darkness. An so the state of light and the state of dark are present at the same time” (Kane 167). The complementary idea of existence suggested by Kane could have been seen as a marriage of two “things” which usually are set apart as opposites. When one looks at the function of literacy and orality in music, the same marriage is born by two different forms of art.
The idea of a marriage between orality and literacy in music would not have been popular with many philosophers like Plato since some musicians chose to write their songs down. “Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind” (Ong 78). Music is a form of memory. Charlie Parker once said, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it wont come out of your horn.” This was true from my own experience; my musical journey began with the hope of reliving past pain, happiness, joy and sorrow I had experienced throughout my life. The idea that I used the technology of writing the song did not destroy my memory of my past events; it enhanced them. The writing and performance of the songs I had written gave life to my past memories and allowed others to share in the experiences and emotions that I had lived.
2
In Ong’s book Orality and Literacy he suggested “ a singer effects, not a transfer of his own intentions, but a conventional realization of the traditional thought for his listeners, including himself” (Ong 142). In this section Ong referred to the idea that every ancient, oral Greek poet had to remember traditional formulaic and stanzaic patterns. Thus, orality had influence from previous speakers. Music is no different. When I wrote a new song, I relied on the same formulaic and stanzaic patterns of other musicians. What I did when I wrote was similar to what ancient Greek oral poets did before they preformed. This was just one example of how music used and still uses practices of both cultures.
To see another way music married the oral culture to the literate I had to look again at Plato’s argument on writing and his opinion of technology. His idea that the technology of writing destroyed memory because they (people) relied on external resources was faulty in the sense that all through human existence technology was inevitable. People had been using new tools (technologies) throughout history starting with language. Language was a tool that people utilized to communicate with other members of the species. Did the fact that language was a new technology diminish interaction between two people? No, it enhanced the experience and allowed a constant flow of communication and allowed non-literate people the opportunity to relate with each other even if the experience was artificial in Plato’s eyes.
This “Platonian” argument, that attempted to separate the literate world from the oral culture, did not fit when one attempted to explain music. In music,
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people didn’t rely on the external resources of writing to remember their past; they used the genre as a whole to relive experiences or emotions they have felt in the past. Plato would argue that since the idea was remembered in the non-natural way of writing, the memory would have been artificial. The only natural way of remembering was through the oral culture. I love Ong’s response to this idea “To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it” (Ong 81). Ong went on to say that the artificial nature of writing allowed the realization of human potential to be fulfilled.
In my opinion, I believe that writing allowed the potential of music to be realized. I would say that music had become more advanced since the day of chain gang music. Chain gang music was simple in rhythm; it moved with the beat of the work they were doing. The music of that time was entrancing because they sang of things they new. They knew the songs in every inch of their body. That has not changed. I knew a couple of musicians who memorized their songs before they preformed them for a crowd. This allowed the entrancing element of the oral presentation to be experienced by everyone. At the same time, the musicians had to memorize the songs by the technologies brought forth by the print culture. This was another example of how the oral and print conditions came together in the genre of music.
4
“Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space” (Ong 119). With music, this quote from Ong is true but at the same time false. When I wrote a song, I first found the tune I wanted it to play and wrote it down. This did move the sound from the world of noise to the world of print but after I had written the song, I moved the song from the world of print back to the world of sound. “ A song only exists only when it is going out of existence” (Ong 100), if I interpreted this quote correct, music only exists when it is heard. When a musician wrote a song, the song did not exist until he preformed it.
Ong said in his book that the oral culture was situational rather than abstract. All conceptual thinking was and still is to a degree abstract. For example, a concrete word like cloud did not refer to any singular tree, but it was an abstract idea that could refer to any tree. Music was and still is abstract to some degree. In the song This Little Light of Mine you never quite understood what the light actually was; it was an abstract idea. This abstract way of thought came from the print culture. Oral was situational and rarely abstract.
Situational language was also found in music. In the song The Battle of New Orleans we knew what battle Jonny Horton was talking about because he gave the date of the battle. So I can honestly say that music is a marriage of situational language and abstract thought found in both the print and oral cultures.
Music is both part of the oral and print culture based on the way that they are constructed. Ong discussed Freytag’s pyramid when we discuss the construction of
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the oral narrative. In Freytag’s pyramid, there was a starting point, rising action, climax, falling action and an end point. Citizen Cope’s song Salvation was constructed in this manner. The song started with a man who had no name coming town to find a musician. The man beat the musician’s girlfriend until she told him where the musician was located. When he found the musician, he attempted to murder him and then he committed suicide; that was the conclusion. The song was tightly constructed in the confines of Freytag’s pyramid.
Songs also were constructed very loose with out closure. We talked about the idea of mis-ene-byme in class meaning “into the abyss.” This term construed the idea that this thing would never end; it would continue on into eternity. When I thought of this term with regards to music, the Never Ending Song came to mind.
“This is the song that never ends. It keeps going on and on my friends. Some people started singing it not knowing what it was and they will continue singing it forever just because it’s the song that never ends…”
As the title of the song so clearly stated, there is no end point to the song. It continued into the abyss of eternity.
As I have shown, music incorporates characteristics from both the print and oral culture. If one tried to classify it into either of these categories they wouldn’t be completely correct; music was and always will be in the grey area between print and orality. It was much easier for me to think of music as the ring that signified the marriage between orality and literacy.
Work Cited
1). Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers.
Broadview Press, 1998.
2). Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy
Routledge N.Y, 1998
Group 6
This table helped me better understand chapter three
Table summarising Chapter 3: Some psychodynamics of orality
oral | literate |
| words as actions | words as objects |
| formulaic | unstructured/multiple |
| additive | subordinative |
| harmonising | analytic/dissective |
| redundant | sparse |
| narrative | facts & lists |
| episodic/thematic | chronological |
| ever-present | past and future looking |
| amnesic | hypermnemonic |
| ’savage mind’ | rationality |
| animistic | objective |
| holistic | linear |
| conservative | progressive |
| unreflective | introspective |
| social/public | individual |
| empathetic & participatory | objectively distanced |
| situational/situated | abstract |
| contextual | self-contained |
| restricted code | elaborated code |
One Hundred years of solitude...what a wonderful book
ROBERT KIELY
o speak of a land of enchantment, even in reference to a contemporary novel, is to conjure up images of elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains. Along with the midgets and fairies, one can expect marvelous feats and moral portents, but not much humor and almost certainly no sex. The idea, it would seem, is to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.
It is obviously not shared by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who has created in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" an enchanted place that does everything but cloy. Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life:
"The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood." This is the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.
Near the end of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" a character finds a parchment manuscript in which the history of his family had been recorded "one hundred years ahead of time" by an old gypsy. The writer "had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant." The narrative is a magician's trick in which memory and prophecy, illusion and reality are mixed and often made to look the same. It is, in short, very much like Márquez's astonishing novel.
It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the book without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things. Though concocted of quirks, ancient mysteries, family secrets and peculiar contradictions, it makes sense and gives pleasure in dozens of immediate ways.
The family chronicle centers on five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula, who sometime early in the 19th century founded the village of Macondo on a river of clear water somewhere in South America. The uncertainties about time and place, like other factual puzzles in the book, are not fashionable evasions on the part of the author but genuine reflections of the minds of the people about whom he is writing. From the beginning we are told that Buendía knew nothing about the geography of the region. He comes to love maps and compasses, but his sense of where he is remains very much his own. He plays with an astrolabe and sextant, but, with characteristic excess, almost contracts sunstroke "from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon."
The book is a history, not of governments or of formal institutions of the sort which keeps public records, but of a people who, like the earliest descendants of Abraham, are best understood in terms of their relationship to a single family. In a sense, José and Ursula are the only two characters in the story, and all their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are variations on their strengths and weaknesses. José, forever fascinated by the unknown, takes up project after project, invention after invention, in order among other things, to make gold, discover the ocean and photograph God. He eventually goes mad, smashes things, refuses to speak except in Latin and is tied to a giant chestnut tree in the middle of the family garden.
Ursula is the personification of practical endurance and sheer will. It is she who mends the pieces and sweeps the house clean after disaster; it is she who continues to raise various offspring long after her own children have grown to adulthood, and it is she who remains strong and clear-headed until the age of 114 or 122--as usual, no one is quite sure.
A mixture of obsessive idealism and durable practicality informs the lives of the Buendía descendants. The males, all named Arcadio or Aureliano, go off to sea, lead revolutions, follow gypsies, fall disastrously in love with their sisters and aunts (except one who develops a passion for a 12-year-old-girl) but most of them add to the family's stature and wealth and all contribute generously to its number. The women are not overshadowed by the men. One eats dirt when she is depressed; another burns her hand in the oven and wears a black cloth over it for life when her lover commits suicide, another, named Remedios the Beauty, is so innocent that one day when folding linen in the backyard she ascends into heaven with the family sheets.
But to isolate details, even good ones, from this novel is to do it particular injustice. Márquez creates a continuum, a web of connections and relationships. However bizarre or grotesque some particulars may be, the larger effect is one of great gusto and good humor and, even more, of sanity and compassion. The author seems to be letting his people half-dream and half-remember their own story and what is best, he is wise enough not to offer excuses for the way they do it. No excuse is really necessary. For Macondo is no never-never land. Its inhabitants do suffer, grow old and die, but in their own way.
Various hard and familiar aspects of reality intrude on their world all the time. What seems unreal or at least unconventional to an outsider is the manner in which the Buendías respond to and explain facts like birth, death, war, sickness and even weather. When it gets hot in Macondo, it gets so hot that men and beasts go mad and birds attack houses. A long spell of rain is remember to have lasted, not weeks, but four years, eleven months and two days. When a plague hits the region, it is no ordinary killer but an "insomnia plague," which gradually causes people to forget everything including the names and uses of the most commonplace objects. In order to combat the memory loss, the villagers label chairs and clocks and even hang a sign on the cow: "This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk."
More serious than bad weather or plague are the intrusions from outside, the mysterious gypsies, the corrupt government officials, the brutal soldiers (both Conservative and Liberal), the foppish Italian piano tuner, the ingenious French prostitutes and, finally, with the railroad, the sweating gringos "planning to plant banana trees in the enchanted region that José Arcadio Buendía and his men had crossed in search of the route" to the sea. At first it looks as though the North Americans will be absorbed into the dream life of Macondo, but they do mean to change things, including the terrain and the weather, and they do eventually build their own sensible counterpart to Macondo, a village of houses in neat rows with tennis courts and swimming pools.
It might have been just another phase in the incestuous life of Macondo, like the 32 revolutions or the insomnia plague, but enchantment and solitude cannot survive the gringos any more than they can avoid the 20th century. Like so much else in this strange and moving narrative, the end seems to have been inevitable. And yet the North American reader--in thinking of this narrative filled with haunting creatures and events--can hardly help being particularly haunted by the spectacle of his countrymen, "the perspiring guests--who did not even know who their hosts were--[trooping] in to occupy the best places at the table." Márquez has shown us, with extraordinary art, who some of the hosts were or, what is more important, who they thought they were. He has also written a novel so filled with humor, rich detail and startling distortion that it brings to mind the best of Faulkner and GŸnter Grass. It is a South American Genesis, an earthy piece of enchantment, more, as the narrator says of Macondo, "an intricate stew of truth and mirages."
Stew is too modest an image with which to describe the wit and power of this lusty fantasia, but if the strong savor banishes visions of twinkletoes, it has served a purpose.
Mr. Kiely is a professor of English at Harvard.
link: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marque-solitude.html
Ha! Memory is important in Broadway as well!
Chapter 7 summary from Ong
In this final chapter, Ong suggests that the concepts he has outlined in this book might provide inspiration for new interpretation by adherents of New Criticism and Formalism, Structuralism, textual and deconstructionist analysis, Speech-act and Reader- Response theory as well as those engaged in the study of literary history, the social sciences, philosophy and biblical studies.
At the end of this chapter, Ong goes to great pains to indicate that he feels that neither orality nor literacy is superior. Myron C. Tuman, in Words, Tools, and Technology (College English, 1983), seems to have missed this. At one point Tuman criticize s Ong for conveying "the sense that literacy offers a vast improvement over earlier techniques for storing verbal meaning," and implies that this means that Ong feels that literacy is superior to orality (770). Later, however, he criticizes Ong for depic ting literacy as opposite and somehow less attractive than primary orality (777). Perhaps Tuman's confusion has to do with Ong's choice of words in stating that "both orality, and the growth of literacy out of orality, are necessary for evolution of cons ciousness"(175). In a "survival of the fittest" sense of the word "evolution," Ong's statement could be construed as an implication that literacy is the "fitter" of the two. At the end of the seventh chapter, however, Ong clearly states that he does not believe that literacy is necessarily "superior" to orality (175).
In his short review of Orality and Literacy for the Winter 1982 issue of Et cetera, Paul Lippert concludes "that for the study of culture and communication . . . this book will become a landmark"(402). The fact that Methuen saw fit to reprint Orality an d Literacy five times suggests that Lippert was correct. Ong's book and the work of others who investigated the differences between orality and literacy in the early 1980s inspired considerable research, much of it in areas that Ong suggests in his seven th chapter. However, fourteen years after its first publication this book and its subject matter can still provide fertile ground for research. In 1982, Ong could not have foreseen the popularity of audiobooks, or the widescale use of such technology as editable voice-mail telephone service and the synchronous text-based communication made possible by the internet. No doubt, the time is right for a sequel to Orality and Literacy, one devoted entirely to the second orality.
A wonderful poem on memory
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.
Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.
Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk's torn off.
Maybe it's better I did not become
Your wife.
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it? -- Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night
I believe that memory aids us in our identity
Prior to this blog, there was another attempt. Its contents have been erased, though traces, fitting to its contents, litter the caches and archives. The manner in which this previous blog emerged, the style adopted, today is alien to me. Reading it back, I see only hyperbolic indulgence at its worst. The writing remains where it began: at an impasse. Happily, the estrangement I experience from this old blog testifies to the disruption of identity and to the possibility of movement in time. With this present blog, I have made a deliberate effort to exorcise any stylistic affectations, to completely remove myself from the supposed tension between seduction and language. My failure to achieve this task is clear in that detachment has itself become an aesthetic stance. None of this particularly matters other than the two blogs are only brought together under the remembering gaze of the anonymous reader.
To think here of a blog and its readers: if such a relationship is possible, then it is surely only in terms of a passing-through, a transient encounter carried out, paradoxically, through the ritual of returning. I return to a blog, not as a continuation of thematic boundaries, but as a desiring curiosity, enforced by the presence of the writer’s identity. The sudden disappearance or silence of a blog often gives presence to the writing, in that the reader is obliged to turn the disruption back upon his self. In contrast, sometimes a writer of a blog will appear who will employ certain phrases and injunctions to their readers, as though they owe their readers a debt. This kind of cosy complicity, engineered to encourage a sense of community, seems entirely at odds with what is distinct about blogging: its fragmentedness and temporal discontinuity.
Given this strained relationship between a blog and its readers, how does the writing of a blog materialise in the non-face of the reader in time? As shame underpinned by the preservation of an outmoded continuity? Or as expectation marked by the need to maintain one’s readers? Both of these modes seem to celebrate the vanity of writing, as the presentation of a particular identity, soon to fall from its temporal foreground. Shame corroborates the false image of a delimited identity: expectation confers legitimacy to blogging, which sees itself as having definite future. As such, both position writing in time, and apprehend it remaining there.
To (over)think the relationship between a blog and its readers is thus to face the decay of writing. Writing falls from sight, disappearing from the gaze of the reader (in the case of the blog this is a literal move, as writing moves sequentially downwards). In the disappearance, the reliance on the non-presence of the reader to give presence intensifies. Excessive hyper-linking, backtracking, and allusions to other posts are all natural attempts to place blogging at an intermediary centre between writing and identity. The emphasis on the past-tense confirms the desire to express the fact thateven blogging has a history, and that such a history deserves to be tacitly acknowledged. From this position, the decay of writing is not to be understood as a loss of presence, but instead, as the formation of a superimposed order of time, in effect a mutated presence, and realised only through the disclosure of temporal discontinuity.
Memory is still important
Yay! Thanks Kayla!
Literature as an aid to memory
beginning of my thesis
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In American culture, the way history has been used, created, taught and projected shows the ethnocentricity that America has now and has had throughout it’s past. An ethnocentric way of thinking is not isolated to just America, the literature of every nation implies a feeling of “us and the other” and the “us” is always superior. What the youth learned in school projects the idea that America is “the darling of the world” and is a shining example for all of human kind. Because of how some literature, such as Gettysburg Address, emphasizes the importance of a group, like an united nation, people rally around America and create a society-based, rooted idea of home and identity for themselves. This idea didn’t work because the projected identity of the United States only includes the Euro-American and leaves out the other regions and races that make up the whole continent and nation of America. This ethnocentric, linear style of thinking creates a racist and limited viewpoint that needs to be corrected if the United States as well as the America truly wants to be united.
Because of the limited viewpoint, other countries’ literature plays with the American notion of history in such a way that the literature could be seen as a critique on Euro-American ethnocentrism. In this paper, we will not only see how this limited view point gains it’s roots in European texts such as The Tempest we will also see the
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effect it had on American texts in the past; we will see how this societal history is questioned, how this critique is shown in writing and finally the way in which it aims to change American ethnocentrism and shape the U.S into a country that is inclusive to everyone. Through some novels like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one starts to see the history of human kind when he or she looks at his or her own life story in a non linear fashion. The end result in this shift of perception is how literature’s function in history changed. In texts grounded in the United States such as Kushner, the writing began to take note of this critique and the writers began to write in a more global and accepting style that focused more on individual rights instead of the rights of a society.
