Group Project

As was mentioned during class, my group had the chapter on tradition. We therefore decided to do an "oral" presentation that would have us connecting with the audience in a way that we imagined many Native American speakers would connect with their audiences. We used the music to create the illusion of being at an oral presentation given by a native Tribes man. My story was one that we are all familiar with, spring defeating winter. It is a cyclical story that has an old man, Winter, traveling the globe until he stops in a place to build his lodge. There he stays making the world cold until a young man, Spring, comes along and he melts away, only to appear somewhere else. It is a constant story of the cyclical.

I hope that everyone found the presentation to be enjoyable and that you all learned a little something about the process of oral story telling.

Theories on Public Speaking

While reading Ong and his thoughts on the shift from oral to print based culture and the effect that this has had on our schooling shifting from a speech based program to a written one, I became curious as to whether or not such a shift would have on the people who were learning in such a way. In other words, could the shift from speaking to writing as the main form of learning be the reason that so many people are now afraid to speak publicly? Was Plato ever as nervous as I am when I get up to make a speach in front of class?

Most of my fear comes from a sense that others will know that I have messed up. Yet they cannot. As Ong says correction is simply a part of the written culture. If one is good enough, we cannot know that they have messed up at all when they are speaking. So why then do I feel this fear? Am I so pervaded by the literate culture that I cannot break away from the mold even when I am speaking to others? I should hope not, but it is interesting to wonder if the use of writing as the primary learning tool has in any way affected how most people in today's world view public speaking with so much fear.

Mother Tongues

I finally learned the origin of the term "mother tongue" today. I'd never really thought about it before, but it makes since. If you are a son and learn one language that your mother speaks to you at home and the other is learned at school, naturally you will remember the first as your mother's language. I'd just never thought of it that way.

Plato Turns His Back on Orality?

We are all aware that the great philosopher Plato once criticized the use of writing, arguing that to use this new technology was to turn ones back on the oral tradition, to allow minds to become weaker since they were no longer required to remember so much since all of the information could be written down. The problem was that in order for Plato to argue his point to as many people as possible, it was necessary for him to write his arguements. We must wonder then if Plato's arguement actually did more harm than good. How could people take seriously an arguement ment to disuade them from writing that was itself written? Could he have perhaps shifted even more people towards the literary side of the arguement?

ideas for presentation

I was thinking that I would either try to look at the connection between our perception of the world and the oral and print cultures. There are of course other possibilities but I think I want to try and look into this more. Kane seems to think that we see the world differently because we are a print culture. I want to know what others think on the subject and then I will try to make my own assessment.

Whew!

So finally got done with my memorization exercise, and I thought that I did pretty well. For the most part I just remember being scared and then having to go up in front of the class and being soo nervous that my voice rose a few octives, but then I simply fell into my own thoughts and was able to find the memory theatre that I had created and list off all the items that I had memorized. I even managed to do the whole thing backwards on my way back from class and was surprized at how easy it was. This was pretty much my favorite assignment to date because it taught me how to really remeber things and I feel pretty good about that.

Peter's Amazing Memory

I know that every one has probably already read this passage from Yates about Peter of Revena but it was so amazing to me that I had to put it in a blog.

"As a young man he started with one hundred thousand memorised places, but he has added many more since then. On his travels, he does not cease to make new places in some monasteryor church, remembering through them histories, or fables, or Lenten sermons. His memory of the Scriptures, of canon law, and many other matters is based on this method. He can repeat from memory the whole of the canon law, text and gloss...; two hundred speeches and sayings of Cicero; three hundred sayings of the philosophers; twenty thousand legal points" (Yates 113).

His memory must have been incredible to remember so many things. If what Yates says is true, just the fact that he can repeat the entirety of the canon law from memory is amazing. Here is a link to the canon law of today so you can get an idea of how big it is. There were probably some additions made since Peter memorized the whole thing, but I am willing to bet that it was still an incredible feet of memory.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM

Dante as a Memory Device

While reading Yates I was struck by the concept of using Dante as a memory device. It's just something that you don't really think about, using the worlds that others have created in order to remember things, but now that I think about it, it seems so simple. Dante's heaven and hell have so many levels full of so many memorable things that the only trouble you would have using it as a memory device would be to decide from all the things what best serves your imediate purpose of memorization. The good thing is that there are so many pictures of it already out there, you wouldn't even really have to reconstruct the images in your mind. I actually want to see how effective that could be for our own assignment.

Epithets

Wikipedia has a great list of epithets that Homer uses in the Illiad and the Odyssey. Here is the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer

Isolation and Writing

According to Ong, writing is something that isolates us from the world around us. In order to write we must separate ourselves from the world and make our own little world. This is quite interesting actually. With oral traditions you have an audience and so you cannot disconnect from the world instead you must find a way to relate what you know or want to tell someone into something that they can understand. In order to do this, you must connect with their own esperiences, and so it is necessary to not only connect to the world but draw from it in order to show your audience what you intend to show them. In other words, you must talk of the world as it is, not as you see or imagine it.

On the other hand there is writing. Writing requires isolation. I have seen this for myself first hand. Every time that I go to write, it is necessary that I find a quiet place where I can think to myself because writing requires that we order our thoughts, that we make them clear and concise, that we think on exactly what it is we are trying to say. Writing can be fun and enjoyable but it also is something that must be done alone. We do not write for others. We write for ourselves. Even the greatest authors of all time, from Wilde to Rowling and beyond, did not write their novels and plays simply for the enjoyment of the audience. It started with an idea that the author felt strongly about and grew into a story that the rest of the world could comprehend and connect with, though that was not the stories original intent. No matter how often we may say that we only wished to share our ideas with the world, in the end we are all just looking to escape to our own imagination where every thing is as we dreamed it.

This is not such a bad thing, but I think that perhaps we should learn to once again connect with others for our stories rather than just with ourselves.

Test thoughts

I just got done with my first test in oral traditions, and I think that I did well on it. I did miss one question that I know of and probably a few more, but the one that I missed was from Ong's list of the points of orally based thought. I couldn't remember #5 because I forgot the connection between the projector and the thousand ships of the ancient Greek fleet that sailed to Troy and how that was a connection to the human life world. I never really got that connection anyway so I'm not too worried about it. I'll just have to do a little better next time. Other than that the test went great, and I am very pleased with what I did. Hopefully that doesn't come back to bight me in the ass.

At the Center

I just finished the third chapter of Ong, and I thought that I would right about my thoughts on it especially about the end of the chapter where he discusses the perceptions that change from an oral based culture to a written one. Ong believes that, since sound is something that is constantly coming at us from all directions, it gives us the perception of being the center of the world around us. Since we cannot see any differently, this must be the case, adn so we are under the impression, for thousands of years, that we are in fact the center of all that is. However, once literature is created, once we become a literate culture and learn to read and write, then the world changes from one centered around ourselves to simply a world that must be explored and whose limits must be found. Withought the technology of maps, brought on by the invention of the written word, at least in Ong's view, there is no rest of the world to discover or explore. We are the important part of the world, so let the rest of it find us.

A Sad Story

I had been asked for another class with Mr. Sexson to write about a pet dying, and since it is a kind of story, which relates to this class, and since I am not certain that I can write anything else today here is a link to the other blog in case anyone is interested.

http://zsclassicalfoundations.blogspot.com/

Memorization Assignments

I have decided to do my memory theater on the modern libraries top 50 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. here is a link to the page in case anyone is interested. i will be using the list given b the board.

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnonfiction.html

Memorizing 50 Items

I think the most daunting task that I'm going to have to try and accomplish this semester is memorizing 50 "discreet" items forward and backward. Memorizing it forward won't be that hard. I mean people have been memorizing things for classes since they were in first grade and had to learn how to spell. The problem, I think, will be trying to recite the items backwards right after that and to do so by going through the rooms of a house. I'm kind of confused as to how it's going to work. If anyone has any advice it would be appreciated.

Connections

We just finished talking about "flyting" in oral traditions class, a kind of verbal duel almost between two people that mainly involves a trickster and a "straight and narrow" guy, and I could not help but think of the connection between that and the ancient myth of the first meeting between Hermes and Appollo. Appolo confronts Hermes for stealing his cattle, adn it is in this context that we get one of the most easily recognizeable arguements in all of history. Back and forth the two go, both cunningly yet almost blatantly verbally assaulting the other. Eventually the dispute is resolved when Hermes presents Appolo with the lyre; yet, it is still perhaps one of the earliest recorded examples of a type of duel that would reach through every type of myth up to Shakespeare and on into the present day.

Blogging for Class

This is actually the first blog that I have ever done. So I'm a little nervous, but I think that the concept of using an online medium to help keep everyone connected and to help share our thoughts is an interesting one and I hope that it works.