Academic survivalist

I'm not sure what I'd do without my notebooks and paper. I suppose I'd become an archaeologist, or make pizzas.

Professor S, in a recent class, asked us to think back to a time without our technologies of writing. The time of memory and speech-- when scops ruled the scene and orators got the ladies. In order to even begin to grok those times, I needed to at least be able to remember what it was like to not write or read.

So I started my mimetic time machine.

So I laid back in my bed to remember.

And a smoking gorilla punched the side of my car while I took the first exit out of Fargo.

I had fallen asleep.

Washing my face and eating a cold slice of pizza I tried again.

I slashed through the vines that had long since enshrouded my first house. My parents were there, still together. I remembered a blue Frisbee with the image of an eagle imprinted on it. I remembered a baseball net and the cherry tree that my mom harvested once a summer to make cobbler. I remembered our unfinished basement and my bucket of legos.

Eventually, I wandered into my old room and shut the door. I picked up an old stuffed dinosaur and started shuffling through old scribblings. On my racecar desk was a large vase of mourner's flowers. Those weren't supposed to be there. I heard my mom yell at my dad and the crash of a broken plate emanated through my skull. Their dueling screams slingshot me back into the present and I found myself on my coporeal bed feeling dizzy.

OK

So I took a shower, went to Spectators for a beer, and returned to my room.

Turns out there are certain things in my head that I should avoid. Landmines. Good to know.

I turned off my lights and resolved to try again. This time, I gave myself an anchor. Placing the first CD I ever purchased into my computer, the speakers started humming the lyrics from Cream's "Disraeli Gears."

I drifted back into my past, trying to find that moment when I thought without glyphs. The stream of Clapton's crooning led me to my first guitar, my 50 watt crate amp, and my first violin lesson. Susan bobbed to the metronome as I scratched out the spine scraping screams of a nine year-old behind a fiddle. Susan bent forward toward the stand and wrote something:

"Practice this section"

not far enough.

I pushed back further.

My mom had taken me to my lessons in a green Subaru... no ... wait, that was my Dad. Shit, things were muddled. (Still are)

A slight clap from the speakers and my addled mind sent me somewhere else.

Ginger Backer's drums echoed in my head. I found myself in a foggy room with trembling mermaids and tales of brave Ulysses. In front of me flashed the face of Homer Simpson eating donuts. I looked to my right and saw various instruments of personal destruction strewn on the ground next to the futon. To my left my old roommate sat with a grin on his face and piece of General Tso's chicken stuck to his shirt. He looked at me.

"Dude, hey, can you pass the grinder? Hey, pass the grinder, I need to pack this before the next episode starts."

I passed him the spice grinder as music echoed through the smoke filled auditorium of my collegiate freshman year. Glancing down, I looked at the business 101 book, "Brand New", sitting by my feet. The lettering was clear to me, reading was tough, but I knew what I was doing.

As "we're going wrong" came on, my present self drifted into slumber.

(To be continued)

My Thoughts are Ungrammatical

Hey if you dig Marshall McLuhan I recommend The Medium is the Massage , especially if you like things that are well designed and exceptionally hard to read.

Anyway,

This passage supports a very important thing: wars come and go, but my Englishs are Forever.

"The smell on the north sides of trees is different." (Kane 37)

This is from Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane. It is a sentence that is both easily made fun of (The smell on the north side of my Uncle Eugene is different) and is reflective one of my favorite parts of the Oral Tradition. It's practical.

Think about it...
Say it...

Practical

My god, I think I just popped a Liberal Arts boner.

They have numbers (the language of God). They made satellites and got to churn the great butter whack of society that makes my bread so delicious and digital. They walk amongst gods. When Oppenheimer passes, girlies throw shirts and men shutter. I have Snoop Dogg; they have the atom bomb.

Well now things are looking up.

Because, now I know that trees smell different on their north sides.

It will be a disease of language that only death or Tony Soprano's two-by-four upside my head can cure.

The specific part that this quote originated from is a section that portrays spoken word as not only a step in linguistic history but as a medium for minute morsels of invaluable information. Within even the most ludicrous sounding epigram is a generation's worth of information. From how to properly wander the forest to the best way to smoke a pipe, the oral cultures created a wonderfully practical collection of sayings.

The examples Kane gives generally come from the indigenous North American people.

For all the white folks out there, here's a little something for ya.

Ben Franklin was a fan of these. His Poor Richards Almanac housed many sayings that ranged from the extremely practical to the painfully worthless. The useful ones still plague society today and the less useful ones allow us to laugh at that savage time from our great internet powered ivory tower. That balding curmudgeon learned us good that a penny saved was a penny earned and that an apple a day kept the doctor away. They were cute and easily memorized but the wisdom in each one could keep a person alive.

This bit from Wisdom of the Mythtellers intrigues me because it is an example of a mnemonic that seems more elegant than repeating something ad nauseum and more accessible than a memory theater for the borderline idiot like myself.

At some point I hope to condense the whole of human knowledge and experience into a group of fart jokes.

"the north side of my Uncle Eugene smells different as the southern wind blows"

(I think I stole that joke from somewhere)

baconword

(
(Anything in parenthesis should be skipped)

Turbaconwordducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. The entire thing is then wrapped in a layer of bacon and then braised with Crisco. After wrapping, the cook scrawls, with a permanent marker, various verses from "The Big Book of Absurdities" on the birdball rendering the thing entirely inedible.

What follows is a brief summary to the first chapter of Walter J. Ong's "Orality and Literacy".

(Walter Ong compensates for his small feet by writing books)

For the sake of argument, Ong first divides the linguistic world into two camps, the "Literate" and the "Oral". He then uses the writing of one cool cat to five some real meat to his argument.

Ferdinand de Saussure, fahther ov mahdurn liingguistiks, buhleevd wrihting 2-b: "a complement to Oral speech, not a transformer."

(wahz gunna right liek ths ahl teh way thru, but I got lazy.)

Henry Sweet augmented the views of Saussure by insisting that we create words through the assemblage of "functional sound units or phonemes."

(I told my nemesis that he was my phonehmee and he died.)

They believed that the sound and feeling of the oral word was the arbiter of the written, not the other way around. Their beliefs came in reaction to the long time teaching that oral traditions were only important measured by their written cousins. Walter Ong supports this philosophy with his notion of, "Primary Orality".

An Primary Orality is defined as Orality pertaining to a people who can't read nor write. Through these cultures, Ong has examples of societies that live in his prestructural ideal.

Ong points out on page 8 that, "Writing can never dispose with Orality."

(One time, Writing disposed of Orality and a refridgerator fell on its head.)

he justifies his point by illustrating that, "Writing is a secondary modeling system" which depends a primary system known as "Oral Speech".

"Oral Speech" is when people make sounds with their mouth and lungs that are somewhat coherent.

Throughout the chapter, Ong defends the notion that Language is based more so on Orality than the written word. He cites the Greek writing, "Rhetoric", which was a big discourse on the subject of talking about things. It created a "scientific art" (mind you, this is using a very loose definition of the word science) or a theory for the spoken word.

(science science lol)

It showed "how a body of explanation" could have been created that showed , "how and why oratory achieved and could be made to achieve its various specific effects (pg. 9)."

This is used as an element to give historical context and justification for the initial thesis of the piece.

Towards the end of his essay Ong presents a few disclaimers for his vocabulary. The first is that the term "primary" in "Primary Orality" exists only in contrast to "secondary orality" which is what we do on cell phones and the like--a kind of oral mechanism, somewhat abstracted. He also, on page 12, admits that literacy is powerful and that the theory as a whole is a bit of a give/take proposition.

(I can't remember if this next part is from the reading or from the lecture that the professor who evoked this blag gave. Eitherway it's a cool concept.)

This first chapter is about "reconstruction". The reconstruction of the part of the mind-brain-thing that controls our language usage in order to create a better understanding of the relationship between things coming out of your mouth and written wordstuffs.


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