second test

test yeah

test

this is a test

my take on the wake.

I wrote this piece about my first experience with Finnegans Wake. I actually was forced to finish it for a portfolio that was due for my professional writing class. At any rate, HERE IT IS!

saterd ay red

mis-en-abyme

Anyone else feel like they can't get away from this class? The themes! it's the themes man. they are following me.

follow this link right HERE

and you will find an awesome example of a frame story. It is a comic that comes from pbfcomics.com


Into the abyss! story within story. it never ends. You are seeing what you are seeing what you are seeing what you are seeing and so on forever and so on forever and so on forever and so





and by the way, good luck to everyone on the final exam. and a good summer too.

final post.

This has been a very rich class. I like getting done and feeling that if someone asked me about orality I could talk to them about it for hours. Also, I love the fact that I now have resources that I would have never had before. I can assure you that if it wasn't for this class I probably wouldn't have read The Art of Memory, Wisdom of the Mythtellers, and definitely not Orality and Literacy.

As I started The Alphabet Versus the Goddess just a couple of weeks ago, I purchased a copy on Amazon so that I could return Shaman Sexson his copy, and I'm going to finish it. This additional material makes drawing conclusions much easier, and helps papers for other classes too!

It was fun, entertaining, and great for the mind. Thank you Shaman Sexson for such a great class!

Cheers everyone!

practical memory.

Memory practicality was not my biggest concern when I heard about memorizing fifty things. I know that it was a tool to help us delve deeper into the magical qualities that memory can take on. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of use my fifty items had.

I work construction, and one of my coworkers loves the blues like I do. I don't know how many times we talked about the top fifty guitarists that I memorized, but it was a very substantial amount. For me, this exercise turned out to be extremely practical.

I hope that I continue to create memory palaces long after this class is over. Has anyone else used their memory palace to include other things? I'm glad that I was forced to do this, because I probably never would have on my own.

orality in climbing.

I've been thinking a lot lately about rock climbing. It is still too snowy and wet to go outside, but soon the weather will improve and the climbing will commence. The thought just crossed my mind that in certain circumstances climbing commands are more and less a part of the oral tradition.

Communication between climbing partners is essential especially when the only thing separating you, your partner, and a long fall to the ground is some man made equipment and the knowledge of how to use it. So, climbers engage in certain commands that allow one to know objectively what the other is doing.

example:
P1: You're on belay
P2: Climbing
P1: Climb

later...
P2: Off Belay
P1: Belay off

Ok, these commands are very simple and efficient. In each circumstance each person knows exactly what the other is doing or going to do. If any of these commands were misinterpreted, serious injury could result.

However, there are many times (especially on wandering Montana routes) where the partners cannot hear one another even when shouting. Therefore, they have to come up with a system of rope tugs that correspond to different commands. For example, two sharp tugs mean 'off belay' and three sharp tugs back means 'belay off.' Here we have a sort of gesture language.

However, if it is a gesture language, it is the least advanced kind. The human to human gesture that characterizes the oral tradition is extremely advanced, and complementary to the language itself. Gesture doesn't stand in for language, it adds to it. Therefore, just as Wise Wandering Shannon mentioned in her presentation, sign language (and rope tugs) are not a kind of kick back to the oral tradition, but rather a product of the literate tradition.

This picture is from a couple years ago when my friend Kyle and I had a particularly awful epic at Humbug Spires. That is the Wedge behind us in the photo, and at this point we were both shaking so bad from the cold that I couldn't untie my shoes or take off my harness. If our communication had been any worse during the hour before this picture was taken, things could have turned out very very bad.

climb safe.