--I know that this is a little late, but I do not expect to be graded on it. I suppose that this is the semi metaphysical aspect of my paper…it does not matter if it’s missing or not. The reason I choose—possibly, not immediately consciously when composing my poem—to write:
Or remember a song sung
In memory of song sung
Along the Nile
Through the coasts, and up Mark Twain’s Missipi…
Were my soul still swoons in green patterns, and falling raindrops,
were my father hitched the highway
with a promosing young thumb
headed west for the first time
eyes on that foliage littered road, misted over perfectly
Like the twang of a rabid Banjo.
Was that poetry, like Joyce’s riverun is everywhere, and a return to the cusp of all truths in a platonic plane. I wonder if this why all humanity like Melvelle says at the beginning of Moby Dick is driven to the water…is it that fury, and sublime power the ocean holds, or is it when it rains we feel the power of the ages soaking are clothes, and our souls. At the end of the dead by Joyce he say’s something along the lines of “snow fell upon all the living and the dead”. It is at this moment realization the protagonist realizes the power of all the event that proceeding a single moment of utter pain.
These are just some thought………..
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Last Blog
everyone's doing it, and its a nice gesture I suppose. well see ya.
Remember meeeee!!!!!!!
Remember meeeee!!!!!!!
Thank You
I just wanted to give my thanks to kevin, and zack of the saving bells for the information that helped me write my paper, Also i thought i would give a cut of my paper that was intreasting, and relatevly less adressed than past subjects. also if you like reggae music this will be cool.
Mythic context (as I have defined as ever changing) is extremely relevant to this notion of situational representation. My poem in its totality has closure, and an explicit ending, but this is just because much of the elements in this poem are from the literate tradition. The songs that contain the epithets themselves are as Ong quoting Horace states, “[an] epic poet [that] ‘hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things (139)’”. This is quite an adequate explanation of why when someone looks at the lyrics of songs, versus when they are performed, the performed song seems to make more sense, even though they do not contain a lengthy back story. It is also an explanation of how Oral Poems and reggae songs such as this, invoke empathy in the listener. For example, the song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers (the first song that is sung in my poem) seemingly has benign and irreverent jargon for lyrics to a reader. Yet when it is performed orally in verse, the sound jumps off the page, and invokes emotions that mean numerous amounts of things in Jamaican mythic context. The author of the book Cut ‘N’ Mix, a chronological study of the progression of culture in Caribbean music makes this point about Jamaican music:
“African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from European classical tradition. The collective voice is given precedence over the individual voice of the artist or the composer. The rhythm and the percussion play a much more central role. In the end, there is a link in these non-European music’s with public life, with speech with the textures and the grain of the living human voice (p.11)”
The author of this book also gives more information into how this music is steeped in the oral tradition. Paraphrasing him he makes the point that this term “versioning” is one of the most important terms that can be assigned to reggae music and its subsequent paradigm shifts. What it means is constantly rearranging songs in new formats to represent new contextual moments. For example: if a politician was shot, an older reggae song might be versioned to add another element to the song to keep up with the contemporaneity. In terms of relevance in a broad perspective, African Caribbean music has had some of the biggest impact in returning western culture to orality.
Mythic context (as I have defined as ever changing) is extremely relevant to this notion of situational representation. My poem in its totality has closure, and an explicit ending, but this is just because much of the elements in this poem are from the literate tradition. The songs that contain the epithets themselves are as Ong quoting Horace states, “[an] epic poet [that] ‘hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things (139)’”. This is quite an adequate explanation of why when someone looks at the lyrics of songs, versus when they are performed, the performed song seems to make more sense, even though they do not contain a lengthy back story. It is also an explanation of how Oral Poems and reggae songs such as this, invoke empathy in the listener. For example, the song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers (the first song that is sung in my poem) seemingly has benign and irreverent jargon for lyrics to a reader. Yet when it is performed orally in verse, the sound jumps off the page, and invokes emotions that mean numerous amounts of things in Jamaican mythic context. The author of the book Cut ‘N’ Mix, a chronological study of the progression of culture in Caribbean music makes this point about Jamaican music:
“African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from European classical tradition. The collective voice is given precedence over the individual voice of the artist or the composer. The rhythm and the percussion play a much more central role. In the end, there is a link in these non-European music’s with public life, with speech with the textures and the grain of the living human voice (p.11)”
The author of this book also gives more information into how this music is steeped in the oral tradition. Paraphrasing him he makes the point that this term “versioning” is one of the most important terms that can be assigned to reggae music and its subsequent paradigm shifts. What it means is constantly rearranging songs in new formats to represent new contextual moments. For example: if a politician was shot, an older reggae song might be versioned to add another element to the song to keep up with the contemporaneity. In terms of relevance in a broad perspective, African Caribbean music has had some of the biggest impact in returning western culture to orality.
My paper: semi edited.
Oral Traditions Term paper
Dr. Sexson
John Nay
What shall become of time,
lapping back and forth?
To begin, this essay is neither conclusive, nor has a real beginning in a linear academic sense; but is a true gestation of what I have learned, or perhaps remembered, in the course of a semester, and the breadth of my entire waking life. This is why epistemological understanding and education for me is about involving oneself in the embodiment of the material physically. Perhaps this is why I wrote a poem for my oral performance, and still perhaps why I use the nine muses as a mnemonic tool to remember things throughout my life.
And…In order for me to accomplish this feat—“a true gestation of what I have learned”, if at all possible,—I will explicate my oral performance in this essay; in a manner that demonstrates poetry’s power to veer through time—in and out the of human consciousness—in the oral world, the literate world, and the shaping of the prevailing mythic world that continues to construct a collective cultural consciousness. And In short, demonstrate life as an object, captured perfectly in remembrance of song sung, or rather songs to sing…in the fury of poetry through the ages.
Myth is perhaps the underlying subject matter of this essay. For it is not something that has ceased to exist—rather it is adaptive to a changing world—and the power it evokes (even in contemporary life) is not something to be taken lightly. For myth is an entity that is neither visible, nor tangible, but merely unconsciously lived in a removed sense. If one were to analyze cultural values in any part of the world, it would become apparent that they are mythic fulfillments, and not underlying truths, other than the truth that a particular culture deems them underlying truths. In a profoundly enlightening novel on this subject matter titled Ishmael, the protagonist (who is a telepathic guerilla) in a Socratic dialogue asks his pupil, “if he thought the Greeks were livid in a world constructed out of myth”. When the student answers no, the discussion continues in a new plane of understanding. Like I have said, Myth in its contemporary form is not tangible, nor was it tangible to any persons living through out it.
Sean Kane in his book, Wisdom Of The Mythtellers, starts a discussion that reflects some of these points I have made. In his study he distinguishes between three distinct eras that he will expand upon, “they are the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic—that is, Early Middle and Late Stone Age. It is from these different kinds of earth relatedness that we will take our stories (p.16)”. Perhaps, this quote does not immediately seem self evident on its relevance to the subject of poetry, or mythic fulfillment—but it is. The mythtellers of these eras (as a contemporary would perceive them) were poets in a preliterate sense, and this “earth relatedness” is what I want to address to expand my subject matter. A bond, and a relationship to the earth is something that is unquestionably true in any human endeavor—yet, isolation and deprivation from the world as it naturally exists is becoming a dominant worldview. And in the minds of scholars like Walter J Ong—the advent of writing progressed this isolation of the human life world into abstract forms such as the novel, and modern western world perspective.
Kevin Luby, in his paper The Memory, Imagination, and Soul of Mythtelling gives insight into the subject matter that has exponentially expanded my perspective on the subject. In his essay he writes:
“The myths of oral storytellers create the dialogue with the earth that taps into its available knowledge. As Sean Kane states in his book, human tradition dictates myth thus allowing them to be apart of the conversation. The earth learns of humans just as humans learn of the earth, through the mythic conversation.”
This is an incredible comment if one is really to reflect upon it. If this is in fact true, than humanity with the advent, and prevalence of agriculture, and increased individualism during the Neolithic era, consciously pitted itself against the earth by creating a sense of personal domain and property—in a world that was once abundant, and harmonious in its resources to all earth’s creatures. This is perhaps why Sean Kane explains that when studying past myth, we are jaded, for we have no real context in fully understanding ancient perspective. Sean Kane makes further assessment on this subject when addressing a myth such as Demeter and Persephone, which has been dismembered by modern interpretation. In the Wisdom Of The Mythtellers he states, “The example of the textbook Demeter demonstrates a myth held in suspended animation in two individual contexts: an ancient context involving a transfer of power from plants to kings, and a modern context involving a transfer of power from storyteller to author(P.231)”.
The context which I attempted to provide in my poem is I hope somewhat reflective of this statement, on a smaller scale of course. For I know that these former statements in my paper were largely political, and this was not really my aim for my poem. Yet it doesn’t matter, for no matter how much things are avoided, poems are mythic invocations of time present, and time past. And the purpose of verse such as this, “We are certainly not who we were/ When we left cracking snow this morning,/ And we are never who we are/when we arrived at crimson dusk;/What will we remember at the beginning, middle, and ending/if anything at all…”,is to invoke a context that is relevant to the class in its momentary reference to snow, its larger reference to memory as primary subject matter, but is also an attempt to leave this poem ambiguous enough to draw a larger body of input from any audience. Another angle I approached to express a sediment of context was to draw soley on personal expression, “Were my soul still swoons in green patterns, and falling raindrops,/were my father hitched the highway/with a promising young thumb”. In this line of verse, I have added myself as subject matter; for everything is relevant to the context of this poem that is attempting blend orality and literacy in a context that is remembrance of this class, in song sung of an ever-changing myth.
The context of the poem, and the verses I just spoke of was primarily in the literate tradition, and as I said in somewhat different words, my goal for this poem was a marriage, and an alignment between orality and literacy. So, what I choose to do to represent a sense of oral tradition in this class was to reinvent popular reggae songs with everyone’s class epithet. Walter J. Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy, has systematically demonstrated the power of epithets in oral verse. In the chapter, Some Psychodynamics Of Orality, he demonstrates how epithets are tools to increase memory in an oral culture. Literary cultures, as we know, find this redundant, and prefer the arsenal of a dictionary rather than these clichés (P.38). But in terms of creating oral epics—which I contend many songs are, especially African Diaspora music,—the epithet and situational scenarios play a particularly important role. Ong states that:
“Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the human lifeworld…[for example]…the epithet amymon applied by homer to Aegisthus: the epithet means not ‘blameless’ a tidy abstraction with which literates have translated the term, but ‘beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful (49)’”.
This situational stream of thought that is prevalent in oral cultures is not only representative of every changing context; it is also representative of the interiority of sound.
Ong makes it particularly clear that sound is itself “exists only when it is going out of existence (70)”. This is why, “In a primarily oral culture, where the world has its existence only in sound…the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word (72)”. So by creating songs that mimicked these theory’s that Ong has presented, I hopefully have created a poem that unifies the oral world, and the literate world.
Mythic context (as I have defined as ever changing) is extremely relevant to this notion of situational representation. My poem in its totality has closure, and an explicit ending, but this is just because much of the elements in this poem are from the literate tradition. The songs that contain the epithets themselves are as Ong quoting Horace states, “[an] epic poet [that] ‘hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things (139)’”. This is quite an adequate explanation of why when someone looks at the lyrics of songs, versus when they are performed, the performed song seems to make more sense, even though they do not contain a lengthy back story. It is also an explanation of how Oral Poems and reggae songs such as this, invoke empathy in the listener. For example, the song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers (the first song that is sung in my poem) seemingly has benign and irreverent jargon for lyrics to a reader. Yet when it is performed orally in verse, the sound jumps off the page, and invokes emotions that mean numerous amounts of things in Jamaican mythic context. The author of the book Cut ‘N’ Mix, a chronological study of the progression of culture in Caribbean music makes this point about Jamaican music:
“African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from European classical tradition. The collective voice is given precedence over the individual voice of the artist or the composer. The rhythm and the percussion play a much more central role. In the end, there is a link in these non-European music’s with public life, with speech with the textures and the grain of the living human voice (p.11)”
The author of this book also gives more information into how this music is steeped in the oral tradition. Paraphrasing him he makes the point that this term “versioning” is one of the most important terms that can be assigned to reggae music and its subsequent paradigm shifts. What it means is constantly rearranging songs in new formats to represent new contextual moments. For example: if a politician was shot, an older reggae song might be versioned to add another element to the song to keep up with the contemporaneity. In terms of relevance in a broad perspective, African Caribbean music has had some of the biggest impact in returning western culture to orality.
If I had had more time I would have made a point in memorizing everyone’s names in a memory theater, and invoking these epic songs in, as Walter J Ong has called it, “the singer’s memories of songs sung (143)”. The purpose of this feat would have been to see if there were any incongruities between what I wrote, and what I remembered, and to see how adaptive song is to present conditions in different moments.
Bringing this paper to my final point, I want to address tonality, and how tone is a method of situating poetry, and even prose in a marriage between orality and literacy. Zach Morris has written a paper that substantially deals with this topic. In his explanation of how tone can become settled in the abstracted universe of the print culture he states, “By imagining a particular mood, and by writing in such a way as to compliment that mood, the author can imagine the tone in which the reader would probably use to read the letter”. And this is, I suppose, is what I was attempting to do when I made the change in my poem from sung verse to that that which was tonally intact in of itself. In lines such as this, “Click: He switched the station after he had enough—His withered fingers told stories that were content with his age, And his eyes were quite with the years…”, I am playing the role of a narrator that is not physically engaging (such as in the oral world of verse) but rounded as Ong states is essential to the print tradition (148). The “click” is the onomatopoeic signifier that bridges orality and literacy in this poem. With subtle changes in my invocation, and conscientious moments of tone difference, I hopefully made this clear in my mode of conveying my poetics.
I developed this idea of a radio as a means of oral expression, and oral diversion from the novel Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey, for it is a work of fiction that is extremely tonally aware. Music, dialect, and a conflict between high literacy and low literacy are extremely prevalent themes in this book, and the conflict that arises in the typical Freytag’s pyramid is not only a dramatic linear plot of literary events, but a clash of the oral tradition and literary tradition. The novel which is actually named after a country-western-song, constantly breaks into verse from truck radio’s, portable radios, and even begins chapters with popular folksy verse. When I read it the first time, I constantly caught myself singing along in a mystic forgotten recollection of the power of poetry. This novel, which was a huge inspiration to me for creating this poem, and understanding literature in general as I do, is a perfect example (tonally speaking) that it is possible to have this marriage between orality and literacy in written form. It is a novel that hopefully with a more in depth understanding, will receive the esteem it deserves.
To conclude in a matter of a lack of a real conclusion, I would like to comment on James Joyce’s masterpiece, Finnegans Wake as the beginning, middle, and ending of everything that I have to say in this essay. In short, it is the return mythically, musically, and tonally of orality through the media of literacy. It is poetry in its purist, and most abstracted form, it is everything and nothing at the same time. It is in a sense more readable, or audible than Ulysses, for there is something in it for everyone to enjoy—it will always have new context.
What I initially stated in this paper, was that song is remembrance of song sung, and that poetry has the power to transcend all human emotion in any era, and practically any mode of expression, and that poetry is not only the breadth and voice of myth, but the mender and creator of it. Is it not possible then, as Dr Sexon has stated in his article, that what Joyce has created is, “not vague recollection but the fashion of a body, wholly body, replete with regenerative functions…the finding of all the missing letters (litter) and the reshaping them into a text with texture, taste and tactility (3).” Perhaps this absurd, and more complicated than anything needs to be, perhaps I have no Idea of what I am talking about…perhaps I will walk out of this room without the slightest idea of what this essay was really about.
Oral Traditions Term paper
Dr. Sexson
John Nay
What shall become of time,
lapping back and forth?
To begin, this essay is neither conclusive, nor has a real beginning in a linear academic sense; but is a true gestation of what I have learned, or perhaps remembered, in the course of a semester, and the breadth of my entire waking life. This is why epistemological understanding and education for me is about involving oneself in the embodiment of the material physically. Perhaps this is why I wrote a poem for my oral performance, and still perhaps why I use the nine muses as a mnemonic tool to remember things throughout my life.
And…In order for me to accomplish this feat—“a true gestation of what I have learned”, if at all possible,—I will explicate my oral performance in this essay; in a manner that demonstrates poetry’s power to veer through time—in and out the of human consciousness—in the oral world, the literate world, and the shaping of the prevailing mythic world that continues to construct a collective cultural consciousness. And In short, demonstrate life as an object, captured perfectly in remembrance of song sung, or rather songs to sing…in the fury of poetry through the ages.
Myth is perhaps the underlying subject matter of this essay. For it is not something that has ceased to exist—rather it is adaptive to a changing world—and the power it evokes (even in contemporary life) is not something to be taken lightly. For myth is an entity that is neither visible, nor tangible, but merely unconsciously lived in a removed sense. If one were to analyze cultural values in any part of the world, it would become apparent that they are mythic fulfillments, and not underlying truths, other than the truth that a particular culture deems them underlying truths. In a profoundly enlightening novel on this subject matter titled Ishmael, the protagonist (who is a telepathic guerilla) in a Socratic dialogue asks his pupil, “if he thought the Greeks were livid in a world constructed out of myth”. When the student answers no, the discussion continues in a new plane of understanding. Like I have said, Myth in its contemporary form is not tangible, nor was it tangible to any persons living through out it.
Sean Kane in his book, Wisdom Of The Mythtellers, starts a discussion that reflects some of these points I have made. In his study he distinguishes between three distinct eras that he will expand upon, “they are the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic—that is, Early Middle and Late Stone Age. It is from these different kinds of earth relatedness that we will take our stories (p.16)”. Perhaps, this quote does not immediately seem self evident on its relevance to the subject of poetry, or mythic fulfillment—but it is. The mythtellers of these eras (as a contemporary would perceive them) were poets in a preliterate sense, and this “earth relatedness” is what I want to address to expand my subject matter. A bond, and a relationship to the earth is something that is unquestionably true in any human endeavor—yet, isolation and deprivation from the world as it naturally exists is becoming a dominant worldview. And in the minds of scholars like Walter J Ong—the advent of writing progressed this isolation of the human life world into abstract forms such as the novel, and modern western world perspective.
Kevin Luby, in his paper The Memory, Imagination, and Soul of Mythtelling gives insight into the subject matter that has exponentially expanded my perspective on the subject. In his essay he writes:
“The myths of oral storytellers create the dialogue with the earth that taps into its available knowledge. As Sean Kane states in his book, human tradition dictates myth thus allowing them to be apart of the conversation. The earth learns of humans just as humans learn of the earth, through the mythic conversation.”
This is an incredible comment if one is really to reflect upon it. If this is in fact true, than humanity with the advent, and prevalence of agriculture, and increased individualism during the Neolithic era, consciously pitted itself against the earth by creating a sense of personal domain and property—in a world that was once abundant, and harmonious in its resources to all earth’s creatures. This is perhaps why Sean Kane explains that when studying past myth, we are jaded, for we have no real context in fully understanding ancient perspective. Sean Kane makes further assessment on this subject when addressing a myth such as Demeter and Persephone, which has been dismembered by modern interpretation. In the Wisdom Of The Mythtellers he states, “The example of the textbook Demeter demonstrates a myth held in suspended animation in two individual contexts: an ancient context involving a transfer of power from plants to kings, and a modern context involving a transfer of power from storyteller to author(P.231)”.
The context which I attempted to provide in my poem is I hope somewhat reflective of this statement, on a smaller scale of course. For I know that these former statements in my paper were largely political, and this was not really my aim for my poem. Yet it doesn’t matter, for no matter how much things are avoided, poems are mythic invocations of time present, and time past. And the purpose of verse such as this, “We are certainly not who we were/ When we left cracking snow this morning,/ And we are never who we are/when we arrived at crimson dusk;/What will we remember at the beginning, middle, and ending/if anything at all…”,is to invoke a context that is relevant to the class in its momentary reference to snow, its larger reference to memory as primary subject matter, but is also an attempt to leave this poem ambiguous enough to draw a larger body of input from any audience. Another angle I approached to express a sediment of context was to draw soley on personal expression, “Were my soul still swoons in green patterns, and falling raindrops,/were my father hitched the highway/with a promising young thumb”. In this line of verse, I have added myself as subject matter; for everything is relevant to the context of this poem that is attempting blend orality and literacy in a context that is remembrance of this class, in song sung of an ever-changing myth.
The context of the poem, and the verses I just spoke of was primarily in the literate tradition, and as I said in somewhat different words, my goal for this poem was a marriage, and an alignment between orality and literacy. So, what I choose to do to represent a sense of oral tradition in this class was to reinvent popular reggae songs with everyone’s class epithet. Walter J. Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy, has systematically demonstrated the power of epithets in oral verse. In the chapter, Some Psychodynamics Of Orality, he demonstrates how epithets are tools to increase memory in an oral culture. Literary cultures, as we know, find this redundant, and prefer the arsenal of a dictionary rather than these clichés (P.38). But in terms of creating oral epics—which I contend many songs are, especially African Diaspora music,—the epithet and situational scenarios play a particularly important role. Ong states that:
“Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the human lifeworld…[for example]…the epithet amymon applied by homer to Aegisthus: the epithet means not ‘blameless’ a tidy abstraction with which literates have translated the term, but ‘beautiful-in-the-way-a-warrior-ready-to-fight-is-beautiful (49)’”.
This situational stream of thought that is prevalent in oral cultures is not only representative of every changing context; it is also representative of the interiority of sound.
Ong makes it particularly clear that sound is itself “exists only when it is going out of existence (70)”. This is why, “In a primarily oral culture, where the world has its existence only in sound…the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word (72)”. So by creating songs that mimicked these theory’s that Ong has presented, I hopefully have created a poem that unifies the oral world, and the literate world.
Mythic context (as I have defined as ever changing) is extremely relevant to this notion of situational representation. My poem in its totality has closure, and an explicit ending, but this is just because much of the elements in this poem are from the literate tradition. The songs that contain the epithets themselves are as Ong quoting Horace states, “[an] epic poet [that] ‘hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things (139)’”. This is quite an adequate explanation of why when someone looks at the lyrics of songs, versus when they are performed, the performed song seems to make more sense, even though they do not contain a lengthy back story. It is also an explanation of how Oral Poems and reggae songs such as this, invoke empathy in the listener. For example, the song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers (the first song that is sung in my poem) seemingly has benign and irreverent jargon for lyrics to a reader. Yet when it is performed orally in verse, the sound jumps off the page, and invokes emotions that mean numerous amounts of things in Jamaican mythic context. The author of the book Cut ‘N’ Mix, a chronological study of the progression of culture in Caribbean music makes this point about Jamaican music:
“African, Afro-American and Caribbean music is based on quite different principles from European classical tradition. The collective voice is given precedence over the individual voice of the artist or the composer. The rhythm and the percussion play a much more central role. In the end, there is a link in these non-European music’s with public life, with speech with the textures and the grain of the living human voice (p.11)”
The author of this book also gives more information into how this music is steeped in the oral tradition. Paraphrasing him he makes the point that this term “versioning” is one of the most important terms that can be assigned to reggae music and its subsequent paradigm shifts. What it means is constantly rearranging songs in new formats to represent new contextual moments. For example: if a politician was shot, an older reggae song might be versioned to add another element to the song to keep up with the contemporaneity. In terms of relevance in a broad perspective, African Caribbean music has had some of the biggest impact in returning western culture to orality.
If I had had more time I would have made a point in memorizing everyone’s names in a memory theater, and invoking these epic songs in, as Walter J Ong has called it, “the singer’s memories of songs sung (143)”. The purpose of this feat would have been to see if there were any incongruities between what I wrote, and what I remembered, and to see how adaptive song is to present conditions in different moments.
Bringing this paper to my final point, I want to address tonality, and how tone is a method of situating poetry, and even prose in a marriage between orality and literacy. Zach Morris has written a paper that substantially deals with this topic. In his explanation of how tone can become settled in the abstracted universe of the print culture he states, “By imagining a particular mood, and by writing in such a way as to compliment that mood, the author can imagine the tone in which the reader would probably use to read the letter”. And this is, I suppose, is what I was attempting to do when I made the change in my poem from sung verse to that that which was tonally intact in of itself. In lines such as this, “Click: He switched the station after he had enough—His withered fingers told stories that were content with his age, And his eyes were quite with the years…”, I am playing the role of a narrator that is not physically engaging (such as in the oral world of verse) but rounded as Ong states is essential to the print tradition (148). The “click” is the onomatopoeic signifier that bridges orality and literacy in this poem. With subtle changes in my invocation, and conscientious moments of tone difference, I hopefully made this clear in my mode of conveying my poetics.
I developed this idea of a radio as a means of oral expression, and oral diversion from the novel Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey, for it is a work of fiction that is extremely tonally aware. Music, dialect, and a conflict between high literacy and low literacy are extremely prevalent themes in this book, and the conflict that arises in the typical Freytag’s pyramid is not only a dramatic linear plot of literary events, but a clash of the oral tradition and literary tradition. The novel which is actually named after a country-western-song, constantly breaks into verse from truck radio’s, portable radios, and even begins chapters with popular folksy verse. When I read it the first time, I constantly caught myself singing along in a mystic forgotten recollection of the power of poetry. This novel, which was a huge inspiration to me for creating this poem, and understanding literature in general as I do, is a perfect example (tonally speaking) that it is possible to have this marriage between orality and literacy in written form. It is a novel that hopefully with a more in depth understanding, will receive the esteem it deserves.
To conclude in a matter of a lack of a real conclusion, I would like to comment on James Joyce’s masterpiece, Finnegans Wake as the beginning, middle, and ending of everything that I have to say in this essay. In short, it is the return mythically, musically, and tonally of orality through the media of literacy. It is poetry in its purist, and most abstracted form, it is everything and nothing at the same time. It is in a sense more readable, or audible than Ulysses, for there is something in it for everyone to enjoy—it will always have new context.
What I initially stated in this paper, was that song is remembrance of song sung, and that poetry has the power to transcend all human emotion in any era, and practically any mode of expression, and that poetry is not only the breadth and voice of myth, but the mender and creator of it. Is it not possible then, as Dr Sexon has stated in his article, that what Joyce has created is, “not vague recollection but the fashion of a body, wholly body, replete with regenerative functions…the finding of all the missing letters (litter) and the reshaping them into a text with texture, taste and tactility (3).” Perhaps this absurd, and more complicated than anything needs to be, perhaps I have no Idea of what I am talking about…perhaps I will walk out of this room without the slightest idea of what this essay was really about.
Shandian piece
I saw brandon put his shandy piece on line, i shall do the same.
the last part is the best, so feel free to skip ahead
A Semester’s worth of Digression,
Opinions of John Nay,
Undergraduate
Introduction
To interject in a non subordinate way; I wish to give equal weight to all my opinions and observations thus far—which is not very far for you dear reader—but certainly far enough for me. This is an essay about consequence, and the consequence of opinion, or rather, lack thereof—because realistically, who takes English major’s that seriously. To give some location, and direction of time and context of where this essay actually starts, I will state that this paper begins with me—somewhere typing it (feel free to guess). If you would like to experience the actual feeling of me typing, here—I am thumbing and fingering words on a blank page, in a soft, white, blank absence of any real empirical opinion, in a blank room that exemplifies a mood of definable blankness that is certain and bleak in its sustaining blankness—because in my opinion—visually taxing the reader with blankness is quite appropriate. In an attempt to further one’s education in the field of dull colors, I suggest reading Melville’s story about a whale and its whiteness—I guarantee the anesthetic qualities of my first few sentence’s, and some of his thoughts on the color white are equally effective.
For even though I give blankness its’ Aesthetic merit—in the quality of sleep one might get (especially when composing and constructing essays) I like to let the reader know a certain innovator in blankness, and sleep improvement will have his opinion—a paraphrased literary critic---------but then, on waking from the best slumber available in the undergraduate market (a night out with Levi-Straus)—I think to myself; I would rather drunkenly gaze at the light break through the blinds in my apartment, illuminating the iridescent fibers as they find a momentary glow, then read another word of Aristotle’s Poetics in (as I have already said, and the reader knows) a white and blank room.
Sitting on my couch, reflecting on fibers and their divine quality, in a day’s worth of delightful laziness and perfected procrastination; I realize blankness has a certain color other than that shade of white, I might have above mentioned. For to be a learned participant in the English Literature department, at Montana State University, one has to amass a certain amount of literary wit—weather it pertains to the text or not. I suggest reading Rawson—he exemplifies a lovely color of blankness, and its importance in a field that is beyond the genius of the text. For example: he has taken careful measure to document one of the only two times Jonathan Swift laughed in his lifetime; and he has also demonstrated the appropriate use of the words “Proloxities” and “Solecism”, in the English Language. Don’t worry reader, the essayist is here to clarify what he meant: the use of Fielding’s long winded sentences were seen by upper class reader’s as ungrammatical—but in the context of the time period, were appealing for that reason. I think rule 14 in, “An Approach To Style” by Stunk and White, would be quite an appropriate solution to de-intellectualize Rawson. But who cares, the real objective of his writing is to test how long a hundred dollar bill can be tucked in the leather binding of a book without being found, in the course of 20 years. Hmmmmm—these are all interesting topics—but this is not an introduction to an essay. No, an introduction to an essay is supposed to be the cusp of a thesis statement. Which I have not done; perhaps my thesis statement will go something like this:
Thesis Statement:
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Body of the Essay:
Argument 1:
—All right, so I do not have a thesis statement yet; I decided in this moment of intellectual catharsis—which is happening precisely at 2:48 pm on a Sunday—to let the reader take a glimpse of my life.— Today is April 2, 2009. A day that I care about as much as any other day—which means I must care quite a bit. I jogged this morning—for the first time in months—and saw the world for all that it was, hypothesized its evils, felt moist spring wind on my cheeks, smelt dog shit in the dog park, and watched snow scorch into steam off the black tarmac, and finally fell into a fit of laughter as I neared the end of my run on Garfield and 5th,to the image of a sorority girl who slipped on the black ice, and smeared dirt on her jeans…I have to interject here…if this were in a serious piece of prose I was writing, I would have to delete that to the moment stream of consciousness farce I just wrote—with all the ferocity the backspace button has to offer.
Argument 2:
My word count is at 790, which means I am half way through, without a serious bit of reflection, interjection, and a profound epiphany other than that—the quality of the coffee in the library is awful. Which means in a Platonic sense, its artifice is a poor one when trying to achieve the ideal plane of coffee—that being a cup of Starbucks. Still, in Plato’s eye’s(yuppie eyes), at least library coffee has its purpose; which brings this essay to perhaps its dominant argument of ambiguities, definition of words, word play, word fun, and the opinions of Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson, like many other Samuel’s I have met, is melancholy, obsessed with opinions, and Tibetan prayer flags. Samuel Johnson— my dear reader who is familiar and agreeable with all the opinions of Plato—had the audacity to embellish the nature of being a poet in an unsuccessful work (like his dictionary) called The History of Rasselas, Prince Of Abissina. To quote him is to degrade him—so I will quote him, “for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he, who knows most, will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction (21) ”. What awful tripe. And to think, the literary critic has the tedious obligation to decipher this whole mess, and assert their genius on the work, in order to understand the components that make a work even readable.
Argument 3:
I am the writer…and am not actually of the opinion of Plato. This is just a note: an opportunity for myself to not literally become the paper, or its opinions.
Argument 4:
I have come to the conclusion, that argument four will be written at 6:30 pm, which it is, as I speak, being written now. Argument 4 will be on the topic of conclusions, if I could formulate a thesis, I might have the ability to discuss how—Jonathan Lamb proposes an interesting idea on Sterne’s readability to his contemporaries—and how it might relate to my opinions, mixed with Deconstruction opinions, Richetti’s opinions, and finally attempt to answer the overwhelming question that has been eluding this whole essay. What makes Tristram Shandy a novel, and what 18th century elements does it have, that exists in all of our texts we have read thus far. If I could answer this, perhaps I could rant about the contribution of Tristram Shandy to the genre, societal judgment, epistemological inference, and the altering affects that might have arisen if this novel had not been written. It’s sad and disheartening, but I am not very original, and the feeling of being drawn out, like a haze into the atmosphere of forgotten obscurity always lingers.
Argument 5:
But it isn’t worth it after all to live, love and lust after morning dew, and then watch dawn’s haze and recollect moments past. To remember the dirt brown cannel’s of Holland, the purple-green fragrant blossoms spouting out of the concrete walls, and my yellow lab that ran along the shore of the beach with me—in the ocean’s gray haze, and cold breeze. And later, when I was teenager, in the old green wet hills near the lakes—New Hampshire, New England. The infinite long, and windy back roads through the fall’s yellow and red dropping leaves, the white churches, and the perfume from those first lips—the cascade of her blue eyes and that white dress, spring 2005. And the first time I really loved Montana’s mountains—when we were all still best friends playing catch outside—watching crimson-red fleeting-orange swirls—the last of days the sunlight, fluster in the clouds on the snowcapped mountains above the evergreen and aspen trees. For, in that final moment between light and dark, a coyote howled at 9 pm on the pastor, behind RJ’s fence, and that—that was my last best memory.
Conclusion:
“And what was all that about”, my proof reader said on finishing the essay. “A Cock and Bull essay” I said—“Cock and Bull Essay, and the best I have ever wrote”.
the last part is the best, so feel free to skip ahead
A Semester’s worth of Digression,
Opinions of John Nay,
Undergraduate
Introduction
To interject in a non subordinate way; I wish to give equal weight to all my opinions and observations thus far—which is not very far for you dear reader—but certainly far enough for me. This is an essay about consequence, and the consequence of opinion, or rather, lack thereof—because realistically, who takes English major’s that seriously. To give some location, and direction of time and context of where this essay actually starts, I will state that this paper begins with me—somewhere typing it (feel free to guess). If you would like to experience the actual feeling of me typing, here—I am thumbing and fingering words on a blank page, in a soft, white, blank absence of any real empirical opinion, in a blank room that exemplifies a mood of definable blankness that is certain and bleak in its sustaining blankness—because in my opinion—visually taxing the reader with blankness is quite appropriate. In an attempt to further one’s education in the field of dull colors, I suggest reading Melville’s story about a whale and its whiteness—I guarantee the anesthetic qualities of my first few sentence’s, and some of his thoughts on the color white are equally effective.
For even though I give blankness its’ Aesthetic merit—in the quality of sleep one might get (especially when composing and constructing essays) I like to let the reader know a certain innovator in blankness, and sleep improvement will have his opinion—a paraphrased literary critic---------but then, on waking from the best slumber available in the undergraduate market (a night out with Levi-Straus)—I think to myself; I would rather drunkenly gaze at the light break through the blinds in my apartment, illuminating the iridescent fibers as they find a momentary glow, then read another word of Aristotle’s Poetics in (as I have already said, and the reader knows) a white and blank room.
Sitting on my couch, reflecting on fibers and their divine quality, in a day’s worth of delightful laziness and perfected procrastination; I realize blankness has a certain color other than that shade of white, I might have above mentioned. For to be a learned participant in the English Literature department, at Montana State University, one has to amass a certain amount of literary wit—weather it pertains to the text or not. I suggest reading Rawson—he exemplifies a lovely color of blankness, and its importance in a field that is beyond the genius of the text. For example: he has taken careful measure to document one of the only two times Jonathan Swift laughed in his lifetime; and he has also demonstrated the appropriate use of the words “Proloxities” and “Solecism”, in the English Language. Don’t worry reader, the essayist is here to clarify what he meant: the use of Fielding’s long winded sentences were seen by upper class reader’s as ungrammatical—but in the context of the time period, were appealing for that reason. I think rule 14 in, “An Approach To Style” by Stunk and White, would be quite an appropriate solution to de-intellectualize Rawson. But who cares, the real objective of his writing is to test how long a hundred dollar bill can be tucked in the leather binding of a book without being found, in the course of 20 years. Hmmmmm—these are all interesting topics—but this is not an introduction to an essay. No, an introduction to an essay is supposed to be the cusp of a thesis statement. Which I have not done; perhaps my thesis statement will go something like this:
Thesis Statement:
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Body of the Essay:
Argument 1:
—All right, so I do not have a thesis statement yet; I decided in this moment of intellectual catharsis—which is happening precisely at 2:48 pm on a Sunday—to let the reader take a glimpse of my life.— Today is April 2, 2009. A day that I care about as much as any other day—which means I must care quite a bit. I jogged this morning—for the first time in months—and saw the world for all that it was, hypothesized its evils, felt moist spring wind on my cheeks, smelt dog shit in the dog park, and watched snow scorch into steam off the black tarmac, and finally fell into a fit of laughter as I neared the end of my run on Garfield and 5th,to the image of a sorority girl who slipped on the black ice, and smeared dirt on her jeans…I have to interject here…if this were in a serious piece of prose I was writing, I would have to delete that to the moment stream of consciousness farce I just wrote—with all the ferocity the backspace button has to offer.
Argument 2:
My word count is at 790, which means I am half way through, without a serious bit of reflection, interjection, and a profound epiphany other than that—the quality of the coffee in the library is awful. Which means in a Platonic sense, its artifice is a poor one when trying to achieve the ideal plane of coffee—that being a cup of Starbucks. Still, in Plato’s eye’s(yuppie eyes), at least library coffee has its purpose; which brings this essay to perhaps its dominant argument of ambiguities, definition of words, word play, word fun, and the opinions of Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson, like many other Samuel’s I have met, is melancholy, obsessed with opinions, and Tibetan prayer flags. Samuel Johnson— my dear reader who is familiar and agreeable with all the opinions of Plato—had the audacity to embellish the nature of being a poet in an unsuccessful work (like his dictionary) called The History of Rasselas, Prince Of Abissina. To quote him is to degrade him—so I will quote him, “for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he, who knows most, will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction (21) ”. What awful tripe. And to think, the literary critic has the tedious obligation to decipher this whole mess, and assert their genius on the work, in order to understand the components that make a work even readable.
Argument 3:
I am the writer…and am not actually of the opinion of Plato. This is just a note: an opportunity for myself to not literally become the paper, or its opinions.
Argument 4:
I have come to the conclusion, that argument four will be written at 6:30 pm, which it is, as I speak, being written now. Argument 4 will be on the topic of conclusions, if I could formulate a thesis, I might have the ability to discuss how—Jonathan Lamb proposes an interesting idea on Sterne’s readability to his contemporaries—and how it might relate to my opinions, mixed with Deconstruction opinions, Richetti’s opinions, and finally attempt to answer the overwhelming question that has been eluding this whole essay. What makes Tristram Shandy a novel, and what 18th century elements does it have, that exists in all of our texts we have read thus far. If I could answer this, perhaps I could rant about the contribution of Tristram Shandy to the genre, societal judgment, epistemological inference, and the altering affects that might have arisen if this novel had not been written. It’s sad and disheartening, but I am not very original, and the feeling of being drawn out, like a haze into the atmosphere of forgotten obscurity always lingers.
Argument 5:
But it isn’t worth it after all to live, love and lust after morning dew, and then watch dawn’s haze and recollect moments past. To remember the dirt brown cannel’s of Holland, the purple-green fragrant blossoms spouting out of the concrete walls, and my yellow lab that ran along the shore of the beach with me—in the ocean’s gray haze, and cold breeze. And later, when I was teenager, in the old green wet hills near the lakes—New Hampshire, New England. The infinite long, and windy back roads through the fall’s yellow and red dropping leaves, the white churches, and the perfume from those first lips—the cascade of her blue eyes and that white dress, spring 2005. And the first time I really loved Montana’s mountains—when we were all still best friends playing catch outside—watching crimson-red fleeting-orange swirls—the last of days the sunlight, fluster in the clouds on the snowcapped mountains above the evergreen and aspen trees. For, in that final moment between light and dark, a coyote howled at 9 pm on the pastor, behind RJ’s fence, and that—that was my last best memory.
Conclusion:
“And what was all that about”, my proof reader said on finishing the essay. “A Cock and Bull essay” I said—“Cock and Bull Essay, and the best I have ever wrote”.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
This is what I wrote, or rather, orally composed for class. My essay, when it is completed, will explain in full detail the relevance of this piece. Oh yeah, I am adding the songs that I drew inspiration from for this in the spots were I sung. The songs are italicized, and there will be youtube links.
Poem for class:
Erato:
What shall become of time lapping back forth—
counting damp minutes?
We are certainly not who we were
When we left cracking snow this morning,
And we are never who we are
when we arrived at crimson dusk;
What will we remember at the beggening, middle, and ending
if anything at all…
Will we encase an everlasting picture of this class
in some mystic never complete theater…
Or remember a song sung
In memory of song sung
Along the Nile
Through the coasts, and up Mark Twain’s Missipi…
Were my soul still swoons in green patterns, and falling raindrops,
were my father hitched the highway
with a promosing young thumb
headed west for the first time
eyes on that foliage littered road, misted over perfectly
Like the twang of a rabid Banjo.
Will I, or you, or anyone, arrive, or depart,
Ever in this world?
And Perhaps, there is a place,
Where time is cornerd
And forever still.
A place were physics never applied.
That place where I used to sit with my grandfather
And that damned, rusted radio, blurting folky verse,
In his fairytale parlour of war medals, and cracked picture frames…
With a quick smile in my direction, and a turn of a silver knob—we listned…
Verse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfXZ9J0VrJc
And one of these days—
Check Mark parker
Deep Sea Fishing Jeff, and Big Rich Are gonna come for you…
Ooooh ooooh
Walk a new road Crazy Coffe Carly…
Ooohh oooh
Your teaspoons, and caffeine pedelling created
Carasmatic Kari
Oooh oooh
And What will you remember
Kyle of the skinny jeans…
Ooooh oooh
Will it be these tight, uncomfortable years
Or Will it be Chris of the laughing Rats.
Oooh oooh
Red Damiselle Daniell
Will you remember…
Snake Haired Kayla Sneaking through the tall grass,
Oooh oooh
Or James the Rat contended with a bit of cheese.
Oooo ooh h oo
Click:
With a smile, and that familiar old purple veined hand, he would turn the knob again…
{The harder they come:}
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGE4dnrPPZQ&feature=relatedKelsey of the Free rent,
Enjoying the view of the sky
Yes Keen kening Ben will be right with her before he( flies)
For as sure as time contends
Sweet smiling Melissa
Will have her ends
And the harder Sutter sacker of cities
Sacks cities
the softer they glow
One and
Three…
Two Tounge Charlie
Well Willy Quiet Willy trying keep
Robert of the Worded limbs down
Yes Tautological Tai is redundant like a clown
And Lisa of the little legs thinks she has the battle one
I say forgive them Chris the Scribe they know not what they have done
Click:
He switched the station after he had enough—
His withered fingers told stories that were content with his age,
And his eyes were quite with the years…
Toots:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S78VlyZYpfcAlmost Nirvana, Hyalite Canyon
Za Zen Zack
Steven of the rivers.
All my classmates there
Bright Eyes Kevin
Fishing in the river
With Wise Wandering Shannon
Chorus:
Summer Breeze Kaylaaaaaa
Take us home
To that place where we belong
Hyalite Canyon My olll mamma
Take us home
Summer Breeze Kayla
We heard
Parker of the outback
in the morning cryin
Jared
of the open planes we need to leave these places
Yes we did
Kate of the beautiful eyes
Tell Helana of the 10,000 lakes
Of this wonderful ridge
and steven’s flowing river…
Click: and then, there was a fading crackling sound that subdued into an absence. I am sorry. I really do forget his hands, and all their kindness. But there is always a rebirth, and an arrival back along the shore…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFGgbT_VasI
Old Zack of the saving Bells
yes the rob we
Minutes after they took Joan Gossimer von goss
From the bottomless pit
And don’t worry Emo Erin,
Lisa the Luddite or Bearded Brandon…
All we have are these songs of freedom
Wont you help me sing…
.
Arriving we will never ask
where the begening will be—
nor the ending?
Certainly not in this class today, or the infinity of tomorrow,
But in a dream differend crunched in a butter
Crackling under this flame of phrase.
And Are you there
…. I am john of the stripid hat…
And song is
When we are together
In fleeting moments wiped clean
From unimagined books
In the last harmony of redemption
under the flouresent glow
of room 125.
Will you be there
Even after the last kick of dust on a brown, hot coral—
Were Jana the Tamar of horses will set us free
While Shaman Sexson sings
Mememorme…o please remember me.
Monday, April 20, 2009
I was just thinking about oral poems surviving in the contemporary world. This is a link to a Saul Williams Sha Clack Clack.
For this blog I will post the lyrics to the poem, and I will also post a link to Youtube with his live performance of the poem.
Video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojDKI8JxfLs
If I could find the spot where truth echoes
I would stand there and whisper memories of my children's future
I would let their future dwell in my past
so that I might live a brighter now
Now is the essence of my domain and it contains
all that was and will be
And I am as I was and will be because I am and always will be
that nigga
I am that nigga
I am that nigga
I am that timeless nigga that swings on pendelums like vines
through mines of boobytrapped minds that are enslaved by time
I am the life that supersedes lifetimes, I am
It was me with serpentine hair and a timeless stare
that with immortal glare turned mortal fear into stone time capsules
They still exist as the walking dead, as I do
The original sulphurhead, symbol of life and matriarchy
severed head Medusa, I am
I am that nigga
I am that nigga!
I am that nigga!!
I am a negro! Yes negro, negro from _necro_ meaning death
I overcame it so they named me after it
And I be spitting at death from behind
and putting "Kick Me" signs on it's back
because I am not the son of Sha-Clack-Clack
I am before that, I am before
I am before before
Before death is eternity, after death is eternity
There is no death there's only eternity
And I be riding on the wings of eternity
like HYAH! HYAH! HYAH! Sha-Clack-Clack
but my flight doesn't go undisturbed
Because time makes dreams defer
And all of my time fears are turning my days into daymares
And I live daymares reliving nightmares
of what taunted my past
Sha-Clack-Clack, time is beatin my ass
And I be havin dreams of chocolate covered watermelons
Filled with fried chickens like pinatas
With little pickaninny sons and daughters
standing up under them with big sticks and aluminum foil
Hittin em, tryin to catch pieces of fallin fried chicken wings
And Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are standing in the corners
with rifles pointed at the heads of the little children
"Don't shoot the children," I shout, "don't shoot the children!"
but they say it's too late
They've already been infected by time
But that shit is before my time
I need more time
I need more time
But it's too late
They start shooting at children and killing them!
One by one, two by two, three by three, four by four
Five by five, six by six, but
my spirit is growing seven by seven
Faster than the speed of light
Cause light only penetrates the darkness that's already there
and I'm already there
I'm here at the end of the road
which is the beginning of the road beyond time, but
where my niggaz at? (Oh shit!)
Oh shit, don't tell me my niggaz got lost in time
My niggaz are dying before their time
My niggaz are serving unjust time
My niggaz are dying because of.. time
Just a brief synopsis:
Saul Williams is a slam poet, which means that his performances center around the emotion of the moment. For further enquiry into this style of performance, I suggest checking out some of his other performances of this poem and others. What I noticed: was that there was changes in his lyrics, flow, and interaction with his audience. Also check out the content of his lyrics—perhaps I will do a blog just on them.
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