| in media res and entertainment/teaching |
[Apr. 5th, 2005|05:49 pm] |
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I went to the Bozeman garage sale(I missed the pancake breakfast though. Shit!) and found a book called "Greg Hildebrandt's Favorite Fairy Tales." It looked interesting so I picked it up. Besides some of the regular fairy tales, there is one called "The Story of Siegfried." On the first page of the story there is a short paragraph in paranthesis that says the story is from the Danes at the time that they were fighting with the English in King Alfred's time. A very old story to say the least. What really interested me about the story though was the beginning. Just like how we were saying in class that oral poems start in the middle of the action, that was exactly how this old story started. And what action at the beginning! Only in the first three sentences all these things happen: an old king had won many wars, married a younger princess, and a young prince came and killed the king and defeated the army for the king's new wife. WOW! Reminds me of action movies when they have explosions at the very beginning- it's automatic, you're attention is fixated on the story from then on. Oral poems/stories are just like that, a grabber at the beginning to get your attention for the rest of the story(good trick). These guys(oral peoples) weren't stupid, but knew instead that entertainment and teaching is the same thing. |
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| oral poem |
[Mar. 29th, 2005|04:18 pm] |
Here's my oral poem that I gave today for Sam(thank you Sam, you did me more than enough justice). As you probably heard, I used rhyming to help me remember it. And there is the epithet, invokation of the muse, and repitions.
Touch me, oh sexy Muse
With words and rhythms help to fuse
The greatest story that was every told
Of Sam the Taken, a beauty ten-fold.
Her mom Canadian, and dad a trucker
Come together did not make a Can-ucker,
No, made between ewe and ram
Came the one that we call Sam.
Growing up fast and growing up strong
She stayed away from the big bad bong,
And each card she played, she played it slow
Wanting nothing interrupting her easy flow.
Crushing highschool, into the wind she would bend
Always coming in first at the finale, the end.
Losers all and challengers few
She bravely fought her way to MSU.
And once here, there was a dank, heavy fog
And alone without little brother or dog
Sam the not-yet-taken was lost
In this brutal land of snow and frost.
Working long and hard at Hannon and truck stop
She bravely climbed her way to the top
And at the pinnacle, she sat and thought,
"The years long and hard, for what have I fought?"
For her back pain had become permanent
Yet she kept her fair temperment.
Still, empty was her shining bowl
Without a mate for her soul.
Listen up now, young and old
For this story, it's been foretold,
She gave her burning heart to a man named Shane
So all your dreams, they are forsaken
For she is now Sam the Taken. |
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| Performance and Participation |
[Mar. 29th, 2005|10:12 am] |
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Last Tuesday we were discussing performances for a short while. During the conversation, Sexson brought up the point that our larger culture needs to bring back in more oral performances, mainly musical performances. And as we already know, oral cultures are highly participatory. I've been very fortunate that I've been able to travel around the country for short periods of time, always to go and see musical performances and music festivals. Sure, I get slight enjoyment when listening to the music, but it always puts me over the top in a good way when actually taking a participatory role in the performance. That means dancing, shouting, smiling at people around me and at the band members, and generally having a good time with everybody there. You can see it in our class room after some of our oral poems(besides the clapping); it's a good time when people shout(aaa-ooooooo, or just a woo) after a performance, and heightens the enjoyment of the performance. It's about the music, but also the community and mood around you. It doesn't matter what kind of music either, just go see something(hell, we could all enjoy country on Thurs., so is it really that bad?). Oral communities must really have/have had rocking times.--Remindes me of Dionysus and the Bacchae, a feeling of giving one's self upto something else(I'm sure Freud has some kind of word for that- the melting away of one's self) And besides, not only is listening to music beneficial to your mind, but also beneficial to your health. Good moods can keep our body healthy, while bad moods can be harmful to our health. Monday's Bozeman Chronicle paper made me smile; the front page was a woman who had just turned 104, and what do you think she said about her life? She danced the whole time, and would be doing it now if she could. |
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| Top 100 |
[Mar. 6th, 2005|12:25 pm] |
When I gave my MSU Top 100 book list, I used more than just a tune to help me memorize it. It was helpful setting it to the ABC song, because if a verse didn't come out right, I knew I had screwed up somwhere, and it's simply a rememorable tune. So the tune was a memorization tool set to verses, rather than using a similar technique, memorizing it in chunks of five or ten books. Besides song, I used alphabetic association(Collected fictions,Canterburry tales, anecdotes of Destiny-C,C,D), small stories(an easy one to figure out is Jane Eyre, The Story Teller, and Epic of Gilgamesh), saying it over and over again to myself, rhyme(Past-Grass), and somewhat genre grouping(like what one might think of as young adult or relating somehow-Fathers & Children, A Doll's House, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, and Huckleberry Finn).
Parry revolutionized the study of oral traditions when he discovered that the peoples had a variety of techniques for memorizing stories and the way in which they told stories. The interesting part for me in singing this list was that I wasn't expecting to use so many different ways to help memorize it, and a lot of the techniques used(and the material itself-conservative) are described by Parry and Ong. I enjoyed doing this because the information in the class sinks in better doing something/participating rather than just sitting and reading and listening. |
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| notes from class |
[Feb. 24th, 2005|04:35 pm] |
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Went over the quizes for the first half of class, and then the second half talked about how memory moved from agonistic to moralistic-moved this way because what was important to be memorized changed, from the art of rhetoric to religion. We also talked about how Dante's Inferno "could be regarded as a kind of memory system for memorising, Hell and its punishments with striking images on orders of places, will come as a great shock, and I must leave it as a shock. It would take a whole book to work out the implications of such an approach to Dante's poem. It is by no means a crude approach, nor an impossible one. If one thinks of the poem as based on orders of places in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and as a cosmic order of places in which the spheres of Hell are shperes of Heaven in reverse, it begins to appear as a summa of similitudes and exempla, ranged in order and set out upon the Universe"(Yates, 95)-This passage was read in class. |
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| Simon Ortiz |
[Feb. 18th, 2005|07:33 am] |
I noticed a lot related to oral traditions in Simon Ortiz's speech on the 17th. A few quotes by Ortiz first: life is "chant, dance, and song", "memory is yours, history is yours", "reclaim the present", "memory and history has gathered us in the present", "today we live", I went into another dimension and I was with "the music of the earth". Besides just the quotes related to memory and history, he also saw a lot of strength in community, unity, nature. And he also retold old stories, keeping the history of Native Americans in the present-specifically one poem he retold about the Sandcreek Massacre in South Dakota in the 1860's. There was the lament of the dead, but strength was found in memory.
I didn't hear really any rhyming in his poems, but his rhythm and beat were amazing-you could tap your foot(maybe even dance!) to the beat of his speech/chant. It actually reminded me a lot of Beat Poetry being read aloud, at least related to the rhythm and perhaps the line too(although I can't really say line b/c I haven't actually read his poems on paper). There also was nature symbols/symoblisms, lists of things/people, and the repitition of words/phrases in his poems. A great reading, but I was disappointed he didn't do any singing, although I guess it was only a 'READING'. A good and great man. |
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| Western conventions for gathering oral history |
[Feb. 10th, 2005|11:41 am] |
Everything I'm going to talk about is from the website http://omega.dickinson.edu/organizations/oha/pdf/Spring 1999.pdf and is entitled Indigenous Peoples' Oral Histories Raise Ethical Issues.
One Western Convention for gathering and sorting knowledge is the belief that our way of doing it is the best, and therefore only way. Thank God we're growing out of our ethnocentric ways, and actually beginning to listen to the indigenous people's ideas, and, more often, their complaints. Winona Stevenson, head of the Indian Studies Department at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, said that "the reality is indigenous communities are sick and tired of giving and giving and receing little if anything in return. So I say to scholars who strive to maintain their scholarly distance and standards(which, by the way, support exicting power relations and the status quo), I say, 'get a grip or move over'". In fact, she sees future researchers working their whole life living and learning from a specific oral culture, instead of taking interviews and then going back to study those transcripts, without considering "how indigenous peoples structure, organize, sift, retain and transmit knowledge", especially knowledge from the past.
Just like we can't fight off new technologies, neither can oral cultures keep their lives "pure" by simply telling researchers/missionaries to leave. It's simply absurd to say that we don't change things when contact is made, and even more absurd to say that we should never talk to these people and leave them alone. What if they have knowledge, a different way of knowing that may be beneficial to us? Though, when that contact has occured, lives are changed forever, and we can't do anything about it. We can, however, be more careful in how and when we deal with these indigenous peoples. Living with, instead of 'straight studying',indiginous cultures will reveal textures of oral societies that will be much richer and bolder than ever once thought possible. Although we are altering other cultures(the main thing people tend to yell about), we are also altering our culture, albeit slowly, to fit into the world. Since we(at least me anyway) tend to see the world as our community, our culture is has been changing to fit those notions it. And I must say that the change was for the better, although remember, cultures never are static, so we just need to keep changing in a more positive manner. Constantly changing towards a 'better' culture will reflect off other cultures, as well as our own. I guess what I'm trying to say that everybody needs to feel welcome, to know their lives and way of living are just as right as ours is(seeing the world as a community). I'm especially glad to see that oral historians and researchers are changing their methods in gathering and classifying knowledge to better accommodate the peoples they are studying. after all, "in most indigenous traditions, personal life histories are very different from oral history, and researchers need to know how indigenous peoples view each of these sets of knowledge before they unilaterally impose categories." |
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| the scientific mind |
[Feb. 3rd, 2005|03:30 pm] |
i admit that i have a scientific minded head-i don't believe anything unless there is proof to back it up. two things i've learned recently have hit on some things sean kane said in the dream chapter in "wisdom of the mythtellers". what particularly struck me was how much music is revered in the oral culture. i always knew there was something special about music, because why are we, as humans, so attracted to music? what's so special about getting hit by sound waves? recently i was watching nova, on pbs, and a team of scientists went into the desert to figure out a mystery that has stumped humans for generations on end. humans, throughout time, have commented on a low tone, almost a hum, that comes from the dunes around them. what was causing the low tone was the sand particles sliding down, causing tiny vibrations, which then reverberate back out from the denser sand underneath. the especially startling thing was that dunes, depending on the dune, only emit 3 notes...perfectly-e,g, or f. i guess it shouldn't be all that surprising since humans first took music out of nature, rhythms and notes. crap, walk around and look-breathing and walking both have rhythms, so does running water, birds sing notes, and leaves twist rhythmically in the wind.
rhythms, kane explains, also exist beyond what we can see or hear;like the "brain wave" rhythm we are constantly walking around with. assuming he, and some oral cultures are right, these waves intersect and cross with other waves, emitted by plants or animals or another person. and most people just don't even notice these things, or overlook them. i know, it sounds kooky, but these oral cultures may have really been on to something. i recently learned that my roomate got an award in 6th grade for her science project. the award isn't the neat part, the cool thing was what she did for her project-two similar plants, that got the same food and sunlight, etc. one plant she would take away and think good thoughts onto that plant. lo and behold, that plant grew stronger than the control. why? she wasn't talking to it, breathing co2 onto it. does this prove that these energy/mind fields exist? not necessarily, but i've also seen other things that can't be explained-1.a grey parrot that could say what picture his master was looking at in the other room(boat, house;pictures and words along those lines)2. couples controlling each other's heart beat from another room, then country. any person of faith will like what i'm saying especially because what this seems to prove is that prayer works, just thinking about another person works. it's all very interesting to me, these 'energy fields', and science seems to back it up(science actually proving an idea that came from a spiritual background-weird). |
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