My Final Blog (of far too few)

First, a few words on today's presentations
Everyone did a fantastic job, particularly given the time crunch (I feel greedy for presenting as long as I did on Monday).
Highlights of interest for me personally:
-Kayla's closing remark, "Myth is human nature in story."
-Ishi (sp? not that it matters in orality), the last Indian to emerge from the wilderness as recent as 1911, a living exhibit of oral culture. Brought to us by Lisa.
-Two-tongued Charlie's comments about boring lists brought a nice reply from our Shaman. Lists did not exist to inform, rather to evoke a trance in the listener.
-Joan described words, and our obedience to them, as a chain reaction. We tend to obey words for the sake of politeness.
-Jana gave a wonderfully Oral (with a capital O) presentation on the power of names for the namer and the named. She moved around, conversed about and with specific people, and gave an interesting lesson overall. Never forget the meaning of "Thermal Pollution."
-Steve discussed the his failures in writing a Raven myth. The Myth itself sounded very classic from the excerpt, but his main self-criticism was the lack of cultural meaning. I think he's on the right track, I'd be curious as to the result of this project if the various lessons were grounded in modern day living?
-Parker of the Outback discussed elements of orality manifesting through films. I would really like a sequel to this about videogames.
-Chris the scribbler told the spectacular story about the monkey. Hooray for storytelling! The story was being retold from the first printed version of it straight from the source, his father. Now if only he could have learned the story well enough to tell it without his notes, then we'd have some serious storytime.
-Kari also spoke on the power of naming, but focused more on historical issues, rather than modern. Interestingly, she left off by mentioning "Spirited Away" which fits perfectly with many f the themes from Kane (the girl crosses to another realm, must give something up to do it, must learn the customs of the other realm, and so on.)
-Kate gave us Tristram Shandy and its attack on literate rules.
-Bri discussed T.S. Elliot's "Four Quartets" and also referenced...MY PRESENTATION! Hurray for more connections.

This course has brought many great topics to my attention, and many great books to my need-to-get-to list. I will certainly be making use of memory theaters from now on, (though I'll never forgive elementary school for not teaching me this technique, given that every assignment back then was list memorization!) Another major element I will take from the class is speaking and presenting more traditionally. By this I mean without notes, though with preparation, such that I can adapt and interact with the audience. I love it, I simply need more practice doing it. I'd really like to improve my storytelling capacity.

All of you enjoy yourselves and if I never see you again (though there's only a 2:3 likelihood of that unfortunate future) remember me through your mythlines. I'm never more than six degrees of separation away!

Post Presentation Thoughts

Well, it's over, I more or less pulled it off. The point seems to have come across, communication doing its job, but there are a few things I didn't get to that I'd like to address here.

For those of you who did not receive it, I passed around a sheet of paper that asked everyone to add two (or so) words to a continuous sentence, it resulted in the following:

"Checkmark's presentation is beginning full of chaos and very lively oranges, pipes; which are beach rocks that begins again in a familiar Room"

This had to do with stories, language, and culture building off of the past. I had also intended to start a telephone game, beginning with the title of my essay, "Finding Some Sort of Meaning in the Chaos of a Connected and Organic Universe Such That You Might Comprehend Your Immediate Experiences and Subsequently Achieve a Higher Perspective of the Whole." Whatever the title transformed into by the end of the presentation, that would be the new title. I figured it would be too much of a hassle to deal with and a little bit too distracting.

I was supposed to do random things while presenting (draw on the chalkboard, blow on the kazoo) but was too concerned with remembering what I wanted to say that I forgot. My biggest regret is that I didn't take a picture of the class while talking. I would then post the picture here and anyone who read the post would have a tinge of re-memory as they recall the moment I took the picture. Oh well.

My presentation mostly dealt with my paper (confused about the baby picture? Read the essay!). I also touched on de Bono, Walt Disney, and the color orange.

I really enjoy presenting things following the oral tradition, but definitely need more practice with it to smooth out my style.

Random connections:
-The theme of the magnificent scroll merges well with my own topic, though Tai seems to be rooting more for order than I am.
-Language emerging from pre-human ancestors links to my introduction
-My paper touches briefly on the orality of internet culture, but not nearly as much as it used to (when it was 12 rambling pages long). I would really like to get into how technology is bringing together groups that never could have communicated otherwise, acting like the creativity hats as a funnel for diversity. Also, I think video games bridge the gap between print-like movies and orality because they are a dialog, the player tells some of the story through choices within the larger story of the game. Plot-based and role-playing games fit into this category in particular.

Random quotes of interest that didn't make the cut:

“Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, "water." We came up with a sound for that. Or "Saber-toothed tiger right behind you." We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say "love," the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I'm saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They're just symbols. They're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for.” Waking Life

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it does. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.” (Anansi Boys 247)

"[The nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."
Benedict Anderson (2006, p.7) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“Transformation implies, not an existence in one world and then in another; rather it implies existence in both realms simultaneously.” (Kane 110)

My Paper (sans title)

It's a mess, but I like it.

This paper, as well as all the other term papers, is a culmination of the teachings of Kane, Ong, and Yates, our class discussions, other courses I’ve taken, conversations I’ve had, my lifetime of experiences and in fact, everything that has preceded me. When I speak with a friend, that conversation exists in reflection of all of my previous conversations with that friend. Similarly, whenever I use a word, this is in response to having heard the word previously. At some point in my past I learned that word, just as the people who spoke the word to me learned it somewhere previously. It goes back on an on. What we say is part of an endless conversation starting when we first learned to speak, when words began, with thought, with nature, with everything. Speech is like stories, which are “told on top of the ruins of other stories like villages built on the strata of older villages that have crumpled in time,” (Kane 172). To navigate this chaos of everything being connected, we must learn to focus, as we do with our memory theaters. Language is not truly chaotic, but organic. Meaning can be found in change and repetition. Concrete rules do not necessarily limit our understanding, they simply frame it.

In the Neverending Story, the author must pull us back every time the narrative wanders off on a tangent. When we start to follow the adventures of a side character we hear some variant of “but that is another story and will be told another time.” It isn’t just a subplot. Just as in orality, it’s a link to another mythline. Everything is part of everything else. We are all physical continuations of our ancestry, so is language. Over generations, language evolved from gestures, and continues to evolve, despite print culture. “If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis…simply a sprawling external memory,” (Ghost in the Shell 2). The physical creations of mankind are an aspect of our natural lineage. Over generations, concepts that seem to be the result of individual decisions, may in fact be revealing greater trends. It is as Michelangelo believed of his art, the sculptures already existed in the stone, but he needed to remove everything else to reveal their beauty. In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan asks, “A world grows around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?” (Moore IV, 27). Kane addresses this same concern, “In a wolf-deer system who runs the show?” “It seems as if the overall circuit governs their actions. It is as if the overall pattern thinks,” (165). Perhaps understanding fades, like in the telephone game, which is played by whispering a few lines into someone’s ear, having them recite it to the next person, and on down the line. With each exchange the message is corrupted until amusing but unrecognizable. Language is not utterly linear, however, and even when messages are not identical, truth is found in the changes. It’s these random little connections that serve us in the end.

Benedict Anderson’s thoughts on identity are discussed in the film Waking Life. “Well, he's talking about like, say, a baby picture. So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image, and you say, "That's me." Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, "This was me when I was a year old, and then later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am." So it takes a story that's actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity,” (Waking Life).

An understanding emerges through these sequential changes. Film writer and director David Mamet teaches filmmakers to break the story into scenes and each scene into concise little actions. This is montage. Show a man’s face in neutral expression, and then the image of a steaming bowl of soup, the man is hungry. Show the same expressionless man, followed by an old woman in a coffin, the man is sad. Eisenstein tells us, “Each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other,” (“Soviet Montage Theory”). On top as in layers, each understood within the context of that which surrounds it. Deeply moving stories are told through a succession of inert actions. Giulio Camillo uses the metaphor of the vast forest (Yates 143). We can understand it when we look down at the forest from a high slope but we tend to experienced it amidst the trees. We are first-person individuals trying to comprehend the universe omnisciently. We must follow our mythlines and observe, as understanding emerges from the chaos, as certain elements and connections repeat.

Communication itself is repetition. Use a unique word every time you see a horse, no one will understand. Through patterns we infer intent. Repetition invites connections. A musical motif will appear, reiterate, alter form, and vanish. Those moments of recurrence, particularly when we are not conscious of it, are strangely fulfilling. They simultaneously present the new while linking with the old. Repetition is cyclical and acts as an ever-renewing framework. Using “please” and “thank you” is appreciative, but it also smoothes the gears of conversation. Repetition acts as a sign, triggering a person to enter a certain mindset, a certain understanding. Flat characters and clichés are criticized, but they successfully convey the exact same thing every time. They convey perfectly comprehensible ideas. Clichés prepare your expectations, like movie genres. You may know nothing else about a film, but choose to go because it’s a western, or a romantic comedy, or a slasher. You must be willing to take on the proper mindset for the task at hand in order to reach your full potential. Like Raven, you must first push your mind through and pull your body after (Kane 56).

Putting on a certain mindset seems limiting, but it is necessary. Society is full of these intentional limitations. “Joining the army, putting on a uniform... You’re giving up your personal life and accepting a socially determined manner of life in the service of the society of which you are a member,” (Campbell 15). Specialization may limit capacity for adaptation, but as the old adage goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.” As we’ve been taught, we have domesticated words the way we fence in nature. We’ve tamed them. This is perfect word choice for the biological nature of language. “What does that mean-‘tame’?” the little prince asks the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book, “It is an act too often neglected…it means to establish ties…But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world,” (Saint Exupery 66). When patterns do not present themselves, we must make them. Our decisions in this way instill value. The trick is to retain the capacity to break the patterns, to be open to adaptation and discovery. There is nothing wrong with remaining in a pattern set by someone else, the key is to understand why that pattern works, to make it your own. Videogames combine film-like storytelling with player-driven choices. In EarthBound, you choose your name and so on and the beginning, but it doesn’t affect skills or statistics in any way. For example, you can choose a favorite food. I chose pasta. Every time I returned to my game home from the difficult journey my game mother would tell me to eat some pasta and go to bed. It became a pattern, not essential to the completion of the game, but essential to the emotional ties the game forms with the player.

This time-wasting repetition of the seemingly meaningless, whether it is a favorite food or color, an epithet, saying please and thank you, or whatever else, gives power. It gives a sense of rejuvenation through repetition, just like the musical motifs. Recurrence is reassuring. We must willingly embrace redundancies. This is why chaos is beneficial. The more variety, the more chances there are that memorable connections will manifest. This is why we are all giving presentations. Some may have only loose ties to our topics, but the random little elements that make those lectures unique may be the key to remembering everything in this course for a single student. Chaos allows us to find usable order. A previous topic of discussion, the Golden Compass, brings another example. Everyone has a daemon that takes on many forms in youth but settles to one with maturity. A single form may lack freedom, but since your daemon is your soul, you gain a new understanding of your identity; your strengths and your weaknesses. Concrete rules are necessary. “Take piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are eighty-eight of them. Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is infinite,” (The Legend of 1900). Brilliance and creativity come from playing off the limitations.

Language and culture are organic. Everything connects and affects everything else. “The story unfolds over the course of its telling, over the course of a lifetime, or several lifetimes, according to the consistency of its various environments-social, natural and supernatural. Validated by this consistency, the myth is a polyphonic composition,” (Kane 147). We, however, are left to follow our own seemingly linear stories within this web. The system must be trusted to evolve on its own, it can’t be forced. However, there are inherent patterns. Following these patterns or making our own rules and frameworks, consciously limiting a portion of ourselves, allows us to progress. The world is not chaos because nothing has meaning; it is chaos because everything connects. Our experiences reveal a specific sequence of these connections and with effort some of the other stories that cross our paths. Only by remembering this, by seeing ourselves as the story characters, can we begin to view the world from above the world, from a third-person perspective.

This paper started as a list of interesting topics and quotes from the class and things that the class brought to mind. I tried to categorize them, tried to reveal some of the countless links. In the end, the subject is still vast, but manageable. I cannot limit it more, because this inability to be limited is what the theme has revealed itself to be. Nothing is truly concrete; it is simply a tight cluster of other things. Within these pages, some kind of connection has been made, and that is the point. Greater meaning will be determined by you, the reader, because, “the storytelling act is dialogical rather than monological. There is give-and-take with the listeners happening all the time with the telling of a story,” (Kane 198). By remembering some of these random little elements you can remember this paper, and subsequently the entirety of this course, and everything discussed within in it, no matter how insignificant.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.

EarthBound. Dir. Shigesato Itoi. Videogame. Nintendo, 1995.

Ende, Michael. The Neverending Story. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 1997.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. DVD. Go Fish Pictures/Bandai Entertainment, 2004.

Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Peterborough, Ont., Canada: Broadview P, 1998.

The Legend of 1900. Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore. DVD. Fine Line Features, 1999.

Mamet, David. On Directing Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics Inc., 1987.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1996.

Saint Exupéry, Antoine. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1943.

"Soviet Montage Theory." Wikipedia. 27 Apr. 2009 .

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. New York: University Of Chicago P, 2001.

Maps

As everyone should know by now, our group presented the topic of our chapter (Maps) by each telling part of a story of remembrance. Before I get into this deeper, here is my portion (the version I had in my hand, not identical to what I ended up saying):

"I remember the long wide hallway lined with rooms. I remember the people in the rooms buying and selling. In this room a woman screamed as she saw her blue hair in the mirror. In this room a boy grabbed a box and hid it in his shirt and walked away with his prize. And I continued down the long wide hallway with great speed. I ran, I flew, I dove on this side and that, as far as I could. And I saw a place of tables and savory smells. And an old man was eating and rice spilled into his beard. And at the end of the long wide hallway was a room full of books and beyond the room full of books was the smell of butter, and they asked me for money or I could not pass, and I had none, and I passed anyway when they weren’t looking. And farther on was a room of chairs, and the room of chairs went dark and nothing was seen there, and new light came, and sounds came, and stories were told of people and places and things true and untrue, past and future, and I remembered my future, and departed from that place that smelled of butter, and there was walking in the cold and dark for a long time, and there was the building, but the sun had not risen and the building could not be entered, and I sat, and I waited.

It’s cold. My head hurts. I hear footsteps. I see a girl dressed all in pink carrying books, wearing a backpack, the pink girl laughs at me into her pink phone. I’m sitting by a door, it’s early, and cold, I stand. I ache, was I sleeping here? I enter the building, it’s warm inside. I stumble towards the smell of coffee; but I don’t have any money. I take a seat nearby, the chair is soft. There are many books here… a bookstore? No…too big, too many students. This place is familiar; I was here before, but how do I know that? By another place, or person, of any thing the image that keeps with my memory? I was preparing for something, reading, writing. Did I have a book? A sense of dread hits me. I’m missing something, something I need. I’ve misplaced something important, but what? How is it that this lives in my mind? What was it? I try to focus again. I think about the past. I know I was here before and I had…whatever it was when I was here. Now I’m here again, but what happened in between, where did it go, where did I go? I retrace my steps. I don’t yet remember what happened but I know I must have traveled to this point somehow. I ask myself, what do I remember? I ask myself where do I remember?"

As we did not meet between writing our chapters and reading them, there was a certain amount of disjointedness, redundancy, and even contradiction. This is to be embraced in the oral tradition. As I heard the others speak I tried to subtly adapt my own telling. This brings me to a topic that I've been thinking about lately. I'm getting interested in active storytelling, with less of an informative focus. Great preparation would be needed and I'm not sure what I would tell, but I will certainly try to approach that subject with my final presentation. One last remark over my sections: there is a reference to the memory caverns in the mall portion and multiple references to The Tempest in the library section.

Overall our theme was of memory being built from physical locations and sensory experiences. The chapter is a little confusing at times as to what is to be learned from specific story examples but it seems to return to the idea that our physical world can act as a map of our stories and our stories can act as maps of the physical world (both directionally and ecologically). Following the mythlines we see that every element of any story is part of countless other stories. Nothing is isolated. The Sacker of Cities brought up a point I'd like to reiterate.
As these early cultures were so constantly dependent on the land, interpreting natural signs (such as which side of the tree the moss grows on) for directions, for input about the state of the region and even as signs of things to come, they were reading the land. Reading predates writing.

My Memory Mansion

While not technically a mansion, my childhood home was rather large. I chose to use it because of it's size and variety, though I have not lived there since 1999. In fact, as I pieced together my memory theatre I actually recalled a great deal of my home that I had forgotten, though much of it is probably incorrect. Many of the film titles are remembered through images from the films, or from other films. I also will include some of the details I have added in my hopes to remember the years each came out in, every decade has a symbol for the number which is reiterated at the five year mark.

1-Wings: A fluttering bird at my old bus stop near my home.

2-The Broadway Melody: A large music box on the berm to the right of the driveway entrance, under the crab-apple tree.

3-All Quiet on the Western Front: A dead and smoldering tree on the left (West) berm over a field of clover (1930, 3-leaf clover).

4-Cimarron: strange word, makes me think of cinnabar, the driveway is now red-orange.

5-Grand Hotel: A beautiful vintage car parked at the front door, bellhop opening its doors.

6-Cavalcade: I used the second definition, and have a procession of masked ball patrons piling out of the car.

7-It Happened One Night: Along with the party, there is a Chinese lantern (for night) and a masked couple stealing a kiss underneath.

8-Mutiny on the Bounty: a sea battle, including a giant squid, is engraven upon the door, a few loose clovers have been dropped at its base (1935).

9-The Great Ziegfeld: A white tiger (Siegfried and Roy) stretches on the carpet.

10-The Life of Emile Zola: A stretch, a child dressed as Zorro stands over the tiger.

11-You Can't Take It with You: Feathers (angels, afterlife) are strewn over the stairs, having been blown there by...

12-Gone With the Wind:...a large fan halfway up the stairs.

13-Rebecca: Just a woman in a flowy checkered dress (1940, squares are 4-sided), behind the fan.

14-How Green Was My Valley: The rest of the steps are overgrown with grass.

15-Mrs. Miniver: Minnie Mouse at the top of the stairs.

16-Casablanca: Sam at his piano just inside my parents' room.

17-Going My Way: Literally a large sign pointing towards the bathroom. (Though I made it old and rickety to help the image along)

18-The Lost Weekend: A man in a bubblebath, doing office-work. He holds a large metal square in his hand (1945) which is cutting him and drawing blood (always add blood if you're having trouble with an image).

19-The Best Years of Our Lives: Snow and autumn leaves fall in the shower, flowers line the floor, to show seasons changing.

20-Gentleman's Agreement: Two men in suits shake hands in the secrecy of the closet, I technically just passed through a wall, but that's alright.

21-Hamlet- A man and woman in royal dress sit in bed, Hamlet's mother and uncle.

22-All the King's Men: Humpty Dumpty lies cracked over a chair.

23-All About Eve: My niece, Eva, stands at the balcony in a star-covered dress (1950, stars have 5 points).

24-An American in Paris: A styrofoam airplane flies from the balcony to the pastures down the hill from my house, an activity from childhood, only this plane has an American flag on it.

25-The Greatest Show on Earth: Fireworks over the pasture.

26-From Here to Eternity: Crossing a stream, the reflection of stars in the the water.

27-On the Waterfront: Marlon Brando sits by the stream.

28-Marty: My friend Martin talks with Martin Scorsese at the fence, they are holding a metal star (1955).

29-Around the World in Eighty Days: The tip (yes, we had a tipi) has images of the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids painted on it.

30-The Bridge on the River Kwai: I have added a small bridge inexplicably leading away from the tipi.

31-Gigi: Half-Life's G-Man stands with his briefcase. G-Man...G...G-G...Gigi. Yeah, I couldn't think of anything.

32-Ben-Hur: A chariot is on its way up the hill toward my house.

33-The Apartment: A small apartment looks over the path is carbon, up the hill, diamonds rest on the table on its patio. The sixth element on the periodic table is carbon, diamonds are made of carbon, (1960).

34-West Side Story: Two "chickens" fight at the top of the hill, movie reference if you don't understand.

35-Lawrence of Arabia: Lawrence, fully robed in white, stands on a large rock overlooking the edge of the hill.

36-Tom Jones: My lighting professor, Tom Watson, at the willow tree.

37-My Fair Lady: A lovely, period dressed woman sitting and winding a...

38-The Sound of Music: Music box, with a large diamond (1965) decorating it.

39-A Man for All Seasons: A mountain man wearing a large pack and lots of equipment, walking towards the pool.

40-In the Heat of the Night: People in the pool to escape the heat.

41-Oliver!: The cartoon Oliver (different movie, I know) in the shallow end.

42-Midnight Cowboy: The corpse of a cowboy leaning on the wall.

43-Patton: Patton...patent...Thomas Edison...the hot tub full of light bulbs instead of water. These lights are multicolored...rainbow...ROY G BIV...seven colors of the spectrum (1970).

44-The French Connection: A cliche Frenchman (stripy shirt, etc.) tying a knot on the pool fence.

45-The Godfather: Marlon Brando, again, in this film's character, opening a door to the house.

46-The Sting: A bathroom full of bees.

47-The Godfather Part II: Marlon Brando yet again!

48-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: The laundry room full of nests, including one with a large, multicolored egg (1975).

49-Rocky: Rocky, leaning on a rock outside.

50-Annie Hall: The main couple lounging on the trampoline. When I had trouble with it, I imagined the trampoline descending into the ground as a vertical HALLway.

have 8 tentacles).

54-Chariots of Fire: Inside the extra garage, chariots on fire.

55-Gandhi: The man himself sits cross-legged in the driveway.

56-Terms of Endearment: Another deer in the main garage.

57-Amadeus: A piano crashes down the stairs, just through the garage house-door.

58-Out of Africa: At the top of the stairs, a giraffe, a person in safari gear, and a giant spider (1985, spiders have 8 legs).

59-Platoon: In my brother's bedroom, everything is covered in camouflage mesh.

60-The Last Emperor: on his side of the loft that separates our rooms, a child dressed in royal clothing.

61-Rain Man: on my side of the loft, a downpour of rain indoors.

62-Driving Miss Daisy: A car crashing through the wall into my room (which is on the second story).

63-Dances with Wolves: Wolves and one cat (1990, cats have 9 lives) rush out of my closet and into...

64-The Silence of the Lambs:...the bathroom, where they kill a sheep.

65-Unforgiven: An old man is shackled to the wall of my sister's room.

66-Schindler's List: many pieces of paper covered in lists fill my other sister's room.

67-Forrest Gump: Forrest sits nearby on a stool.

68-Braveheart: William Wallace takes a zipline back to the first floor, a cat in his arms (1995).

69-The English Patient: A person in a hospital bed.

70-Titanic: A replica of the last tip of the ship sinks into the ground in the dining room.

71-Shakespeare in Love: Shakespeare sits on a cupboard.

72-American Beauty: a young woman wrapped in the American flag.

73-Gladiator: Gladiators fight in the kitchen near a broken computer (2000, for the Y2K crisis).

74-A Beautiful Mind: Russel Crowe again, different character.

75-Chicago: Richard Gere in character in the living room.

76-The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Lots of gold rings strewn on the couch.

77-Million Dollar Baby: a baby in a crib on a pile of money.

78-Crash: a gaping broken window, and another computer (2005).

79-The Departed: someone disappearing through said window.

80-No Country for Old Men: Multiple old men relaxing in the guest room.

81-Slumdog Millionaire: A blind and begging child in the hallway.

Blast! I Missed Class...Again!

I finally found something to base my epithet on (seeing as we've had trouble naming me) and it's visual, story-based, and slightly grotesque!

When I was around eleven years old I was at a scout camp where the meeting areas and cafeteria were at the bottom of the hill and the campsites were higher up. After an activity I was walking back to camp by myself and ducked under a log fence. Well, I came up to soon, and it hurt briefly but the pain went away. However, I started gushing blood from my head. So I return to the bottom of the camp, drenched in blood, casually asking if anyone had seen my father so that we could go to the hospital. I ended up getting stitches, resulting in a thin line of a scar on my scalp.

A couple summers ago I was working at a Blockbuster Video. I guess I hadn't had enough to drink that day because that night, just a few minutes before close, I was carrying a huge stack of dvds across the room, I felt woozy, and I woke up on the floor. I can't tell you whether I blacked out, causing the fall, or simply felt woozy, fell, and lost my memory of it because of hitting my head on a shelf. I found myself on the ground in a pile of dvd cases, once more bleeding from the head. Yet again I go to the hospital, yet again I get stitches. The kicker, however, is that the new wound actually hit the years-old one. I now have a checkmark on my head, though it's sort of curved and wonky looking. You can't really tell unless my hair is super short, but it's there.

So basically, now that you all have heard the story of the unlucky part of my head, this can be the memory associated with my epithet. For the more violent minded: "Blood-soaked Parker" or "Parker of the Bleeding Scalp" could work, but for simplicity's sake, and for consonance I think, "Checkmark Parker" should suffice. What do you think? Will "Checkmark Parker" give you an image of me in a mess of dvds soaked in blood, or do I need to put "bleeding" in my name somewhere?

My memory demonstration is of the Best Picture winners of the Academy Awards. There are actually 82 of them, so I memorized them all, I'll just recite the first fifty or the last fifty or something in class if we're short on time. Though I won't include them when reciting, I have also implemented visuals to remember the years by. So here they are in chronological order:

1-Wings
2-The Broadway Melody
3-All Quiet on the Western Front
4-Cimarron
5-Grand Hotel
6-Cavalcade
7-It Happened One Night
8-Mutiny on the Bounty
9-The Great Zeigfeld
10-The Life of Emile Zola
11-You Can't Take It with You
12-Gone With the Wind
13-Rebecca
14-How Green Was My Valley
15-Mrs. Miniver
16-Casablanca
17-Going My Way
18-The Lost Weekend
19-The Best Years of Our Lives
20-Gentleman's Agreement
21-Hamlet
22-All the King's Men
23-All About Eve
24-An American in Paris
25-The Greatest Show on Earth
26-From Here to Eternity
27-On the Waterfront
28-Marty
29-Around the World in Eighty Days
30-The Bridge on the River Kwai
31-Gigi
32-Ben-Hur
33-The Apartment
34-West Side Story
35-Lawrence of Arabia
36-Tom Jones
37-My Fair Lady
38-The Sound of Music
39-A Man for All Seasons
40-In the Heat of the Night
41-Oliver!
42-Midnight Cowboy
43-Patton
44-The French Connection
45-The Godfather
46-The Sting
47-The Godfather Part II
48-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
49-Rocky
50-Annie Hall
51-The Deer Hunter
52-Kramer vs. Kramer
53-Ordinary People
54-Chariots of Fire
55-Gandhi
56-Terms of Endearment
57-Amadeus
58-Out of Africa
59-Platoon
60-The Last Emperor
61-Rain Man
62-Driving Miss Daisy
63-Dances with Wolves
64-The Silence of the Lambs
65-Unforgiven
66-Schindler's List
67-Forrest Gump
68-Braveheart
69-The English Patient
70-Titanic
71-Shakespeare in Love
72-American Beauty
73-Gladiator
74-A Beautiful Mind
75-Chicago
76-The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
77-Million Dollar Baby
78-Crash
79-The Departed
80-No Country for Old Men
81-Slumdog Millionaire

I'm still not entirely certain about the presentation assignment. Is it to be something specifically discussed in the books or simply a topic that fits with our class focus? I have a few topics that interest me, but honestly, nothing that has me bursting with excitement.

Print, It's Kind of a Big Deal

Just a few comments from Friday's class.

-The power of the written word was emphasized through the story of Baby M in which a surrogate mother decided to keep the baby. The courts eventually ruled in favor of the couple for whom she had carried and given birth for because of the written arrangement they had all agreed to and signed before hand. While I tend to agree with this case (she knew what she was agreeing to do) there are certainly cases when circumstances change that are beyond the scope of the original contract and even more frequently, contracts that are simply unfair. If I trick you into signing a contract allowing me to kill you, that shouldn't count as suicide. Caution and common sense should always be used in such cases, despite the concrete nature of writing.

-We discussed Finnegans Wake (Fin Again/Fun Again/Awake/A Wake) which seemed very entertaining, though nearly incomprehensible. This book was cited as an attempt to return to the style of orality. A concept I've been trying to work with in terms of filmmaking. Obviously films are capable of sound (unlike books) but given their similarly concrete nature they still lack something. I wonder if Finnegans Wake would be a good audio book?

The novel is circular. The "end" of the texts drops off in such a way as to be continued by the very beginning, thus it is endless. This concept reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Don't continue reading this paragraph if you dislike (minor) spoilers, but the book covers the history of a fictional town, focusing on a specific family line. At the very end , both the town and the last of the family line are about to die. In the apocalyptic chaos of these final moments, the last family member finally interprets and reads a prophecy that had been written down long ago. It contains the entire history of the family, leading up to the moment that the man is reading it. It is essentially the same novel within itself. This moment invites another read and gave me an entirely different comprehension of everything I had just read.

I dare anyone to read Mark Leach's Marienbad My Love, found here. Which was basically only written to be ridiculously long in every way imaginable. It is seventeen million words long, the title alone (Marienbad My Love is the "condensed" version) is nearly seven thousand words. That being said, I've read some excerpts and there is a sense of fun in reading it, similar to Finnegans Wake. I expect there had to be, or else the aythor would have lost his mind, assuming he hadn't already.