So, read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin. He was a much easier read than the other Walter. There wasn’t much to respond to in reading his paper. The main section gave a fairly accurate and interesting description of what’s happened when moving from older forms of art to more modern forms.


Where the interesting bit comes in is in his preface and epilogue. Let’s start w/ his preface. He presents the idea that ‘creativity and genius’ are no longer usable or practical terms. I’d be forced to disagree there. They both are still valid and indeed, should be used in my opinion. He also says that about ‘eternal value and mystery’. I’m not sure about eternal value. I might have to agree with him on that one. I can’t see anything as having value forever. Mystery, i feel no way about.


The war bit at the end in his epilogue was kind of funny. The Marinetti quote just made me think… “Alright, if war is so beautiful, let’s see you go and enrich a flowering meadow on the front lines.” Sounds like a guy who does alot of talking, but not alot of doing.


Also, I’m not sure I got where he was going with all the Fascist talk. I didn’t quite get that. Felt like just oh-so-much-ranting.

Here’s our 1 minute video. We accidentally failed to record one scene and accidentally deleted another while slicing. 😀 Go video editing and stuff.

Ok, so it was < 1 minute. Bleh.

So here’s my repsonse to the waterfalls:MEH. Frankly, I was underwhelmed. They were just… there. Oh, and at night they lit up.

And my response to Ong: The first thing I have to say about Ong is … Wow, this guy can really talk.. er, write. He somehow manages to take a simple idea and expland it into multiple paragraphs through use of examples. I think this reading would be alot easier to follow if he dispensed with all the references to other texts and such. It’s just waaaay too long winded for my tastes.

Ong says that a literate person can never truly recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. I think that he should perhaps have said that they can never capture it. Being literate, they probably learned to read at a young as and never had the sense that pure oral people get. Though if he said that he’d be wrong. My family has a tradition of storytelling to the young children and these stories tend to carry over through the generations w/o being written down.

Really, I had no idea such controversy existed over the Illiad and the Odyssey. I found the idea that Homer’s group was illerate to be a bit interesting. But only a bit. I found Parry’s work to be pretty hilarious though. A couple of the most famous works of literature made up of cliches and literary formulae.

The bit about oral cultures being made up of literary formulae I agree with. Proverbs are far more commonplace in primary oral cultures.
I’m up to chapter 3 and there’s still not much I can say about this. Most of what’s here seems like, “Oh yea, that’s true.” It’s getting more interesting though. I like the case studies.

Overall impression: Very DRY (Kind of like having biscuits w/o tea).

So here’s a retrospective look at my blog setup process. It went fairly smoothly. I just turned my old index.html content into an About page. The instructions on the wordpress site were pretty clear and I really just spent the most time styling the damn thing to match with the rest of my website (which isn’t in php yet). Gonna get cracking on that.


I suppose I should… add links to blogs I like in my sidebar, but I don’t really follow any other blogs. I guess I’ll find a few and put em up later.