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).