Stross’ Laundry Series Goes RPG
From Charles Stross’ blog:
Cubicle 7 Entertainment is producing a roleplaying game based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and the forthcoming The Fuller Memorandum) by the even-more-award-winning Charles Stross, and uses the also-award-winning Basic Roleplaying System (Call Of Cthulhu) by Chaosium Inc.
“We love the Laundry Files novels, so we’re really excited about this game,” said Dominic McDowall-Thomas, Cubicle 7 Director. “The world of the Laundry is a perfect mix of espionage, conspiracy and tentacled menace from beyond the stars.”
“The books are Lovecraftian spy thrillers. The best elements from both genres are thrown together with a sprinkling of long lost Nazis, terrorist cultists, other foreign governments wanting a piece of the action, as well as Her Majesty’s Civil Service.” added Cubicle 7’s Angus Abranson. [Read more.]
I expect this to be very fun. My introduction to Stross’ work began with an Analog review of The Jennifer Morgue, which begins with:
In The Atrocity Archives (reviewed here in June 2006), Stross presumed that mathematics, topology, physics, and computers all had the power to open portals and let the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft, et al., through. Naturally, there are government agencies whose business it is to prevent disaster, either by stopping meddlers (sometimes by recruiting them) or by cleaning up the mess after the meddling. One of their employees is Bob Howard, once a graduate student whose work became meddling, now a computer geek whose usual job at the Laundry was keeping the computers running smoothly until they needed him for something more active. [Read whole review -- you'll need to scroll down.]
Here’s what I wrote about The Atrocity Archives after I read it:
Lovecraftian SF with a hero named Bob Howard,1 how could I not check it out further? The Atrocity Archives is, essentially, a mashup of H.P. Lovecraft (Lovecraftian mythos, which I’ve long maintained is as much SF as supernatural horror), Neal Stephenson (post-cyberpunk SF), and Len Deighton (cold war spy thriller), all three of whom are thanked in the acknowledgements, with a great deal of government bureaucratic procedure tossed into the mix, all written in the comic vein (because, you know, a serious novel with this much paperwork due to actions such as killing a co-worker to stop a major demonic possession/transdimensional infestation would get tedious). A fun romp, and yet another novel I’d like to teach someday.
Call Of Cthulhu is an excellent RPG set in Lovecraft’s world—as if you couldn’t tell by the title 
—so it makes a logical starting point for a game based on the Laundry series, allowing the game designers to focus on world creation rather than game mechanics. I may have to pick this up just for the sake of reading it. (Yes, I have been known to read RPG rule and source books as you might read a novel or magazine.)
- That is, Robert Howard, author of Conan and long-time correspondent with Lovecraft. [↩]
Neil Gaiman on CBS Sunday Morning
CBS ran a good introductory piece on Neil Gaiman this past Sunday and have put the clip online. Quite enjoyable. I’ve seen lots of pictures of locations and objects in his house from his blog, but seeing them in video added a new perspective. And I’ve long wanted a writing room like his gazebo, set off from the house with electricity. This is the first time I’ve seen inside it. Mine would need a small kitchen so I could make tea rather than walk back to the house. His might, actually, but maybe not. Unlike me, Gaiman can afford an assistant, the Fabulous Lorraine, who, among other things, makes tea for him.
Intro to “Memory and the Art of Imagery”
I’m working on the art of letting go. While taking one last pass through before sending off to the committee, I thought I’d post the introduction to my chapter “Memory and the Art of Imagery.” I’ll post more of the chapter over the next week or so. In the meantime, here’s the intro:
Memory and the Art of Imagery
The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Carruthers, The Craft of Thought 3)
Memory, in short, is an imagetext. (Mitchell 192)
In his chapter on images in The Rhetoric of Cool, Jeff Rice argues that composition study’s visual turn has too much focused on the interpretation of images at the expense of focusing on their production. Referring both to Dean Rader’s review essay “Composition, Visual Cultures, and the Problem of Class” and Carolyn Handa’s reader Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World, Rice sums up what he believes is their implicit message: “True writing can only come from reading images, these positions state, not from making images (135). In shifting the focus from interpretation to production, Rice moves us towards a theory and practice of imagery. That contemporary composition studies and rhetorical theory need “discover” such an art is yet one more consequence of our forgetting the role memoria plays as a dynamic process of meaning making for ourselves and for others. Central to this chapter is the assumption that not only does our visual turn need a theory of practice of image production, but that we have the makings of one in classical and medieval practices of memoria.
My use of the phrase memory and the art of imagery is an intentional nod to “the art of memory,” the places and images mnemonic and the broader category of locational memory I discuss in chapter 2. The striking feature of this particular memory art—what for many is the art of memory itself—is its use of images, mental, verbal, and graphic.1 Just as Kristie Fleckenstein argues that we need to conceive of word and image as a “double dialectic, a double vision of literacy as image and word, as imageword” (Embodied Literacies 4), we need to recognize the art of memory as a double dialectic of image and memory.
Before entering into a theoretical and practical discussion of an art of imagery, I want to provide one more contemporary example of imagery as a process of making meaning beyond the examples of the Emerson Garden and imagery in Beowulf, both of which I discussed in chapter 2. For this third example, I turn to Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s discussion of writing Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, offered as three blog posts titled “The book I didn’t write,” “The Book I Did Not Write, Part II,” and “Fabulations, Third and Final Installment.” In these three posts, Cohen shares a series of “fabulations,” fictional stories that he calls “product of the imagination,” which he intended to serve as explorations of the book’s themes (“The book I didn’t write”). As these fabulations were eventually cut from the book, so to was the explanation he wrote to account for their presence in the book, then provisionally titled Stories of Blood: Monsters, Jews, and Race in Medieval England. This explanation is including in the first of the three blog posts discussing these fabulations:
My previous books have attempted to work simultaneously in medieval literature and in what often gets called critical theory (a field, I would argue, more accurately and more simply described as philosophy). Stories of Blood marks a departure from this work in that much of the theorizing is conducted quietly, often below the level of direct quotation or even of footnote. This departure should not be read as a rejection. I am as committed to philosophically rigorous work as I ever have been, and would not have been able to formulate my argument without the help of theory, especially postcolonial theory. Yet I also feel that the time is right for medievalists to experiment with how they formulate their arguments, articulate their themes, convince their readers. It is time to essay rhetorical devices and generic shifts that can perhaps achieve something a predictable scholarly prose style will not. Each of my chapters therefore makes use of what I call fabulations. These brief, fictionalized, and experimental asides are meant to function like the strange moments that occur throughout twelfth-century historiography, moments when the sedate and scholarly course of the narrative is startled by an irruption of the marvelous, the monstrous, the new. As Monika Otter has made clear in her book Inventiones, such moments are not digressions from the texts that feature them but explorations in another register of the concerns animating those works. Thus Gerald of Wales “interrupts” his Journey Through Wales to narrate a story about a utopia of tiny men. This subterranean domain bears an uncanny resemblance to the lost world of Gerald’s own childhood, and permits its narrator to mourn the Welshness he has rejected in himself in order to become a cleric who writes in Latin and a courtier who speaks in French. Although I worry that my own fabulations may strike readers as self-indulgent, overwritten, or simply extraneous, it nonetheless seems to me that, even should I fail badly in the attempt, it is worthwhile to allow the sources I have worked with here to imbue my text with their own imprint. (“The book I didn’t write”)2
Significant in Cohen’s call for medievalists to “essay rhetorical devices and generic shifts that can perhaps achieve something a predictable scholarly prose style will not” is that he is not calling upon medievalists to invent new rhetorical devices and methods but to “experiment with” and “essay” modes, techniques, and strategies other than traditional scholarly prose. In fact in his abandoned explanation, he compares fabulations to the “strange moments that occur throughout twelfth-century historiography,” and in his blog post introducing this explanation that was to appear in the book he states, “I believe I had become infected by all the twelfth-century Latin I was reading, and began to compose in a contemporary mode.” In this discussion of the fabulations, I find fascinating both Cohen’s call for expanding standard academic prose and his location of the fabulations in twelfth-century Latin texts. In this discussion we find a professor medieval literature making the same kind of call for expanding academic composition that we find many compositions do, especially those engaged in computers and writing and new media. Just as striking, I believe is the fact that his fabulations are, simply put, acts of monastic rhetoric.
As I explained in chapter 2, monastic rhetoric was not so much an art of persuasion as an art of composing, and this compositional technique found its way into a wide variety of arts, including that of religious and secular poetry and prose. Keeping in mind that mental imagery—“cognitive pictures”—was the building blocks of invention and that verbal imagery—the rhetorical figures of ekphrasis and enargia—was used in medieval verbal art in much the same way mental imagery is used in the places and images mnemonic,3 that Cohen locates the origins of these fabulations in the twelfth century texts with which he was working can not be stressed enough. While they did not make their way into the final draft of his book, they helped him work through the complex theoretical and philosophical issues with which he was working.
I’ve begun this chapter with a discussion of Cohen’s fabulations because they exist as contemporary examples of monastic rhetoric, of writing through images. While Rice’s own call for the production of images focuses on graphic imagery, I believe that we will only establish a fully-realized theory and practice of imagery if we expand our notion of images to include the mental and verbal as well as the graphic as Fleckenstein argues we should. Moreover, I believe we must do so not only through a double dialectic of “literacy as image and word” but as a double dialectic of memoria as image and memory. As I illustrate how these two double dialects work to make meaning for both ourselves and for others, I will begin with a discussion of two medieval products of monastic rhetoric, the eighth-century box made of whale bone known as the Franks Casket and the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” In discussing these two artifacts of Anglo-Saxon England, I will discuss monastic rhetoric as a mnemonic art of making images. From there, I will turn to the concept of conceptual blending, also known as conceptual integration, from cognitive science to discuss how image-based mnemonics and mnemonic arts such as locational memory and monastic rhetoric are rooted in “the origins of thought and language” and “the way we think.”4 Finally, I’ll return to the contemporary classroom to discuss how we can monastic rhetoric, conceptual blending, and the two double dialectics of literacy as image and word and memoria as image and memory can inform a vision of writing as composition with images.
Works Cited
Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. “The book I didn’t write.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 30 Aug 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. “The Book I Did Not Write, Part II.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 4 Dec. 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. “Fabulations, Third and Final Installment.” In the Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog. 13 Dec. 2006. Web. 7 Feb. 2008.
—. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching. Studies in Writing & Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.
—. “Inviting Imagery in Our Classrooms.” Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision. Eds. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo, and Demetrice A Worley. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2002. 3-26.
Handa, Carolyn. Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. U of Chicago P, 1994.
Rader, Dean. “Composition, Visual Cultures, and the Problems of Class.” College English 67.6 (July 2005): 636-50.
Rice, Jeff. The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2007.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
- In discussing three kinds of imagery—mental, verbal, and graphic—I am following Kristie Fleckenstein’s system of imagery classification (“Inviting Imagery into Our Classrooms” (4). [↩]
- Examples of these fabulations can themselves be found in Cohen’s three blog posts. [↩]
- Likewise, we cannot ignore the use of such imagery in medieval visual art ranging from paintings, frescos, stained glass windows, and manuscript illumination. That we find this mnemonic use of imagery across mental, verbal, and graphic mediums serves to both justify Fleckenstein’s classification of imagery into these three forms and illustrates the need for rhetoric and composition to pay attention to and revive medieval conceptions of memoria. [↩]
- The respective phrases “the origins of thought and language” and “the way we think” come from the titles of books on conceptual blending by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner respectively. [↩]
The Latest on the “Hobbits” of Flores
From The Observer:
The crucial point about this interpretation is that it explains why the Flores people had such minuscule proportions. They didn’t shrink but were small from the start – because they came from a very ancient lineage of little apemen. They acquired no diseased deformities, nor did they evolve a smaller stature over time. They were, in essence, an anthropological relic and Flores was an evolutionary time capsule. In research that provides further support for this idea, scientists have recently dated some stone tools on Flores as being around” 1.1 million years old, far older than had been previously supposed.
The possibility that a very primitive member of the genus Homo left Africa, roughly two million years ago, and that a descendant population persisted until only several thousand years ago, is one of the more provocative hypotheses to have emerged in anthropology during the past few years,” David Strait of the University of Albany told Scientific American recently. This view is backed by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. “We are still grappling with what this discovery has done for our thinking and our conventional scenarios.”
Very, very cool is all I have to say.
Via Neil Gaiman
Humanities as Steam Engine
From Information Age Without Humanities = Industrial Revolution Without Steam Engine:
The World Wide Web is the steam engine of the Information Age. And without the humanities, virtually everything about the World Wide Web is a muddle. All of the key issues of how knowledge is exchanged, how it is created, what its role is in the world, how it functions and changes, how one kind of idea influences another, how knowledge travels, leads to a complex History of Ideas the likes of which we have not seen before. We need the equivalent of all of the resources of histoire du livre–history of the book–to understand all of the relations of producers, consumers, distributors, systems of literacy and education, access, divide, and on and on. The World Wide Web both redefines and reinforces ideas such as “nation” and poses new problems for concepts of social groups, racial and gender boundaries, censorship, privilege, and the larger issues of mediation. These are not “add on” issues. They are the powering features of the Web. They are definitional in the protocol of creating the WWW and part of the governing issues of the W3C, the informal consortium that sets policy but does not really govern, the Web–a structure also singular in the history of political thought and political theory.
Kevin Brooks, Scott McCloud, and the Structure of The Medium is the Massage
McLuhan once again. Or, more specifically, The Medium is the Massage, around which I am yet again centering multiple courses. (What can I say? The book rewards rereading.) I’ve just read Kevin Brooks’ “More ‘Seriously Visible’ Reading: McCloud, McLuhan, and the Visual Language of The Medium is the Massage,”1 available for download from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/issues/v61-1. As I’ve blogged before, I’ve had some fruitful discussions with Kevin about the book, and his essay is quite helpful. I’ve read Scott McCloud’s trilogy of comics theory2 and have used passages from them in digital/new media theory classes. Kevin’s now got me thinking about including sections in the first-year composition course to help us think about The Medium is the Massage. I’m also considering adding one to the book list for Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text, which I teaching in March as an accelerated half-semester course.
As interesting and useful as Kevin’s application of McCloud to McLuhan’s text is, this post is not about Kevin’s application of McCloud but his brief discussion of the structure of The Medium is the Massage. Kevin divides the book into seven scenes:3
- An introduction: pp. 1-7
- The Mechanical Bride reworked, pp. 8-24
- A visual inter-chapter, pp. 25-43
- The Gutenberg Galaxy reworked, pp. 44-75
- Another visual inter-chapter, pp. 76-91
- Understanding Media reworked, pp. 92-149
- A conclusion, pp. 150-60.
As the book is often described as “Understanding Media lite” or “reworked,” I like that Kevin finds sections in the book that correspond to The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy as well, making the book more of a summary/reworking of McLuhan’s work to date and especially The Mechanical Bride. McLuhan—and through him Walter Ong—were deeply influenced by I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, which precedes Leavis’ New Criticism. (As Rob Pope notes in The English Studies Book, Richards was much more interested in describing reactions to literature than professing judgments of value as Leavis and his predecessors, and Richards was also much more interested in a text’s rhetorical effects (84-85). Ong used to say that McLuhan brought with him to Saint Louis University the New Criticism of Cambridge and their Richardsonian focus on analysis as description of effect is a unifying methodology through much of their work. The Mechanical Bride is an excellent example of this approach.4 It’s my sense that far too few people are aware of the Richardsonian underpinnings to Ong and McLuhan’s methodology.
While I’m still ruminating on Kevin’s seven scene structure, I’m contrasting it with the structure I present as I teach the book. My found structure is as follows:
- Introduction, pp. 1-41, that is the “Good Morning” page which has the egg on the plate through the page which explains that by altering the environment, media “evoke in us unique rations of sense perceptions.” It is in this section that McLuhan presents his argument and teaches us how to read the book, which he does on page 10 and to a lesser extent pp. 8-9. In the context of the transition that follows, we can call this section the “sentence.”
- Transition, pp. 42-43. The paraphrase of the trial scene from Alice in Wonderland. The focus here is the question of whether evidence should come before the sentence or the sentence before the evidence.5 (I discuss the importance of this transition below.)
- Evidence, pp. 44-151, in which McLuhan both supports and elaborates on his argument.
- Transition, pp. 152-55. Here again McLuhan and Fiore return to Alice, framed by the crowd portrait with numbers instead of faces. Here we find the caterpillar asking Alice who she is and with her responding that she isn’t sure, having gone through several transformations since she got up that morning. This itself invokes page 1 of the book with it’s “Good Morning!” and egg on a plate. This use of Alice’s Adventures here is intended to signify our new awareness of the effects of media and how they change “practically every thought, every action, and every institution taken for granted” (8).
- Conclusion, pp. 156-60. This section begins with a The New Yorker cartoon of a son explaining McLuhan to his father, takes us through the photo credits, and ends with a final A. N. Whitehead quote, “The business of the future is to be dangerous;” a final reminder that we must be willing to contemplate what is happening if we, like Poe’s mariner, are to successfully navigate our environment.6
I probably spend too much time on the transition of pp. 42-43, but I find it’s debate over the order of presenting the evidence and sentence (judgment) as a discussion over when we present a thesis and when we present the supporting evidence. The evidence then sentence model of Angl0-American trials, which is premised on the idea of innocent until proven guilty, is a hold over from Anglo-Saxon legal practices, that is from an oral/oral-literate transitional culture. We also find this structure in scribal culture and early print culture.7 As we interiorized the ideology of print, our evidence the sentence model reversed itself to give us our present structure in writing, including the structure of McLuhan’s book which presents the sentence (thesis) and then supports that sentence with evidence.8 That McLuhan and Fiore use the trial scene from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is critical to understanding the function of the break. Having just given us his sentence and just about to give us his evidence—which begins with Western culture’s transition from the oral to the phonetic—McLuhan and Fiore foreground for us that even the conventions of reading a printed book are predicated upon the medium itself.
- CCC 61.1 (September 2009): W217-37. [↩]
- Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing an Art Form; and and Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels [↩]
- See pp. W225-27 for a fuller explanation of Kevin’s reasons for dividing the book up as he does. [↩]
- Ong, by the way, was one of three people to review The Mechanical Bride. (See item 67 in Thomas Walsh’s Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006 for the full bibliographic record of Ong’s review.) [↩]
- The text and the picture of Alice and the Queen of Hearts used on pp. 42-43 actually come from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original mss. from which is derived Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (( See the Project Gutenberg HTML version, pp. 88-89. [↩]
- I could just as easily posit the start of the conclusion at page 150 as does Kevin, and have indeed done so with some past classes, I can’t ignore the return to Alice and Wonderland and its position right before The New Yorker cartoon. As I place so much emphasis on the importance of first transition, I need to think of this as a transition as well. And, of course, transitions are medial spaces, verges that resist being one or the other. [↩]
- I ask students to think here of Thomas Aquinas—their Jesuit education comes in handy!—and I give a mini-lecture of Montaigne and the origins of the essay, doubly relevant as Montaigne is quoted in The Medium is the Massage and understanding the origins of the essay as exploration through writing helps foreground the idea of writing to learn. Also important is the fact that McLuhan gives us a means of understanding why “the essay” has gone from an exploration through writing to a demonstration of mastery through writing. [↩]
- Note that print culture’s reversal of evidence and sentence is predicted in McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects. The hot medium of print reverses the order in which evidence and sentence are presented. [↩]
Dr. Thomas Walsh
My discussion of E. O. Wilson and Walter Ong reminded me that I’ve neglected this post for far too long. On 19 October 2009, Dr. Thomas Walsh died. He was an Associate Professor at Saint Louis University and the compiler of the definitive bibliography of Walter J. Ong’s works. Both a former student and close friend of Ong, Dr. Walsh was also a mentor and friend to me. Dr. Walsh shared with me an interest in the arts of memory (with Dr. Thomas Zlatic, he published “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” which won the 1981 Norman Foerster Prize for the best article published in American Literature and had returned to studying renaissance memory) and provided a wealth of information about Fr. Ong as I worked on the collection.
He was a careful and deliberate scholar who spent most of his career teaching for the Saint Louis University Parks College of Engineering, Aviation, and Technology, which meant that most of his career was spent teaching in a trimester system with 4 courses/term at the Cahokia, IL campus. With the merging of Parks College and its faculty into SLU proper, Dr. Walsh returned to research, gained Graduate Faculty status, and was working on a number of projects involving renaissance memory, renaissance rhetoric and literature, and Ong’s work on Milton. (I pulled everything I could find in the Ong collection relating to Milton for Dr. Walsh to work with during a recent semester-long sabbatical.) I’ll note here, now that he is no longer with us, that Fr. Ong had asked Dr. Walsh to work on an update of the Ramus and Talon Inventory, the companion volume to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, a testament to the kind of scholar Ong believed Dr. Walsh to be. And witnessing first hand the care and rigor Dr. Walsh approached the Ong Bibliography, I understand why Fr. Ong believed Dr. Walsh was up for the task of updating the Inventory.
He was far too young and his death came as a surprise. While losing a dissertation committee member is hard enough, I have lost a friend and I don’t think he knew just how much he meant to me.
New Journal: The Evolutionary Review
Making the rounds in twitter is a link to a new journal, The Evolutionary Review, with comments calling the concept cool but questioning starting a new print journal. As a member of the editorial board of a born-digital journal some 14-years old, I can understand the sentiment. For me, the print vs. digital debate for new journals is far overshadowed by the concept and focus, which is described as such:
An annual publication that uniquely and forcefully elucidates the intersections of evolutionary science, the humanities, arts, and popular culture.
The Evolutionary Review offers a forum for evolutionary critiques in all the fields of the arts, human sciences, and culture: essays and reviews on film, fiction, theater, visual art, music, dance, and popular culture; essays and reviews of books, articles, and theories related to evolution and evolutionary psychology; and essays and reviews on science, society, and the environment. Essays in The Evolutionary Review implicitly affirm E. O. Wilson’s vision of “consilience,” that is, the unity of knowledge. They also give evidence that an evolutionary perspective can yield a richer, more complete understanding of the world and ourselves.
The idea of an interdisciplinary journal of this kind is exciting in and of itself, but what caught my attention is that the journal is meant to “affirm E. O. Wilson’s vision of ‘consilience’.” E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was a key text for what became Ong’s Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness and related works. Thomas Farrell, rightly, identifies Fighting for Life as a sociobiological work as E. O. Wilson himself defined the field “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior” (Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies, 169) while Ong himself identified the text as noobiology, “the study of the biological setting of mental activity” (Fighting for Life, 11).
Fr. Ong, I’ve been told by the late Dr. Thomas Walsh, former graduate student, SLU colleague, and close friend of Ong, that Ong was fascinated by Wilson’s Sociobiology when it came out in the mid-70s and spent much time studying it and talking about it. (I want to say that the Ong’s copy is heavily marked up, but I can’t check to confirm this. The book is, however, part of the Ong Collection. I do remember that.) I don’t think most people in the humanities realized that Ong consciously understood himself bridging the gap between the humanities and biology. In a letter to Thomas Farrell, I want to say written during the time Farrell was working on his book on Ong, Ong wrote the following, which I blogged about early on during my work with the collection: “I’ve always been a biologist at heart, in study and hobbies.” Likewise, as I reported in my M/MLA 2004 presentation “The Walter J. Ong Archive: A Preliminary Report” the Ong collection includes a number of sketches of flora and fauna and some field notes listing the flora and fauna he observed in some places he visited.
Consilience is an idea that both Wilson and Ong share, and it’s a vision of knowledge our world needs.
Aviary Tools
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this suite of browser-based creative tools. From their intro:
Aviary Tools
Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. We’re on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing. Sign up for an account today to start creating, sharing, and collaborating with our community of artists.
I’ve found that some students are hesitant to download free, open source programs like GIMP and Audacity. Since the image editor, Phoenix, allows one to work in layers, and the audio editor, Myna, can mix multiple tracks, this might be a useful alternative.
3 McLuhan Videos
The first is “The Medium is the Message” from the Canadian Heritage Minute series:
and the other two are mashups by John Zimmerman:
“The Medium is the Message”
“The Medium is the Message: Extensions”
