About the Old Machina

While I've moved all my posts to the new Machina Memorialis site, I've decided to keep the old site up as an archive to keep links, both mine and others, from going dead. And in case you missed the first announcement or didn't get around to it, new Machina Memorialis posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina/. Please update links and readers accordingly. Thank you!

Machina Memorialis Has Moved

D'oh! I should have mentioned this a few days ago: While I have returned to blogging, I've moved to a new blog using WordPress. New posts can be found at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina.

Ong Orality-Literacy Contrasts Bibliographies

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've compiled both a long and short bibliography of Ong's publications on oral-written-print-electronic contrasts. In addition to the two versions, there's an introduction which offers some important qualifications. As the introduction explains, while extensive, the long bibliography is not comprehensive, and while highly selective, the short bibliography is not intended to be taken as a "best of" or "must read" list. My bibliographies are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

And speaking of Ong bibliographies, I heard a few days ago that Thomas Walsh's definitive Walter J. Ong Bibliography (put together using Ong's own files) is in the process of being put online. The bibliography, which contains has something like 430 entries (each entry includes full reprinting history for a total of some 1,200 items), has been marked up in XML for flexible searching. I'm not sure when it will go public, but I'll let you all know.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

Orality and Literacy | Walter J. Ong | Walter Ong

Ong Bibliographies

Back in February, I posted a complaint about an bibliography of the orality-literacy wars I found on Palimpsest. My complaint wasn't that the bibliography had been posted--I had a vague memory of someone asking if they could use it and, more importantly, it was attributed to me, but rather I was concerned that it was misidentified as an orality-literacy bibliography. I should have mentioned here earlier that the bibliography was properly labeled before I got around to asking that it be changed. This is way too late in coming, but I wanted to acknowledge this, if, for no other reason, I like the idea behind Palimpsest and want to support it.

I've had many requests for an orality-literacy bibliography over the past few years, and I got a number of them a few weeks ago while at C&W, so I'm putting one together. Rather than attempt a definitive orality-literacy bibliography, I'm focusing on Ong's work and it'll list readings which help contextualize and extend Orality and Literacy. It'll have three parts: a long version (about 40 items), a short version (about 16 items), and three suggested retrospectives. I'll pass it on to Palimpsest once it's done.

C&W and KY

I'm back from Computers and Writing. Well, I've been back for a week, but less than 100 minutes after my plane landed in St. Louis, Tracey and I were on the road to Kentucky for a Virtue and Vice themed vacation (we visited the Jim Beam and Maker's Mark distilleries and the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill).

The distilleries were cool. While Jim Beam doesn't do a tour of the distillery proper, they do have a cool set up. Maker's Mark's grounds are beautiful, and while they don't offer samples of their bourbon, they do let you taste it as it ferments (fermentation takes place over four days and they let you sample each day).

The Shaker Village is well worth visiting. Plan to spend at least a day and maybe more if you want to go on a number of area hikes, a river boat cruise, or participate in one of their workshops (they'd just done a dry stone construction rock wall workshop a few weeks before we visited). While we didn't stay overnight (there's something like 80 rooms and I've been told by a friend the accommodations are good), we did eat in the restaurant and the food is excellent.

I uploaded some of pictures from the trip to Flickr. The oddest thing we saw was an traveling Angus Beef exhibit, which consisted of a cargo truck (which had most of the exhibit, I'm assuming), and a pickup pulling a cow statue:

I'll post more on C&W in the next few days.

MLA Field Bibliography Fellowship

Back in Feb., I mentioned that I'd applied for one of the 2006-2009 MLA Field Bibliography Fellowships. MLA hasn't updated the website yet, but beginning July 1, I'll be one of the Field Bibliography Fellows! I don't yet know what journals I'll be covering, but my application listed the following interests: the history and theory of rhetoric; composition studies; medieval literature (particularly Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse); medievalism; orality-literacy studies and the media ecology of oral, chirographic, print, and digital cultures; digital English studies; science fiction; and fantasy. As I noted in my application letter, my interests are quite diverse. While the journals I'll eventually cover will depend upon what isn't already being indexed by a field bibliographer and what I have access to, I'd like to cover a mix of areas. I am planning on checking to see whether or not Kairos is being covered by a field bibliographer, and if it's open, I'm going to request it.

C&W 2006 @Get Info Blurb

While I don't have a fancy video or anything like that for @Get Info at Computers and Writing, I do have a little blurb. I intended to make a video last week, which would have been me saying something like what I've got below with various places in the archive as backdrop, but plans changed. My hope is that the subject itself will be enough of a draw...

@Get Info Blurb for “Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy”

In February of 1990, Ong wrote a letter to Harvard University Press regarding his most recent book project, entitled Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization.

Wait, I’m sure many of you are thinking, Ong wrote a book on digitization? Kind of. He wrote 40,000 of a projected 50,000 words, some of which did make it into print in such publications as “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I’.” And he wrote a number of other things on the topic that didn’t make it into print, such as the presentation “Secondary Oralism and Secondary Visualism,” and my favorite, the unpublished but brilliant article “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.”

And that’s what my presentation’s going to be about: the stuff that makes up Ong’s “digital turn.” While I’ve talked about what’s in the Ong Manuscript Collection before, this is my first presentation about what I’ve learned while working in the archive.

Session G.3, which is Saturday right after lunch.

computer and writing | C&W2006

C&W 2006 Handout (Select Bibliography)

I thought I'd post my bibliography handout, which goes with my Computers and Writing 2006 presentation "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy." There should be streaming video archives of a number of the presentations at http://richrice.com/cw/website. On it are a number of unpublished material found in the archives.

Select Bibliography for "Ong’s Digital Turn: Published and Unpublished Writings after Orality and Literacy"

“Kleine, Michael and Frederic Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Forum 7.2 (1996): 65-86.

Ong, Walter J. “A.M.D.G.: Dedication or Directive?” Review for Religious 11 (1952): 257-263. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 3: Further Essays, 1952-1990. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 1-8.

---. “The Church and Cosmic History.” American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 1-15.

---. “Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers.” Communication Research Trends 18.2 (1998): 4-21. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 527-49.

---. “Ecology and Some of Its Future.” Explorations in Media Ecology 1.1 (2002): 5-11.

---. "Evolution and Cyclicism in Our Time." Thought 34 (1959-60): 547-68. Rpt in revised form in Darwin's Vision and Christian Perspectives. Ed. by Walter J. Ong. New York: Macmillan, 1960. 125-48. Rpt. in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 61-82; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 2: Supplementary Studies, 1946-1989. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 85-103.

---. Forward to The Barefoot Expert: The Interface of Computerized Knowledge Systems and Indigenous Knowledge Systems. By Doris M. Schoenhoff. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. ix-xii.

---. Forward to Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. By Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. xiii-xiv.

---. “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I.’” Oral Tradition 10.1 (1995): 3-36. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 183-203.

---. “Information and/or Communication: Interactions.” Communication Research Trends 16.3 (1996): 3-16. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 217-38. Rpt. in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 505-25.

---. “Knowledge in Time.” Introduction to Knowledge and the Future of Man: An International Symposium. Ed. Walter J. Ong. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 3-38. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 1. Selected Essays and Studies, 1952-1991. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. 127-53.

---. "The Knowledge Explosion and the Sciences of Man." American Benedictine Review 15.1 (1964): 1-13. Rpt as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1967. 41-51. Rpt. as "The Knowledge Explosion in the Humanities" in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 55-68.

---. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Oralism to Online Thinking.” Explorations in Media Ecology 2.1 (2003): 43-4.

---. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

---. “Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

---. “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. "Secular Knowledge, Revealed Religion, and History." Religious Education 52.5 (1957): 341-49. Rpt as "Secular Knowledge and Revealed Religion" in American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillian Company, 1959. 74-95.

---. “Time, Digitization, and Dali’s Memory.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Voice, Text, Fundamentalism, Hermeneutic, and God’s Word: The Personal Grounding of Truth.” Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

---. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.

Swearingen, C. Jan. “On Photographic ‘Literacy’: An Interview with Walter J. Ong.” Exposure 23.4 (1985): 19-27.

Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive.

computer and writing | C&W2006 | digital culture | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Eurovision Upset: "Monsters" Of Rock Win

Eurovision? What?

Most of you, I'm guessing, don't follow the annual Eurovision Song Contest, Europe's battle of the bands. I don't either except for the little bit of coverage it gets on the BBC World News, but this year was different. While Eurovision is usually dominated by Europop so bad even Europeans make fun of it, this year's contest was swept away by the Finnish "monster metal" band Lordi and their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah." Even for me, a casual observer of Scandinavian metal, Lordi's invention of monster metal just makes sense. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done by a metal band before, Scandinavian or otherwise. It's a logical move blending the stage presence of KISS, Alice Cooper, and the like with the metal band monster mascot like Iron Maiden's Eddie.

And the song's not bad either as far as metal tributes to rock go. And it's much better than the usual Eurovision fare. Youtube.com, of course, already has a number of videos of the Eurovision performance:



BBC stories on Lordi's win:

Finnish monsters rock Eurovision

How horror rock conquered Europe

Finns shocked by Eurovision band

Link Roundup

The Scotsman has a short piece based on an interview with the Vatican's astronomer. The story has a very Ongian take on the intersection of science and religion: "Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer." Via Neil Gaiman.

Cow abductions. Watch the video on the front page. Via Lisa at The Truth Hurts.

Michael Drout's How Tradition Works: A Meme-based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century is now out. It's a must read book for me, but I'm not sure if it's going to be a read-for-dissertation book. It would have been a must-read for the old dissertation, and while it's something I should read now, the cut off point for new books has probably been passed.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education has published the report "Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences."

The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative is funding the NEW TIES project, which seeks to create a "computer society" of software agents capable of developing their own culture and language. Via CogNews.

I forgot to add:

University of Toronto Press has published Marcel O'Gorman's E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities, a book which I want to check out.

Matthew Driscoll of the Arnamagnæan Institute has an article in the new issue of Digital Medievalist that describes the new manuscript description module in TEI P5: "P5-MS: A General Purpose Tagset for Manuscript Description."

Ong at MLA 2006

MLA has accepted my panel "Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy at 25," which I hope will be the first of a series of 25th anniversary celebrations for the book. MLA's on board, C&W 2007 will likely be a go, so now it's up to CCCC. Steve may be right: 2007 just might be the year of Ong.

The MLA panel's three papers and presenters are:

"Orality, Literacy, and Ong's Asymmetrical Opposition" by Jerry Harp of Lewis and Clark College

"Orality and Literacy as a Methodological Apparatus for Examining Women's Rhetorics" by Melissa Fiesta of California State University, Long Beach

"Ong, Derrida, and the New Media Theory" by David Martyn of Macalester College

We'll be posting abstracts later this summer.

Cross posted to Notes From the Walter J. Ong Archive.

MLA | MLA2006 | Orality and Literacy | walter ong | Walter J Ong

Miscellanea

I meant to post this much earlier, but the time between returning from a celebratory dinner and discovering the theft of the Neon was about 8 hours. Any way, on May 2, Gina Merys defended her dissertation, "Teaching Freedom: The De-Colonized Classroom, Empowerment, and First Year Writing," and she was hooded yesterday. Dr. Merys joins Creighton University as an assistant professor later this summer.

I finished grading over the weekend and submitted grades on Sunday. For the most part, the final papers were good, and a number of them taught me something about the texts we read, which is always a great thing. All in all, a good class. I'll be posting a wrap up in the not too distant future.

We bought a new PT Cruiser on Tuesday because, as I mentioned yesterday, our Neon was stolen and totaled. While it means having a car payment, and, therefore, me having to pick up freelance work this summer to cover it, we wanted a new car rather than an used one. My mother-in-law loves brokering car deals, so we let her at it. She got us a better price than we were hoping for and other than the color, the car has everything we wanted. While we wanted black, we got magnesium, which was our second choice.

I need to need to reread Heaven's War. With the movie hype going around, I couldn't help but note some echoes of the Da Vinci Code, which isn't to say that Heaven's War has anything to do with the Da Vinci Code but rather that both stories draw from the Grail/Knights Templar/Merovingian mythologies covered in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I've not read either book, but I know good amount about both, so I was able to pick up Heaven's War's use of Holy Blood, Holy Grail well before I read the notes in the back of the book. I've been told by a number of people that I should read the Da Vinci Code at some point and I probably will. Even if it wasn't enjoyable, and I've been told by enough people that it is, it's medievalism and it's bringing students into medieval studies courses, and that's a good enough reason to put it on a "to read" list. Heaven's War itself focuses much more on Charles Williams than on Tolkien or Lewis, which I found disappointing, but I expected as much. The title, after all, is a nod to Williams' own grail story, The War in Heaven.

The backyard lawn, which we replanted last October is doing quite well. Too well, I think. It needs to be mowed more than once a week and it's so thick it jams up the lawn mower. With this new found lawn success, we're probably going to rent a roto-tiller again and tear up the front yard, which not only suffers from the hard-packed Missouri clay but a steep slope and too much shade. We're also thinking about turning the front yard slope into terraced flowerbeds. We've also got canna coming in and the hostas have grown in. We've filled our screened-in porch with flowers and other plants (including two basil plants), and we've also got a number of moonflower seedlings ready to transplant. I need to build a trellis to put up alongside the porch so we can enjoy the moonflowers when we sit out there in the evenings. I'm also supposed to build a number of bamboo border fences in the Yotsume style. The bamboo has even been ordered.

"No sign of theft"

Just over two weeks ago, our 1995 Neon was stolen, taken for a joyride, and, as is almost always the case in St. Louis, intentionally crashed before abandoned. The aftermath, for the most part, was one long nightmare. Before we could see our car, we had to once again talk to the police, who tried to get us to admit to crashing our car and fleeing the scene. That was a two hour nightmare in which the detective told us a number of lies, including that she had sent someone down to the impound lot to check our car and that there were no signs of theft. (When we finally got to see the car, we found the steering column exposed, the ignition lock busted up, and ignition lock fragments all over the floor of the car.) At some point, I called my dad, who is an attorney, a retired FBI agent, and a retired judge, and he told me how to push back. He also told me it would piss the detective off, but that she'd give us the paperwork to get our car. She got pissed off, but she did let us go shortly after. She wouldn't, however, ever give us a theft report number. I had to call back to ask for one and she told me there wasn't one. I then asked if she'd had someone look at the car because, contrary to what she'd told us earlier, there were clear signs of theft. She said someone would look into it, and called the next day to tell us that the car had been stolen. She then told my wife that the accident report would also serve as our theft report. When we picked it up five days later, it didn't. We've finally gotten it all resolved, but it took the intervention of the Crime Victims' Advocacy Association.

And here, for your enjoyment, are a few more pictures of the non-existent signs of theft: The ignition, in b&w:


A pulled back view. Note the small item on the floor mat above the black rectangle of rubber -- that's the biggest piece of the ignition lock. Apparently it's too small for a St. Louis Police officer to notice. But then, they assumed I've driven the car for the past three years with the steering column and ignition lock in the state you see above.

"Heaven's War": The Inklings Vs. Crowley

I don't remember where I learned about Heaven's War by Micah Harris and Michael Gaydos, but it was sometime in the last 6 months. I ordered it last week as a post-semester diversion. It's short, so it won't be that much of a distraction, and finishing up a semester of teaching science fiction (it's finals week), I can't rationalize reading something like the Quicksilver, the first novel in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which has been sitting on my shelf for a few years now. I could, probably, rationalize Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus or Tales of a Scottish Grandfather Vol. 1: From Bannockburn to Flodden: Wallace, Bruce and the Heroes of Medieval Scotland by Walter Scott (justified, even, as Scott engaging in the production of social memory). But, really, I just can't pass up this comic, which is described as such:

1938: As the world moves toward global war, a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind's fate. The infamous Aleister Crowley plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will.

Only "The Inklings"--20th century fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams--oppose his scheme. Their altercation with Crowley will take them to the very threshold of Heaven--and one of the Inklings outside time itself!

Lewis and Tolkien have long been favorite authors of mine, and I've enjoyed their scholarship as much as their fiction. And not only did I TA and then teach my own Tolkien course before the movies made it fashionable to do so, I team taught a class on the Inklings with T.A. Shippey a few years ago. Like I said, I can't pass this up.

It came much earlier than I expected, so now I've got to put it away until I've submitted grades.

And need I mention that I've got Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr. Crowley" going through my head?

Aleister Crowley | Charles Williams | comics | C.S. Lewis | graphic novel | Inklings | J.R.R. Tolkien

Resources on Electronic Scholarly Publishing

Via the Humanist Discussion Group:

• Version 62 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,680 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.


• The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.


• The Open Access Webliography (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.


• Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information: The page-specific "Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information" and the accompanying "Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography" (listing all indexed items) deal with all aspects of electronic publishing and include print and non-print materials, periodical articles, monographs and individual chapters in collected works. This edition includes 2,300 indexed titles. Both the Index and the Bibliography are continuously updated.

digital scholarship | electronic publishing | Open Access