Comments for Blue Collar Rocket Science

Comment on How can Digital Media Help the Bottom Billion? by Peggie

2009-10-02T18:37:18Z

I find your thesis to be well written and on track to true and viable assistance for a large quantity of the world {previously unknown of and /or unable to communicate quickly with the rest of the world} and we can all learn from each other and through trade make life better overall and maybe succeed at cleaning up our enviroment before it is to late.

Comment on Précis: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present by Brook Ellingwood

2009-09-17T16:05:32Z

Professor Davidson,

I’d be honored to read your paper. While I’ve been fascinated by these ideas since being exposed to them as an undergrad in the 1980’s by Charlie Teske at The Evergreen State College, I’ve applied them to my pursuit of a professional, rather than academic career. My current studies are likewise towards a professional Masters’ degree, but I was thrilled when the class I took last Winter gave me a chance to return to the rise of literacy and the way it shaped human thought. As we go through increasingly rapid introductions of new media forms, this understanding becomes less historic and more relevant to our future.

-Brook

Comment on Précis: The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present by Edith Davidson

2009-09-17T15:39:15Z

My book, “Intricacy, Design, and Cunning in the Book of Judges” by E. T. A. Davidson (Xlibris 2008) is a literary criticism of the 7th book of the Bible.

I have studied Judges for about 30 years and analyzed it to find all kinds of amazing things in this ancient anthology of short stories that no one before has ever noticed, so far as I know.

I finally concluded that it was originally created by storytellers before the age of writing and transmitted by storytellers over the centuries until finally it was frozen at a later time when put into writing.

Some of the (many) things that I discovered about its language are what Havelock also finds in the oral “literature” of Greece.

I had come across a sentence by Havelock in an article on film noir in PMLA (January 2008) and used it in an article I was writing last year. His sentence about the function of storytelling capsulated what I had learned in my many years of teaching world literature in colleges and universities-–works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Ovid, Beowulf, the Icelandic Sagas, Cervantes, Voltaire, etc. and also (very importantly) what I had learned from comedy and present-day storytellers. The sentence I quoted from Havelock iappears I n my unpublished paper, “Complexity and Design” (2008), in which I summarize the unique characteristics s of the style of the Book of Judges: My passage:

“Ancient stories were created in order to bring the community together, build team spirit and patriotism, foster a collective memory of the society’s values, and transmit these values from one generation to the next. In a preliterate era, writes classics professor Eric Havelock, ‘a collective social memory, tenacious and reliable, [was] an absolute social prerequisite for maintaining the apparatus of any civilization.’ Judges as we have it possibly represents the point at which the oral and the written forms intersected, the site where traditional storytelling finally developed into written art. What Israel needed was strong leadership, valiant warriors, and cooperative tribes. But it did not have them.”

As in oral literature, there is no prose treatise in Judges about morals and ethics, but only questions the stories raise about the behavior of the various men and women who jump into the fray to “save” Israel.

Yesterday, I read Havelock for the first time and was excited to learn that “The Muse Learns to Write” confirms many of my conclusions about a similar period of time in ancient Israel.

One reason why this is important to me is that I believe that Judges, which is many respects is fictional, is the first book of the so-called histories of the Bible which contains traces of actual history, and that this actual history is different from what most (perhaps all) other scholars thought it meant. I find these “traces” in what I call the archaeology of the language. Through my analyses, I was able to build up a picture of that society– an incomplete picture, to be sure, but nevertheless a picture. This language, like that of the Greek oral literature (as discussed by Havelock) ”shows;” but doesn’t “tell.” It doesn’t give us the prose explanation of what the stories mean. What the stories “mean” is something that might be discussed with the audience, after the performance was over–or much later in time by readers like me.

If you would like to read my paper, I would be glad to send it to you by email.

E. T. A. Davidson

Comment on CEOs and Tank Warfare by Suzanne

2009-08-19T00:22:52Z

This is exactly why I got laid off from my last job. An information-hoarding, control freak who didn’t understand many levels of the business was apparently too threatened by my bootlace and tin can solutions, and sacked me. And then left five months later. Jerk.

Comment on Senior Management and Washing Dishes by Suzanne

2009-08-19T00:16:27Z

Amen to that, brotha!

Comment on The Future of Social Networking Sites by Brook Ellingwood

2009-06-17T13:07:26Z

Update:

Yesterday MySpace announced it was laying off 30% of its employees.

How MySpace fell off the pace: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-myspace17-2009jun17,0,6726077.story