Making Memories Rather than Having Them

When Sexson was talking about how sometimes people can make up memories that don't actually exist it reminded me of a paper that I wrote for another class...It was a response to this paper by DM Murray titled "All Writing is Autobiography." (for reference pg. 207)

Here is a picture of the late Donald M. Murray

I was just going to attach, but I guess I cant...so I will simply copy and paste it.

William Meznarich
ENG 326
Prof. Downs
November 10, 2008

Thought 11: The Place of Stories in Reality

Sorry this took me a little longer to write than most of the other Thought Pieces. I really honestly had the paper more or less planned out when I took off for class at 3 PM, and after I spent around fifteen minutes listening to everyone’s responses to Murray’s article, I realized that everyone had read this article in an entirely different way than I had. It flabbergasted (good word) so much that I had to come home and rethink the entire project and after an hour and it being Friday, well I’ll just leave it to the imagination of how I got distracted until now. Regardless, I will here and now address that issue that so distracted my thoughts, while everyone else was concerned with autobiography and that everything written is based on our experience and or is a direct bi-product of our experience, I was more interested in Murray’s idea that anything written becomes a part of our lives, our memories, and most especially our autobiography. I will take an example from Murray to help explain my point.
It is true that the boy, myself, skated on thin ice and that he skated at Sailor’s Home Pond in Quincy, Massachusetts, although the thin ice may not have been on that pond. He did not, however, see a fish in the ice until I wrote the poem, although he was obsessed with the eyes of the fish, haddock and cod, that followed him when he went to Titus’s fish store in Wollaston. Readers believe that Alex is my brother, although I was an only child. There was no Alex; no one I knew had drowned by falling through the ice until I received the poem; I did not, after loving, stare up to see him skating above me until after I wrote the poem, I do now. The poem that was for a few seconds imaginary has become autobiographical by being written (Murray 70, emphasis added).

Now while the rest of the class was discussing how the trip to the fish store lead to writing a poem about seeing frozen fish in a stream, I was intrigued by Murray’s phrases explaining how he understands the images as they stand now. As he explains in the last sentence, what was once something that was contained in his imagination takes on real life and existence when he writes about it. It is something that I have came across before, in fact all the time, and like Murray all the authors seem to point it out implicitly and not explicitly. After writing this poem, all the images in Murray’s imagination have become real to him, in the very same way that the images are real to a reader, because they exist in reality, in this sense on the page in front of the reader. Stories have an interesting way of being turned into truth, just think of myth#, and how after so many time telling and retelling a story (and in conjunction hearing and rehearing a story) a story becomes real. Many of these myths took place before the advent of writing, allowing the stories to be rewritten and reheard with ease, but even after these stories are scribbled down, they still exert a power of reality even in somewhat stagnant form. The paper itself provides the writing with authority, or at the very least as something of importance, because someone took the time to record it.
Back to what I was saying before, I have also had this experience of imaging something that eventually became very real to me, as have probably any person who considers himself a good storyteller. I have been lucky enough to hone some of my skills to the stage of stand-up comedy, of which I have performed infrequently over the past two years. In my routines, much of my material is based on what I experience in the real world, however, that information is molded by me to accentuate what is funny about what I am talking about. This is a purposeful act; it goes without saying that not everything told in chronological order ends up producing guffaws, but with a little rewriting just about everything can be turned on its head for laughter’s sake. But the problem is that eventually, that made-up story is how I remember the event; eventually, I cannot discern what really happened versus what I made up to make it funnier. And it gets more complicated, sometimes I allow stories I tell people to be fabricated, sometimes parts and sometimes entire stories, making up events and situations in my life that never really exist for no other reason than entertainment. At first, this concerned me greatly, the thought of becoming a fraud or a liar even if just for entertainment’s sake scared me. I was convinced that I would lose the respect of my friends if they knew that a great portion of what I said was not reality. But that is when I made the connection, how fabrication and false reality are a total part of how the world really works. We do not differentiate what is reality and what is said as reality well, and in effect everything is reality (our classes point) because everything we think is based on the experiences we have had throughout our lives. Not only is all fiction, but to an extent, all speaking word is fabricated one way or another to make one point and reversed to make another point. If my goal is to make people laugh then the story will be different then if my goal is to provide a truthful account, like a police report (hopefully this example never comes to happen!). However, since language can only relate information and not reproduce an event as it happens and our memory is absolutely faulty in its attempt to recreate events in our lives exactly how they happened, it is fair to say that all writing and even all spoken word is in some way a fabrication or a rewriting, spoken only because its speaker has a purpose.
With this in mind, I know exactly what Murray means when he says that it is possible that all reading is autobiographical, and it parallels nicely to my research paper. Readers see different things in the same text because like writers readers have intentions and expectations when they read which lead to lead their discovery and interpretation. For a long time (and still today unfortunately), the goal of reading has been to discover what the author meant, and this can’t entirely be blamed on readers’ ignorance because think of language and its purpose, that is to convey meaning from one person to another. When someone says, “I’m going to the gas station. Do you want anything?” the meaning is clear; the purpose of the listener is uncover that clear meaning and respond, a person saying something like “Oh, just because I’m a woman you think I can’t get anything for myself? That I need help?” This is an example of that break of meaning and how language can sometimes fail us. What we thought was something that had clear meaning, can be reinterpretated by the listener to mean something else, while the original meaning is still left intact. This second interpretation is something guided by our values and what we are looking to discover, and is very much like my point in the beginning of how I can see something that no one else appears to see. I, like my made up feminist, am reading according to my values. Now remembering my reading and taking it with me, is how reading becomes autobiographical. How I can remember events and stories told to me by other people is how reading can become autobiographical. Language and learning even is itself autobiographical, which leads to Murray’s main point that writing is autobiographical, for what am I doing now? Isn’t what I’m saying here now a part of my life and my history?

attempt at the conversion

At first I wasn't sure if I wanted to undertake this...assignment may I say, but as I was walking back home I couldn't get the idea out of my head.

I remember when I read Ulysses, it was difficult and sifting through all of the information proved to be more of an arduous intellectual task than any other book I had picked up. I thought the same thing...as the anti-joycian, not because she doesn't deserve a name but simply because I have not learned it yet and I do not wish to offend her. Like her, I was a bit confused why someone would want to write about such seemingly trivial things...like going to the market to buy something for breakfast. You could easily ask the same question as to why we as a class have to remember about "the cooler" or "how beaugoin means beautiful eyes?" or "when Jon Nay's 21st birthday party is?" Trivial facts...seemingly no purpose, right? But this seems to be Sexson's purpose.

I remember why I read Ulysses for the first time. It's a simple reason. I came to the conclusion that I was interested in pursuing a doctorate in English Literature somewhere, so after hearing Sexson's speech about Ulysses in a classical literature class about Bloomsday and the trek people make...to celebrate a book, and to celebrate the life of a fictional character on an ordinary day.

Anyone who has been an English major for any amount of time have been at least once asked about the triviality of the degree; something along the lines of "I heard you got your English Literature degree...I hope your parents are proud of your overated book club membership."
Is it? Is it just a degree for people who enjoy reading...stories!?!

If you have been long enough in the major (and have been paying attention) you are provided an answer to this question, which goes something like, "English Literature as a member of the Humanities, is a study of the human condition through the lense of literature, texts, oral traditions...etc."

To me this assessment (or defense) makes sense and it makes sense in the same way that I see value in a 800+ page Joyce novel about a single day in an ordinary man's life. Joyce cannot simply write "and then Bloom went to the store to buy his wife Molly breakfast" but must write about what REALLY happened...for it is true that life is not as simple as some stories and sentences can be. Bloom saw things, heard things, thought things, felt things, and experienced his world in a way much closer to reality.

I will give an excerpt now (feel free to read past if you already agree with me):

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawaywaywaywaywayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's letter. Here. Thanking you for hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape inelectable, call it back. Endless, would it be mind, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now. Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more (Joyce 48).


To Joyce there is value in the ordinary, in the trivial, that to him, Bloom going to the marketplace holds as much value as Dante's trip into the Inferno. And because of the canonization of Ulysses, we are all forced to agree with him!
By connecting Bloom's day to that of Homer's Odyssey, we are forced to see them in the same light, that a random man's ordinary day is of as much importance as one of the foundational works of Western Literature. In association then our ordinary days are just as beautiful and memorable as Bloom's. His point (one of many) is that there is art and beauty in everyone of our days...we are just not trained to see it or appreciate it. We study literature for the same reason that Sexson has us memorize seemingly trivial things...to get at the greater beauty and knowledge contained in the REAL world...the same way that Joyce and Proust and all artists understood it. The problem is that we can't look at the real world but only "trivial" reproductions of it...like Bloom's day, or was the cooler cleaned out!

me working out ONG 35

It's just something that jumped out at me...something that I've looked over in studying these wisdom statements.

"Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them."

To literate society, these are just wisdom statements with some sort of logic possessed within them. However, nowadays nobody would say that a person who has a great memory of these statements would be wise...nowadays if someone were to say to me something proverbial like say I come in late to this 9 am class and say, "Aww, my back is killing me! I was up till 3 last night." and someone responds saying,

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

I'm not 100% sure how I would respond...it's possible that I might just give him an incredulous stare....I imagine I could come up with a response eventually, but it would probably just be "ummm, yeah" or something to that effect.

However surprising it may be that these proverbs were knowledge to people in the world today, it makes sense to a pre-literate society. Just like we were talking about in class, if you can't write something down then you have to remember it, and of course the best way to remember it is to make it formulaic, as in rhyming or in verse.
Can you imagine the first shift, that is from the oral culture with knowledge contained in formulaic sayings to a literate culture where knowledge can be saved in writing and not necessarily simply remembered?

It's actually easy to imagine since we have many proverbs from the previous oral culture with us here today, such as the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, and new proverbs are being invented all the time throughout human history, such as Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richards Almanack, where the above proverb was taken.

The interesting thing to think of is that people at one time actually read these collected sayings to GAIN knowledge. It doesn't seem like knowledge at all, because we are so immersed in literacy...I guess that's why I looked over it.

my first memory--money in the crib

so my first memory is a bit unusual...when I was in the 3rd or 4th grade I was asked to answer this same question...and when I thought and thought for most of the day trying to recall (and recall chronologically) so after awhile I started looking at pictures of me when I was very young. And one picture that I looked at caused me to recall the memory of the event. It was a picture of me, in a crib, holding a bunch of money. The only problem (not realized as a problem by me) was that I was only 11 months old.
I remember the scene, everything was fuzzy and lacked form. I was on my back and the sun was shining in from the window closest to my left foot and it was blurred into the brown rails of my crib; the money in my hands did not have its usual form but instead just looked like a green blob. It wasn't really a scene, but more of a picture that I remember...

The problem was that my teacher didn't believe me, she told me that it was impossible for me to remember that. The only reason I didn't take her word for it was because of the memory I had of the sun shining in. It was such a ordinary detail in the picture...the fact that the sun was shining in on me...that I highly doubt that I could have even recognized it in the picture to imagine it. And to add to that, I wasn't trying to make anything up in the first place anyways...I looked at a multitude of pictures from before that and my memory did not recall anything.
Regardless, I came up with another memory for the class project; me watching my dad watch football and me mimicking his reactions. It worked for the assignment, but I always thought that that first memory was genuine

Stand up poets?

As I was reading Chapter 2 in Ong's Orality and Literacy, I realized that there was significant resemblances of the rules and properties of oral poetry to common day stand up comedy. I will explain by using examples that seemed obvious to me when I was reading last night.

"Poets...were not expected to use prefabricated material. If a poet did echo bits of earlier poems, he was expected to modulate this into his own 'kind of thing'" (Ong, 21).

"Only beginners or permanently poor poets used prefabricated stuff" (Ong, 22).

If one simply replaces the word poet with stand up comedian and the word poems into material or more specifically other comedians material, it is easy to see the similarities that first struck me. As a general rule in the stand-up community, it is very much discouraged to use another comedian's material. Offenders are known as hacks, and are often black-balled by the entire community. see these links for some examples of this in real life:


Dane Cook accused of stealing jokes:
(note: I know alot of people who are fans of Dane Cook...I'm not trying to go after him or anything. But it is true that of the many stand-up comedians I have talked to ALL of them consider him a hack)

Carlos Mencia accused by Joe Rogan:
Basically Joe Rogan calls out Mencia for being a fraud (i.e. he's not really mexican, he's actually from Honduras, his name is not Carlos but Paul I think anyways, and he stole jokes and the comedian he stole them from confronts him)


However one argument that is easily made by comedians accused of stealing material is the commonality of what's funny. For example think about relationships between men of women...like married people don't have sex or are miserable. The argument is that comedians generally can notice the same things as funny in society but they go after it in different ways. Thus comedians are drawing awareness to the same thing but doing their "own kind of thing" as Ong is talking about.

Like the oral poets, a stand-up comedian's bit is based on a formulaic system that is memorized and is also made on the fly depending on the response of the audience. Also, pieces are altered, added, or deleted based on what the comedian guesses will work (that is make people laugh and not be pissed...for example not the best idea to make fun of Butte in Butte, but GREAT idea in Bozeman or anywhere else in Montana).
Thus often every performance of a stand up routine will be different every time, but also very very similar because of the original memorized formula.

There is however a difference between a stand-up performance and a blonde joke or a chicken crossed the road joke or a knock-knock joke. These kind of jokes depend upon a strict (yet flexible) formulaic structure.

George Carlin writes in his book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

"A GENERIC JOKE: A person goes into a place and says something to another person. The second person says something back to the first person, who listens to that and then says something back to the second person. The thing he says back is really funny."



More or less, jokes depend upon this formulaic structure even to simply deviate from it. For example: many jokes can be explained in two ways, but not all, it would take too much thinking right now for me to uncover them all.

An event is presented, the listener is led to believe that a certain occurrence will happen, and another occurrence happens that the listener did not see coming and thus it is funny.

Two men are out golfing. Upon seeing a funeral procession in the distance, the man driving the golf cart stops, steps out, and removes his hat, while the other man watches in confusion. When the procession is finished and out of sight, the man puts back on his hat and gets in the cart and starts driving as if nothing had happened. The other man says "why did you do that?" The man says, "well I was married to her for 30 years, I figured it was the least I could do."

What's funny in the joke is that the listener did not see the conclusion coming and the irony of "the least you can do" is realized, as a man is literally doing about the least he can do when his wife dies.

This is interesting and I think I will try and get back to this later...

First day of class

try as I might I could not unearth what my last name means...and unfortunately I did not think finding out that meaning (if it exists because according to some of the sites I looked at some names don't mean squat!) was important enough for me to dive into that never-ending game of discovery and filing known as "genealogy."

My mom always tries to play that game with me...telling me what different ethnicities I am (German-French-Jewish--interesting combo). All in all, it doesn't really interest me. But I did want to find out what my last name means...I guess mainly just because it is such an important part of my identity. In an odd way, when you say "Meznarich" you mean me...in a sense anyways. And this name being so linked to me as a person, I suppose I simply wanted to understand where it came from, as if when I understood that it would lead to some sort of epiphany or at least provide an albeit weak explanation of me. I suppose I was taken up for a minute with the romantic notion that my name might mean something stoic or simply cool.
But unfortunately I couldn't find anything, and I think I'm okay with that.
I am an English major, so I'll just steal that maxim "what's in a name" and call this blog done.