Between chance and repetition: Lesson 6

Lesson 6. Memory and Chance

Otto Zitko, from "Polyne," http://www.michaelwoolworth.com/artists/otto-zitko

A. The Chance Notebook

1. For this section, the assigned project will be a Chance Notebook. The idea is to jot down the words people say wherever they are, as the words come within earshot, without any attempt to edit or suppress anything as far as possible. You must pretend to be a pure passive recording machine.

Go to a mall or any crowded place, like the cafeteria. You can include other sounds, known or unknown, human or nonhuman. A page is enough but two pages is also okay. You may also use the technique of concrete typography if you feel like it.

2. "Chance Reading Session." Read an excerpt of your Chance Notebook in class.

3. Next, rewrite your Chance Notebook into a vignette, or a very short piece in ''conventional'' prose narrating or describing the auditory "events" that you recorded . 

4. Which between the two is more realistic for you? Why or why not?

5. Do you agree that reality follows the order of Simultaneity while language follows Sequentiality? Like the contrast below between the linear order of stairs and the nonlinear nature of Zitko's graphism?

From https://www.pinterest.com/godelieftielens/otto-zitko/

B. The relationship between Memory and Writing

For this section, watch the YouTube trailers for "Memento" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Ioza-LfSk and "5O First Dates" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io8DlI1xaKI (where Lucy watches the video made for her to remember).

Next, watch Jonathan Nolan's discussion of the plot structure of "Memento." The YouTube interview with Nolan is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYScJZWhaHA. For further reading, you can check out the Wikipedia page about the film at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film).

C. Discussion questions

1. What do you think is the relationship between an event and our memory of it as reconstructed in writing? Is our memory as expressed in any storage medium like writing reproduced faithfully, or is there a certain fictionality involved?

2. When you rewrote the "events" in your Chance Notebook into a vignette, what did you add, what did you take out? Why?

3. What are the parallels between what you did with your Chance Notebook entries and the writing of News or Journalism? How much is fiction, how much is truth?

4. Are the words and expressions you used to reconstruct the event properly yours? What is the role of culture in your reconstructed version? Who speaks, then, your Culture or you (or the Google search results you found)?

5. Are memory and language internal or external, or both?