Learning
đ¤
I took my mnemonic wanderings in new directionsâpoetry and movementâwhile continuing my experiments with narrative. I finished listening to Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers, transcriptions of lectures by Marcel Jousse introducing his groundbreaking work from the 1930s on the orality of ancient Palestine. He revealed their culture to be based significantly on a ârhythmo-melodicâ style of speaking meant for creating and sustaining an oral tradition, which is an idea I want to look into for my own memory practices. So I picked up an encyclopedia of poetics to help me explore forms, along with some books of a evocative words and names to help me name landmarks and a dictionary of allusions for extra metaphor ideas.
Taking a queue from Anastasia Woolmer‘s comments quoted in Lynne Kellyâs Memory Craft, I began looking into various types of movement as a source for mnemonics, focusing on dance and sign language. On dance, I concluded I needed to familiarize myself more with the territory before I invested in reference books, but on sign language I concluded my long-standing search for an authoritative dictionary, choosing The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language, published by Gallaudet University, a leading institution in the deaf arena.
On the neighborhood narrative experiment, I had an image generator show me my characters and had Bing AI create a backstory for it, then asked some bots for five-act stories based on that before deciding itâd be easier to base the stories on the landmarks than to name the landmarks based on arbitrary stories.
For my PAO list, I asked ChatGPT to come up with actions, objects, and locations for my people, but although its ideas were on target, they were much more generic than I needed, so I’ll have to iterate on it.
Images
đ
I finished assembling a Windows background slideshow of a bunch of my liminal space photos from the past year. So now I can pretend I’m working in empty hallways and forgotten corners.
View this post on Instagram
Nature
đ§
The woods down the street had another surprise for me Mondayâthe lakeâs disturbingly low water level. In some places the lake was more like a trickle. I spent extra time looking around again.
View this post on Instagram
đŹ
Friday I spent a damp afternoon at work after a weather miscalculation on my lunchtime walk. Alas, the downpour wasn’t enough to fill up the local lakes.
View this post on Instagram
