297 project

Ok Compadres,

Here's some stuff I'm interested in for tonight:

1) Reality and Chance in the movie MAGNOLIA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAWDEsgMahQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sWJuQD0cL8&feature=related


2) How truth is stranger than fiction, and how that relates to Agee; how fiction, conversely, maybe the only way to truth?

see Sherlock Holmes:

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. … If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

“A Case of Identity”, Adventures of SH

3) Then see also Melville's Extracts (the front material to MOBY DICK)

http://pd.sparknotes.com/lit/mobydick/section2.html

4) And then we have the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description"

(paraphrased from Wikipedia, but good enough for our purposes)

Thick description

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In anthropology and other fields, a thick description of a human behaviour is one that explains not just the behaviour, but its context as well, such that the behaviour becomes meaningful to an outsider.

The term was used by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) to describe his own method of doing ethnography (Geertz 1973:5-6, 9-10). Since then, the term and the methodology it represents have gained currency in the social sciences and beyond. Today, "thick description" is used in a variety of fields, including the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism.

In Geertz's essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture", (Geertz 1973:3-30) he explains that he adopted the term from philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle pointed out that if someone winks at us without a context, we don't know what it means. It might mean the person is attracted to us, that they are trying to communicate secretly, that they understand what you mean, or anything. As the context changes, the meaning of the wink changes.

Geertz argues that all human behaviour is like this. He therefore distinguishes between a thin description, which (to extend our example) describes only the wink itself, and a thick description, which explains the context of the practices and discourse within a society. According to Geertz, the task of the anthropologist is to give thick descriptions.

*It seems to me, Thick Description is also the role of the Documentarian. Famous Men is perhaps a forerunner to Thick Description, as is the work of Zora Neale Hurston in MULES AND MEN, which is excerpted in your packets.

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As for the Documentary impulse, what about this?

Leviticus

Upanishads

THE SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST, TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES, BY VARIOUS ORIENTAL SCHOLARS, AND EDITED BY F. MAX MULLER.

Apart from the interest which the Sacred Books of all religions possess in the eyes of the theologian, and, more particularly, of the missionary, to whom an accurate knowledge of them is as indispensable as a knowledge of the enemy's country is to a general, these works have of late assumed a new importance, as viewed in the character of ancient historical documents. In every country where Sacred Books have been preserved, whether by oral tradition or by writing, they are the oldest records, and mark the beginning of what may be called documentary, in opposition to purely traditional, history.

There is nothing more ancient in India than the Vedas; and, if we except the Vedas and the literature connected with them, there is again no literary work in India which, so far as we know at present, can with certainty be referred to an earlier date than that of the Sacred Canon of the Buddhists. Whatever age we may assign to the various portions of the Avesta and to their final arrangement, there is no book in the Persian language of greater antiquity than the Sacred Books of the followers of Zarathustra, nay, even than their translation in Pehlevi. There may have been an extensive ancient literature in China long before Khung-fû-ʓze and Lâo-ʓze, but among all that was rescued and preserved of it, the five King and the four Shû claim again the highest antiquity. As to the Koran, it is known to be the fountain-head both of the religion and of the literature of the Arabs.

This being the case, it was but natural that the attention of the historian should of late have been more strongly attracted by these Sacred Books, as likely to afford most valuable information, not only on the religion, but also on the moral sentiments, the social institutions, the legal maxims of some of the most important nations of antiquity. There are not many nations that have preserved sacred writings, and many of those that have been preserved have but lately become accessible to us in their original form, through the rapid advance of Oriental scholarship in Europe. Neither Greeks, nor Romans, nor Germans, nor Celts, nor Slaves have left us anything that deserves the name of Sacred Books.

(http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe01/sbe01003.htm)

let man mediate on the syllable "om"