A Summation

First: rock, pen, bunny, moon, seashell

I have found these blogs to be helpful with my learning this semester.  I have always thought that the goal of college courses was not necessarily to learn rote lists of things but to develop my skills as a writer, reader, and thinker.  With this in mind, I have definitely improved my understanding of how my memory works although I should mention that this course also hints to new questions. 

I liked examining the different memory devices of Camillo, Bruno, Lull and Fludd, but I think their attempts to aid in remembering fall well short of their goals.  I would say that Camillo and later Fludd seem to have hit a chord with me being that their devices were based on individual interpretation of an environment.  I kept these designs in mind in choosing the Haufbrau for my musey-room, and I truly believe that knowledge of a physical space is just as important in shaping memories as mental space. But, what I hope to explain in my presentation is that there are fixed items to call memories in the physical space as well as moveable parts which would be the people who come and go from the physical space.  This allows for unlimited combinations of loci to store different information without putting all the emphasis on the memory on one specific item. 

I also liked the Ong text because it alowed me to draw conclusions from various articles of literary theory in terms of memory.  I took Lit 300 a few semesters ago, and I found it very interesting how Ong drew in the work of Derrida and the symbology of language.  My interpretation of this analysis lends not to individual symbols but the interaction between multiple pre-existing mental images and symbols for actual items.  While I like the image of the chinese boxes or russian dolls, I believe mental symbology exists in my mind more like a cooler door at the hauf plastered with bumper stickers.  All the information exists on one planar surface, and each piece is connected to every other piece through a series of movements around and through the other pieces.

I was very impressed with all the presentations this semester, and I think everyone should be commended on the success they exhibited in terms of their ability to remember a lot of information.  I liked how many of the musey-room presentations displayed not only reflections of actual places but drew inspiration from imagined sources.