Desiderata Stories: The Round Room

The Round Room

                There wasn’t as much junk laying around as you might expect from a school full of hippies, but one piece of flotsam that stayed in place was an old wooden railroad spool, big enough to serve as a tool shed. We built a ledge around the inside on which served as a bench. You could sit there and smoke without anyone seeing you.  We called it “The Round Room.” One day three or four of us were sitting inside the darkened cylinder, passing a joint, when Bob looked down at the floor and said, “Look! Do you see that? Sky and clouds on the floor?

At first, we laughed, thinking Bob was shitting us. But I saw it too, a blue tinge on the floor and beige clouds moving in the wind. Bob then pointed to a small hole in the otherwise darkened Round Room.

                “We’re inside a giant Pin-hole camera!” he said, smiling (a smile in the mail or a smarmy slug?) and passing the joint. “Everyone block the light from any holes besides that one.”

                We put our hands or back over the other light leaks. The entire outside panorama become colorfully clear, projected upside down and backwards on the walls of the Round Room, as if the world had been turned outside in by the light squeezing through the pinhole. As our eyes became adjusted to the dark, we could see people moving around outside.

                Jaime said, “Look there’s Greg, walking upside down. He has no idea we can see him.”

                Ross said, “This is ideal man. We can smoke in here and see anyone who might be approaching from any angle.”

                A couple of our teachers took our discovery as an opportunity to teach us about the early uses of the camera obscura and the invention of photography. We learned that each point in the scene emits light and because all of the points do that at the same time and in straight lines, the entire scene is projected on the inside of the giant camera. Previously when an “uncool visitor” came to Desiderata (“Desid”) we put all the garden tools in the Round room and called it the tool shed. Now we could call it our Giant Pin-Hole camera that smelled like pot smoke.

     Using the pin-hole camera as an early warning system didn’t quite work, since if an authority figure was spotted our choices were to put out the joint and pretend to be just sitting there, maybe smoking cigarettes, or to just exit the Round Room and let the open door condemn us with a puff of sweet smoke. But luckily, we were seldom visited by authority figures. A notable exception was the day the FBI stopped by looking for a drifter who had dated Squeaky Fromme. No one was in the Round Room at the time. Stay tuned for that story.

Transformation of Stories/Use-Value and Genre

One way of looking at the evolution of anonymous stories is to trace their transformations. Here are the four major kinds of transformation I will be looking at:

Transformation of stories when they travel from:

1.one genre to another in the same period and the same culture (e.g. history to literature);

2. one culture and language to another (e.g. Latin to vernacular, Old French to Middle English, Sanskrit to Arabic, Arabic to English);

3. one period to another (e.g. pre-literacy and literacy, pre-modern and modern, before and after copyright law);

4. one medium to another (e.g. oral to written,  literature to film.)

What can narrative transformation tell us about the function of ‘tradition’ in the ways texts, literary or otherwise are shaped?

Why are the seemingly same stories re-told in a variety of ways?

Genres are unstable because they are produced intertextually; they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places where genres "collide" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology and the use-value of language. 

Here are some of my questions using ideas from Genre Studies:

Which cultures and periods have been the most "genre-sensitive" or "genre demanding?"

Might use-value be a better way of defining genres than critical or popular labels? (However, to find and in particular to express the exact use-value of genres is not always such an easy matter.)

In what ways may the changes be attributed to genre ideologies, and what are the other causal factors?

Can genre ideologies explain the formations of literary or other canons and traditions?

What can these genre ideologies tell us about the culture, genre or medium that produced the story?

Mimesis in the Public Domain

Literary works with multiple oral and textual sources such as such as the Bible, the ancient epics of Greece and India, The 1001 Nights, or The Lancelot/Grail Cycle, create dense and fluid textual networks that survive and grow over time. Most of these works were either orally or collectively composed and remained multiform even after they became texts. For the past decade or so I have been working toward an informed grasp of the similarities and differences between these Anonymous Masterpieces and their widespread influence. Why have they branched out and flourished for so long? Is it because of innate characteristics that transcend cultural barriers and remote origins? The study will trace the history of the concept of authorship as it evolves from ascribing voice and identity to ownership of intellectual property. If I ever finish the resulting project, the book will be a response to Auerbach’s Mimesis  using heuristics adapted from studies of cultural evolution. I will have a section on what are in the West lesser known epics and collections of stories from Native American, African, Indo-European, Middle-Eastern and Asian languages. So, it will be a sweeping but detailed, simplified but learned, and scholarly but entertaining, big old-fashioned book. The only polemics are arguments for the importance of the Public Domain and for reading the biggest stuff first.

Strange experience, not supernatural

I picked up a sheet of paper off the floor. When I stood up I was more than a little light headed. I couldn’t figure out what was printed on the sheet. I looked for a heading and couldn't focus.  I wondered if I might be dreaming, because I can never read very well in dreams.  I forced myself to keep looking at it.  It was some sort of list. I picked up on a couple of names that sounded like they might be archetypes from mythologies I was unfamiliar with. I might have printed this out from something like Propp’s Morphology of Folk Tales….or …..then I realized: IT WAS THE RACING FORM. I just don't see them often. I printed this out the one day we went to Santa Anita, and we didn't even wager. This was a trap I set for myself. Time to start getting up slower.

A thought-and-a-half on knowledge and originality from the Quixote.

"There are some people who wear themselves out learning and discovering things that, once learned and discovered, don't matter one bit for our comprehension and retention."- Don Quixote, Vol 2 Ch. 22

This is an interesting moment in the Quixote. They are talking to a pseudo-scholar who is compiling a book of "who did what first." This college graduate is referred to as the cousin (primo) of a scholar they met earlier. Primo, of course, also means first! Sancho makes fun of the fake humanist and asks him who was the first man to scratch his nose, and tells him, "it must have been out father Adam." Then Sancho stumps the pedant by asking him "Who was the first acrobat?" Why, Lucifer, of course. Most Cervantes scholars think this is a sardonic interpretation of the decadence inherent to the compilation of data for its own sake, an accumulation that is then allowed to pass for erudition. But I think this chapter is really about originality. The scholar's knowledge of firsts is not only useless but mere compilation. Sancho's questions and answers are creative and original compared to those of the scholar, and of course, the squire's examples are closer to the original creation! Cervantes is also critiquing the use of "formulas" for composition, such as those used by his arch-rival Lope de Vega. If nothing else, the Quixote is unpredictably original.