Recordando a Cesar

Cesar Chavez (March 31, 1927 -- April 23, 1993)

"Rhetoric, and Memory/History/Critique"

(Image from the Jane Campion film "The Piano")

The following is the reading list for John Louis Lucaites seminar course in rhetorical criticism titled "Rhetoric, and Memory/History/Critique":

Bodnar, John. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.

Card, Orson Scott. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. New York: Thomas Dougherty Assoc., 1996.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House.

Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

Hawlbachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vita Yazdi. New York: Harper, 1950.

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, ed. Edward T. Linenthall and Tom Englehardt. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1990.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories; The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1997.

Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Quote of the Day

"Creditors have better memories than debtors."

Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Remembering the Feud Between Garcia Marquez & Vargas Llosa

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is shown smiling with a shiner after Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa slugged him after a confrontation that resulted from a long and bitter feud--31 years ago--between both writers.

So there is trouble in literary paradise!

Remembering King Henry VIII

Showtime is already geared up to debut its new series THE TUDORS, which narrates the early life of King Henry VIII, who reign of England between 1509 and 1547 demonstrated many political relationships, but also (in)famous romantic liasons.

Already saw the first episode and it is very provocative and edgy!

Quote of the Day

"Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film."

Steven Wright (1955 - )

Remembering Medusa

Today, I gave a presentation about Helene Cixous' essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." I presented the following as a response:

After reading Emma Perez's book "The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History" and Gloria Anzaldúa's "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza," I immediately had to read Helene Cixous' essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." Both Perez and Anzaldua, by this particular time in my life, had shifted my thinking about the ways in which writing continues having the persuasive power to convince an audience that re-writing what has persisted in the past is crucial for creating a present which functions as the locus of empowerment as we enter into a future that sometimes we refuse to invite into our lives. Although it can be argued that everyday can be the future through the process of re-invention. My point here is that, from reading the works of these two Chicanas, I knew that Cixous had had a profound influence on their intellectual work. Therefore, it was imperative that I examined how Cixous' feminist rhetoric had the ability to shift the thinking of a person, a community, a culture and a nation, especially a nation that was profoundly transformed by Second Wave Feminism (between 1960s and 1980s), which happened as a result of women's effort toward economic equality, as well as sexual liberation.

With regard to sexuality and desire, I must admit that there lies the
shame that I do not know French in order to understand and experience the complete sensuality and intricately orchestrated metaphors that Cixous' presents in an essay that does more to just challenge a male dominant discourse. In this essay, Cixous presents an argument that affirms, embraces pleasure, provides pleasure and contemplates the joys of writing as embodied to serve as an offering to an audience of women who, like Perez and Anzaldua, brought forth transformation through theoretical concepts such as the "decolonial imaginary" and "mestiza consciousness" as ways to look closely at the male dominant discourse and then, in the tradition set forth by Cixous, cutting through it. I would like to think that after Cixous remembered and challenged the dominant discourse created by the likes of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche--she forgot them all. Just like Emma once told me: "Read "Anti-Oedipus," and then throw it away." "The Laugh of the Medusa" thus continues being a testament that attempts to argue that a rupture between the past and present must occur in order to provide new ways of seeing and writing in order to "cut through." (So it's all about regeneration (sexual regeneration), not stagnation.)

So now, as I read Cixous, I remember Perez and Anzaldua. When I read Anzaldua, I think about Cixous, especially when Anzaldua's speaks and writes as Cuatlicue, the Aztec Serpent Goddess. La Diosa Cuatlicue enables me to remember Medusa, who laughs as she is never able to tamed because of her Serpent's tongue. Also, as I read Cixous, I think of her intellectual colleague, Luce Irigaray, another French feminist who, like Cixous, faced intense criticism for being "an essentialist." When I read Irigaray, I think about Monique Wittig, another important French feminist who made sexuality public through writing. All of these women, through their efforts to sexualize writing and write about sexuality have created the theoretical foundations for feminist theory and queer theory, which cannot be denied in the History of Rhetoric because desire itself has and continues to carry the power to persuade, especially via language. Of course, if we are to engage in a discussion about desire and language, it is critical to address the question that queer theorist Judith Butler has articulated for queer scholars: In what way are desire and language bound? Does the use of language fulfill the desire that inevitably gets fulfilled when expressed through language, thus creating the closure for desire?

More specifically, I ask: What does an orator's desire and sexuality have anything to do with oratory? Why should desire and sexuality be argumentative? Well, Cixous would mostly like argue that the way we communicate and attempt to persuade is all relative to neither the anal drive, Oedipus Complex, Electra Complex nor any demented will to truth. Instead, the role of language in writing is to fulfill the desire to cross boundaries, or in the words of Anzaldua, to cross borderlands; more specifically, to interrogate the construction of binaries and disrupt dualistic thinking because in employing "l'ecriture feminine," neither sex nor gender, nor sexuality, is stable. All is fluid, and what freedom comes after that!

Remembering Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Today, I gave a presentation on Virginia Woolf and Helene Cixous. The following is what I wrote in response to Woolf's essay "Professions of Women" and Chapter 5 from "A Room of One's Own". Hope you all like:

* * *

I would be lying if I said that there was no problem, on my behalf, in accepting Woolf as rhetor. After all, isn’t the academic training in literary studies all about categorizing according to time, gender/sex and genre? What does Woolf have to contribute to the rhetorical tradition and does she speak/write differently within a rhetorical context that she would a literary one? “Professions for Women” and “A Room of One’s Own”—in unison with “The Laugh of the Medusa” are important contributions to the rhetorical tradition because they demonstrate the way in which the line between rhetoric and poetics are blurred. Woolf exemplifies this idea in Chapter 5 of “A Room of One’s Own,” which presents Woolf’s deliberation about Mary Carmichael and the way in which Carmichael has the freedom to choose any situation based on creativity. However, as Woolf states, “she [Carmichael] must convince me that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she has made it she must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my duty by her as reader as if she would do her duty by me as writer…” (1263). There is a relation here that can elicit Bakhtin’s examination of dialogue involving the “negotiation of meaning” between author and reader. However, I choose to see Woolf as blurring the line between author and reader in the way in which she is both reading and writing Carmichael, who in turn, has written herself through her text—whether it be novel, essay or political manifesto (Why should there be a difference?). Another important contribution by Woolf is her precise interrogation and examination of how women’s exclusion from certain experiences affected their writing (as in the case of Bronte and Eliot). Woolf’s “Women and Fiction,” much like Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” is specific in the way it proposes hope for women and writing to be strengthened and valued, especially as an art that persuades audiences to rethink, rewrite and transform.

* * *

Remembering the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico '68

The following is an excerpt about the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico '68 from Wikipedia:

"The Tlatelolco Massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco (from a book title by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska), took place on the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics celebrations in Mexico City. The death toll remains controversial: some estimates place the number of deaths in the thousands, but most sources report between 200 and 300 deaths. Government sources say "4 Dead, 20 Wounded". The exact number of people who were arrested is also controversial.

The massacre was preceded by months of political unrest in the Mexican capital, echoing student demonstrations and riots all over the world during 1968. The students wanted to exploit the attention focused on Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, however, was determined to stop the demonstrations and, in September, he ordered the army to occupy the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's largest university. Students were beaten and arrested indiscriminately. Rector Javier Barros Sierra resigned in protest on September 23.

Student demonstrators were not deterred, however. The demonstrations grew in size, until, on October 2, after student strikes lasting nine weeks, 15,000 students from various universities marched through the streets of Mexico City, carrying red carnations to protest the army's occupation of the university campus. By nightfall, 5,000 students and workers, many of them with spouses and children, had congregated outside an apartment complex in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco for what was supposed to be a peaceful rally. Among their chants were No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución! ("We don't want Olympic games, we want revolution!"). Rally organizers did not attempt to call off the protest when they noticed an increased military presence in the area.

The massacre began at sunset when police and military forces — equipped with armored cars and tanks — surrounded the square and began firing live rounds into the crowd, hitting not only the protestors, but also other people who were present for reasons unrelated to the demonstration. Demonstrators and passersby alike, including children, were caught in the fire; soon, mounds of bodies lay on the ground. The killing continued through the night, with soldiers carrying out mopping-up operations on a house-to-house basis in the apartment buildings adjacent to the square. Witnesses to the event claim that the bodies were later removed in garbage trucks.

The official government explanation of the incident was that armed provocateurs among the demonstrators, stationed in buildings overlooking the crowd, had begun the firefight. Suddenly finding themselves sniper targets, the security forces had simply returned fire in self-defense.
In October 1997, the Congress of Mexico established a committee to investigate the Tlatelolco massacre. The committee interviewed many political players involved in the massacre, including Luis Echeverría Álvarez, a former president who was Díaz Ordaz's minister of the interior at the time of the massacre. Echeverría admitted that the students had been unarmed, and also suggested that the military action was planned in advance, as a means to destroy the student movement.

In October 2003, the role of the U.S. government in the massacre came to light when the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a series of records from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI and the White House which were released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. However these claims do not show direct involvement in massacres of the students. Some suggest that the documents just show that the U.S. was concerned with security during the Olympics."

Quote of the Day

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Memory Bibliography

In Autumn 1999, Andrea Lunsford taught a course titled "The (Re)Composition of Memory" at Stanford University. The following link will take you the class bibliography created during the seminary. Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful!

"The (Re)Composition of Memory"

Quote of the Day

"Every man's memory is his private literature."

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Katherine Gossett's Thesis on Memory--"The Forgotten Canon"

The following are the first two chapters of:

THE FORGOTTEN CANON: MEMORY IN A DIGITAL AGE
_______________
A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty
of
California State University, Hayward
_______________

By
Katherine E. Gossett
December, 1998

"I. The Rhetorical Tradition

Classical rhetoric has been called the "most complete critical system that has ever been devised for the analysis and production of discourse" (Welch, "Classical" 3). Although there is no definitive origin of rhetoric, its concepts and practices can be found in treaties from antiquity to the present. It has survived "2500 years [of] attacks and misrepresentation, accommodated the views of the strictest constructionists and most liberal interpreters, and managed to remain pertinent to Western rhetorical theory despite fundamental cultural transitions from orality to literacy to electronic technology" (Reynolds, "Issues" 1).
At the heart of classical rhetoric are the five canons: invention (inventio, heurisis), arrangement (dispositio, taxis), style (elocutio, lexis), memory (memoria, mneme), and delivery (actio, hypokrisis). If rhetoric is the discipline, then each canon is a sub-discipline. Together, they provide a structure that allows us to study, analyze and generate discourse (Welch, "Ideology" 270). Separately, each canon may be studied, expanded on, and practiced to the exclusion of the others. It is the very malleability of these canons that has allowed rhetoric to survive and flourish through the many cultural transitions of the past twenty-five centuries.
The use of rhetoric as a tool is first evidenced by the works of Korax and Teisias around 500 BCE, which was then passed down to the ancient Sophists (Ueding and Steinbrink 11). Later, this tool was taken, refined, and codified by rhetors like Aristotle, Aspasia, Cicero, and Quintillian. These rhetors used the canons to fashion great oratories for political, legal, or civic purposes. During the medieval period, rhetoric "disintegrated into highly specialized disciplines" (Vickers 238). The process of invention was relegated to scientific discovery, arrangement and style became mostly grammatical in nature (when they were addressed at all), memory became the "noblest of all these, the basis for all the rest" (Carruthers 9), and delivery all but disappeared.

As the humanists searched for knowledge and enlightenment during the Renaissance, the canons were reunited to form a complete process of inquiry, discovery, and creation. The reintegration of the canons lasted until the Industrial era when the canon of invention, as the precursor to scientific theory, exerted its dominance (Yates 369). "This disintegration," wrote Vickers in 1988, "has persisted until our time, although we may now be seeing the beginnings of a second renaissance in rhetoric" (215). Unfortunately, Vickers may have been a bit premature in heralding this second renaissance. Return to TOC

II. The Fourth Canon
Wresting Memory from the Rhetorical Tradition
Although rhetoric remained popular as a pedagogical tool from the 17th to the 19th century, each discipline that made use of rhetorical practices continued to focus on specific canons, producing "unconscious, imbedded, implicit, partial, or oversimplified versions of the canons . . . [thus promoting] a truncated version of the five classical canons" (Reynolds, "Issues" 2). Most of the rhetorical systems that emerged during these centuries easily adapted invention, arrangement, and style, but usually deleted the more problematical canons of memory and delivery.

A standard explanation for the removal of memory and delivery from the five canons relies on a simplistic idea that the burgeoning power of writing made memory and delivery less relevant because those two canons are said to be more powerful in orally dominant cultures. (Welch, "Reconfiguring" 19)
In the mid-19th century, rhetoric found a home within the Belles Lettres movement and flourished through the end of that century. In the early 20th century, however, with the rise of the "composing-as-tool" metaphor at such institutions as Harvard and Yale, rhetoric fell into disuse and was relegated to the speech and communication departments (Grierson 22). The canons of invention and style remained prominent, arrangement and delivery received marginal treatment, if at all, and memory was dropped from the textbooks (Reynolds, "Issues" 3). Rhetoric remained in this state until Edward J. Corbett wrote his groundbreaking book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student in 1965.
In his article, "Memory Issues in Composition Studies," John Frederick Reynolds gives Edward J. Corbett the dubious honor of being "classical rhetoric's best-known and most distinguished modern advocate," as well as being one of the most instrumental scholars in wresting memory from modern rhetorical studies (4). "Ironically, in all editions of his influential book (1965, 1971, 1991) Corbett revived the canon of memory only long enough to dismiss it, defining it as 'memorizing'" (4). Corbett's only mention of memory in all of his editions is as follows:

The fourth part of rhetoric was memoria (Greek, mneme) concerned with the memorizing of speeches. Of all the five parts of rhetoric, memoria was the one that received the least attention in the rhetoric books. The reason for the neglect of this aspect of rhetoric is probably that not much can be said, in a theoretical way, about the process of memorizing; and after rhetoric came to be concerned mainly with written discourse, there was no further need to deal with memorizing . . . There will be no consideration in this book of this aspect of rhetoric. (38)
Corbett's easy dismissal of memory as "memorizing" in 1965 is a shame, but his continued dismissal of this canon in his 1971 and 1991 editions is disturbing and confusing, especially given other scholars' writings on the subject (not to mention his own later discussions on this topic).
The continued excising of memory from rhetoric, according to Welch, can be directly attributed to the success of Corbett's book and the "textbook tradition" ("Reconfiguring" 19). Most textbooks are based on tried-and-true material, not exciting or breakout theory and research. Generations of students, some of whom have become the instructors of today, have been weaned on this truncated version of the canons, and have further contributed to the emasculation of rhetoric. Contrary to this tradition, however, Welch argues that "memory [does] not wither with the growing dominance of writing; rather it changes form. With the increasing empowerment of writing, memory [simply takes] on different attributes" ("Reconfiguring" 19).

Restoring Memory to the Rhetorical Tradition
Just as scholars previously labored intensively to wrest the fourth canon from the study of rhetoric, new and emerging scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have begun laboring to restore the canon to the fold.

"How greatly we misunderstand when we reduce ancient and medieval memoria to 'memorization'" (Carruthers 1). In The Book of Memory, Carruthers states that in ancient times, memory was the central canon upon which all the others were based. In order to have invention, you must first have thoughts, or memory. To have arrangement, you must recall, or remember, your arguments and place them in the most logical order. To add style to your argument requires a knowledge and application of stylistic and grammatical rules, and finally, to deliver your argument well, you must remember it. Carruthers is not alone in her supposition.
In 1966, Frances A. Yates wrote her masterful analysis of the fourth canon The Art of Memory, in which she traced memory from Aristotle and Cicero to Descartes and Leibniz. Beginning with Latin and Greek sources, she also showed that memory was much more than memorizing. John Frederick Reynolds summarized Yates' opening chapters in his article "Concepts of Memory in Contemporary Composition."

Yates traced complex, multiple, interrelated notions of rhetorical memory to antiquity. The classical art, she explained, had involved much more than memorizing: It had included improving the memory (2), imprinting on the memory (3), memorizing in order (3, 7), making memorable (9), holding in memory (12), retrieving from memory (34), delivering from memory (6), and preserving in memory (45). Memory, she noted, had been viewed in antiquity as being critical to invention (5, 12, 34, 45), arrangement (3, 4, 7), style (8), and delivery (6, 7). Memory was the loci of the topoi for Aristotle (31), and the connection to the divinity of the soul for Plato (36, 37). Memory was the custodian of all of the parts of rhetoric to the author of the Ad Herennium (5) . . . the "groundwork of the whole" to Plato (37). (246)
In addition, Yates provides a detailed examination of the two types of memory defined by the author of Ad Herennium: the natural memory, "that which is engrafted in our minds, born simultaneously with thought," and artificial memory, that which is "a memory strengthened or confirmed by training" (5). The Ad Herennium further states that "A good natural memory can be improved by [training the artificial memory] and persons less well endowed can have their weak memories improved by the art" (5). Yates goes on to trace the significance of training the artificial memory from antiquity to the sixteenth century, and concludes that:

The serious investigation of this forgotten art may be said to have only just begun. Such subjects do not have behind them, as yet, an apparatus of organized modern scholarship; they do not belong [in] the normal curricula and so they are left out. The art of memory is a clear case of a marginal subject, not recognized as belonging to any of the normal disciplines, having been omitted because it was no one's business. And yet it has turned out to be, in a sense, everyone's business . . . The artificial memory as part of rhetoric belongs [in] the rhetorical tradition. (389)
While both Carruthers and Yates provide thorough, insightful studies into the art of memory, it must be said that both of their works deal clearly with the history of the art (Carruthers with medieval scholasticism, Yates with ancient, medieval, and renaissance scholasticism) and cultures that were predominantly oral in nature. The need for an excellent memory is clear in cultures whose communication is primarily oral, and whose scholarly canon was available only to a select few. Yet in an age of literacy and secondary orality, when the cultural and scholastic canons are made available to entire populations in millions of books, on the Internet, and through the World Wide Web (WWW), what does memory mean?"

The Dissertation Proposal!

I’m currently writing the initial part of my dissertation proposal (by hand, believe it or not). Even before beginning to write about all of the scholarship on memory, I have been seriously thinking about the way in which writing from memory—or remembrance—is an act of pain. I think this is true for the place of memory in poetics. However, in rhetoric, memory is most often associated with the art of memory. Nevertheless, this act of writing is, without a doubt, painful and quite the opposite of having the desire to heal. Writing is torturous. To remember is to feel pain and to write about it is to create the wound.

I’ve also been thinking about why I’m so interested in memory. I guess the important question I always ask: What is there aside from memory? Everything revolves around memory. Many people take herbs and minerals in order to improve their memory. Others buy books and try to improve their memory. Some accept the decline in memory because of age. Others, have excellent memory and disregard it like if it were yesterday’s newspaper.

The art of memory is significant for me because I am in awe of the extraordinary abilities that the Greek and Romans had in order to use the art of memory in order to recall arguments and information needed in the instruction of rhetoric. The art of memory appeals to me because it involves space, time, language and imagination. I am so thankful that Frances Yates recorded all of this history. I am also thankful to Mary Carruthers for writing memory as a way for us to look back and examine how much the mind was elevated to record so much information, which, sadly, is gone with the use and privileging of technology.

I have seriously been thinking about what contribution my scholarship will make to the field. How will I compare with important people like Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers?

Hmmmmm…..until next time…..

Frances Yates and the Art of Memory Revisited

I wanted to share with all an excerpt from Lara Kelland's definition of "memory" which mentions Frances Yates' discussion about the art of memory from the keyword glossary in Theories of Media:

"Frances Yates chronicles the historical usages of memory in rhetoric in her article Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory. Utilizing a spatial conceptualization of mnemonic processes, Roman rhetors were capable of recounting lengthy orations with little difficulty or error. By a process of visualization of the space of memory, one could 'place' elements in a linear movement throughout the conceptualized architecture and recapture them through 'moving' again through this image. Yates also likens the mnemonic process to linguistic structures, stating "(t)he art of memory is like an inner writing" [2] . By imagining a spatial inscription or attribution, the orator would be able to revisit the symbolic recollection and summon up the information."

Paving the Way for Memory Lane

Suggestions for improving memory, according to Dr. Maoshing Ni, founder and Chancellor of the Yo San University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Los Angeles:

Get an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep each night.

Do a half an hour of cardiovascular exercise every day, such as brisk walking, slow jogging, biking, or swimming. This will improve circulation and increase blood flow to the brain.

Turn yourself upside down for a couple of minutes daily.

Mental fitness activities are imperative to prevent age-related cognitive decline. Read and learn new things, find new hobbies, do crossword puzzles, add up your bill in your head while shopping, memorize a set of phone numbers forward and backwards; all these can stimulate brain cell activities and in some cases even grow new brain pathways.

Work with your physician to find a supplemental regimen that helps improve your cognitive capabilities. Memory-enhancing supplements and herbs include B-complex vitamins, magnesium, CoQ10, alpha-lipoic acid, fish oil, flax seed oil, Chinese club moss, ginkgo, and ginseng. A supplement that has been well-documented in Europe for reversing age-related dementia and memory loss is phosphatidylserine (PS), a compound made by the body from the amino acid serine. Taken in supplement form, PS lowers stress response and promotes the release of neurotransmitters in the brain that facilitate thought, reasoning, and concentration.

Quote of the Day

"The dead have nothing except the memory they've left."

Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952), Hungarian Dramatist & Novelist

Quote of the Day

"The true art of memory is the art of attention."

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

Quote of the Day

"I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things."

Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)

Lila Downs

Lila Downs:

1. Viborita - Lila Downs
2. Dignificada - Lila Downs
3. Cielo Rojo - Lila Downs
4. La Bamba - Lila Downs
5. One Blood - Lila Downs
6. Malinche - Lila Downs
7. Tirineni Tsitsiki - Lila Downs
8. La Cucaracha - Lila Downs
9. Mother Jones - Lila Downs
10. Paloma Negra - Lila Downs
11. Brown Paper People - Lila Downs
12. Una Sangre - Lila Downs
13. Yanahuari Nin - Lila Downs

In the January 29, ‘07 issue of “Time” magazine, writer Michael D. Lemonick, whose last name seems to rhyme with “mnemonic,” points out two “facts” about memory:

He states, “[e]ach time we retrieve and re-store a memory, it can be subtly altered by all sorts of factors. What goes back into our brains is like the new version of a text document, overwriting the old.” (102). In the two subsequent pages after this quote, there are two photographs of Bing Crosby, which clearly show how new memories tend to overwrite older memories with alterations that imply that memory is more slippery “in nature” than we think. I find it so intriguing how, in this quote and through this quote, Lemonick alludes to technology as a way to explain how retrieval and re-storing functions to an audience who is, undoubtedly, informed and sustained by technology. Why address an audience that is not situated in technology, right?

The second fact is that “memory and emotion are intimately linked biochemically, with hormones like adrenaline actively involved in forming the neurological patterns we call memories” (102). So, memory formation can be explained “biochemically” with “adrenaline” as a factor. Hmm…ok…so who does Lemonick refer as source for this claim?

Well, he consults with UC Irvine neurobiologist James McGaugh, who states that, “[a]ny kind of emotional experience will create a stronger memory than otherwise would be created” and that “[t]he major purpose of memory is to predict the future” (102-3). Sounds interesting, right? But how does this work more specifically?

According to McGaugh (and through the words of Lemonick),

“…when faced with an emotion-charged situation, such as a threat, our bodies release the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. Among other things, these signal the amygdale, a tiny, neuron-rich structure nestled inside the brain’s medial temporal lobes, which responds by releasing another hormone, called norepinephrine. Norepinephrine does two important things. First, it kicks the body’s autonomic nervous system into overdrive, the heart beats, respiration quickens, and the muscles tense in anticipation of a burst of physical exertion” (103).

He elaborates,

“Second, even as it’s kick-starting the body, the amygdale sends out a crackle of signals to the rest of the brain. Some of them put the sense on high alert, ready to deal with a threat. But these signals also tell the neurons that any memories recorded in the next few minutes need to be especially robust. One piece of evidence for this scenario: Lawrence Cahill, a colleague of McGaugh’s at Irvine, showed subjects emotionally arousing film clips, simultaneously gauging the activity of their amygdalae using positron-emission tomography (PET) scans. Three weeks later, he gave the subjects a surprise memory quiz. The amount of amygdala activity predicted with great accuracy how well they remembered the film clips” (103).

He then adds,

“Imaging studies also make clear that it isn’t just dangers or tragic events that cement memory formation. Positive emotions, which are also mediated through the amygdala, have the same effect. Again, that’s a perfectly reasonable evolutionary development. If eating or having sex makes you happy, you’ll remember that and do it again, keeping yourself healthy and passing on your genes as well” (103).
So, let me see if I understand: if a certain act, such as eating or having sex, proves enjoyable, your memory will then be the factor that creates a behavioral pattern where the act will be repeated, right?

Right…ok…interesting…but didn’t any of these so called neurobiologists read what Aristotle and Augustine said with regard to the relationship between memory and psychology? Is God anywhere in this picture of how the brain functions, for whom and when? Hmm.

Toward the latter part of the article, Lemonick states that adrenaline, Ritalin and amphetamines are proven to improve memory. (104)

Really? Doesn’t the Soul have any place in improving memory? Hmmm…

Stay tuned for my discussion of St. Augustine, as well as my continuing discussion of Yates “Art of Memory” (with some interesting photos/fotos).

Work Cited

Lemonick, Michael D. "The Flavor of Memories." Time 29 Jan. 2007: 102-104.

Remembering La Reyna de Tex Mex -- Selena (1971-1995)

When listening to, and remembering, the artistas who have left the most memorable music in our cultura, we must never forget La Reyna:


Selena (1971-1995)

(get out the boots and start dancin'!)

Listening to the Matriarch of Tex Mex

This Spring Break '07, it's been all about music. I've been listening to Joan Baez, Lola Beltran, Lalo Guerrero, Lila Downs, Chavela Vargas and the lovely Lydia Mendoza

Remembering the Father of Chicano Music -- Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero

Recordando a: Eduardo "Lalo" Guerrero (1916-2005)

Guerrero was the trailblazer for all Chicano musicians with an impressive repertoire that included boleros, corridos, children's canciones and blues songs. As a lyricist, he wrote about the plight of farmworkers and created "spoofs" of traditional American songs. His "pachuco style" music was immortalized in the Golden Globe nominated drama/musical "Zoot Suit" (1981), which featured a young Edward James Olmos as "El Pachuco". Don Guerrero's music has been so influential as to have earned numerous covers by the likes of Jose Alfredo Jimenez, Lola Beltran and Los Panchos--grand figures in the history of Mexican music.

Quote of the Day

"Memory feeds imagination."

Amy Tan, Novelist

Ay de Mi, Llorona!

Currently listening
(and weeping) to:



"Gracias a la Vida/Here's to Life" (1974)

Joan Baez

Remembering Zapata

Currently watching...

Remembering Las Revolucionarias

Photographs from:

Mexican Revolution Photograph Collection. PH 015

from UTEP Special Collections