Quote of the Day

"I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Quote of the Day

"Web sites are our places of memory, and their mnemonic schemes the currency of our efforts to explore deeper realms of knowledge. We go to them at the click of a mouse, and each click leads us deeper into their inner sanctums."

Patrick H. Hutton

Quote of the Day

“Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.”

Gloria E. Anzaldua (1942-2004)

Quote of the Day -- "Oppositional Consciounsess"

"...what I am proposing would be considered a 'science of oppositional ideology.' This study identifies five principal categories by which 'oppositional consciousness is organized, and which are politically effective means for changing the dominant order of power. I characterize them as 'equal rights,' 'revolutionary,' 'supremacist,' 'separatist,' and 'differential' ideology forms. All these forms of consciousness are kaleidoscoped into view when the fifth form is utilized as a theoretical model which retroactively clarifies and gives new meaning to the others. Differential consciousness represents the strategy of another form of oppositional ideology that functions on an altogether different register. Its power can be thought of as mobile-not nomadic but rather cinematographic: a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners. Differential consciousness is the expression of the new subject position called for by Althusser-it permits functioning within yet beyond the demands of dominant ideology. This differential form of oppositional consciousness has been enacted in the practice of U.S. third world feminism since the 1960s."

Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed

Black History Month on iTunes

"Black History Month is a chance to study Black History in long terms...In this quest for dignity and freedom, let no lies under you, no grave yard contain you and through it all, keep hope alive."

Rev. Jesse Jackson

***

iTunes is currently featuring books, albums, audiobooks, TV specials and movies by and about African Americans for Black History Month. Included in the collection are audiobooks on Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks. Also, the collection features the music of Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Mary J. Blige, and Common (among others). Especially noteworthy is Cornel West's "Sketches of My Culture" and a collection of Malcolm X's greatest speeches.



It was about time iTunes got smart and feature writings, music and films that matter!



Photo of Jesse Jackson courtesy of Wikipedia (click link above for more info.)

Quote of the Day

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."

Audre Lorde

Quote of the Day

"While a slave in Baltimore, Douglass read Caleb Binghams's Columbian Orator. Not only did this book offer him his first formal introduciton to public speaking, it also deepened his hatred of the peculiar institution, gave him the words to meet proslavery arguments, and inspired him to master the art of oratory."

Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845, Gregory P. Lampe

Quote of the Day

"Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination — in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing."

- Italo Calvino

Quote of the Day

"How greatly we misunderstand when we reduce ancient and medieval memoria to our word 'memorization'."

Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory

Quote of the Day

"Memories connect you not only to past images and past senses, but also to past emotions. That is because whenever a memory is stored, bits of it get connected through nerve pathways to those centers in your brain that add an emotional charge -- the amygdala for fear and anxiety, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure. Nerve cells in each emotional center in the brain make and release different nerve chemicals that help cement the memory: dopamine for pleasure and addiction, adrenalin-like norepinephrine for fear. The brain’s stress center, the hypothalamus makes the stress hormone CRH, corticotropin releasing hormone. Through hard-wiring and these nerve chemicals, memories formed at the same time that a strong emotion is experienced are seared indelibly into the brain."

Esther M. Sternberg, M.D., "Writing, Emotions and Memory"

Quote of the Day

“Women historically linked to Africa have been speaking in public arenas, writing, and thinking critically about writing and themselves as writers for many, many centuries. A challenge for rhetorical history, then, is to imagine the possibility, even the likelihood, of a comparable trajectory for the participation of women of African descent in rhetorical history, theory, and performance as well. When we establish a less Western point of view, based on the idea that humans have the capacity to use language resources well wherever they happen to reside, how far-fetched can such a possibility really be?”

Jacqueline Jones Royster, “Disciplinary Landscaping , or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric” (2003)

Quote of the Day

"Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects of the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity."

Gorgias, "Encomium of Helen"

(photo courtesy of "The Athenaeum Reading Room"

Quote of the Day

"Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?"

-- Chuang-tzu

Quote of the Day

Last week, I stumbled upon the following quote, which was posted outside a history professor's door. I think it is noteworthy because of its unique use of the word "must".

Check it out:

"Students of history must never forget that human memory is inevitably imprecise, and it is not uncommon for the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes."

James Carroll (2002)

Quote of the Day

"Intellectuals are now biding their time because there is no more real dialogue, nor any real discussion. Each person is doing his or her own thing, attached to his or her research or to a group."

~ Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

Quote of the Day

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."

~ Jane Austen (1775-1817), Mansfield Park

Quote of the Day

“Do you think that a mere dilettante like me could recite from memory in a manner worthy of him a speech that Lysias, the best of our writers, took such time and trouble to compose?

Far from it—though actually I would rather be able to do that than come into a large fortune!"

~ Phaedrus

Quote of the Day

"All things we remember are in our memory--and since we must remember forgetting, or we would not know what the word means when we hear it, then forgetting must be in our memory. It is there for us to remember, but its being there means we forget. Or should we say that forgetting is not there itself when we remember it, but only some representation of it, since its being present itself would make us lack memory? Who can fathom such a thing, or make any sense of it?"

~ St. Augustine, Confessions

Quote of the Day

"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."

~ Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Quote of the Day

"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not."

~ Mark Twain (1835-1910)