Proust said what??

Lol, I like that title. Anyway, wow if feels like need to blog more compared to some of my other classmates, I feel like such a slacker, *sad face.* So the book I decided to read for my literacy class is a book called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I will inform anyone who is crazy enough to read this blog that I did not choose this book because the summery of it looked interesting (though it is) I picked it because of the cover.....
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Cool huh lol. Anyway, lets begin shall we. Maryanne Wolf breaks her book up into three parts. To start, in this blog I will go over the first part before getting into the other two. Her book is designed to "celebrate the beauty, variety, and transformative capacities of the origins of writing; proceeds to dramatic new landscapes of the development of the reading brain and its various pathways to acquisition; and ends with difficult questions about the virtues and dangers in what lies ahead" (xi). I find it quite unique how she starts off talking about this remarkable thing we humans due, read. I never really looked at reading in such a in depth way. One of the major points she makes is the fact that, human being were never born to read. Over centuries our species has evolved and created a system to allows us to read. By using pictures, or markings, our ancestors have developed this remarkable way to keep records of things, in a way that we could share with our fellow man kind. And over time our brains have developed to better process these scripts. One thing I would like to quote from Wolf is about the brain, and how "the brain doesn't find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many worlds related to it" (9). Have you ever thought about reading in this way? I know we all know that words can have many meaning other then just one, but have you ever stopped and thought about how remarkable that is? Or how a brain can hold all this information, sometimes in more then just one language??!!


She then goes into a history session about the different writings that were first created, which ones died and which ones were successful, which all of them were successful at the time they were created, well you know what I mean, or a least I hope you do?? :) One last thing I would like to talk about in this blog however is the section where Wolf talks about Socrates. Did you know that good old Soc, didn't believe in written communication?? He did not believe it to be pure.. that you could never really communicate what you wanted to say on paper, you needed to oral. "Oral language as the truest vehicle for intellectual and spiritual growth" (78). Do you think he had a point? Wolf does, for me.... I kind of have mixed feelings. On the one hand I don't think that you could ever truly communicate on paper what you want to say, because well your writing you might forget it, or write it differently then how you meant to say. Or take for example if I wrote a friend an email, and I was trying to be sarcastic, but she/he thought I was being serious, they might not get my sarcasm in an email, but if I was in front of them and communicate with them orally, they would have (hopefully hehehe).  But I would never totally disregard the written language. Because of it we are able to record our history, keep stories by famous authors, email/ write someone half way across the world, etc. Those are my thoughts anyway. Wells I best be going, the fireworks are going off and I need to make sure no one catches my house on fire. Ciao for now!!