Show Me Your Ong

Two websites - Remembering Walter Ong and The Walter J. Ong Project - are devoted to the life and work of the recently deceased (2003) Renaissance scholar, Jesuit priest and lifelong devotee of the study of culture.

Ong's work has some resonance for the folklorist, his Orality and Literacy should be read by all (alongside with Havelock's "The Muse Learns to Write.")

Check out these websites, RWO works as a message board for those scholars who are devotees of Ong's work, and the WJOP is a digital archive of his work. Both are interesting and offer many avenues of diversion.

Encyclopedia Mythica

Today I came across this website called the Encyclopedia Mythica. I don't know how I have overlooked this website before. I must have stumbled upon it some time ago, but it probably did not leave much of an impression.

I kind of find resources like this interesting. What it seems to be is a collection of definitions of various creatures and dramatis personae from mythologies the world over. It's good for people like me, people who can't keep names straight.

However, this kind of work also annoys me to no great end. It seems to be what the layperson believes folklore to be: the study of nymphs and leprechauns. It sets up folklore as a lexicological endeavour. It's like the folklore section at Barnes N Noble - especially in the discounted remaindered books in the front section - basically reprints of nineteenth century omnibuses - always very solarist - whose copyrights have enterred into the public domain.

Works like this consciously avoid the present. They treat folklore as some quaint relic, it's as if the whole twentieth century never happened.

Take the Encylopedia Mythica's definition of Paul Bunyan for example:

A legendary hero of the lumber camps of the north-western U.S.A. His feats are many, and one of the most famous is perhaps that he cut the Grand Canyon by dragging his pick behind him. His stories are told and retold with embellishments by the lumbermen. Some of those stories are collected in Paul Bunyan Comes West.

I don't understand how an entry on Paul Bunyan could a) treat it as real folklore, and b) not mention any of Bronner's (or is it Dorson's, I should look this up in my notes before I blog and rant) work on fakelore. Paul Bunyan is an example used by Bronner (Dorson?) of manufactured lore. At least make some mention of this.

Introductions!

Hello and welcome to Vernacular Culture: The Folklore Blog! The title of this blog is cribbed from Chuck Perdue, the funny and pithy folklorist and raconteur from the University of Virginia. (He was also a second reader on my masterpiece of a dissertation).

This blog will be an analysis of current trends, books, publications, blogs, websites and developments in the field of folklore.

As the title to this blog probably shows, my definition of folklore is very wide. Back when I was a poor graduate student, my folklore interests included Computer-Mediated Commmunication, Knowledge Management, Hypertext Theory and MUD studies. This is not traditionally considered folklore by any standard. I can think of only three or four folklorists who study what I study: Jeannie Banks Thomas, Bill Ellis and Bruce Lionel Mason, off the top of my head. And, of course, they do it all a lot better than I can and did.

I fell in love with folklore studies my first semester in graduate school after taking a class on the folktale taught by the irrepressable Natalie Kononenko. I quickly forgot about all of that Russian Literature stuff which I told the department I was going to study. I had had some Russian folklore exposure as an undergrad: my Russian professor and mentor (Lou Wagner in da house!) was the English translator of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, and he made us study Propp's formulae and such. Back then I had no clue what the fuck Lou was talking about. I thought he was crazy and trying to teach us calculus or something.

Like most Americans, I had no freakin' clue what folklore was. If you had asked me, I would have responded like one of Leno's Jaywalkers: "Dude, it's the lore of the folk, I guess." I still see the look of disbelief and confusion on people's faces when I tell them that I am a folklorist. Just last week my dentist says: "Oh, a folklorist? What do you do?" "Oh, I basically just hang out with my kids all day. Maybe someday I can teach somewhere." How do I explain to a layperson that my thoughts are concerned with the study of vernacular culture in all of its manifestations? That my main area of study is the folklore of an online community of gamers who play a Russian-language text-based adventure game? That I have devoted over a year of my life trying to apply the tenets of knowledge management to the study of Slavic Folkloristics, even creating a computer-based ontology of Slavic Folkoristics and Russian Erotic Fairytales?

Oh yeah, the Russian Erotic Fairytales. At one point in my brief academic career I was known as the Oral Sex Guy. I had presented a paper at a small conference about images of oral sex as they appear in Russian jokes, tales and songs. It was a serious look at the lack of oral sex imagery in Russian folklore, the attitudes towards oral sex in Russia and an interpretation of said folklore applying Mary Douglas's theories of boundary protection. I thought the topic held more than prurient interest and that I did an evocative and serious study that was not without humour. During my talk, between the giggles, I could see all of the professors in the room (and my talk was a big draw) trying to remember how many blowjobs they got when they were exchange students. The rest of the conference it was "Hey Oral Sex Guy!" Years later people were talking about me in the third person: "Did you hear that there was this guy who was going to write his dissertation on oral sex in Russia?" That project never panned out. But imagine the fieldwork!

Speaking of fieldwork, I have many other projects that never got off the ground. A while ago I was enthralled with the work of Jack Santino, especially his studies of occupational folklore. I decided on studying the occupational folklore of Russian sex workers living in the United States. I'd get to do my fieldwork in tittie bars! It was legit. It was dealing with my area. It was folklore and oral history. I thought I had struck the motherlode. There have been many many oral histories and studies of sex workers: Times Square Strippers, Porno Stars, etc. However, I was interested in the cultural clashes that occured during the 1990s influx of sex workers from the former Soviet Bloc. I should still keep this brilliant idea on the backburner.

I should also keep my million-dollar ideas to myself, else someone steals them. Oh, go ahead, you can have them.

This is turning into a long-ass introduction. I'd better cut it out before I start explaining my theory on how Gary Alan Fine is stalking me (the subject of a later post). If I have another glass of this South African Pinotage I just might also gripe some more about not finding a job in the field.