“Every month [students learning Tongva] gather, practicing pronunciation, mastering the use of particles, singing songs and playing word games under the guidance of Pam Munro, a linguist from UCLA who has been teaching these classes for 15 years. She calls her work ‘a reclamation effort’ for a language that is no longer used in conversations. (includes audio clips, video, and study guides) – Los Angeles Times
Tag: 05.09.19
Autofiction? What’s That?
It is perhaps this apparent contradiction, between “fiction” and “facts strictly real”, which can seem baffling. Is autofiction fiction, or non-fiction? Autobiography, or novel? There is no easy space for the genre to settle, and the area it occupies remains uncertain. It has always troubled some readers, and it requires if not a new, then a reconsidered, critical response. – Times Literary Supplement
This Ancient Art Form Is Practiced Every Morning In Front Of Houses All Over South India
“A physical form of prayer and symbol of protection, a daily exercise, and a moment of intense concentration and meditation, drawing kolam is an important household ritual that has a lot more to it than may first meet the eye. Two very different women living in Chennai explain their shared passion for kolam, and their involvement in the local kolam competition.” (video) – Yahoo! (BBC)
There’s A Reason For That: Understanding The Age Of Enlightenment
“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” – New York Review of Books
Diary Of A Player In The First US Orchestra Ever To Visit Mao’s China
As the Philadelphia Orchestra prepares to depart for its 12th tour to China, here are excerpts from a journal kept by the piccolo player on the orchestra’s first tour there, back in 1973. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Howard Stern Explains How He Turned Into Terry Gross
Three years ago, the Times ran a feature about how the erstwhile King of All Media had moved on from the crazy, raunchy stuff that made him rich and famous and become an intelligent, sensitive, and generally admirable interviewer. Here, in an extended Q&A, he tells David Marchese just how it happened. (includes straight talk about Donald Trump, a longtime friend and frequent guest of yore) – The New York Times Magazine
This Detroit Artist Turned The Street He Grew Up On Into A Great Big Art Installation — Why Is He Now Taking It Apart?
“At various points in the last three decades, [Tyree Guyton’s] Heidelberg Project, as it has come to be known, has been dismissed by neighbors as the junk of a crazy hoarder and hailed by critics as one of the great American artworks of the last 50 years. … After years of fighting off destruction from vandals, from elected officials, from arsonists and police, Guyton must now effectively destroy his work in order to save it.” – The New York Times Magazine
Shakespeare’s Globe Postpones Its Project Prospero Expansion
The major capital project, which was to begin in October of this year, includes new production and rehearsal facilities and a library/archive; when it was announced in 2016, it was expected to cost £30 million. But projected construction costs have risen significantly since then, and Globe administrators decided to delay work for two years. – The Stage
Wales Proposes Making Arts Core To Public Education
The Welsh government is proposing a new curriculum in which schools would be required to provide a “broad and balanced curriculum” in which the arts would become one of six core “areas of learning and experience”.These are the expressive arts; health and well-being; humanities; languages, literacy and communication; mathematics and numeracy; and science and technology. – The Stage
The Cost Of Being A Ballerina
As 43-year-old ballerina Crystal Brothers prepares to retire from Ballet Memphis, here’s what she has been doing each day to keep her body going in the brutal sport, er, art, of dance: She sleeps in therapy boots all night to reduce leg cramping, and then … “I ice my feet, I take at least three baths a day, I have heating pads attached to my body with elastic bands and thera-bands, and I’m, you know, shoving a heating pad down my pants for my lower back.” – WKNO (Tennessee)