One thing that would improve college teaching immensely would be mandatory drama and speech classes for all new faculty. Forget the expensive technology. Teach them how to use their voices, how to modulate their tones, how to string together an exciting narrative without notes. Teach them to make the passion that is surely inside them…
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set…
Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. It is about properly using the words and punctuation you already know. —The Commonly Confused Words Test (OK Cupid) It’s a good thing for my sense of professional pride that I scored as an English Genius, though according to the site I got one answer wrong.…
“We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music,” conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts. It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time…
Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes are always dangerous things –it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced…
We, the guests were already disgusted with the whole affair when Trimalchio, who, by the way, was beastly drunk, ordered in the cornet players for our further pleasure, and propped up with cushions, stretched himself out at full length. “Imagine I’m dead,” says he, “and play something soothing!” Whereat the cornet players struck up a…
Playing off the self-esteem theme, digital artist David Sullivan’s contribution to the show is the Ego Machine, a project that uses Google to project Sullivan’s soul into the future and puts the fun back into funeral. —Michelle Delio —Immortality Through Google (Wired) If it has anything vaguely to do with technology, Wired is there. Similar:Realm…
—Name Voyager (The Baby Name Wizard) Very cool site, that illustrates the popularity of baby names over time, from 1900 to 2003. For every million babies born in 2003, about 1600 were named “Xavier,” while about 84 will go through life with the head-scratch-inducing label “Xzavier.” Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Similar:Harper Lee to publish new…
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace claimed that literature is “sweet” and “useful.” Since then, literature has been traditionally understood, at least in Western cultures, as having the dual purpose of entertaining and educating its audience. Literary texts are constructed in effect as objects of beauty, sources of pleasure and as…
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes…
NASA — Last year was the fourth warmest year on average for our planet since the late 1800s, according to NASA scientists. To determine if the Earth is warming or cooling, scientists look at average temperatures. To get an “average” temperature, scientists take the warmest and the coolest temperatures in a day, and calculate the…
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde’s idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years’ time if you take no exercise,…
Though “1893” is a homage to bygone text adventures, the sophistication of the programming is a step up. In “Zork,” commands more complicated than, say, “attack troll with rusty knife” would confuse the game. But “1893” can handle much more. “The parser is pretty elaborate at this point,” Mr. Nepstad said. “You can type ‘get…
So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation…
The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions. When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a…
Literary critics who never use but one approach remind me of a child who, playing with a piece of transparent red plastic, has just discovered this effect. ?Look, mommy,? she says, ?the refrigerator is red!? ?Look, mommy, the stove is red too!? ?Look, mommy, the dish towel is light red and dark red!? ?Look, mommy,…
Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed-that…
Orality, Literacy, and Writing Technology (U Penn) Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE — compiled by Andrew Wiesner, who also points to James O’Donnell’s Some manuscript images of the technology of the word in the Middle Ages I’ll look through these in more detail later. Similar:This…
[March 20, 2000] I turned to the lady next to me and said, ?excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing?? [May 8, 2000] I was mesmerized by the glint of the sunlight on the crest…
The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride’s party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and –in a supreme affront to the “vitality” of the art– will don a bright red…