![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniListened to:
From WNYC's "RadioLab" -- A a segment from a show from December last. The first five and a half minutes or so of this 33 minute segment is about the joy of a man at the end of a three-month solo trek across Antarctica. And then, from then on, it's the story of a Holocaust survivor who tried to invent a new communication system that he hoped would end all war... That, it itself, would have been fascinating. I was not expecting it to end up revolving around children with cerebral palsy living in an institutional home/school/hospital in the 1970's in Ontario, Canada... but it did (Content note-- it ends on a fairly tragic, ironic note):
Mr. Bliss
For something completely different, also from "RadioLab": Liev Schreiber reads Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon; written in Italian in 1965, and translated into English in 1968... i.e., before we landed there...
(Content note-- one of the main characters is written as Deaf for metaphorical/symbolic reasons as a sort of Magic!wild-man/Innocent-Primitive)
Read:
Found by way of "Rolling around in my head": Reclaiming memory: Searching for Great-Aunt Sarah (Content note: institutional life and death in the early 20th century)
From "Rolling around in my head" Directly: The Better Way (content note: neither tragic nor ironic-- includes a crying baby)
Watched:
And a child shall lead them -- going-on-eleven year-old Stephanie leads a blue-grass band of adult white men... You can tell she's the leader in this particular set, because she sets the tempo for their playing, and signals the final chorus of the first song with a straight-leg kick (a standard signal in folk music):
(Content note-- precocious kid on stage and occasional out-of-focus camera).
This moved me not so much for the cuteness factor, but the aplomb and grace of one so young in front of an audience -- maybe that's her "un-cuteness"?
From WNYC's "RadioLab" -- A a segment from a show from December last. The first five and a half minutes or so of this 33 minute segment is about the joy of a man at the end of a three-month solo trek across Antarctica. And then, from then on, it's the story of a Holocaust survivor who tried to invent a new communication system that he hoped would end all war... That, it itself, would have been fascinating. I was not expecting it to end up revolving around children with cerebral palsy living in an institutional home/school/hospital in the 1970's in Ontario, Canada... but it did (Content note-- it ends on a fairly tragic, ironic note):
Mr. Bliss
For something completely different, also from "RadioLab": Liev Schreiber reads Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon; written in Italian in 1965, and translated into English in 1968... i.e., before we landed there...
(Content note-- one of the main characters is written as Deaf for metaphorical/symbolic reasons as a sort of Magic!wild-man/Innocent-Primitive)
Read:
Found by way of "Rolling around in my head": Reclaiming memory: Searching for Great-Aunt Sarah (Content note: institutional life and death in the early 20th century)
From "Rolling around in my head" Directly: The Better Way (content note: neither tragic nor ironic-- includes a crying baby)
Watched:
And a child shall lead them -- going-on-eleven year-old Stephanie leads a blue-grass band of adult white men... You can tell she's the leader in this particular set, because she sets the tempo for their playing, and signals the final chorus of the first song with a straight-leg kick (a standard signal in folk music):
(Content note-- precocious kid on stage and occasional out-of-focus camera).
This moved me not so much for the cuteness factor, but the aplomb and grace of one so young in front of an audience -- maybe that's her "un-cuteness"?
no subject
Date: 2013-04-26 09:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-26 09:02 pm (UTC)I think that's one reason that, while I greatly enjoy talking to children (people before the age of puberty, in my experience, seem to have a lot fewer hangups about the wheelchair), it makes me cringe every time I see an adult interview a child on television or some other public media… In the latter case, there always seems to be the subtext of: let's look at this person who is so clearly "an Other" – almost like watching a trained seal at the circus.