Posts tagged georgia | Culture Making

25 August 2009

Frequently the [peacock] combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sound like a cheer for an invisible parade.

—Flannery O'Connor, "The King of the Birds"

21 July 2009

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor author Brad Gooch, interviewed by Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm. Additional links from Black Market Kidneys

In the introduction to Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories her editor Robert Giroux writes of her arrival at the University of Iowa: "At their first meeting in his office, in 1946, Mr. Engle recalls, he was unable to understand a word of Flannery's native Georgian tongue: 'Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad.'" This sort of thing happened to her quite a bit in Northern literary circles. Which made it all the more amazing when I heard a recording of Flannery's voice for the first time the other day, two and a half minutes into this interview with her biographer Brad Gooch. Her dialect, though strong, is completely understandable. I often assume that our saturation with recording technology must have a homogenizing effect on our speech, making us all talk the same. It may do that, but it also apparently makes us more used to people who talk different. (Here, btw, are lengthier mp3s of the same two-part speech: "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature," and a reading of her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find".)

re: cultural worlds, georgia, language, literature, stories, voice

Nate:

22 June 2009

The world-changing potential of new technologies is often best realized not by people whose initial goal was to change the world, but by those who dove into smaller passion projects, put in their hours and honed their craft without an eye on earth-shattering outcomes.

re: africa, europe, georgia, horizons of the possible, internet, journalism, kenya, protests

Nate:

from "As Blogs Are Censored, It’s Kittens to the Rescue," by Noam Cohen, NYTimes.com, 21 June 2009

From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

The Russia-Georgia war, he said, offered a contrast.

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”