Posts tagged stories

11 March 2010
excerpt The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete
I first discovered Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when she was featured on the cover of my copy of Poets and Writers magazine. She was so striking on the cover, with her bold red head wrap and beautiful gaze, and her interview revealed a very intelligent, inspiring woman—I couldn't wait to read her work. In this video, Ms. Adichie talks about the danger of hearing only a single story about another person or country, risking a critical misunderstanding about their depth, beauty, intelligence, and humanity.
re: africa, horizons of the possible, nigeria, stories, video
Christy:
from "The danger of a single story," by Chimamanda Adichie, TED.com, July 2009

1 February 2010
image The lion and the mouse
image
from The Lion and the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney, 2010
Last month the author and artist Jerry Pinkney was awarded the highest honor for an illustrator of children's books: the Caldecott Medal. His wordless retelling of the classic Aesop fable, The Lion and the Mouse, contains stunningly beautiful renderings of this heartwarming story, set in the African Serengeti, that reminds young and old alike that no act of kindness is ever wasted. In this video he invites us into his studio to get a bit of background on this remarkable work of art.
re: africa, animals, books, illustration, stories
Christy:
27 August 2009
video Storytelling in sand

from "Ukraine's Got Talent," by Kseniya Simonova, posted 7 June 2009
This remarkable and touching Ukrainian history lesson depicted in sand is a wonderful example of how art can do what words cannot. Watching the reactions of the audience members speaks volumes about how that nation's citizens are still feeling the emotional impact of WWII and Victory Day. After you've watched the video, get more of the story here.
re: europe, sand, stories, ukraine, visual art, war
Christy:
21 July 2009
embed Flannery’s voice

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:
28 July 2008
video Ira Glass on the taste-execution gap

via Lifehacker
A pep talk for creative folks from the This American Life host. The third of a four-part series on storytelling for radio and television: first, second, fourth.
re: cultivation and creation, disciplines, execution, ira glass, radio, stories, taste, tv
Nate:
30 June 2008
excerpt Pixar’s R&D
The "Here's why Pixar is so amazing, and why their movia-a-year is consistently so good" article is a bit of a cliché now. Doesn't make such investigations much less fascinating, though. I can't wait to see Wall-E. Though of course I will ...
re: cultivation and creation, grace, movies, pixar, stories
Nate:

from ”Pixar defies gravity”, by Patrick Goldstein, the LA Times The Big Picture blog

Pixar is also unique because of its origins. Today’s studios are four generations removed from their original immigrant entrepreneurs. They’re more like banks than movie companies, made up of employees all surrounded by constant reminders that they work for a mega-conglomerate always worried about making back its investment. Though owned by Disney, Pixar is still, creatively, the construct of Steve Jobs, a first-generation technological entrepreneur and visionary.

“We’re a studio of pioneers who, if you look at it technically, were the ones who invented much of computer animation” says Lasseter. “Everything we’ve done no one had done before—it was all new. So that creates a group of people who strive to break new ground. It’s addicting. When someone comes in and says, ‘This is something no one has ever done before,’ we all get excited. We have a company culture that celebrates being pioneers.”

He adds: “Because we’re a culture of inventors, nothing is standard operating procedure for us. We constantly reevaluate and reexamine everything we do. We go back and study what works and what didn’t work and we get excited about what didn’t work because, for us, that’s a challenging new problem to solve.”