Life without language | Neuroanthropology Thought without symbols — life without language — it’s a cognitive reality that is virtually impossible for most modern humans to fathom. For the vast majority of us, our thought processes have been profoundly shaped by the introjection of language into our cognitive worlds, the taking on board of a massive intellectual prosthesis, the collective product of countless generations. Human thought, for the majority, is not simply the individual outcome of our evolved neural architecture, but also the result of our borrowing of the immense symbolic and intellectual resources available in language. What would human thought be like without language? The question of the relationship between language and ‘mind’ (a word I hate using), or between symbolic resources and cognitive abilities (there, that’s equally vague!) We might try to imagine thinking without language, but, of course, we’d be doing that with language itself. Schaller meets Ildefonso I walked up to him and signed, “Hello. Stumble It!
11 Fascinating Facts About ‘Goodnight Moon’ Goodnight Moon, a deceptively simple children’s book that falls somewhere between a going-to-sleep narrative and a lullaby, will turn 68 later this year—and yet it remains one of the most universal cultural references even all these decades later. Here are a few things you might not have known about Margaret Wise Brown's sparse classic. 1. Brown was born in 1910 to moderately wealthy but distant and bickering parents. Three years later, when she was 25 and still searching for a career, Brown enrolled in Bank Street’s Cooperative School for Student Teachers. One of Bank Street's early ground-breaking revelations in children's speech patterns was Mitchell's observation that "communication is not the earliest impulse that leads to the use of language." 2. In the 1930s, most children's literature was still firmly stuck in the 19th century, and consisted of moralizing fables or fairytales set in faraway lands and distant ages. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. ... 9. And, in fact, never married. 10. 11.
A French Writer Who Blurred the Line Between Candor and Provocation Anonymity comes for us all soon enough, but it has encroached with mystifying speed upon the French writer Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991. His work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore. How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste — let alone one so prescient — remain untranslated and unread? Happily his extensive, idiosyncratic body of work is being slowly exhumed, and freshly translated. Guibert was a pioneer of autofiction and the author of one of the truly great AIDS novels, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” in which he documented the breakdown of his body with detached fascination. Guibert was a programmatically disobedient writer, in Elena Ferrante’s phrase, who found comedy in tragedy, lust in death and in AIDS “something sleek and dazzling in its hideousness.”
4 Tips on Writing Action Scenes Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy This week's Refresher Friday takes an updated look at another favorite from the archives--exploring ways to write great action scenes. Enjoy! I like action in my entertainment. Books, movies, TV shows, even games. I also enjoy a great story to go with it, but I like the external forces that cause the true nature of a person to bubble to the surface. At this point in my career, writing action comes pretty easily to me, but that wasn't always the case. And that's bad. For Compelling Action, Get in a Character's Head It's almost counterintuitive, but showing the thoughts and feelings of an active character make for better action sequences. There's no set rule for how much emotion to put into an action scene, but I try not to let too many straight descriptive paragraphs go by without hearing from my point of view character in some way. From a purely structural standpoint, these emotional pauses also help break up the text to better control the pacing. Pace Yourself
48 Hours of Joseph Campbell Lectures Free Online: The Power of Myth & Storytelling Photo by "Folkstory" features Joseph Campbell (left) with Jonathan Young, via Wikimedia Commons. You may not be interested in politics, they say, but politics is interested in you. The same, if you believe famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, goes for myth: far from explaining only the origin of the world as believed by extinct societies, it can explain the power of stories we enjoy today — up to and including Star Wars. The man behind PBS' well-known series The Power of Myth left behind many words in many formats telling us precisely why, and now you can hear a fair few of them -- 48 hours worth -- for free on this Spotify playlist. "From the Star Wars trilogy to the Grateful Dead," says the Joseph Campbell Foundation, "Joseph Campbell has had a profound impact on our culture, our beliefs, and the way we view ourselves and the world." Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Related Content: Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers Break Down Star Wars as an Epic, Universal Myth
87 Deeply Subversive Documentaries That Challenge the Status Quo x2x By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org/ Jul 19, 2017 Now that there are thousands of films on Films For Action, we realized the very best gems have really become buried all across our library, and for people new to this information, we needed a more guided way to dive in. Spread across 15 core themes, this collection aims to be that entry point. It is our attempt to curate the kind of crash-course curriculum on the state of the world we wish we had all got growing up, especially during high school and college, but didn't. Sadly, you are not likely to see these documentaries in school, broadcast on television, or available on Netflix. Enjoy the knowledge swim! Economics Education Ecology Media Literacy Empire & Government War Drug Prohibition and Prisons Community Food Democracy & Politics Culture Consumerism The Big Picture Wisdom Designing The Future Explore Films For Action's complete library via the Explore menu.
6 Easy Steps to Unforgettable Characters By Laurence MacNaughton, @LMacNaughton Part of the How They Do It Series (Contributing Author) Readers will pick up your book because of the concept, but they’ll keep reading because of the characters. No matter what genre you write in, interesting characters are absolutely essential to a well-told story. So what's the easiest way to create them? Most writers approach character creation in a haphazard manner, making things up as they go along. P is for Personality E is for Experiences R is for Relationships S is for Sketch O is for Objective N is for Need P is for Personality Think about what this character’s temperament is like, as a person. What are her strengths? What are her weaknesses? Does she have any personal rules that she always follows? Does she have any strong (but possibly incorrect) beliefs? For example, in my funny urban fantasy series, the main character (Dru Jasper) is smart, sweet, and resourceful. E is for Experiences What does this character do for a living? N is for Need
Writing an artist statement? First ask yourself these four questions | Culture professionals network "Combining radical notions of performativity and the body as liminal space, my practice interrogates the theoretical limitations of altermodernism. My work, which traverses disparate realms of object-making such as painting and performance, investigates the space between metabolism and metaphysics and the aporia inherent to such a discourse." Are you impressed yet? These forms of writing are scattered across the contemporary art world. You can find preposterously complex, jargon-laden artist statements on the websites of galleries and pop-up project spaces all over the English-speaking world. This is a dialect of the privileged; the elite university educated. The funny thing is, the chat you actually hear at a gallery opening rarely uses this language. What is the alternative to artspeak? Where does this artspeak come from? Believe it or not, it does come from somewhere and that place is often very interesting, if you're into art theory. Who are you really writing for?
Is Your Novel All Premise and No Plot? By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy Ideas come to me all the time. I have a folder on my computer that’s nothing but ideas, and I add to it every time something hits me—either another new idea or something to flesh out an existing idea. It’s pushing 50 ideas right now, but that doesn’t mean I have 50 books waiting to be written. Most of these ideas are nothing more than premises. And a premise isn’t a plot. Without that plot (and the conflict at the core of it) there’s no book. Goal–Conflict–Stakes. Quite often, a premise lacks at least one if not all three of these. A farm girl gets transported by tornado to a magical world of talking animals, wizards, and witches. What’s the goal here? If you describe you book by premise only and can’t pinpoint the goal of the story, that’s a big red flag that there’s a problem with the book. This is where a lot of story ideas fall flat (and why the book hits a wall around page 100 when you try to write it). Let’s take this premise and add a goal:
More than animation: Software supports animated storytelling Disney Research has developed new tools to help people use animation to tell stories by eliminating distracting details that hamper creativity, suggesting ways to fill holes in plots and assisting in the creation of virtual worlds where stories can play out. "We are empowering anyone to create their own animated stories," said Mubbasir Kapadia, a former Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research and now Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. This could include anyone from a professional screenwriter who is creating pre-production storyboards to casual users who simply want to try their hand at animated storytelling. The researchers have developed two such tools - CANVAS, a computer-assisted tool for creating narratives, and Story World Builder, a graphical platform where people can create "story worlds" populated with characters and props. Earlier this summer, CANVAS was presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation held in Zurich, Switzerland.
After Orlando, Examining the Gun Business Bars in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia let out at 2 A.M. On the morning of January 17, 2010, two groups emerged, looking for taxis. At the corner of Market and Third Street, they started yelling at each other. On one side was Edward DiDonato, who had recently begun work at an insurance company, having graduated from Villanova University, where he was a captain of the lacrosse team. On the other was Gerald Ung, a third-year law student at Temple, who wrote poetry in his spare time and had worked as a technology consultant for Freddie Mac. Both men had grown up in prosperous suburbs: DiDonato in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia; Ung in Reston, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Everyone had been drinking, and neither side could subsequently remember how the disagreement started; one of DiDonato’s friends may have kicked in the direction of one of Ung’s friends, and Ung may have mocked someone’s hair. None of that has hurt the gun business. The U.S.
A-helpful-chart-of-facial-expressions James Baldwin on Resisting the Mindless Majority, Not Running from Uncomfortable Realities, and What It Really Means to Grow Up “I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman wrote, “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” Nearly a century later, James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — another poet laureate of the human spirit — embodied this ethos in one of his shortest, most searing, and timeliest essays. In 1963, the children’s book author Charlotte Pomerantz edited an anthology of prominent writers’ and artists’ critiques of the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the Orwellian investigative committee largely responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans and the Hollywood blacklist. Titled A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938– 1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC, it featured writing and art by such titans of creative culture as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Ben Shahn. Reflecting on how such metastases of power imperil the moral climate of a society and corrupt the very foundation of democracy, Baldwin writes: