Sunday, November 2, 2014

Serendipity strikes again

This semester I've found myself preaching serendipity to at least two different classes: Global Cinema students got a New York Times piece on German dubbing practices to inform their consideration of different translation practices around the world; Media Theory & Research students got to hear an NPR piece on the correlation between home computing, gendered advertising, and the collapse of the percentage of female computer scientists in the 1980s.

Yesterday, I found myself posting about Havel on All Saints' Day; today I found myself thumbing through this new biography of Havel, written by his longtime press agent. After finals is over, this one will leap to the front of the queue. Ordering it from Titcomb's this week!

Saturday, November 1, 2014

All Souls' Day


It's All Souls' Day, and tonight I'm starting to watch Agnieszka Holland's latest, the HBO Europe miniseries Burning Bush (2013)--it centers around the fallout after Jan Paloch's self-immoliation in response to the Soviet Invasion in August 1968. We're watching this next week in Global Cinema--for a chapter on global television. The echoes of 1989 resonate that much more on this anniversary year.

This is my candle for Václav Havel.