Orality and Storytelling
I was drawn to orality even as a kid, loving accents, imitations, wordplay and narrative. An encounter with innovators in the use of storytelling in the foreign language classroom early in my teaching career enabled me to travel my own road through the oral tradition. This section of the blog is, I hope, a natural mix of experience and experiment. Much of what is published here will be put in writing for the first time.
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Lend me your eyes so my ears can see
Audio description or AD is the oral narrative system used in film, and during certain live events such as theatre performances and sporting competitions, to compensate for the absence of images for the visually deficient. ADs of screenworks are pre-recorded, but for live events the description is spoken by the describer simultaneously with the event. In this post, beginning from the origins of AD, we'll visit the various stages involved in creating the audio description for a screen fiction by which an audio describer works to make the visual become verbal.
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Come any closer and you’ll be in the movie
As a kid, I used to dream of sitting in the front row at the cinema, but you had to fight for a place. 60 years on, it's another story but, when it happened to me, I had an unexpected and unforgettable visual experience. I saw things you don't normally notice, and I heard others that you don't normally listen for.
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The undertaker’s friend
This piece first came to life as a spontaneous oral story when talking casually with friends about how narrative could just come out of the air. The man and the horse walking together were suddenly there and I followed them to the bridge. Later I realised it was an echo of an anecdote I'd forgotten from my mother's family who raised horses in County Cork on her father's side, and I wrote it down.
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Eye-awful wildfire in France
I was at the beach in Leucate for a family afternoon when at around 4pm the sky began to change colour. Darker and darker, first taking the heat off the sun but in the space of less than an hour then stealing the light. It reminded me of a solar eclipse. People were still at the beach but the sky was no longer blue.
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Going against the flow : faces in the crowd
Crowds can make us feel safe and give us a sense of belonging, but they can also make us feel uncomfortable and leave us dreaming of a space of our own. The same can be said of life online, where the invitation to click or share to show our approval or dispproval as one of the crowd is so difficult to resist. But how do we percieve somebody who breaks free from a crowd of whatever sort and takes their own path? A street photo by Alejandro Diez invites us to explore precisely that question.
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Eyjafjöll : the unsaga of an eye-awful eruption
Wildfires in Canada created smoke haze in Europe recently. But who remembers the eye-awful effect of the eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 2010?
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Spring clean
We have been doing a Spring-clean on the blog and the new version is ready. Easier to read and to use.
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No Ordinary Rider
What's independence? Freedom from being governed by another country. The ability to live your own life. The capacity to make decisions and do things for yourself. Here's a picture of somebody who you may not immediately turn your head to look at in the street, but who was noticed by a photographer. The result ? The very picture of independence.
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The Room Next Door
Is there a door to death? Seeing the new Almodovar film about assisted dying sent me back to something I wrote down in answer to this question after seeing my mother for the last time. Quite a journey, but one which shows what happens when metaphors get real. Let me try and explain.
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Vehicle of Change
My all time favorite automobile has to be a grey Morris Oxford Series II with red leather seats. It was our first family car which our dad turned up with one evening after work shortly before we moved house in the summer of 1964.
