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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. I now realize that the articulation of story, both oral and written is something which constantly comes to mind. This page shares its various forms.
The genius and the awkwardness of our personal narratives is an ongoing source of inspiration for me. This section of the blog proposes a natural mix of experience and experiment in an exploration of three main questions. How do we tell our own stories? How do we respond to stories proposed by others? How important is orality to those constructions?
As usual, there will be posts in English and in French. And sometimes in both because, for me, things often happen twice upon a time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We have been doing a Spring-clean on the blog and the new version is ready. Easier to read and to use.
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.
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.
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.
This next travel tale has a sporting flavour. A fight on a station platform at Greenwich between rival football supporters recalls George Orwell’s connection between sport and war. What can this fight tell us about territory, identity and the sense of belonging in these war-driven times?
People-watching requires no specific qualifications, just a little time and the curiosity to do something other than scrolling through irrelevant notifications on your phone. This means that, instead of looking down, you look up. What may turn up in our immediate environment has not been chosen by an algorithm. At least, not yet. This next piece in this scrapbook of travel tales is about a people-watching experience et Gatwick Airport.