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Tag Archives: Art
Storytellers
John Ehle reads from and talks about his book, The Journey of August King, the story of an early 19th-century white farmer and a runaway slave girl whose paths and lives cross against the backdrops of social racism and individual conscience. This book is also the basis for a recently-released theatrical film.
George Garrett reads from and talks about his novel The King of Babylon Shall not Come Against You, which is about American society since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Kirkus Reviews calls the book an entertaining colloquium on the state of the nation.
Computers and Culture
As part of a continuing series of discussions on the history of information technology produced in collaboration with the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program, Soundings features innovator Brewster Kahle. His latest brainchild is the Internet Archive, a large-scale digital information repository. Among the Archive’s goals is keeping track of the technical innovations that are changing our understanding and use of digital information.
Sojourner and Frederick Part 1
Nell Irvin Painter discusses her new book, Sojourner Truth — a Life, a Symbol.
John Sekora discusses his new book, Frederick Douglass. [unpublished?]
Ancient Mosaics
A conversation about Sepphoris in Galilee, an exhibition that recently opened at the N.C. Museum of Art. The exhibition focuses on the archaeological site of Sepphoris, an ancient city in Roman Palestine described by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius as the ornament of all Galilee. Today, Sepphoris represents cultural crosscurrents between the modern and the ancient world. A conversation about the law in ancient Rome.
The Country I Remember
David Mason reads from his latest collection of poems, a 12-part verse narrative. The Country I Remember recalls the life of one of Mason’s ancestors, Lt. John Mitchell, who was captured in the Civil War battle of Chickamauga in 1863. The poem also looks back to Mitchell’s daughter, Maggie, who recollects her own life in the shadow of her adventurous father. Joyce Carol Oates has praised the poem for its evocation of powerful and intimate voices.
The Cyber Agenda: Politics and the Power of the Internet
Lawrence K. Grossman and James Kinsella participated in a conference at the NHC, “Deliberative Democracy in the Information Age,” part of the American Issues Forum. They “discuss and describe how new technologies such as the Internet, online magazines, and interactive cable systems are replacing our shared experience of the front page, nightly news on TV, and conventional magazines. ” [Wayne Pond]
Grossman is former president of PBS and author of The Electronic Republic: Reshaping American Democracy for the Information Age. At the time of this interview, Kinsella was general manager of MSNBC; he was founder of Time Magazine’s online newsfeed and Time Warner’s Pathfinder.
Posted in Episodes
Tagged Art, Computers, Humanities, Internet, Journalism, Television
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Season’s Greetings
Jerry Bledsoe reads from and talks about The Angel Doll, a poignant Christmas story based on his memories of childhood.
Lee Smith talks about her new novella, The Christmas Letters. In this story she uses all the Christmas letters she has ever received as inspiration for this vivid and funny, familiar and gossipy, sometimes heartbreaking, but unfiltered seasonal view of American marriage over the last 50 years.
After Thought
Can computers think? According to cyberspace expert James Bailey, the power of intellectual development is in transition and computers will soon no longer be merely our tools but our intellectual companions. Bailey, was invited to talk about his new book, After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence, as a part of the series of discussions on the history, culture, and ethics of information technology with the cooperation of the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program.
From the Doghouse to the Lighthouse
William Baldwin, South Carolina’s mad hermit swamp-dwelling eccentric tour guide waterman carpenter artist and genius, talks about his new Novel, The Fennell Family Papers. The novel is a bizarre and satirical story of an ancient family of coastal-dwelling light-house builders and proprietors. Brad Watson reads from and talks about his new book, Last Days of the Dog-Men, a collection of stories about dogs — as accomplices, as unwitting victims of human passions, and as missing parts of their human companions. Funny, dark, sometimes brutal, but stunning in their perfection of expression, Watson’s characters, according to writer Barry Hannah, are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs.
Women in Flight
Connie May Fowler talks about her most recent book, Before Women Had Wings, the powerful and affecting story of Avocet Abigail Jackson, her adolescence, her family’s broken lives, her dreams and uncertainties. There is no denying the depth of Fowler’s talent and breadth of her imagination, says The New York Times Book Review. Jane Mendelsohn talks about her new novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which brilliantly evokes in fact and fancy the fate of the celebrated aviatrix and her navigator when they disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1937.
Creating the National Pastime
G.Edward White, a social historian and baseball fan, talks about his new book, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953. In a conversation with another legal scholar and baseball connoisseur, Vincent Blassi, Professor White describes how baseball, which began as a marginal urban sport associated with drinking and gambling, became more than a ritual of childhood, an emblem of American individuality and fair play, or an idyllic search for myth. Rather, as it evolved through the Progressive Era, it was the seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game that helped to transform baseball into the national pastime.
West Virginia Wired; Commentary
Governor Gaston Caperton is the winner of the Zenith Data Systems Information Technology Leadership Award for Education, presented in recent ceremonies in Washington at the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program. Gov. Caperton talks about a highly successful model for computer technology training in West Virginia’s schools, a program that has resulted in the installation of nearly 16,000 computer workstations in classrooms throughout the state from kindergarten through grade four and in the training of more than 10,000 educators through intensive, hands-on experience.
American Legend
Pete Seeger enjoys almost legendary status for millions of Americans. But he says that over the years the motives for his music and his activism have remained true to the local wellsprings of concern for children, care for the environment, and individual responsibility. He and Michael Honey, a recent scholar in residence at the National Humanities Center, spoke and sang about his (Seeger’s) life and artistry.
Writing God’s Life
Jack Miles provides an overview of his new book, God: A Biography, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography. In it, he contemplates the life of the Divinity as expressed through a variety of epic roles, from creator to destroyer to friend of the family. The result, according to The New York Times, is a scintillating work of literary scholarship that will forever color, if not downright alter, our perception of the Bible as a work of art.
New Musics
A discussion of and performance of excerpts from the music of two important American composers, George Gershwin and William Grant Still, both of whom helped to shape contemporary ideas about highbrow and lowbrow artistry.