Maps

We {heart} "Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination" by Katharine Harmon

First in the "We heart..." series, a beautifully-illustrated book showing an eclectic and colourful mix of maps & charts of real and fictional places, bodies, dreams, maps made of sticks or carved into stone. It plunges us in the magical world of Places, playing with the concepts of finding our own in the world and having our unique vision of places based on memory and emotions rather than geographical facts. Everyday we build our own landscape, we create and react to our surrounding environment. Places slowly end up meaning very different things to different people.
Try and draw a map of a place not as it is, but as you remember it and feel it. Let yourself be surprised by the outcome, by how your own story and creativity mix with geography. Throughout this blog, we will be looking at how cities are experienced and take shape in the heart and minds of people that live,work,love, interact and have fun in them and we will have a peek into their personal geography books...
Stay tuned!

Old records

We {heart} the visual feast provided by old vinyl records...
the rare and collectible ones digged out in second-hand shops or the family's dusty treasures found in the garage, the funky disco 70's ones and the cheesy 80's ones.. As much as I love my iPod, it is so nice to step back in time sometimes, gently placing the needle and listening to that crackling sound.
For ideas on how to bring music and visual arts even closer together and turn album covers into a DIY project, see here:
http://abeautifulmess.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/03/diy-vintage-record-cover-wall-art-.html

Words in Action's library. Have a browse!

Viaggiare

"... Erodoto, infatti, va alla scoperta dei suoi mondi con l'entusiasmo e la passione di un bambino. La sua scoperta principale é che i mondi sono molti. E tutti diversi. Che sono tutti importanti e che bisogna conoscerli, poiché le altre culture sono specchi che riflettono la nostra, permettendoci di capire meglio noi stessi. E' impossibile definire la propria identità finché non la si è confrontata con le altre. Ecco perchè Erodoto, dopo aver scoperto la cultura degli altri come specchio nel quale rifletterci per comprenderci meglio, ogni mattina, instancabilmente, torna a rimettersi in viaggio. "(Ryszard Kapuscinski, In viaggio con Erodoto).

Godard and the subtitle stunt

In his latest Film Socialisme, the legendary Swiss-French film director Jean-Luc Godard played a little avantgarde game with subtitles leaving his audience baffled and causing a wide range of reactions amongst the critics, some of which stormed out during the screening.
The movie is a "symphony in three movements", a multilingual collage of fragments set on a cruise ship visiting Egypt, Odessa, Israel, Greece, Naples and Barcelona.
And what is the fuss all about, you might be wondering?
Well, what is seen on screen is very different from what is heard.
The English subtitles don't follow the original but are a made-up version of the French dialogues. No subject-verb-object constructions. Just keywords, clusters of words, slogans, neologisms.
Godard's slogan in one of his recent interviews was "Don't translate, learn languages". A left-wing European intellectual's stance on our new globalised era where people from different cultures are brought together by English as a lingua franca.

Watch the longest and the shortest of the 6 trailers available for the film:

Goodbye, Monsieur Levis Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France's greatest thinkers, the founder of modern anthropology, has died just a few weeks before his 101st birthday. A great man, philosopher, explorer, traveller and music lover,he collaborated with Roman Jakobson and was inspired by his structural linguistics in his anthropological and social sciences studies.

Here is an interview from 1984 for the programme Apostrophes, where Lévi-Strauss discusses his work:

http://www.ina.fr/sciences-et-techniques/sciences-humaines/video/I06292950/claude-levi-strauss-definit-l-ethnologie.fr.html

The Language Show, Olympia, London

Highlights from The Language Show, which took place in Olympia,London from the 30th October to the 1st November for the delight of all language lovers and professionals:

"Today a student, tomorrow a star: interpreters on the frontline" was the title of an inspiring talk by Daniel Pashley, EU staff interpreter, on the highs and lows of EU interpreting, from plenary sessions in Strasbourg to potato fields, aimed at students, wannabe interpreters and newcomers to the profession. Simultaneous interpreting booth simulation + documentary on the history of conference interpreting.

-Links into Languages, a government funded programme launched in April 2009, which offers professional development courses for those involved in languages education in Primary, Secondary and Further Education.

Free event coming up in London: An introduction to Links into Languages
Date: 18th November 2009
Location: 309 Regent Street, University of Westmister, London

In view of moving our office to Barcelona next year, we started getting "in the garlic" (from the Spanish expression estar en el ajo= to be clued up) on anything Catalan!
The Institut Ramon Llull has a London office (17 Fleet Street)and offers plenty of opportunities to keep up with Catalan culture, society, movies etc.

http://www.llull.cat
www.parla.cat (to "aprende catalan en Internet")
www.gencat.cat/llengua

We also discovered an exciting series of seminars called "Languages of the Wider World" held at SOAS- UCL Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, whose aim is
"to promote, support and research the languages of Africa, Asia, the Middle East; Russia, Slavonic and Eastern European; Hebrew and Yiddish; Netherlands and Scandinavia. We call these the Languages of the Wider World." Itesh Sachdev, Director

First lecture coming up soon: "Technology enhanced language teaching and learning"
Date: 12th November 2009
Location: SOAS, Vernon Square campus
To register: www.lww-cetl.ac.uk


I had a chance to visit the stand of Mantra Lingua, a publishing house for fantastic bilingual children's books and toys which I occasionally collaborate with. They produce a great series of audio books, fairy tales and educational posters for children.
See more on www.mantralingua.com

I picked up a copy of the latest "Languages today" magazine, designed for language teachers and published by the Association for Language Learning
www.all-languages.org.uk

..and finally I purchased some of the very fun and useful Quaderni di cinema italiano, ed. Guerra for teaching Italian through films.

An insightful & useful trade exhibition and, over all, a wonderful/wunderbar/magnifique/magnifico day.