17 mar 2011

Cultural Literacy (ii)

What I'd do, following the model in the link to the post below, is choose three items per session. One literary, one artistic or musical, and one in any other category I wanted (intellectual history, film...) The idea is to explain something briefly but not superficially, not with wikipedia factoids, but with some real understanding. The topics would have to be narrow enough to explain in 15 minutes, so that I could do three in an hour.

4 comentarios:

Clarissa dijo...

What would your first 3 topics be?

I think I'd do:

1. Why Malevich's "Black Square" is a work of genius.

2. Why the major totalitarian regimes of the XXth century had a profound dislike of modernist art.

3. Why Spain was marketed as "different" during Franco's regime.

Jonathan dijo...

Mine would be

(1) Ornette Coleman's 1959-60 recordings.

(2) The Prologue to Henry V and what it teaches us about Shakespeare's dramaturgy.

(3) Why people think certain language have a lot of words for snow and why it isn't really true.

Clarissa dijo...

I don't know anything about any of your topics, so I'd come to listen for sure.

Have you published any posts on number 3? I'm very curious now. Russian and Ukrainian have only 1 word for snow between them.

Vance Maverick dijo...

On #3, see Language Log's compendium. And if you don't know #1, check out "Lonely Woman" right now!