In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup a favorite of mine is Sixty years in poems. I like it not only for the poetry but also for its illustration of the many ways we can capture our stories. For a thought-provoking piece on the harmful side of life writing, be sure to read Life Writing: An ethical source of self identity, or painful invasion of privacy?
- Byte-sized Life. “We are used to duration—getting to know people over time. One of the great innovations of film during the silent era was the close-up. Directors used the facial expression of a character the way one might use an interior monologue in a novel. But it was always shown in some sort of larger narrative context. Now, DVDs, the DVR, and YouTube allow for piecemeal and repetitive viewing…We require so little—a gesture, a word, a simple facial expression—to form an understanding, or the illusion of an understanding, of another person.”
- Storytelling Animals: 10 Surprising Ways That Story Dominates Our Lives. “For humans, story is like gravity: an inescapable field of force that influences everything, but is so omnipresent that we hardly notice it. Here are 10 hidden ways that story saturates our lives.”
- Harper Lee’s sister gives glimpses of reclusive author’s life. “Glimpses into the family life of the famously reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, have been given by her sister Alice, a practicing lawyer who recently turned 100. Alice Finch Lee, known as Miss Alice, was speaking to documentary maker Mary McDonagh Murphy.”
- Sixty years in poems. “Carol Ann Duffy invites leading poets to recall a year in verse.”
- Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City. “Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet. The city’s Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database. Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.”
- Life Writing: An ethical source of self identity, or painful invasion of privacy? “On Tuesday evening, roughly 30 students, faculty, staff and Greencastle community members gathered to hear John Eakin’s reflections on life writing in his talk, “Telling Life Stories: The Good of It, and the Harm.” … Eakin, a professor at Indiana University and one of the foremost authorities on the autobiography and memoir, addressed the complexities of the genre.”
- Indiana company adding QR codes to gravestones, links to memorial website. “You might think gravestones would be stuck in the “stone age” and tough to turn high-tech, but one monument company in Indiana says that’s wrong. Cellphones can now link loved ones to living memorials.”
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