Quote for Today: Florence Falk
We, who are so schooled in the art of listening to the voices of others, can often hear our own voice only when we are alone. . . For …
Quote for Today: Ray Bradbury
Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and …
Familiar and Strange: Experiencing Kabuki with Heisei Nakamura-za
Art from other cultures can be difficult to understand, but sometimes reveals similarities to our own that we don’t expect. While in New York City to perform in Houston Grand Opera’s …
Signs of the Times: Isolation in Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro
Society changes constantly. How do we respond to the alienation and loneliness that result from these changes? Kokoro, which can be translated as The Heart of Things, is a novel written by …
Dolls from Around the World, part two: Folk Dolls and the Female Image
From inspiring imagination to setting expectations and limits, dolls teach concepts like gender and class. What do they tell us? We can’t interpret our world without creating context, including scientific …
Quote for Today: Dorothy L. Sayers
A man once asked me… how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member …
Quote for Today: Lorine Niedecker
I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl …
Remembering Jean Stapleton: Rebel in a Housedress from Emancipation Conversation
Jean Stapleton may be remembered as the dingy but long-suffering Edith Bunker, possessing a voice that could scratch glass in the rendition of Those Were the Days that opened the Archie Bunker …
From a Bygone Era: The Art of Kissing, 1936
1936 was a memorable year: Hitler’s Germany hosted the Olympics in Berlin and broke the Treaty of Versailles by stationing troops in Rhineland; Italy occupied Ethiopia; Franco rose to power …
Modifying Tradition: Tian-Ming Wu’s King of Masks
We all have traditions. Sometimes the reason traditions fail to thrive is because we don’t allow them to change. Tian-Ming Wu’s film King of Masks takes us to the China …