Language Blogs Voting Deadline

Monday is the deadline for votes for the 100 Top Language Blogs being run by Lexiophiles. Click the button on the right to vote, or go back here for more details.

Summer Recommendation 2 : Deaf Sentence

David Lodge has had a long career in fiction since his first novel The Picturegoers in 1960, combining comedy and thoughtfulness in novels such as Changing Places, Thinks, Nice Work and Therapy. His latest, Deaf Sentence (just out in paperback) is another highly enjoyable work, if not his very best.

Desmond Bates is a retired professor of linguistics, whose hearing has deteriorated badly, the cause both of distress and humour. He is caught in an uncertain state, spinning around in some confusion between his much more robust wife 'Fred' (Winifred), an aged and embarrassing father, and a disturbed and disturbing young female American student, Alex. Alex is a rather unconvincing character, but otherwise the novel shows Lodge's characteristic strengths, being both delightfully comic and moving.

He is interviewed by Rachel Cooke in the Guardian about the book here, and Jane Shilling reviews it in the Times here.

Seamus Heaney: a life in rhyme

Robert McCrum has a long interview with Seamus Heaney in today's Observer magazine, called 'A Life in Rhyme':-

For someone who has been so remorselessly scrutinised, Heaney is still something of an enigma. He works hard to make "famous" seem normal. Unfailingly courteous and attentive, he can also be grave, remote and occasionally stern, always watching himself, like the king of a vulnerable monarchy.

In keeping with that vigilance, and a well-defended uncertainty, Heaney is always asking himself the essential questions articulated in Preoccupations, his collected essays. "How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?"

Read the full article here.

William Trevor Films

The forthcoming Kilkenny Arts Festival (7th to 16th August) is featuring the works of Old Columban William Trevor, as seen on the cinema and TV screen. The screenings are on Saturday 8th August in the Set Theatre in John Street: Hidden Ground (a 1990 BBC documentary on Trevor), Felicia's Journey, Access to the Children and The Ballroom of Romance. Colm Tóibín introduces the day. Full details (and online booking) here.

Top 100 Language Blogs Voting

We're delighted to be in the running for the 2009 Top 100 Language Blogs (in the Language Learning category), and voting has now started (50% of the assessment is via public vote). We'd also be delighted to get your vote - so just click here or on the icon at the top of the sidebar on the right, both of which will take you to the voting page. Then scroll down (alphabetical order) to 'SCC English', click the circle to the left of the name, and go to the bottom of the list and click 'Vote'. Done! Should take 10 seconds. Please vote by the deadline, Monday 27th July.

You can read about all the nominations in the category here - with blogs in Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Hindi, French and lots more. There are also categories in Language Teaching, Language Professionals and Language Technology. The awards are being run by Lexiophiles.com and bab.la, both of which have lots of interesting material about language in its myriad forms.

Summer Recommendation 1 : The Story of a Marriage

The first of a series of occasional book recommendations for the summer holiday...

Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage, just out in paperback from Faber and Faber, is set in 1953 in San Francisco, and shares some of the atmosphere of the great TV series Mad Men (which is set at the start of the 60s, when change is more obviously in the air in America). It's a short novel, but packs a lot into its 233 pages. Narrated by housewife (and mother of a polio-stricken son) Pearlie, it hits us with two revelations in the first section, one which comes as no great surprise, and a second which is a real shocker. The interplay of these two complications drives the story, which evokes 1950s San Francisco expertly.

The novel opens 'We think we know the ones we love', a sentence repeated periodically through the novel, and the elegant twists and turns of the narrative constantly enact this idea. Greer's prose style is pleasingly free of the portentousness of some modern American fiction, but is still capable of moments of lyrical beauty. Pearlie's voice is always convincing; a particularly moving passage late in the book expresses the aching possibility of loneliness -

I was still in my twenties. And here's what I thought would be the worst: that no one else would ever know me young. I would always be this age or older, from now on, to any man I met... (continued on page 209 in the Faber paperback)

Previously, Greer wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Below, an interview with the author by Daniel Handler ('Lemony Snicket'). Greer's website is here. George Miller's interview on the Faber site here is recommended.

The English Fuss

A month ago, there was a huge fuss in the national media about the rescheduled English Leaving Certificate exam. Our Head of Department has a piece reflecting on this on the Poetry Ireland guest blog here.

Top 100 Language Blogs 2009

SCC English has been nominated for the 'Top 100 Language Blogs 2009' Award (not sure how, or by who, so thanks to whoever did), run by Lexiophiles.com and bab.la (see the comment on the previous post). Voting and judging are in July: more then.

Off to the Beach

And so we head off on our summer holidays. 88% of our posts this year have been about the school, but in the holidays every now and then we'll also throw in posts about matters of general literary interest.

Our third full year of blogging has been as busy as the others. Our main innovation this year was a start on podcasting, with several interviews, as well as Macbeth revision sessions (and there are plenty of plans for next year's podcasts). We were delighted to receive the Edublogs Best Blog Award 2008 in December. We published lots of pupils' poetry and essays, and continued posting lots of news about drama, fiction, poetry and more.

So it's time to pack a pile of books into a bag and head off...

Podcast 14: Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady'

Our final podcast of this academic year, just in time for some satisfying holiday reading, is an interview with former colleague John Fanagan, who discusses Henry James's great 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. Set in England and Italy, the book examines the progress of the innocent American young woman Isabel Archer, as she comes into contact with the ways of an older civilisation. John discusses other characters in the novel, such as Ralph Touchett, Lord Warburton, Madame Merle, Henrietta Stacpoole and the dark Gilbert Osmond. There's a spoiler warning before the last few minutes of the podcast, in which the infamous ending is discussed, so if you haven't already read the novel, you might like to pause it then, and return later.

(This is also the 700th post on SCC English).
Listen to the podcast via the player below:

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You can also listen to our podcasts via the 'widget' on the sidebar to the right, or by visiting our podcast page here (if you have iTunes on your computer you can also subscribe by clicking here, and so download our episodes to your MP3 player, or by searching for 'SCC English' in the iTunes Store).

The Submarine, June 2009

This year's final edition of the excellent Library magazine, The Submarine, is out now, and is a bumper 16-page sign-off, with plenty of food for thought. Appropriately, given the weeks ahead of us, it focusses on reading. It can be read online via Issuu below, or downloaded to your computer from the College site here.

The guest editor this time is Fiona Boyd from V form, who Librarian Tom McConville commends for her 'sure touch and irresistible force of personality' (in other words, if you said you'd write something, you'd better turn up with the goods). Among the articles are reviews by Anna Traill of Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things by Dr Garry Bannister, and of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by Sarah O'Mahony. There are also poems by Fiona Boyd and Opeline Kellett.

In addition, there's an edited transcript of this blog's podcast interview with Professor Terry Dolan on Geoffrey Chaucer, a summary of this term's new Library books, a story by I former Christian Sullivan called 'Hitler's Scientist', an advice column on reading by Virginia Peck, and lots of both enlightening and entertaining comments under the 'What's Reading Me?' heading by plenty of staff and pupils.

Click on the pages below for a larger view, scroll through by using the arrows, and click again for a close-up.

Open publication - Free publishing - More reading

'Tinseltown Meltdown': the inside view

Miriam Poulton was one of the Transition Year participants in the Actiontrack Show on Saturday (see yesterday's posts for a photo album and an Animoto video). She writes:-

Thursday morning the scripts were given to us. From past plays we had known that Actiontrack performances generally didn’t make much sense, but this… Tinseltown, plastic celebrities, singing hippos, icecream mines… could it get much stranger? The team kindly asked us what parts we would prefer, though only some got their preference. For instance, I had asked to be one of the ice-cream people, but after break when the team told us the parts I found I was to be Tara Cards, the prophesying and crazy old lady with a talking garden. Just what I always wanted to pretend to be on stage...

Read the rest of Miriam's excellent description of the five days here.

(Pictured, Michael McBurney breathes fire at the climax of the evening).

Actiontrack 09 Animoto

Below, a 3-minute Animoto video put together from photos taken at the Actiontrack performance of Tinselstown Meltdown on Saturday evening. Click the icon on the bottom, second from the right, for a full-screen view. See today's other post for the photo album. The music is 'Festa Da Carnaval' by Fernando Ebano.

Actiontrack 09 Photo Album

Here's an album of some photos of last night's Actiontrack performance and rehearsals (see today's other post to see these turned into an Animoto video set to music):-

'Tinseltown Meltdown'

It can be safely said that last night's Actiontrack Showbuild performance from Transition Year ended in the most spectacular way imaginable - with the large curtains over the Deerpark end window parting to reveal a blazing 'volcano', and the audience following the cast out of the BSR in the semi-dark to stand around a bonfire accompanied by two 'fire-breathers' and a Japanese drum unit. Whereupon a large tractor hoved into view, in its uploader an enormous icecream, which was then tipped into the flames, 'quenching' the volcano.

What had taken place in the preceding 80 minutes was a drama called Tinseltown Meltdown, the story of the innate shallowness of the world of celebrity, and the innate decency of icecream. Over the next couple of days we'll have lots of photos, a video, and a pupil's review.

Click here for the programme.

'Lake Thun'

The last of the recent series of four poems inspired by paintings and photographs, written by Transition Year, is Sophie Millar's 'Lake Thun', which was prompted by Ferdinand Holler's painting of that name (click here for a large image).

'Lake Thun' by Sophie Millar

Calamity and Catastrophe
Steered far away
From the warm blue chill
Of the dawning day.
With airbrushed colours
Within shy waters,
The mountains arose
To take control.

But presumptions took the tide of doubt
And it was believed a dream,
For no life could possibly live
In this lovestruck paradise.

'My First School'

Recently we posted Susannah Cooke's piece about her first school, and here is another essay from the Transition Year Work Portfolio on the same subject. In this case it's Rebecca Moran's experience of her first school in Castlebar:-

As I walked along the dark grey corridor, I was greeted by a red door. I held my mum’s hand. We were welcomed by a rather old woman who had pronounced wrinkles in her forehead and had a friendly, caring look about her. She wore a pale pink v-neck sweater and long black trousers. Her name was Miss Kelly. She reached for a large sheet, filled with the names of boys and girls. She scanned it and finally came across mine...

Read the full essay here.

Podcast 13: Actiontrack - an interview with Nick Brace

Our 13th podcast is an interview with the Artistic Director of the Actiontrack Performance Company, Nick Brace (pictured, giving last-minute instructions to last year's cast). Actiontrack have been coming to us since 1993, working with II formers in March, and with Transition Year in particular at the end of each year in 'showbuilds'. Nick discusses the process in which a musical production is created from scratch in five days, involving song-writing, singing, dancing, set design and of course acting. He also talks about Actiontrack's work generally, including local work in Somerset with schools, youth groups and communities. Actiontrack's website is here.

Listen to the podcast via the player below:-

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You can also listen to our podcasts via the 'widget' on the sidebar to the right, or by visiting our podcast page here (if you have iTunes on your computer you can also subscribe by clicking here, and so download our episodes to your MP3 player, or by searching for 'SCC English' in the iTunes Store).