Language is both an indispensable aspect of culture and a way to approach culture. This week, we had a special event after class-change the world with onigiri. For Japan, food has always been an essential part of the Japanese traditional culture. It not only satisfies the appetite of the Japanese, but also represents a …
Category Archives: Block 8
Splashing into Week 1
It’s block 32 for me at CC, and I am surprisingly glad to spend it taking Water! Water is a notoriously difficult Environmental Science class, but thus far has been better than expected. Last week, we went on a field trip to Mt. Princeton Hot Springs! Never did I ever expect that CC would put …
Smiling Through The Apocalypse: The Beginning of the End (Times)
“Oh yeah, I’ll be there. But, what are we going to do?” I asked David Hendrickson, my 4-year academic adviser, sometime during 7th block as we wrapped up a meeting spent knee deep in deciphering a coherent direction to take my big senior tutorial paper. “To be honest, I’m not sure I want to spend …
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A week of conferencing and work days
Our class all seemed to be disproportionately sick, overtired, or gloomy this morning, myself included. I think 3rd week monday of 8th block came a bit sooner than a lot of us were expecting. It’s occasionally been challenging to be fully present in this class during such a transitional time on campus. Most of our …
Workshopping; The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
Thursday and Friday of this week were consumed by workshopping all ten drafts of our final audio essays. Both days were long, rewarding and difficult. It was my first experience workshopping anything, or being workshopped, and I think most of the class was a little nervous. A writing workshop environment is so intense because you …
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Playing around with sounds (Audio Essay, Block 8)
Greetings from the Audio Essay! So, after reading an awesome article by Brendan Baker (here’s the link: http://transom.org/2014/using-music-brendan-baker/ ) our class spent the day split between peer editing our personal essay and a very fun, creative sound compilation exercise. I think the bigger sound nerds in our class got more from the Brendan Baker article than I …
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Making the Pitch
The second week of The Audio Essay started out on a note of high anxiety for me; we all made a professional story pitch. Over the weekend, our assignment was to create a formal pitch for a personal essay to debut on a radio program. Theoretically, if our pitch did well in class, it was …
Miracolo a Milano
The last couple days have introduced a bit of levity to our material. As we learned last week, neorealist films focus on real life, everyday experiences of average people – usually the underdog – and often addressed World War II and contemporary social justice issues. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan) is another film by De Sica, …
Neorealism
In the second half of the week, we shifted our focus to the post-World War II reaction to fascism, exemplified in a cinematic and literary movement known as neorealism. Neorealist directors like Rossellini sought to strip away the artificiality of propagandist films of the previous decades and explore not only the effects of reality – …
Italian Political Cinema
As a Romance Languages major who chose Italian as one of my specialties, I’m lucky that the few upper-level Italian courses we’re offered are so interesting! Many, like this one, are cross-listed courses, so I get to take class with not only Italian students (it’s a pretty small department – the few of us overlap …
