Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 22

These Last Few Days

These last few days have been strange. Filled with joy and sorrow. Fun and excitement on the one hand and horror and despair on the other.

Last Friday and Saturday, the Mixed Remixed Festival took place at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. I attended last year, and this year I was a presenter. I reconnected with friends I’d met last year and made new friends. I got to speak on my first author panel ever. I’m going to write more about this year’s festival soon, but I feel...

San Francisco

I visited San Francisco again this past weekend! Upon arriving late Friday afternoon, I went straight to Casa de Paz, an intentional community in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. There I met my friend Miyuki. The residents of the house were cooking a vegan meal for Friday evening meditation, which I wasn’t going to be able to stay for. Miyuki showed me the amazing gardens, and then we sat on the front steps and caught up. Occasionally someone from the neighborhood would walk by, and I’d...

Nüshu, Laotong, and Gemaecce

The other day, I was pondering how two characters in a new story I’m working on might communicate secretly with each other through an exchange of notes. It occurred to me that they might use a women’s script. I knew that there was a real women’s script derived from Chinese characters, so I looked it up again. It’snüshu (女書), and it was used by women in Jiangyong County in Hunan Province.

Nüshu text (Source)

In the course of reading the Wikipedia page on nüshu, I came across the concept of lao...

The Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest

I devoted most of last weekend to musical activities. Saturday was the LA Regional All-Day Singing at Angels Gate in San Pedro. Many songs were sung, the requisite photos of the Korean Friendship Bell were taken, and Robert’s rules of order were much abused. We had visiting singers from Colorado and Georgia!

On Sunday, the LA Sacred Harp singers held workshops at the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest & Folk Festival, which is…exactly what the name says. You can compete in different levels on fiddl...

In Which I Go to a Magic Show

On Sunday evening, my friend Isabelle and I went toIn & Of Itself, a magic show at the Geffen Playhouse. Glenn Kaino, the conceptual artist for whom we created Lunar French got us tickets, since he was the show’s producer. The performer was magician Derek DelGaudio.

Before the show began, we joined the crowd milling around a wall hung with cards that read “I am a…”. The blank was filled with many different options, and the cards were arranged in alphabetical order. A sign on an easel instruct...

YALLWEST 2016

This past weekend was YALLWEST, a YA book and author festival that’s the West Coast version of YALLFEST, which takes place in South Carolina. YALLWEST was held at Santa Monica High School, which is ENORMOUS. Seriously, it’s the size of a small college campus, with separate buildings for Humanities, Science, etc. It even has Harry Potter-esque houses. Also, the abbreviation for the school is Samohi, which looks like a made-up word in a phonology paper.

I was only able to go on Saturday. There...

The Dark Is Rising

There was a point in elementary school when it seemed like everyone was reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, and somehow I never did. The other week, I decided to rectify that. I was at the library, and The Dark Is Rising caught my eye. Only later did I realize the first book in the series is actually Over Sea, Under Stone, but The Dark Is Rising works as a standalone.

A few things struck me as I was reading. First, The Dark Is Rising is a great snow book, and more specifically...

LA Times Festival of Books 2016

My friend Isabelle and I spent all of last Saturday at the LA Times Festival of Books at USC. This was my second time attending the festival; last year, I went specifically to meet my editor. This year, I went without an agenda. It was a rare rainy day, and Isabelle and I went from booth to booth (Kinokuniya, Vroman’s, Mysterious Galaxy, Once Upon A Time, Pages, Skylight Books, etc.) looking at and talking about books. Some highlights included:

At the Book Soup booth, they were running a moc...

AWP in Los Angeles

Last Saturday, I took the bus downtown to go to AWP at the LA Convention Center. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and it hosts an enormous annual conference. (Last year it was in Minneapolis! I didn’t go.)

I arrived early because a particular 9:00am panel had caught my eye: The Politics of Translation: Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe. La Tragédie du roi Christophe is a play I read as historical background for a college class on contemporary Haitian novels...

African Linguistics at Berkeley

Like last year, I spent the end of my spring break at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics. This time, instead of camping in Oregon, I stayed with my friend Andrew, a grad student in linguistics at Berkeley, where the conference was held.

The Campanile

I presented a poster on Maragoli, the language I worked on in Field Methods last year. Famous Linguist #2 (see last year’s post) came to my poster, and we spent some time discussing the data and the way I transcribe the vowels of Marago...