from www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk
Tomorrow afternoon’s Digestives broadcast on Resonance FM is Holidays Vocabulary, a new work of mine based on the sound files I unearthed on an old dictaphone of mine last month. It’s an experiment in translation.
Holidays Vocabulary airs tomorrow at 4:30pm and is repeated this Friday at 7:30pm, and you can listen by clicking the ‘Listen Now’ mp3 stream at www.resonancefm.com, or tune in to 104.4fm inside London. Afterwards it will be available to download as a podcast at www.antepress.co.uk.
“How Things Began was a radio series, broadcast in the early 1950s for junior school kids, concerning early prehistory. It described in what I recall as intense detail the life of trilobites, pterodactyls, and dinosaurs, and when we had listened to each broadcast – was it fifteen minutes? – we were expected to make drawings of what we had just heard. It was easy to do, as we never questioned the authority that required us to make these drawings, and indeed enjoyed it enormously – though I recall the sweat of fear when I made a bad line and rubbed through the paper trying to get it right. I really could not draw, and have never done so.
Next Tuesday at Goldsmiths I’m going to do a grammar workshop for the other people on my Art Writing course. We’re on our Christmas holidays now but we want to keep meeting up anyway even if the tutors aren’t there. We’re going to each muster some field of special expertise or interest, one by one, and show it to everyone else. The Tamarin Grammar-In (I didn’t name it) is the first one of these meetings, and I’m not sure how to put it together.
I want to give an idea of the ‘Transformational Grammar’ I studied during my Italian and Linguistics degree, and to contextualise it briefly and broadly within a wider idea of what Linguistics is and how grammar fits into it. The trouble is that I finished that degree in 2004 so I’m really rusty, and even if I were freshly graduated I’d still only have limited undergraduate knowledge of the field. The blind leading the blind.
Anton sent me this short article which begins:
Practice-based PhDs, where doctorates are awarded for “non-textual” submissions such as a work of art, are becoming more common. Yet researchers in the creative fields still lack a “properly developed language” to describe what they are doing, a debate at Northumbria University heard last week.
