Giselle is right up there with Swan Lake when it comes to ballet fame. But I was still surprised when my oldest daughter gasped, “I have to see Giselle; you can take my sister to all the rest of them but I have to see Giselle,” and then proceeded to tell me the entire story. She practically levitated through both acts of the Saturday matinee. So it’s a little bit ironic Giselle was the most challenging piece for me this season.
ByGD
Giselle at Pacific Northwest Ballet
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Welcome to India
Source TOI Image via The Hindu
Before there were blogs, I spent a quarter studying sustainable development in southern India. Many nights involved entertainments of the herbal or alcoholic kind; there were roof-top full-moon parties and midnight swims in the ocean (the garbage floating there was harder to see in the moonlight); some evenings were spent on planting plans and composting-toilet design. But occasionally, I sat down at a computer and wrote about my adventures for an email distribution list of friends. This is one of those stories.
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Book Report: The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning
Iceland has one of the richest literary traditions in the world, and it is a tradition that is alive and well today, as evidenced by several oft-quoted statistics about literacy rate, books read per capita per year, and the highly debated “1 in 10 authorship” claim. Reykjavík is a UNESCO City of Literature – the first non-English speaking city to receive the title. And therein lies the rub.
Almost all of that literary activity is occurring in a language that only a few medievalists and the population of a small, sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic can understand. In such a tiny, saturated market, even record sales are not enough to guarantee a novel’s translation into English, and so most of the world remains unaware of Iceland’s tremendous literary output. Hallgrímur Helgason decided to fix that. He wrote The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning in English, from the point of view of a foreigner arriving in Iceland for the first time and with no preparation. Read More