As I was saying in Part I of this extremely short series of posts about Our Golden Hour, on Sunday morning I met with Maung Nyeu (the founder of this wonderful non-profit) at Algiers Cafe on Brattle Street in Cambridge. I handed over the materials created by some of my students in the Champlain College […]
Quite quietly, in the upper room of Algiers Cafe on Brattle Street in Cambridge, an extraordinary seasonal gift exchange took place yesterday morning. I was meeting with my friend, colleague, and collaborator Maung Nyeu, founder of the amazing non-profit organization Our Golden Hour, which aims to provide mother-tongue education for indigenous children in the Chittagong […]
Phew! Thanks to generous support from several of you and a week of carving, painting, and finishing, eight pieces of maple, 6″x6″, are on their way to my friend Maung in Cambridge, and then with him to the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh. Each is to be mounted on the door of a classroom in […]
When the Endangered Alphabets team was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival this summer in Washington D.C., the tent next to ours was occupied by singers and dancers of the Kalmyk Republic, also known as Kalmykia. The Kalmyks, who originally came west with Genghis Khan and settled in the Caucasus, are a remarkable people in many […]
Wow. Even as your intrepid Endangered Alphabets team (Maung Nyeu, our friend and collaborator from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, calligrapher/printer Jamie Kutner, Cindy Barnes, myself, and invisible back-in-Vermont laser-dude Paul Ledak) are recovering from several weeks of intense exertion and excitement, it’s time to tell you what actually happened down there on the National Mall. […]
My collaborator and friend Maung Nyeu found a book of Marma proverbs (he himself is of the Marma people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh) and sent me a scan of one page. This is one of my favorites. It reads: “The body of a frog, but the voice of an ox. Small […]
When I started the Endangered Alphabets Project, I hoped it would take me to many strange places and lead to many unusual experiences. Eating squirrel was not on my list. Nor was Iceland. My flight paused at Keflavik, the island capital’s airport, and I was looking forward to seeing, if only from the air on […]
The Alphabets Lite edition in its London bus-themed wheely-case left Vermont last Sunday, June 24th. The plan was to take a couple of days in Boston so my daughter Maddy could visit some prospective colleges and art schools, and then the Alphas and I’d take off from Logan Airport on the evening of Wednesday […]
The Alphabets have had an amazing week and a half: their first European tour. Many adventures to tell, but the first challenge was simply getting them there. To ship the original exhibition in its trunk would have cost nearly $1,000 each way, so I created The Alphabets Lite: twelve slightly smaller carvings in curly maple, […]
When I was in Bangladesh last week, meeting members of some of the country’s indigenous peoples and thinking a great deal about endangered alphabets, I found myself thinking about issues of script loss even in my down time—in other words, when I was watching television. A naïve visitor to a developing country (or, indeed, any […]
