Come to the BBF with your BFF

September 9, 2010 By 1 Comment


Graduate students like me, and other bookish folks in this economy, love to find events that combine cultural cachet and entry fees of $0.00. If you like the sound of that, too, you can’t do better this weekend than the Brooklyn Book Festival, now in its fifth year, and taking place in and around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. The main day is September 12th, but the event is ‘book-ended’ with activities on September 10th and 11th, too, and features 170 publishers and booksellers with displays filling Borough Hall Plaza and Columbus Park.

Described as “hip, huge and free,” this event has a long list of scheduled authors, including Salman Rushdie, Naomi Klein, the poet John Ashbery, celebs like Venus Williams, and people you might see on the streets of Brooklyn year-round, like novelist Paul Auster. A few of the programs center on graphic novels, one moderated by Columbia University’s Karen Green, whom I mentioned in a previous post on comics for iPhones. Another panel I want to see includes The Daily Show’s John Hodgman and Kristen Schaal. Some of the events take place elsewhere in Brooklyn and do have a fee, such as Russell Banks talking about books being made into movies (his novel The Sweet Hereafter was made into a film that really stuck with me, by Atom Egoyan) [$12 at BAM].

Sometimes I feel as if I live not only in the most culturally rich city in the world, but at the very epicenter of cool, right here in Brooklyn. There may be a lot of other worthwhile things to do on the anniversary of September 11th, 2001, but this one offers an upbeat reminder of some reasons why we live here.  This is a kid-friendly event, with children’s book authors and workshops, including one that teaches kids how to write their own comic book.

Here’s a video a friend of mine made with quick views of a number of authors who will be there.

Check out the complete schedule for the Brooklyn Book Festival here.

Filed Under: Conferences, Fun, literature, New York

“The most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago”

September 7, 2010 By 5 Comments

While normally not the biggest fan of slam poet-motivational speakers, the above piece by just such a character caught my attention this summer.  Taylor Mali’s reminder to “speak with conviction” contains some painful observations about the way we speak, and as I begin my second year at the BLSCI, this brief video helps diagnose some of the unfortunate patterns that can infect our oral communication.

Mali’s main point is one I stress to the students who attend the debate workshops I organize to support Baruch management courses.  That is, how you say something is often more important than what you say.  And I have found that most students think much more about content than delivery, which means their oral presentations are often presented in stilted, too-quiet, monotonous speech patterns that prevent the speaker’s often solid facts and arguments from coming across.  While not every student speaks in the specifically meek manner described by Mali, it’s clear that a lot of students, for a wide variety of reasons, have a difficult time “speaking with conviction,” whether they are talking about geometry or Lady Gaga, and I’m wondering what kinds of interventions we can make upon this widespread lack of confidence in oral communication.

In my debate workshops I forbid the use of notes or index cards, forcing students to internalize their main points rather than turning to the crumpled paper in their hands.  I’ve found that the more they feel like they are speaking from a place of knowledge, their speech patterns become clearer, louder, stronger.  The “no notes” rule is just one strategy, though, and I’m wondering if other have ideas about the admittedly difficult task of helping a young, diverse set of students to find the authority that often hides within them.

Filed Under: Oral Communication
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