Stories. "Asking Questions in Church" by michelle (TP member)

Welcome to the TP Podcast!

This month, we have a story by a member of the TP Project. It's a childhood memory. Enjoy!

Listen to the story! Read the story at the TP Website!

Would you like to practice writing a childhood memory? Post it at the TP Blog "Our World in Spanish into English" and see if it also gets selected for publication on the TP section called "Your Stuff!". If you are not a Spanish-speaker, you can send your stories directly to the TP website. Be sure to proofread your texts before sending them in!

Have a nice day!

Stories. "Ada" by Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an experimental writer who explored language without any kind of fear, and joyfully. Have fun!

Listen to Ada.
Read the story and check out the TP webpage on Gertrude Stein, where you can also listen to her reading bits of her work.

Stories. "Gertrude Talks Back" by Margaret Atwood

Welcome to the TP Podcast!

This story is told by Gertrude, Hamlet's mum! Enjoy it!

Listen to "Gertrude Talks Back"
Read the piece at the TP website, plus find out more about Margaret Atwood and her work.

Poems. "The Housing Poem" by Dian Million

Listen to the poem.
Comment the poem at the Dakota in Spain blog.
Read about its author on the TP webpage for Dian Million.

Read here the poem:

The Housing Poem
by Dian Million

Minnie had a house
which had trees in the yard
and lots of flowers

she especially liked the kitchen

because it had a large old cast iron stove
and that
the landlord said was the reason
the house was so cheap.

Pretty soon Minnie's brother Rupert came along
and his wife Onna
and they set up housekeeping in the living room
on the fold-out couch,
so the house warmed and rocked
and sang because Minnie and Rupert laughed a lot.

Pretty soon their mom Elsie came to live with them too
because she liked being with the laughing young people
and she knew how the stove worked the best.
Minnie gave up her bed and slept on a cot.

Well pretty soon
Dar and Shar their cousins came to town looking for work.
They were twins
the pride of Elsie's sister Jo
and boy could those girls sing. They pitched a tent under
the cedar patch in the yard
and could be heard singing around the house
mixtures of old Indian tunes and country western.

When it was winter
Elsie worried
about her mother Sarah
who was still living by herself in Moose Glen back home.
Elsie went in the car with Dar and Shar and Minnie and Rupert and got her.
They all missed her anyway and her funny stories.
She didn't have any teeth
so she dipped all chewable items in grease
which is how they're tasty she said.
She sat in a chair in front of the stove usually
or would cook up a big pot of something for the others.

By and by Rupert and Onna had a baby who they named Lester,
or nicknamed Bumper, and they were glad that Elsie and Sarah
were there to help.

One night the landlord came by
to fix the leak in the bathroom pipe
and was surprised to find Minnie, Rupert and Onna, Sarah and Elsie, Shar and Dar all singing around the drum next
to the big stove in the kitchen
and even a baby named Lester who smiled waving a big greasy piece of dried fish.

He was disturbed
he went to court to evict them
he said the house was designed for single-family occupancy
which surprised the family
because that's what they thought they were.

Special Episodes: Women’s Day (March 8)

Welcome to the TP Podcast! Listen to this episode. Check out the podcast to see the pictures. Here is the text:

It’s taken over 20 centuries for us as societies to start questioning the gender system – those ideas, shaping feelings and attitudes, and ways to relate to each other and organize life within our society which establish that there is a difference in terms of rights and worth between men and women, this is, that there are two kinds of human beings, and that women are second-class people.

Traditions (always based on religious dogmas!) insist on that, cruelly, unfairly, irrationally, contradicting the most precious achievement of human understanding: human rights. They exert constant pressure on us so we won’t allow the system to change. But as a species, we’re beginning to realize it’s a system we don’t want, because it is unfair and we could do better designing our lives and our interaction.

The gender system encourages violence against women because that is part of its foundation, and violence here should be taken in its complex sense, including more than physical violence and the violence society exerts when it ostracizes people just because their ideas or identity do not comply to the mentality prevailing in society. So it’s violent…
* to force people to be what they don’t want to be (e.g. a woman is…, a man is…),
* to force people to lead a lifestyle they don’t want to lead (e.g. being forced to have children or to die because reproductive rights are established by machista people, who do not value women’s lives; or having to fight for your own and other people’s survival, with no recognition ever, subject to rape and other forms of torture, all just because a bunch of immoral and cruel people are taking all the resources and consider other people are there just to be abused in every way), [Sorry, I'm thinking about Africa - heartbreaking]
* to force people to relate in their private lives to whom they don’t want to relate (e.g. serving as sexual slaves or maids in the home, or being the punch bag for men who think they have the right to beat up women; or being subject to social pressure on their sexual life because machismo does not respect women’s choices in this matter),
* to force people to do what they don’t want to do (e.g. not be able to study, not to have actual access to certain paid work and be forced to take up certain other jobs),

* to call people what they don’t want to be called (in Spain, for instance, in spite of the fact that last year a bill was passed on this – check this out -- some people refuse to use the feminine suffix when they address women. Their violent refusal points to the fact of how important language is for our conceptual system and for how we relate to people. Naming implies existence. And if women have started to exist, to be visible in society beyond the roles they were forced into by the gender system, language needs to make that visible).

We should support the development of solving problems through the use of our intelligence, not through violence. But the world we live in bombs us with images of violence so that we never give intelligence a chance, so that we consider violence unavoidable. Women have fought, and some people in the world have fought, without using violence. Violence is not unavoidable. That’s a primitive idea, based on the conviction that violence is better than using our intelligence. Are we really so little intelligent? The human rights movement, including feminism, which is a human rights movement focused on overcoming gender discrimination, has been the most successful nonviolent social transformation so far, but its work, its impact, though greater than ever, is far from being safe, understood by all.

It is amazing how feminism is still perceived by many as something negative, when there is overwhelming evidence of how negative it is what feminism fights against, and how constructive or nonviolent it is the ways in which feminism fights for what should be.

Today, March 8, International Women’s Day, I’d like to say thank you to all feminists, my deepest thank you, my deepest respect – feminists are despised, ignored, attacked, constantly, and when society benefits from their struggle, they get no recognition, and they don’t care, but it’s unfair they are never acknowledged as what they are: people contributing to building a truly civilized world. I’d also like to say thank you to all those people who, not considering themselves feminists, do support in their daily attitudes, words, ideas, and actions a world where discrimination for reasons of sex is rejected.

Women have been forced to transmit the words that would educate children in perpetuating the gender system. If they didn’t, they were ostracized, tortured in various ways and killed (and that’s never been recorded in History books). So it is not surprising that women have contributed to maintaining the gender system, a system which is full of violence towards women, and also towards men who do not comply with their gendered role.

Women have been excluded from being listened to. It’s not that there haven’t been women thinkers, artists, activists... Women’s brains are human brains. It’s that they haven’t been welcome, and that they have been severely repressed, punished. Nothing has encouraged women to perform certain activities and everything has been traditionally against women performing certain activities. Human kind needs to listen to women, too. There’s lots to catch up in terms of listening to women! We people need to listen to men and women who are criticizing all the violence in our systems, because building a better world cannot be done through the use of violence (aren’t you absolutely saturated with all this violence?). It can only be done through the use of intelligence. Even if it’s a minority understanding this idea, it’s possible to get our message through, because even though we’ve been trained to see what we believe in, and not what is there, our mind is capable of seeing what is there.

Here is the link to the webpage on TP devoted to March 8.

A warm and grateful thank you to all those people who fought -- and were harmed and killed – to make this world a better place to live.

A warm and grateful thank you to all those women who are carrying the heaviest burden of a sexist gender system that forces on them the survival of all giving them nothing in exchange, not even recognition.

A warm and grateful thank you to those men who understand the points raised by feminism and actually support it, by working with feminist groups or ideas, or in their daily lives by not accepting their “privilege” to beat and rape women, or consider them inferior.

Happy March 8. Take care. Keep safe. We’re products of our culture, so it’s hard to be transformative. Don’t let confusion lead your way. Communicate. Rational caring dialogue helps us think better. Let’s make the most of our lives by using intelligent freedom, and tender solidarity. All human beings should have the chance to be happy. Use it if you

have it, and support other people may have it too.

Stories. "House of Light & Shadow" by Nicholas Gage

Welcome to the TP Podcast! A few weeks ago, CPG, a fifth year (Y5) student at the state-run language school where we meet up, gave me a little present – The New York Times Magazine, the 15th of jan issue, 2006, which is where I found the story I’d like to read today to you all. It’s called “House of Light and Shadow” and it was written by Nicholas Gage, an author I don’t know and who I had never read before. So it’s been a discovery, and a pleasure! I like the story because it includes childhood memories, dreams, a house in an open landscape, which I imagine very beautiful because it’s in Greece, and it also includes thoughts and feelings you get throughout your life, as you grow older. I really like that.
I hope this inspires you to write about your own childhood memories, so you can practice using the past tenses, including the modals! You could just write short 150-word pieces, and send them to the Talking People Website for publication! (Check out the TP section Your Stuff to read some!) If you do, remember to type in the subject line “TP contribution”.
So, here it goes. Enjoy!

Listen to the story. Read the article.

Stories. "A Telephone Call" by Dorothy Parker

Hi everybody!

Here's an interesting writer, probably one of the very first who used the stream-of-consciousness technique (modernist writing). The story, however, is not one of my favorites. I chose it because it's got good language material for English learners! So, I had a hard time recording it because I'm no actress and although I had a similar experience when I was young-younger that seems to be so far away from my emotional life today, that I think I didn't manage to read well. Anyhow, I did my best! :)

Listen to Dorothy Parker's "A Telephone Call"
Read the story and also my language notes, which are an example of how to use literature to review some language points and become more fluent and correct while using your English! This story is very useful to review hypothetical language, the language functions "will" has, the modals in general, indirect speech and various verbal phrases. Feel free to comment here and pose your questions on the TP forums.
More about Using Literature to learn English at the TP section How to Learn, especially here.

Stories. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by Salinger

If you don't know J.D. Salinger, listen to this story. It's a good way to start - it records a key moment in his life and to understand his work. If you already know him, and enjoy his literature, you'll love this story. It's lifelike - daily, undaily, warm and softly funny, very sweet, endlessly sad and tragic.

Check out the Talking People webpage dedicated to Salinger.

Stories. "The Debutante" by Leonora Carrington (Surrealism)

Half of this audio is me talking about the writer Leonora Carrington first, and then comes her story "The Debutante," so you can listen to it in two 5-minute sessions!

Listen here.

Today I’m going to read one of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, “The Debutante”. Please, listen as if it were a dream. Don’t get in the rational mood to listen, because Surrealist literature needs the kind of approach we have with poems – we just let go, let words take us wherever! Visualize the story – Leonora Carrington was actually a painter!
Leonora Carrington was born in England, in the UK, in 1917. Her parents were English textile tycoons and very strict Catholics. Leonora Carrington would lead a very different life and personal development – she became a Surrealist artist and a Mexican citizen.
When she was 18 and just before leaving England for good, she had to be a debutante -- she had to go to Buckingham Palace for her public presentation to society. She didn’t like it one bit!, so she wrote this short story I’m about to read. Apart from helping us learn about the world and develop our passions, Art helps us to digest those things which hurt us.
Carrington met the Surrealist artist Max Ernst at that time. He was in London exhibiting his paintings and she was there studying Art. They fell in love and eloped -- he portrayed her in Bride of the Wind. They lived together in Paris, with other artists, and talked lots about art and life, and Hitler’s threat on freedom. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Max Ernst was put in a concentration camp. Leonora Carrington tried to get his freedom, but she had to escape south herself! Just imagine… In that time she had several mental breakdowns. She was put in an institution (a mental hospital) and given those hard drugs women patients got then when doctors diagnosed them with “hysteria”. After one breakdown, in a hospital in Santader (read her story “Down Below”), Carrington escaped, rushed to the Mexican Embassy and married a friend of hers who was a diplomat there. They moved to Mexico and eventually separated – later, she married a Hungarian photographer.
One of her best friends was the Surrealist painter Remedios Varo (1908–1963). Their paintings are sometimes mixed up in books! Varo and Carrington got a kick out of the occult. This is not what I love from Leonora Carrington, though. I love her freedom as an artist. I can feel it in every word she writes! I love her use of animals in the stories. The hyena, for instance, an animal that appears in The Debutante, stands for her sexual self. The horse, another of her favorites, represents her spiritual self. I love her approach to life and art. She says that she paints/writes because she enjoys it (doing it well or badly is irrelevant, really!). Something else she says is this – “If young people tell me I'm young at heart, I take offence -- I'm OLD at heart.” I know what she means, I think. Growing older is good for people who love freedom, because you need many years to learn to be free…
Leonora Carrington has written tons of articles, novels, essays, and poems, in Spanish, English and French! She has also produced thousands of paintings, sculptures, collages, and a number of tapestries.

Here’s the link to a Self-Portrait she’s got in the Met (NYC, the USA). As you can see it’s got a hyena and two horses!

More on Leonora Carrington at Talking People.

And now, for the story. Enjoy it!

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Thanks for listening. Enjoy!