Episteme

Here I am on the eve of travel after a month absence. It's so easy to get consumed by absolutely nothing. But I have the feeling, part of it anyway, that I used to get when I was going some place I've never been before - imagining how it will smell and taste, the groans and sighs of the trucks, the sneezes of passersby. There is something comforting in the fact that where I go it seems a little familiar but I also think I've been to places that are alike. My favorite place to go is into the woods where I can't hear car engines or voices and the sound of water filters up through the valley. I find it hard to talk to people when I get back, though I've been finding that difficult for a while. Anyway, off to Mexico where I hope to see so much that I am completely overwhelmed by it all. Certainly, my knowledge of history is inadequate for all I will encounter. I promise to take good notes and pictures.

Posted by Dawn at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's be clear - I wanted to see Shrek 3 in English. I wanted to hear Julia Andrews, Cameron Diaz, Amy Sedaris and the like playing royalty. I wanted to hear Eddie Murphy as the donkey and Mike Myers as Shrek, and I was pretty mad that we actually bought tickets to the Spanish version. (They have both at the movie theater but this one was as the time we wanted.) But I must say that it was great, even if I didn't get all the jokes because of either the language or the cultural references. Poor me. But it's pretty darn amazing how well all this stuff translates - Antonio Banderas played the cat in Spanish too, of course, but they had a very famous Mexican comedian playing the burro, the fairytales are all known here too, and the main plot is pretty universally understandable. Even the high school cliques worked, and they used the equivalent of a snobby kids' accent to show the social pressures of high school which, unfortunately, aren't so different here.

It's similar with The Simpsons, which has people mesmerized here in the same way it does at home. While the show comes across as the story of an American family, with basically the same voices and personalities as it has in English, the story works in a different cultural context because of how universal it is - the father, his job, the naughty son, the doting but frustrated mother and wife, the plump policemen, etc...

So that's my bit on soft power and why it works so well!

Posted by Kim at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)