Cultuur en Educatie – Buitenland

As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell... Read more »

With Halloween just days away, many of us are even now readying a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still undecided about your own Halloween viewing material, allow us to suggest The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s “masterpiece of modern horror.” Those words come straight from... Read more »

In the graduate department where I once taught freshmen and sophomores the rudiments of college English, it became common practice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on many an Intro to Lit syllabus, along with a viewing of Julie Taymor’s flamboyant film adaptation. The early work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first... Read more »

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley, who... Read more »

If you’ve made the journey to Athens, you probably took the time to visit its most popular tourist attraction, the Acropolis. On that monument-rich hill, you more than likely paid special attention to the Parthenon, the ancient temple dedicated to the city’s namesake, the goddess Athena Parthenos. But no matter... Read more »

One of my very first acts as a new New Yorker many years ago was to make the journey across three boroughs to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. My purpose: a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave. I came not to worship a hero, exactly, but—as Fordham University English professor Angela... Read more »

More than a few of us might be interested in the opportunity to spend a day in Victorian London. But very few of us indeed who’ve ever read, say, a Charles Dickens novel would ever elect to live there. “London’s little lanes are charming now,” says Sheehan Quirke, the host... Read more »

Lake George Reflection (circa 1921) via Wikimedia Commons What comes to mind when you think of Georgia O’Keeffe? Bleached skulls in the desert? Aerial views of clouds, almost cartoonish in their puffiness? Voluptuous flowers (freighted with an erotic charge the artist may not have intended)? Probably not Polaroid prints of a dark... Read more »

If you wish to become a cinephile worthy of the title, you must first pledge never to refuse to watch a film for any of the following reasons. First, that it is in a different language and subtitled; second, that it is too old; third, that it is too slow;... Read more »

The practice of cartomancy, or divination with cards, dates back several hundred years to at least 14th century Europe, perhaps by way of Turkey. But the specific form we know of, the tarot, likely emerged in the 17th century, and the deck we’re all most familiar with—the Rider-Waite Tarot—didn’t appear... Read more »

In 2003, a Salvador Dalí drawing was stolen from Rikers Island, one of the most formidable prisons in the United States. That the incident has never been used as the basis for a major motion picture seems inexplicable, at least until you learn the details. A screenwriter would have to... Read more »

On Sunday morning, some audacious thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre Museum. The heist took only eight minutes from start to finish. At 9:30 a.m., the robbers parked a truck with a portable ladder in front of the Parisian museum. They ascended the ladder, cut through a second-floor window,... Read more »

In the eighteenth century, the readers of Europe went mad for epistolary novels. France had, to name the most sensational examples, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses; Germany, Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther and Hölderlin’s Hyperion. The English proved especially insatiable when it came to long-form stories... Read more »

The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decades of popular music would look like.... Read more »