Big Talk
Yo ho, the first installment in my new series of interviews, jointly produced with WFHB radio and The Ryder magazine, came off without a hitch yesterday.
Media Conglomerate
■
The series has no name just yet — I’m leaning toward something like The Big Talk. Interview Number 1 aired during the Daily Local News at 5:30pm on 91.3 FM. I’d sat down with Nate Powell, now a Bloomington resident and one of the top graphic novelists/cartoonists in the country. Powell illustrated Congressman John Lewis’s biographical graphic novel, March: Book One. Lewis was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement and famously got his skull broken by an Alabama state trooper’s nightstick on Bloody Sunday, the day of the first Selma voting rights march.
The series includes both an 8-minute radio interview to be followed by a longer chitchat in the magazine. The Powell interview will run in Feb.’s Ryder, appropriately enough, during Black History Month.
Tons o’thanks to WFHB News Director Alycin Bektesh and The Ryder editor and publisher Peter LoPilato for their support. This is gonna be fun!
Anyway, check out the Nate Powell talk online.
▼
Making Things Up
My pal, the retired IU prof of Southeast Asia studies (who, BTW, forbids me from disclosing his name in this communications colossus), suggests we need a word for the practice in coffeehouses and restaurants of combining two or more tables to accommodate a big group of people.
You know, something like schadenfreude¹ or zeitgeist² or doppelgänger³. The Germans, natch, are huge on that portmanteau-ish practice and, in fact, are notorious for coining words that go on and on and on. The language and writing blog Verbavores points out the 30-letter word Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkungen, which actually means nothing more complicated than speed limits.
Strassenverkehrsordnung-stuff
■
A visiting German student working on his thesis here at IU was sitting with us in Soma this AM. We leaned on him to help us come up with such a word. Give us something with table and combine, we said.
He thought for a moment, then commandeered my interwebs machine to type in the following: Tischzusammenschiebungen.
Hmm. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? We’ll have to keep working on it.
◆
[1: Harm-joy, finding pleasure in the suffering of others; 2: Ghost-time, the spirit of the age; and 3: Double-goer, a paranormal double of a living person or one who uncannily resembles someone else.]
◆
[Oh, one more thing: the name of this media powerhouse, in Teutonic portmanteau, is Elektronenbleistift. You’re welcome.]
▼
Everybody’s Talkin’
▲
Mike,
How about dropping the article and simply making it, per your header below, “Big Talk”?
DBJ