Every Day is Magic: Ada Limón

In her 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist for poetry, Ada Limón writes of moving to Kentucky: “Confession: I did not want to live here.” It’s perhaps not a surprising sentiment coming from a coastally oriented person who was raised in Northern California, attended college in Seattle, and then spent over a decade in New York City.

 

But Limón and her husband, Lucas, have been in Lexington for seven years now and the effects of settling into this place are noticeable in her new book, The Carrying (Milkweed, Aug.). It’s a phenomenally lively and attentive collection replete with the trappings of living a little closer to nature. While Bright Dead Things is marked by a preponderance of light, such as images of fireflies and neon signs, The Carrying features numerous appearances by various trees, birds, and beetles. Limón also demonstrates a greater willingness to be explicit in naming colors, particularly green. “It’s crazy green, the whole book,” she says. “Lexington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived.” Similarly, where in Bright Dead Things, Limón tells a lot of stories and anecdotes, in The Carrying she is very present in her thoughts and experiences.

As it turns out, these shifts in focus have another, altogether unexpected source. While putting Bright Dead Things together, Limón was diagnosed with chronic vestibular neuronitis, which can cause bouts of vertigo. “If I’m really having vertigo, it’s pretty intense and I really have to focus,”
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Media Professionals adopt charter

Latin American Media Professionals Adopt the Charter of Guadalajara

21-06-2005 (Paris)
More than 200 media professionals gathered in Guadalajara (Jalisco, Mexico) on 14-16 June 2005 to analyze the current audiovisual landscape in the region and come up with concrete proposals for action in 2006/2007.
The Conference, jointly organized by UNESCO and the University of Guadalajara with the sponsorship of numerous Mexican media, was the culmination of a one-year process at the beginning of which UNESCO launched a call for “good ideas and best practices” in local audiovisual production and distribution in the region. Thirty of the one hundred fifteen innovative proposals received were retained and presented in Guadalajara. The initiatives included cultural, scientific, community television channels, community radio stations, itinerant movie theaters, festivals and thematic and local news agencies. They all had in common their success in reaching important publics and delivering to them public service oriented contents.

The Charter of Guadalajara includes a set of recommendations addressed to the media, governments, civil society, universities and UNESCO. Among the most concrete ones addressed to UNESCO is the setting up of an Audio-Platform which, inspired by UNESCO’s E-platform, would gather under one single portal different audio archives for the use of radio stations in search of public service oriented content. To overcome the language barriers, the portal would be divided into different linguistic blocks

UNESCO


  

Poem
“…And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while…”

T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Mexican American Proarchive Annual Report for 2022

The American Community Survey is an annual survey administered by the federal government to help local officials and community leaders and businesses understand the changes that take place in their communities. It includes percentages of our population’s graduate school attainment and the employment of Mexican Americans in various occupations.  These important factors influence the allocation of federal resources. Mexican American Proarchives uses the data provided by the American Community Survey to better understand how Mexican Americans compare to the general population.

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