【推荐2】Writing across Time

When students today need to take notes, they simply reach for their ballpoint pens. For students in the past, writing instruments were not so convenient.

Quill pens were made from large bird feathers. Students sharpened the quills with knives and then dipped them into pots of ink to write. The points needed constant re-sharpening and each dip of the quill provided only enough ink to write one word. Besides these problems, drops of ink often stained the page. Yet, people used quill pens for more than a thousand years. Can you imagine writing with a quill pen?

Chinese students traditionally used brush pens to practice writing characters. Unlike quill pens, brush pens had soft bristles that made smooth lines. Students dipped their brush pens in a pool of ink on an inkstone and then wrote.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when paper was not easily available, chalk was widely used in classrooms. Teachers wrote with chalk on blackboards while students practiced writing and maths on their own slates (石板).

Fountain pens were the first pens that stored ink inside, from where it flowed through the metal tip or nib (笔尖) for writing. In the 19th century, they finally replaced quills on school desks. However, even with fountain pens, ink still often spilt out, leaving stains everywhere.

Early ballpoint pens leaked and wrote poorly. Three inventors took almost sixty years to finally solve these problems in the early 1950s. Today two of them, Hungarian journalist Josef Laszlo Biro and French Baron Bich, are known for making the ballpoint pen cheap and reliable. Biro and Bic pens are still hugely popular and useful today.

【推荐1】An international group of electronic music composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that includes the sounds of endangered birds. The album will come out next month, whose proceeds will go directly towards efforts to save birds.

The whole project was born out of this idea of trying to combine birdsong, electronic music and conservation. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean was organized by activist, music producer, Robin Perkins. He invited artists from each of the endangered birds 'homelands to build their own songs around the birds’ songs. There are contributions from ten artists in eight different countries.

First single Black Catbird was created by The Garifuna Collective, from Belize. Al Obando, guitarist and producer of the group, always took in national parks and viewed birds when on the road with the band. “There are no trails, and there are no signs there to tell you about what you reseeing,” Obando says. “So we're trying to do something for the birds and nature tourism.”

Another musician who responded to Robin's call is Tamara Montenegro, an artist from Nicaragua. She was shocked to hear of the serious situation of the Guardabarranco after being approached: “This beautiful creature I grew up adoring also faced the influence of the systematic human activities”. In response, she created a song inspired by this bird and the challenges it faces to live naturally.

The new album is the second edition, following on from A Guide to the Birdsong of South America, produced by Robin in 2015. That first album has raised, to date, over $15,000 benefitting conservation projects in South America. As with the first album, all of the money from the sales of the new album will support specific organizations, including Birds Caribbean.

【推荐2】It’s easy to think festivals are just about drinking and dancing, but festivals are also representatives of what a certain way of life thinks, the way they express themselves. I’ve been to over 60 festivals in 22 different countries, and I still want to experience more. One of the main reasons I enjoy going to international festivals so much is the fact that they are a microcosm of what they represent. Festivals are an opportunity to see as much as possible in a weekend into worlds so different, or even familiar, of my own.

Festivals are a fascinating insight into a group of individuals with a common understanding and the world they are living in. This is also one of the reasons I enjoy international festivals.

I ticked off a huge bucket list festival in Lake of Stars Festival in Malawi a few years ago. I was unwell and not my usual party self, but, it gave me the opportunity instead to sit and listen to the local poets. Through their poetry they enlightened me to some of the issues of the day—calling out their “fat government” and covering everything from housing, to relationships, to the nominal(名义上的) opportunities.

The importance of celebrating festivals abroad isn’t just to gather with your “tribe”. What I learned in a few poems at Lake of Stars Festival were fascinating insights into modern social issues and the Malawi of the present, which I would have had to dig deep to find out. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered to, to be honest.

Even if only for a weekend, what I learned there from the poets and artists gave me a better understanding of what life was like in Malawi.

You never know what you’re going to learn when you visit a new festival. That’s all part of the fun and expectation.

Comedy makes current social issues fun, music makes them melodic(有旋律的), while poetry makes them considered and heartfelt. Festivals bring you them all.