Thursday, January 3, 2019

Selected titles

Some of the titles Talia removed from a bookshelf during her visit:

Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking
All age-appropriate, when you think about it. The kid is on the go. “Go.”

comments: 3

Fresca said...

Oh! This is like the Asian tradition of "the birthday grab", when a one-year old child chooses among several objects, and their choice reflects their likely future.

I looked it up and it's called:
"Thôi Nôi in Vietnamese, Doljanchi in Korean, Zhuā Zhōu in Chinese, and Erabitori in Japanese to name a few. The tradition is usually performed by Buddhist families. It goes back to the Song Dynasty in China. "

Talia has a very communicative future!

Chris said...

When my daughter was toddling around and learning to speak one of the first words she learned to say was "rat," which I taught her when she pulled a copy of Gunter Grass's The Rat off the shelf. It helped that there was a drawing of a rat on the cover.

Michael Leddy said...

I like knowing about the birthday grab. It reminds of how the search for the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama involves placing objects before the candidate. Does he choose the ones associated with the previous Dalai Lama?

Rat! It’s remarkable how children latch on to pictures and words and animals. We were playing with barnyard puppets, a lion puppet, and Daniel Tiger when Talia was here. What’s up with that?!