IN MEMORIA: Wales Mourns the Untimely Loss of Important Media Scholar Dr. James Thomas

PICTURED ABOVE: DR. JAMES THOMAS

According to the Cardiff University School of Journalism Media and Cultural Studies web site:

"James Thomas died suddenly last weekend."

"He is, and will be, sadly missed by all his present and past students and by all of those who have worked with him over the years."

"The school offers its sincere condolences to James's family and friends during this difficult time."

"Terry Threadgold, Head of School"

Visit the James Thomas memorial site here.

James's is well known for his pivotal role in the development of the Welsh Media Journal Cyfrwng.

His research interests included Media History, History in the Media, Public and Media Mourning, British Politics and the Media, Welsh Media, Media and Monarchy, Media Power.

His articles and books spanned from explorations of anti-Welsh attitudes in the media to 'The Case for a Bi-lingual S4C'.

Many of his dear friends and students and colleagues are in a state of shock.

A special memorial page has been setup on Face Book and has this recent news:

FaceBook Group Info Name: Remembering James Thomas

Description: A group to remember the wonderful James Thomas, who has passed away much too early. We wanted to create an informal place where his friends, colleagues and students can remember him -- please post your memories, pictures, thoughts or anything else...

Recent News:

Dr James Thomas just passed away. He died suddenly, in his sleep, from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The funeral will be this Friday, 24th August, at 10.15 am in St. Andrew's Church, Tonypandy and the burial will follow at 11am at Treorchy Cemetery.

Any cards can be given to Mr Huw Thomas in the JOMEC main office. He will ensure that they are passed on to the family.

JOMEC has set up a memorial website:

Chttp://journalism.cf.ac.uk/JamesThomas/index.php

I thought James was especially kind and helpful to patiently give me advice last year about completing my dissertation.

He went out of his way to encourage me and to offer some guidance, even though I was from a different institution.

This is certainly tragic and sad news, and our hearts go out to his family, students, colleagues and friends.

He will be missed.

mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

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CCI Atrium Artist Headlines this Weekend's Rock Benefit Bash at Millenium Centre in Cardiff Bay

Can any good thing come out of Pontypridd? Well, when it comes to music, just ask music icon Sir Tom Jones. Or maybe ask the Pontypridd band, BenSem . . .

Totally Lost Control is a music event at the Cardiff Bay Millenium Centre this weekend, one of the last 'end-of-summer' events you don't want to miss.

My University of Glamorgan colleague Chris Hughes is not only a band member, but he's mostly responsible for throwing this enormous rock and popular music event.

The event will benefit the Toby Lloyd Cockbain Foundation, which helps children with cancer in Wales. The bands will play from noon until midnight, and not surprisingly, Cardiff School of Creative Industries music students are among the band members.

For example, don't miss the headliner BenSem. The BBC Music website says this:

"Friends since the age of 11, Pontypridd's Semmens and Rawbone have been playing music together since 2000, and have now got together a band they feel they can take out on the road."

"Cook and Jones joined in 2006, and their soft indie rock (think the likes of Del Amitri or Crowded House as starting points) came together quickly."

"We're a family," they say. "We're not concerned with today's stylised music industry, BenSem want to concentrate on bringing back what matters most: great music and strong songs played with heart and soul.

Please see BBC Music web page on BenSem

The event includes a raffle to benefit Kids with Cancer, so if you want to get a £2 discount at the door, bring something to donate to the raffle.

It's an affordable event with £2 pints, free mixers with spirits, BBQ, quizzes, raffles and auctions of artwork. Don't miss it!

Find out what bands are appearing at www.myspace.com/totallylostcontrol

www.myspace.com/totallylostcontrol

Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries

mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Celtic Cult Cinema on the World Wide Web.

Visit the UK Film Studies and World Cinema and Music Import Showcase

© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

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© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

Come See a Sexy Late Summer Welsh Valleys Arts Blast: Pontypridd Comes Alive As Artists Fill Five Venues Next Week

All Over the Shop:

15 artists in 5 venues for 1 week only!!!

25th August -1st September 2007

A thriving community of artists have recently established a network, based in the town of Pontypridd, with a large number of new sculpture, painting, films and new media works to show, the artists have seized the opportunity to transform a number of vacant shop units in the Taff Vale Shopping Centre and the Muni Arts Centre into multi-media gallery spaces for this first ever ‘All Over the Shop’ festival of visual art.

Preview opening:

25th August 12 noon at Muni Arts Centre Gelliwasted Rd., Pontypridd

25th August 1 pm at Taff Vale Shopping Centre, Taff Street, Pontypridd

mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Celtic Cult Cinema on the World Wide Web.

Visit the UK Film Studies and World Cinema and Music Import Showcase

© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

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Why Do Many Small Nations 'Specialize' in Film Adaptations?

It has been estimated that an overwhelming percentage of Welsh films and television dramas are intentionally based upon other literary sources.

This overwhelming dependence upon literary adaptation is primarily from important Welsh literary or cultural sources. This suggests an attempt to ‘recall and recollect’ and to re-‘write the nation’, after a period of suppressed or neglected representations of Welsh-ness.

While Dave Berry’s book and other studies have attributed this Welsh dependence upon literary adaptation as ‘laziness’ (Berry 1994: 234), we see it as being related to issues of post-colonial ‘re-telling’ of a national story, or more related to the economics of production.



For example, Stephen Bayly directed Joni Jones (1982) as a well-received television series for S4C, an adaptation based upon the well-known children’s stories by R. Garallt Jones entitled Gwared y Gwirion or ‘Redemption of the Innocents’.

It is often the case in Wales, that directors will create a series which is actually suited to be converted into a feature film at a later date, should the funding and political will be present to effect the re-formatting.

Additionally, one of Wales's most famous sons is Andrew Davies, who is known around the world as the 'Prince of Adaptation'.

Andrew Wynford Davies (born September 20, 1936 in Rhiwbina, Cardiff, Wales) is a British screenwriter.

He is the creator of the children's Marmalade Atkins television series and A Very Peculiar Practice, and is also well known for his adaptations of classic works of literature, including the 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle and the 1998 adaptation of Vanity Fair.



Literary and stage adaptations have added clout with film production investors, who assume that a successful novel or stage play will naturally make a successful film.

Some screenwriters have been known to 'invent' a novel AFTER writing a film script, for purposes of marketing the film, and for raising venture capital.

In small nations, broadcasting drama department Commissioning Editors often opt for an adaptation. This satisfies several remits: nationalistic and cultural agendas are fulfilled, while it's assumed that an established audience exists for the new film or TV series.

My favorite book on film and literature in general is Tom Corrigan's 'Film & Literature' (1999, Prentic Hall Inc / Simon & Schuster).

Here's a pleasant Youtube tribute to Colin Firth in Pride & Prejudice:









'Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature' (Paperback) by John Desmond (Author), Peter Hawkes (Author) is concise and readable new text for courses in Film Adaptation or Film and Literature introduces students to the art of adapting works of literature for film.

'Adaptation' describes the interwoven histories of literature and film, presents key analytical approaches to adaptation, and provides an in-depth overview of adaptations of novels, short stories, plays, nonfiction, and animation.

The book concludes with an analysis of why adaptations sometimes fail.



mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

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© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

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Minority Language Summer Field Work (another lame excuse to 'subsist' on prosciutto e melone) Che peccato!

Pictured above, a vicolo piccolino tipico in the Molisano Medieval mountain fortress cittadina (walled-city) of Guglionesi, where the language of 'Wee-yonn-naish-shon' is spoken, not Italian.

Guglionesi possibly derives from Colle di Nyseus, or Hill of Bachus, a mix of Latin with the ancient Samnite Italinate language.

The local dialect is a pure version of Frentani-Uscosium, which stretches from Vasto in the north to Puglia in the south.

[Dw i'n wedi ymweld yr Eidal gyda fy Mhartner Eidaleg y penwythnos diwethaf, yn y brofins o'r enw Molise, gyda dair daleithiau o' enw Campobasso ac Isernia (canolau taliethiol Rhufeinaidd). Dw i' mynd ar ol dros mis Awst.]

I'm doing a bit of summer research 'field work' in Molise, which is the centre of the Samnite dialects, which are cousins of Latin in the Italic family of Indo-European.

With all the fresh melone and prosciutto, to avoid putting on an extra stone, I am jogging every morning and taking the local 'passiaggiata' every night, that is, walking along tops of this walled city, which is perched atop a mountain 1,000 feet above the Adriatic.

No one speaks English for many miles around here. I have walked each night along the crumbling ramparts as I learn another (yes another) minority language from the chatty WWII pensioners and widows in black hose and scarves . . .

The Samnites were conquerered by the Romans in 290 B.C., since their nation was located directly over the Appennine Mountains, hugging the Adriactic, and apparently Rome lusted for the fertile vineyards, olives and girasole (sunflower) fields of the Montane di Sannita'.

The curious Samnite dialects, which are mostly comprehensible to an Italian speaker, first caught my attention when I read the philologist Dottore Mario Pei's famous book, 'The Story of Language' in 1975.



Pei points out that Celtic language scholars once thought the Samnites might have a connection to Gaulish, Welsh, Breizh or Irish, since the Osco-Umbrium borderland dialects have mutations and other traits which are similar to modern Welsh, etc.

The connection has been rejected, but the similarity has never been effectively explained, at least not without detractors, who assert a Celtic connection, going back to the 3rd century B.C.E.

What's curious is that the people of Molise, in relatively rural and economically-impoverished ancestral centres like the medival fortress city of Guglionesi, are continuing to speak and teach their language (whose written form predates Christ by at least 250 years) to their children, even without the help or support of any 'national' language boards.

This is my third visit to Molise, and I have started to compile a dictionary and grammar of their language, which they insist is only a 'dialect' of Italian.

But my casual study reveals a grammar and sophisticated vocabulary that is distinct from Italian, and which parallels the history of people who still consider themselves a separate 'paese' or country, not to be confused with the official Italian culture and language, based upon the Tuscan vernacular of Italian, albeit the local "diletto's" displacement by Latin and then Italian is post-colonial dating from Republican Rome).

I met with several prominent scholars last week, and tracked down numerous 'dialetto' books and music CDS, etc. There is a dictionary of sorts, which I've ordered, but I noticed that the phonetic rendering uses Latin or Roman letters, which neglect to indicate the distinctive aspirate or unsounded consonantal stops and words, i.e., d t t tr is pronunced duh-tuh-t-ya-truh, and is an anagram of a related Latin or Italian phrase.

Era fatto in Sicilia, si, pero' solomente per essempio, guarda Lei questo film con l'Italiano proprio e il dialetto siciliano nello film famoso, 'il Postino' (1994):


I located a film festival in Molise, which I hope will lead me to indigenous tv and filmic product in the this 'non-language' national language of the people of Guglionesi and nearby towns and cities, along the Adriatic Sea.

In Guglionesi itself, there is a media school which is producing an annual children's film fest 'Friends' which celebrates the local language in video and film, and which features local folk singers and dialect 'rappers'.

The studio is called 'ARS IDEA STUDIO' located on Via Roma across from the Chiesa Maria Maggiore (crypt and presbytery circa IX-X centuries) which you can find here:

ARS IDEA STUDIO

Molise Cinema Film Festival 2007

Hwyl fawr dros y Haf i bawb / Tanti auguri a tutti quest'estate e Felice Ferragosto!

Marc Miami



mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Celtic Cult Cinema on the World Wide Web.

Visit the UK Film Studies and World Cinema and Music Import Showcase

© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

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Exciting New Glamorgan Research Decodes English, Welsh, German Translations for Theatrical Adaptation, Fiction, Poetry and Novels

Pictured above: Dr. Katja Krebs, author of the new book, 'Cultural Dissemination and Translational Communities'.

In our continuing list of books for your summer reading . . .

There's a lot of discussion these days in film and theatre circles about translation and adaptation, subjects which are particularly impotant to both the literature and National cinema of Wales.

Dr. Katja Krebs has just completed an important new work on German Theatre works, which were translated and adapted to the English stage, and the Welsh Music, Film and Books Symposium recommends this new book for your summer reading:

Katja’s main research interests are in areas related to theatre history, historiography and translation studies.

She is particularly interested in the relationship between translation practice and dramatic tradition.

In addition to her numerous papers presented at conferences relating to her areas of research, she was invited to give the opening lecture at the ‘European Theatre in Translation’ conference in Dublin in 2004 and has been asked to contribute to the seminar series hosted by the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, in 2006.

She is keeping busy at the moment by founding a new journal on translation and adaptation for theatre and film (to be published by Intellect) with her University of Glamorgan colleague Professor Richard Hand.

Cultural Dissemination and Translational Communities
German Drama in English Translation, 1900-1914
by Dr. Katja Krebs
ISBN 1-900650-99-1



The early twentieth century is widely regarded as a crucial period in British theatre history: it witnessed radical reform and change with regard to textual, conceptual and institutional practices and functions.

Theatre practitioners and cultural innovators such as translators Harley Granville Barker, William Archer and Jacob Thomas Grein, amongst others, laid the foundations during this period for – what is now regarded to be – modern British theatre.

In this groundbreaking work, Katja Krebs offers one of the first extended attempts to integrate translation history with theatre history by analyzing the relationship between translational practice and the development of domestic dramatic tradition.

She examines the relationship between the multiple roles inhabited by these cultural and theatrical reformers – directors, playwrights, critics, actors and translators – and their positioning in a wider social and cultural context.

Here, she takes into consideration the translators as members of an artistic network or community, the ideological and personal factors underlying translational choices, the contemporaneous evaluative framework within which this translational activity for the stage occurred, as well as the imprints of social and cultural traces within specific translated texts.

Krebs employs the examples from this period in order to raise a series of wider issues on translating dramatic texts which are important to a variety of periods and cultures.

Cultural Dissemination and Translational Communities demonstrates that an analysis of stage-translational practices allows for an understanding of theatre history that avoids being narrowly national and instead embraces an appreciation of cultural hybridity.

The importance of translational activity in the construction of a domestic dramatic tradition is demonstrated within a framework of interdisciplinarity that enhances our understanding of theatrical, translational as well as cultural and social systems at the international level.

Katja has also collaborated as co-editor with Welsh language translator Christopher Meredith.



[Pictured above: Christopher Meredith, Professor of Creative Writing, University of Glamorgan]

Christopher Meredith is a novelist and poet from Wales. He was born and brought up in Tredegar.

He lives with his wife in Brecon and is professor of creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.

He has published three collections of poetry, This, Snaring Heaven and The Meaning of Flight and three novels, Shifts, Griffri and Sidereal Time. He has also translated a Welsh language novel, Melog by Mihangel Morgan, into English.

Meredith, C. (2005) Ed. with Katja Krebs, Five Essays on Translation (Pontypridd: University of Glamorgan, 2005). 73pp. ISBN 1–84054— 120–2 Awdur: Christoper Meredith, Grahame, Davies, Katja Krebs, Lisa Lewis, Sheenagh Pugh, Claudine Tourniaire.

Buy it Now From GWALES

Melog, by Mihangel Morgan, trans Christopher Meredith (SEREN £7.99)



"This novel contains some fine comic touches, all wonderfully skewed in support of the Welsh nation (this publication is the first English translation of the original Welsh text)."

"Melog, for example, speaks excellent Welsh thanks to a strange young teacher called Cadwaladr who travelled to Laxaria and, with great enthusiasm, taught the local youths English."

"The children became more and more proficient in "the world's greatest language" until a school inspector revealed that Cadwaladr had, in fact, been teaching them Welsh."

"Although the pace is sometimes a little too frenetic, Melog remains a highly original, alternately hilarious and poignant satire on political oppression and a moving tale about loneliness." [A review from The Independent ]

Christopher Meredith

St. Jerome Publishing

Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries

mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Celtic Cult Cinema on the World Wide Web.

Visit the UK Film Studies and World Cinema and Music Import Showcase

© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

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European Scholars' Debate: Is Wales Postcolonial or Post-National, or both?

Is Wales Postcolonial? Scholars continue to debate this issue, and there are some very entrenched and opposing views:

Welsh historian Geraint H. Jenkins tells us,

"Some historians have simply presumed that the political assimilation of Wales by England necessarily meant that the history of this ‘internal colony’ was no more than a tranquil and uneventful interlude between the rebellions of the fifteenth century and the epoch-making industrial revolution." (Prys Morgan, Tempus Publishing Ltd. 2001: 74)

Describing Wales as an ‘internal colony’ of England during this or any period, or variously describing Wales as colony/former colony/neo-colony, etc. of England, raises the question as to whether postcolonial theory is applicable in the case of Wales, which is not without controversy.

'Postcolonial Wales' is a collection of edited essays derived from a one day conference “exploring aspects of contemporary Welsh cultural & political life from 'Postcolonial' theoretical and critical perspectives” considered this question on 13 July 2002 at the University of Glamorgan, Wales, and the papers from this conference address the question in a recently published book, edited by Jane Aaron and Chris Williams.

Media scholars tend to see Wales, at least as far as film and media are concerned, in some state of colonial or post-colonial status:

In his new book 'Film, Television and the Break Up of Britain' Professor Steve Blandford has asserted that, while some areas of governance of newly-devolved Wales have achieved a certain level of independence from England, i.e., ‘postcolonial Wales’, Welsh film and television are still subject to residual colonial controls based in London (Aaron and Williams 2005: 191; Blandford 2007: 91).

Professor Dave Barlow (in the recent book, 'The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation' which he co-authored with Philip Mitchell, and Tom O'Malley) confirms that this continuing monopoly of news and copy-righted-entertainment production and marketing in Wales by England and Hollywood is pervasive not only in film and television, but extends throughout other media (Barlow, Mitchell et al. 2005: 34).

Swedish scholar Dr. Johan Schimanski,

an Associate Professor from the Norwegian Universitetet i Tromsø, and former Visiting Professor of Border Studies at the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan, has compared post-colonial Norway to post-colonial Wales in his lecture entitled:

Cultural and Political Nationalism in Wales

Johan Schimanski writes:

"Like post-colonial Norway, post-colonial Wales has no aristocracy of its own. I mention this right at the end of my talk to give a hint of what is to come."

"The rise of a Welsh-speaking middle-class has lent prestige to the Welsh language, and has, with the help of the new Welsh-language media and education establishment moved the focal point of Welsh-language culture away from Y Fro Gymraeg - where Welsh-speakers top in percentages of local populations - and to the great cities of Swansea and Cardiff - where Welsh-speakers top in absolute numbers per square kilometre [Aitchinson 1994:91,94]."

"The tensions involved in this hardly expected turn in what we might call the ongoing crisis of representation in the Welsh nation must continue or be resolved, perhaps at some point providing new figurations of the gap between cultural and political borders."

Schimanski, Johan. "Cultural and Political Nationalism in Wales". In Nationalism in Small European Nations ("KULTs skriftserie"). Ed. Øystein Sørensen. Oslo: The Research Council of Norway, 1996.

We recommend both books, by scholars David M. Barlow, Philip Mitchell, and Tom O'Malley, and the collection edited by scholars Jane Aaron and Chris Williams.

Here's the published synopsis of Postcolonial Wales:

"Postcolonial Wales, edited by Jane Aaron and Chris Williams, is collection of essays that uses questions, hypotheses and concepts drawn from postcolonial theory to understand the culture and politics of post-devolution Wales."

"Beginning with discussions of how Wales as a nation has been understood historiographically, as well as historically, the book focuses in the next section on society and politics in post-devolution Wales. "

"The final section of the volume considers Welsh cultural difference in terms of literature, the mass media, music, drama and the visual arts. Flexible in approach and diverse in their approaches, each contribution aims to stimulate ideas and suggest new ways of thinking about contemporary Wales."

Zoë Brigley, a Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Warwick in her post entitled,

Chris Williams: ‘Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’

writes:

"In this essay, Williams begins by rejecting any models of Wales as a post-colonial nation, but he does embrace aspects of postcolonial theory such as ‘ambivalence, hybridity and post-nationality’ which might be useful in considering Wales as a marginal region (13)."

"William sees ambivalence as bound up with Wales’ complicity with the English and British. There is also hybridity in the ‘migration, settlement and intermarriage’ in Wales: what Williams calls ‘Wales’ “fuzzy borders” and its long inheritance of multicultural experiences, if not of multiculturalism’ (14). "

"Williams is adamant that hybridity has often been ignored by critics and commentators in Wales, yet possibilities might be found in the view of selfhood that defines postcolonial theory."

Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries

mwoods[at]glam[dot]ac[dot]uk

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh-American Family Genealogy, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Welsh Music, Film, and Books Symposium, on the World Wide Web.

Click here to go directly to my personal blog page called Celtic Cult Cinema on the World Wide Web.

Visit the UK Film Studies and World Cinema and Music Import Showcase

© 2007 Mark Leslie Woods

Smart & Sexy? Your Queer Advantage is waiting!