Today I published my first Arts & Entertainment article of the Fall 2016 semester – if not one of the first A&E articles I’ve ever written, to be honest.
As someone who focuses almost solely on hard news, it’s rare to find me jumping around to other sections. I do occasionally when there’s an interesting topic elsewhere, but even then I’m not usually super confident with it just because it isn’t my area of expertise.
For this story about the Tim Brooke’s “Endangered Alphabets” exhibit currently residing in the CSUF Pollak Library, however, the content was close enough to being news that I had a pretty easy time covering it. On top of that, the exhibit is genuinely nice to visit and makes for an awesome place to sit around and relax. As someone who enjoys having nice, quiet places to relax in, it’s a pretty great added bonus.
In fact, I’d argue that the hardest part of getting this article done was the deadline night surrounding it. We had a huge enterprise story on the News page regarding theft on campus that’s well written but took a lot of time to finish, so we were there until at least 1:30 A.M. Not quite as bad as four in the morning, but it’s still rough. At least my first class of the day got cancelled due to my professor being at a conference, so there’s always a bright side somewhere.
The exhibit consists of a series of wooden slabs that have characters of languages rarely heard and even on the way to going extinct carved into them. The carvings are split up into three sections in the gallery that each carry their own meaning. The first “Writing as Art” section shows a series of single characters that represent a progressive change in the development of language from simple ideas to full phrases. The second “Article One Collection” has the first article from the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights carved out in various endangered languages. The third “Sacred Spaces Installation” features four larger wooden panels that have a poem carved out on the wood set up in a circle, creating a space or “grove” that you can enter and experience the languages around you.
“Endangered Alphabets” will be running in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery until September 23 if you happen to be in the area and want to check out the beautiful carvings before the exhibit is cycled out.
If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here. You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!
Work in Progress 
Congratulations on the article!
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