THOMAS LARSON

And Titanic’s Band Played On: 100 Years of a Musical Mystery

A multimedia presentation by Thomas Larson

Twenty-twelve (2012) marks the 100-year anniversary of the sinking of RMS Titanic, the great ship that hit an iceberg and went down with some 1500 people, two-thirds of its passengers and crew, who lost their lives in the freezing North Atlantic.

Today we see another maritime disaster with the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship larger than Titanic. Mercifully fewer than 20 of the 4,200 aboard died, a great achievement, considering the panic and confusion and the me-first behavior of the captain.

Join Thomas Larson for a retelling of the undying mystery of Titanic’s eight musicians—their music, their fate, their remarkable afterlife.

This multimedia talk is appropriate for those participating in—and bewildered by—the new digital forms of reading and writing; it will appeal to college students, writing groups, literary guilds, community writing centers, literacy scholars, and library programs.

In the digital age, writers are the last artists to be transformed by the tools of the Internet and electronic communication. We are losing traditional protocols of print and bound book as well as facing challenges to the standard literary forms of poem, novel, and narrative history. As reading and writing changes its platform from one-dimensional print to interactive screens, we are also being pushed toward new forms of expression: memoir, blog, mosaic, hypertext, and collaborative writing with video. A new environment dominates our work: self-publishing and self-promotion, personal websites and sound/video presentations, direct sales and interactive readers. What are the changes this new digital environment is asking of us younger and older writers and how are we and those we write for going to thrive in it?