The MacDowell Colony is one of the oldest and best known artist colonies in the country, located on 450 acres in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. MacDowell’s mission (使命) is to nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring residential environment to produce enduring works of creative imagination.

MacDowell’s operations are funded by foundations, corporations and individuals. Writers, composers, photographers, filmmakers and sculptors — both famous and unknown — compete for the 32 free studios at the place. Once accepted, an artist can stay for as short as a couple of weeks, or as long as a couple of months.

When they arrive, artists find a kind of isolation (隔绝) hard to find in our world. There’s no phone. No fax. No friends. No family. It’s just a cabin in the snowy woods.

Writer Emily Raboteau lives in New York City. She came to MacDowell to work on a novel. She received a desk, chairs, pencil and paper. Another colony resident, Belfast composer Elaine Agnew, plays a piece called To a Wild Rose, written by Edward MacDowell. She says it’s so famous that every pianist in the world has played the tune. A hundred years ago, MacDowell owned the land where the colony no sits. He liked its isolation and his ability to get work done there. After his death, his wife, Marion, encouraged other artists to come.

And for the last century, artists have accepted the invitation, coming to step outside of their daily lives for a short time. Privacy is respected, but cooperation and discussion is common.

Screenwriter Kit Carson—who wrote Teras Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the film adaptation of Sam Shepberd’s play Paris, Terus-has visited MacDowell twice. He says that the interdisciplinary (学科间的) discussion there is valuable.

“You sit around at dinner, talking, and then somebody runs off and brings you back some stuff and shows it to you,” he says. “That, I didn’t realize, was part of the magic here because people are really open to show their opinions.”

I didn’t understand the irony immediately. Only on the way home. The book I had just returned to our library was called “Unquiet Landscape,” by Chritopher Neve. He widened my view.

But the ironic word for me in his book’s title, I realized, was “unquiet”. It applied not to the landscape but to our local library. I have visited it again since then, and my conclusion is much the same: There is no longer a quiet place.

On both of my visits the library was packed with small children, and they were doing rather a lot of small-children things, such as dancing in circles, singing, jumping up and down, and so on. Various adults sitting around were clearly not discouraging them, rather the opposite.

I wasn’t exactly shocked. But I have to say that my understanding of library behavior and purpose changed somewhat. All my upbringing about libraries was that they were sanctums, places of escape in a noisy world. If one so much as cleared one’s throat in a library, one was likely to be stared at by the librarians — not to mention tolerating the disapproval of fellow library users enjoying their post-lunch nap. The first school I attended had a library that was entirely traditional in function. In it, we boys did (or were expected to do) one thing only: read. The second school I attended allowed one to write as well as read in the library.

Since those days, my attitude, I hope, has changed a little. I’ve come across some very pleasant librarians eager to help with my projects. Some of them are surprisingly generous with providing access to their books, which are as dear to them as their own children. And the silence rule has, over the years, become much less strict. Even quite loud laughter, I find, is not always frowned upon.

At the beginning of the century there was a big farm called Hollywood Ranch. It was near Los Angeles in California. A few years later Hollywood was one of the famous places in the world. From the 1910s to the 1950s Hollywood was the film center of the world. Every family knew the names of its film stars—Charlie Chaplin，Greta Garbo，Bergman and hundreds more.

The reason why people went to Hollywood to make films was the sun. At first people made films in New York on the east coast of the United States. But then they heard about Los Angeles where there are 350 days of sun every year. As they made all the films by sunlight，the west coast was a much better place to work. Also near Hollywood you can find mountains and sea and desert. They did not have to travel far to make any kind of film.

When TV became popular，Hollywood started making films for television. Then in 1970s they discovered people still went to the cinema to see big expensive films. After twenty years they are still making films in Hollywood and people watch them all over the world.