Some reflections from the Writers Festival panel on the essay
Pub post: the essay allows exploration and more inquiry, but the form's brevity disciplines. It requires economy and some precision.
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This is a place where I share my ideas and my writing and put into practice my hopes for greater connection, critical thinking and clear expression amongst people who care about our world, our communities, and each other. Social and political issues, writing, language, fathers and fathering - these are some of the things you'll find here.
Pub post: the essay allows exploration and more inquiry, but the form's brevity disciplines. It requires economy and some precision.
Walking out after the Writers Festival panel on the essay with Chloe Hooper, Nicolas Rothwell and Gideon Haigh, I was cheered by the lovely lights of the ferris wheel.
From a Creative Commons licensed original by Danielle Wood, as part of the Remix My Lit project.
Labels: blogging, free-speech, internet, writing
It's the Remix My Lit event at Federation Square, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I've been remixing a story for the last half hour or so. It's a bit of a copy and paste job on chunks of a story that caught my eye, 'How to Domesticate a Pirate', by Danielle Wood.
Labels: blogging, internet, writing
Fairfax staff – journalists, columnists, sub-editors, and printing staff of The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review, and some other small papers – are on strike this weekend in protest against the publishers' massive job cuts. And rightly so.
Labels: Australia, labour, media, politics, work
As if to chastise me for my previous complaint about the Melbourne Writers Festival's use of archaic online tools to engage with its participants, I was reminded of a rather exciting multi-platform digital initiative the Festival is supporting: short poetry published via Twitter – and so to your mobile phone.
A guide dog soaked my leg in pee. His seeing eyes grinned up at me. The blind man laughed until he cried. I think they saw the funny side.A number of the poets have gone with the haiku form, and I admire them for trying. I would love to learn to write in that form.
– by Andrew Masters
Heavy air rasps across a bruised sky, the spinifex shivers. A swarm of grass seeds dances with sandy red soil. Storm comes.If you're a Twitter user, you can subscribe to the poetry 'tweets' and elect to have them sent to your mobile phone via SMS – thus making it multi-platform. I'm loathe to get any Twitter updates via SMS to my mobile, so I'm preferring the slow method of checking my tweets via the web and various other clients.
– by Raphaelle Race
Labels: blogging, books, internet, writing
I'm glad Rushdie read good chunks from his new book. I'm inspired to read it. Will post more on him later.
I'm going to some of the sessions of the Melbourne Writers Festival, which opened yesterday. I missed out on the opening address – Germaine Greer's keynote sold out pretty early, I gather, but it would probably be enough to read the extended essay and follow the broo-ha-ha in the media.
Labels: books, culture, writing
My every intention to post earlier and regularly this week went out the window late on Tuesday night when I had to join my partner in waiting at the Emergency department of the Austin Hospital. We were waiting for the paediatrics emergency doctor to see our younger son, Jamie.
Labels: children, family, life, parenting, work
The Children's Book Council announced this year's winners of its annual children's book awards this afternoon. Melbourne author Sonja Hartnett won the award for book of the year for older readers for her latest work, The Ghost's Child (published by Penguin Australia).
“Celebrate the joy of reading and begin a lifelong love of books with the delightful Parsley Rabbit and his pesky little brother, Basil. Lively and entertaining, it features a remarkably clever and handsome rabbit and is full of fun, flaps to flip and questions to share. Parsley introduces children to books - from the cover, to the imprint page to the title page, formats, style and more - and takes the reader on a hilarious and stimulating journey through the world of books. An absolute treasure of a book for children from 3 – 7 years."What a wonderful way to introduce children to the art and process of making and enjoying books, and not just reading them (or having them read).
Labels: books, children, culture, writing
Very hot in the morning. In the afternoon sudden thunder-storm & very heavy rain. About 50 yards from the gate the road & pavement flooded a foot deep after only 1 1/2 hours rain.And so observes George Orwell of the 12 of August – 70 years ago.
Blackberries beginning to redden.
each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.The blog's publishers deserve to be congratulated for bringing Orwell's domestic diaries to a new audience and for breaking out of the mould of (re)publishing another overpriced, thinly illustrated and poorly annotated dead-tree tome in time for the Christmas glut. Publishing each diary entry in blog post format in 'real time' also strikes me as quite a novel move.
Oh what a cliffhanger. Are the blackberries going to ripen before the rain spoils them? Can’t wait to know!
"Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon."
Labels: blogging, internet, life, writing
Emunctory's comment this week about being a 'nerd herder' prompted me to hunt up an old post I'd written nearly four years ago when I first started blogging. Reading back over that old post, I was quite pleased with it and decided to 'repost' it.
Labels: blogging, life, writing
It is 08.08.08 – the eighth day, on the eighth month, of the eight year of this century. The Beijing Olympic Games open at eight minutes past eight Beijing time (just after 10 pm local/Australian Eastern Standard Time). This came in an email this afternoon from online campaign mob Avaaz.org:
As the Beijing Olympics begin, the world looks on with mixed emotions. It's a moment which should bring us closer together, and Chinese citizens deserve their excitement - but the Chinese government still hasn't opened meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama, or changed its stance on Burma, Darfur and other pressing issues.That is pretty much how I feel about the impending opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing tonight.
Labels: democracy, human rights, sport, TV
Labels: culture, food, hypocrisy, odd
I've just heard that my photograph of the famous smiling entrance to Luna Park in St Kilda, Melbourne, has been included in the latest edition of Schmap's online travel guide to Melbourne. The photograph is published on my creative commons license on flickr, which is where Schmap found it.
Today is Hiroshima Day. 63 years ago today, the crew of the United States bomber the Enola Gray dropped a bomb, Little Boy, onto the city of Hiroshima on the west of Japan's Honshu Island. The bomb blast directly killed an estimated 80,000 people. Injury and radiation poisoning killed another 90,000-140,000 by the end of the year.
Labels: death, disaster, history, peace, uranium
Cadel was never a competitor, never stamped his power and ego over the Tour. He was a capsule of averages, a moving wave of statistics who consistently did okay at the front of the peleton, always sustained by the fact that he is better at the time trial than the others whose performance is more uneven. While we hoped for the best, he was vulnerable to a mountain climber who learnt the mental discipline of riding like a steam train on the flat, off in some mathematical space which is really a meditation on rhythm.Watching Carlos Sastre hurtle up the 13.8 km of the Alpe d’Huez, the toughest climb on the Tour de France, alone and peerless, as his CSC teammates dicked around with the peleton and Cadel just bobbed around in the flotsam, it was pretty obvious that the boy from Katherine is a one trick pony.
I so wanted to believe Cadel could win that it seemed disloyal to digest what David said. But in the end I had to agree – especially as I too noticed that while I watched Cadel (and then only a little) on TV, I couldn’t shake the nagging ‘back of the mind’ thought that he didn’t look like he could really do it, that he looked like he struggled up the mountains in a miasma of pain, rather than seem to almost float up as the leaders, and Tour winner Carlos Sastre obviously, did.