Dear Blog,
I scrolled back in time and found my early tweets – I seemed to have quite the poetic bent back then. Wonder if I’ll find my way round that corner again. Here’s some of them:
@McFifi
so beautiful and strange-so Hindenberg-esque http://www.etravelblackboard.com/showarticle.asp?id=101689
11 Feb 10
@McFifi
Sky opened lightening flashed leaves flowed in veins over the tarmac water pooled and now all softly settles down in cool
11 Feb 10 Continue reading
This is a pretty awesome article in the Guardian by Stewart Lansley, Why economic inequality lead to collapse. He’s the author of The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy, published by Gibson Square, which sounds like something I should read. This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me – the economic bug that I’ve had to scratch at all my life.
It reminds me of when I was working in a deli in a shopping centre foodhall, my part time job while I did my economics degree. Exhausted on a 15 minute break, I doodled on a piece of paper trying to draw the appropriate graph for the relationship between hours worked and consumption demand. I figured I was spending so much time either at uni or working part time that despite earning money I didn’t get the time and didn’t have the energy to spend it. It was a curiously shaped curve I reasoned. To a point, working more hours and earning more money rapidly increased how much you would buy, but then I reasoned the curve would flattened out. If you’re spending all your time working, you just can’t spend. You need leisure to buy. An economy needs people to have time off. Money should buy that, but it wasn’t happening. Continue reading
An article in the Guardian (31 Jan 2012) Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide by The Atlantic’s Megan Garber and the report from which it drew highlight some of the fascinating things happening around how we use and think about Twitter.
Basically it’s about a study by researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech who analysed 43,000 crowdsourced responses to tweets from 21,014 Twitter users via their site, Who Gives a Tweet. The results are hoped to provide answers to what ‘works’ in the twittersphere. Continue reading
My latest piece for artsHub goes online today here.
For it I spoke with the lovely Pam Newton, author of The Old School, and Lenny Bartulin, who has written three crime novels featuring Jack Susko, and is now working on a more ‘literary’ historic novel set in Tassie. They will be leading a six week course in Sydney on writing crime fiction as part of the Allen & Unwin Faber Academy. Wouldn’t that be fab to be part of!
There’s so much in every interview that you wish you could include but there’s just never the space. Pam and I talked a lot about how she got into writing, which was actually a slow process over almost 10 years after leaving ‘the job’ ie.the NSW Police force. Only an ex-cop can say that convincingly. She also said some really interesting things about her masters exegesis, and how she became fascinated by a quote from David Lodge’s Consciousness and the novel on how a poem can capture qualia, a sense of shared subjective experience. ‘He said the novel is the most extended example of that, where you actually travel through time and space in the soul of another human being.’
And Lenny and I spoke about how much effort he puts into his research, including playing 5-card stud with himself so that he was sure every move was possible. And about the time he tried to ring the police to find out how they would investigate a particular kind of car accident only to find himself being asked to provide his name and details and feeling like he’d just initiated an enquiry into some very dubious author activities.
Armed and Dangerous: The Craft of Crime Fiction with Lenny Bartulin and P.M. Newton
15 February – 31 March 2012
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Course fee: $1,200 (inc GST)
Maximum of 15 students
For further details visit www.allenandunwin.com/faberacademy
This image came from me just stuffing around with a caligraphy pen years ago. I really liked the idea of these computers all swimming around in cyber space as awkward fish and creating an image of a computer that was fluid and sort of minimal.
But now, many years later they do look incongruous and, well a lot like sperm. I’m not sure this is saying the right things about my blog. Time for a change, hmm. but what too?
For anyone who has an inkling of the passion of Dr Who fans, there was never any doubt that the MSO’s foray into the cult phenomena would be a popular success. Expanding on the 2010 BBC Proms and translating it into a two and a half hour ‘Symphonic Spectacular’ however was also an ambitious world first.
Not many orchestral performances could take over the 5,500+ seat Melbourne Exhibition Centre Plenary Hall (twice the size of the Hamer Hall) for two performances and pretty much sell out both. Continue reading
My review of the most recent edition of the Griffith Review is now up on artsHub.
It’s been a kind of harrowing few days reading so many essays, memoirs and short stories about terrible disasters and the things that go wrong in people’s lives but these things do seem to bring out some great writing. Well worth reading.
Sophie Cunningham's most recent book is actually non-fiction, Melbourne
Before Christmas I got to meet Sophie Cunningham at Newtown SC to talk about writing novels for artsHub.
She’s taking a six month course at the Allen & Unwin Faber Academy from April to September which would be fabulous to do. Now all I have to do is follow her advice and write that damn novel!
You can read the article I wrote about our chat on artsHub: What it takes to write a novel
Extracts from Sophie’s novels are available on her website: www.sophiecunningham.com
Writing a Novel with Sophie Cunningham
Course dates: 18 April – 26 September 2012
Venue: The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
Course Fee: $5,950 (inc. GST)
Maximum of 15 students
For more information visit: www.allenandunwin.com/faberacademy/
Margaret Hansford, Partnership Solutions
I first heard about Margaret Hansford when I did an interview with The Song Company (for the article Building a Better Arts Business), who recommended her as a great person to talk to on the subject of managing change in a not-for-profit or arts organisation. It took a few months for me to finally catch up with her and I’m so glad we did. Margaret was so giving of her time and what she had to say about how organisations should think about managing change processes was illuminating. Not rocket science but surprising how rarely organisation even recognise that change is something that can be managed, communicated and planned effectively.
You can read the article on artsHub here: Change management in the arts
Polyglot’s Tangle
Polyglot’s latest production Tangle will be part of the opening weekend for the Sydney Festival in January and entangle kids outside the Arts Centre in Melbourne later in the month.
This gave me a great reason to catch up with the divine Simon Abrahams and talk about Polyglot’s journey, where it’s come from and where it’s heading.
The article was published today on artsHub for the Jobs Bulletin as an organisational insight, a chance to look into great arts organisations and see what makes them tick. You can read the full article on artsHub here: Organisational Insight: Polyglot