i-Anya

My friend Minttu sent me a link to this flash game/story: Samorost. It took me a while to advance past the first screen but it’s rather fun when you do - hint: listen to the little person carefully and beware of visual red herrings!

Over at Analogik, an Australian multimedia and electronic music site, they have a review and are also a hosting the game on a mirror site because of its popularity. There’s also some other flash games by the same designer at the Analogik.

At the original site there’s a note saying that a sequel is in the works - excellent!

I have a very big book chapter due in two weeks time. I was allocated the title and at the time I agreed happily, thinking it would be easy to write about… but I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and worrying about what to write because it is such a big topic it is overwhelming!!!

So this afternoon I promised myself I would make a start. I’ve written a draft introduction which may or may not stay in the final chapter but it was my way of trying to frame up what I might say. Here it is - comments, advice, suggestions welcome.

Cyberculture and Cybercommunity

This chapter is about cultures and communities in cyberspace. From the outset, I want to interrogate the notion of cyberspace, a term coined by William Gibson in his cyberpunk fiction, Neuromancer (1986). Which spaces might be considered “cyber”? What is “cyber”? What do these cyberspaces mean for a global society? What sorts of cultures exist within these spaces? What types of communities are there? How do these cultures and communities impact upon lives beyond the screen? In a world that is becoming increasingly more mobile and technologically advanced, where young people walk around in wearable technology, isn’t all space now cyberspace if it is inhabited by technology? And if so, how does this affect our new identities as global citizens, citizens with i-pods, cell phones, wireless laptops, and bluetooth streaming 24 hours a day?

Embodied in the subject of this chapter, then, are three key concepts: (1) What is cyberspace? (2) What is community in this space? and (3) What is culture in this space? These questions will be addressed with the view to understanding how each concept influences our emerging identities as global citizens. In doing so, I will also address the notions of gender, embodiment and power as they are manipulated, performed and regulated in these spaces.

There’s a quiz over at visualideology.asoe.net that tells you what political and ideological stance you have through your response to images. I was really excited when I saw it because I use Kress and van Leeuwen’s text: Visual Images: A grammar of visual design with three out of the four main classes I teach, both undergraduate and post graduate. And one of the points they make is that their grammar is based on a Western model of how we read and interpret images.

The first thing I noticed though was how the questions were so clearly ideologically laden. (I was anticipating one of those Mensa-type “Culture Fair” tests).

The first images asked me to select from republican or democrat, and I have to tell you, how US-centric is that? *grumble*

The next one was a bit more subtle - I had to choose the colour scheme of an image of a group of sailors: black and white / sepia / washed out colour or full colour. (I chose sepia). But generally the whole thing was full of references to Bush, Iraq, and America.

In the end, the quiz simply showed me how my answers stacked up percentage wise to either republican or democratic, so it wasn’t of much use to me at all. How disappointing.

OB Sunset

Originally uploaded by Just Jo.

“To the dull mind nature is leaden
To the illumined mind the world burns and sparkles with light.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I really like this - a whole flickr group where the posters add literary references to match their photographs. Lovely.

Isn’t this a great image! It’s found here. The text reads something like: she’s thinking rhizomatically. (Any German speakers out there? Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m stealing this for my presentation, it’s so brilliant!)

I received a review of my paper, Positioning the Reader: the Affordances of Digital Fiction yesterday. I am happy to say that the review was very positive with only minor edits.

Here are some of the kind words:
” it will open up a window into the online world of today’s young people”
“the paper is nicely framed”
“a useful overview”
“I enjoyed reading this paper”
“well written”
“provides a useful commentary on new literacies”

Then of course there was a long list of edits (I never seem to get my referencing accurate no matter how careful I think I have been! :/ )

This is Angela McRobbie!

Here’s Foucault:

See more lego theorists! (via CultureCat).

Today’s task (apart from the one million meetings!) - writing a lecture about nominalisation.
In doing so, I found a couple of useful online resources:

Nominalisation in academic writing
Building technical information
ESL teaching notes

The first one is best. I am going to use some kids science explanations and historical recounts to further explore what it means.

Reader, I Shagged Him is an article in the Australian Age about Charlotte Bronte. The article is actually a review of (apparently) a very bad biography written about Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. Here’s a taste:

On the 150th anniversary of her death, it is time to rescue Charlotte Bronte. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Bronte industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

It’s a very refreshing look at the “real” Charlotte Bronte, but what amused me most was not the references to her sexual desires or how she was the “grandmother” of chicklit, but this quote about her role as a schoolteacher:

Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach.

As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: “I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.”

I’m sorry, but as an ex-schoolteacher I think I am permitted to laugh - I had best not say more because I am a terrible person for finding this hysterical! Personally I decided that when I spent more time managing children than teaching them that it was time for me to change careers. And I am very very thankful that I did. How many teachers do you know that are old, cynical, spend their days shouting at kids, obviously hate teaching, but still do it anyway?! I didn’t want to turn into one of those teachers.

The Australian press just can’t get enough of “our” Mary and her life with Prince Frederick of Denmark.

Today has heralded the news of her pregnancy - a very big deal given that she had fertility tests before being given the thumbs up for marriage and has signed a pre-nup relinquishing her rights to any children in the case of a divorce.

First of all there were the headlines about her grace and beauty and “the fairytale” she has stepped in to. One very sad Syndey columnist, Miranda Devine, wrote an embarrassing article called: Fairytale defies the feminists, in which she made the point that Mary was “the fairytale come to life” and that this fairytale archetype was “hard-wired into (the) DNA” of young women. (The letters to the editor reacting to that particular article exploded across the internet, on blogs, and via emails). Summarising the article, one person stated “In short, our mediated and romantic understanding of Mary must be tolerated because it revives a lovely, natural, girlish ideal about redemption via the means of Prince Charming.”

Radio host Derryn Hinch made a public mockery of this notion. “This is from a time gone by,” says an exasperated Hinch. “Please go back to your Golden Books for that kind of nonsense.”

Katelyn Mountford also wrote in response to Devine:

Devine lauds the fact that Donaldson “worked hard” for her marriage, losing weight, going to deportment school, converting to Lutheranism, relinquishing her citizenship and agreeing to give up her access to any future children in the event of a divorce. This is apparently the traditional marriage to which young women should be aspiring: one where our bodies and minds aren’t acceptable, where the most basic rights won by the feminist movement must be renounced.

The idea that women aren’t acceptable the way they are is not new — indeed, it slaps us in the face everyday. If you had picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald the day before Devine’s article appeared you might have read that a study by researchers from Flinders University found that 46.9% of girls between the ages of five and eight wanted to lose weight. A similar study by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found that 71% of seven-year-old girls want to lose weight.

Other commentators were quick to notice how Mary’s body became the focus of attention for the media:

According to Dr Maryanne Dever, director of the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University, the princess acquires some merit through visual means.

“Traditionally for a princess, her appearance, as with all fairytale females, has been the register of her moral condition. She is good because she is beautiful. We read her goodness through her beauty,” says Dever, who reads the “respectable” media attention cast on Mary’s tiny dimensions as no more toxic than that commonly afforded to nearly all famous women in the gossip rags.

“There is no more harm here than is usually done by the way in which popular culture fixates on a very narrow range of body shapes. Mary can just thank her lucky stars that she fits that body shape,” she says.

When the public feminine body spirals out of control, so inevitably will media coverage of her untidy descent into fat. For the moment, however, Mary is safe from harm.

Identifiers used for Mary included: the incredible shrinking princess, slimline beauty, and like a Stepford wife. We learn about her “tiny waist”, her “snug blouses” and the way she wins (reigns!) over New York’s Fashionistas.

Next we had a backlash against her because she was “too” glamorous and overshadowed Prince Frederick, and it was claimed that the royal minders were trying to tone her image down because they didn’t want another Lady Di/Prince Charles scenario developing, wherein she became more popular than the Prince.

“The knives are out for Mary” according to the Australian’s women’s magazine, Woman’s Day.

Then she came back to Australia for a few weeks and the media forgave her for deserting “us” and fell in love with her all over again (and indeed her press was bigger than that of Prince Charles whose visit to Australia coincided with hers). Everyday, three times a day we saw what outfit she was wearing and learned all about her new fairytale life.

But then there was sooo much anxiety (Pregnant pause for the incredible shrinking princess) about whether or not she would be able to conceive and how quickly they could start a family. “She’s too thin to be ovulating” joked another women’s magazine editor (ironically named Mia).

Well, we have our answer now.

And the new headlines?
How Mary will “get her body back” after pregnancy.

Santa Maria della Salute from the Accademia Bridge

Originally uploaded by artandscience.

So I have my very first sabbatical from August this year til Feb 2006. Most will be spent here in various parts of Australia, but I can afford one overseas conference, and its likely to be the NRC conference in Miami in December. And I am permitted to get a round the world ticket from Australia to the USA via Europe and Asia (its a long flight!). SO I am trying to work out how I can take advantage of the free stopovers either just prior to the conference or immediately after it. I have close friends (Julia and James) in Belgium, a friend in Norway (Hanne) and a friend in Ireland (Natalie). But I am really looking for an excuse to stop over in somewhere exotic like Venezia or Firenzia or Amsterdam. How about then European people who read this blog organise an educational mini-conference in Europe somewhere so we can meet up and so I can get two or three days of rest between the flight and the beginning of the miami conference I’m going to be speaking at….

Any takers!??

Cybermind is the first mailing list I ever joined, back in 1995 (wow, TEN years ago!!). It’s a mailing list focussing on virtual community, future thinking, and other cyberspace issues. It shaped my thinking about cyberculture and was actually one the impetuses for my PhD research. I met some of the Australian members of the list, have written/am writing with others, have engaged in online cu-see-me meetings with some (in the heydey of the webcam) and still use the research by people like Jerry Everard and Jon Marshall as a benchmark for my work.

Jerry wrote numerous papers about the list (here’s one).
Jon wrote a Phd thesis on the list (and he wasn’t the only one).
Lynne has just posted a case study of the list.

I have never been active on the list really, but the backchannel networks I developed have been invaluable. I wonder if there has been any research about the underbelly of social networks?

The Vanguard is Newtown’s answer to New Orleans. I come here often *grin* to listen to jazz music and relax.

Here’s the background info from their website:

A life long interest in music, particularly blues and jazz,
led to a trip to the USA to see where some of the music had its beginnings.
New Orleans captured our imagination and planted an idea,
which has been growing ever since.

New Orleans is vibrant and sensuous.
The food is rich, music is everywhere, the historic district is beautiful and lived-in,
and you would have to work very hard to not have a good time.

Newtown, with its bohemian mix of people could easily be New Orleans little sister.
Newtown is the perfect place for a New Orleans inspired live Jazz and Blues Restaurant.
The venue is the Vanguard.
The word ‘vanguard’ has long been associated with freethinking,
intellectual, artistic and musical movements.
Newtown is home to artists, musicians and intellectuals but it is also home to many families.
It is diverse, exciting, growing, moving and totally alive.
Newtown is ready for The Vanguard!

Today when I walked past I took a photo of the latest menu… mmmmmmm (click for larger version).

Outside is a simple ‘V’ - I photographed it because of the flickr words-from-photos project.

newtownbuilding

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

This huge building in Newtown is derelict - I think it used to be an old theatre. it’s so beautiful, I wish somebody would restore it and make use of it. I really love the architecture in the Victorian and Federation buildings of Sydney.

abgrafitti3

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

koalagrafitti

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

abgrafitti2

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

Now that I’m taking my digital camera on my walks I thought I’d take more photos (from earlier in the day so that the colours are better) of this indigenous moural/grafitti.

Evening island

Originally uploaded by zenera.

It’s ANZAC day today - a memorial for soldiers who were killed in the second World War. Music bands perform, old soldiers march, movies about war have been playing on TV for the past 3 days. Men are being interviewed. Men are crying about losing their mates.

I don’t want to have anything to do with it, but I will post this peaceful image of an island garden. And this is for my grandmother, now passed away, who spent all of her life bitter and angry and racist because her brother was sent to and tortured at the Changi prison in Singapore and then killed by the Japanese soldiers there.

Nan - I hope you’re at peace now.

I really enjoy the Vicar of Dibley! It is so rare to have larger women starring their own show and I have the greatest of admiration for Dawn French. I am torn though - so many of the jokes are her making herslef the butt of the joke, so to speak. I laugh with her but its deeply mortifying at the same time that her body is so heavily featured in the humour, and I am not convinced that the humour serves to reify the stereotypes of fat = stupid; fat women = undesirable. How do I reconcile these feelings - of enjoying the show and her character of Geraldine so much, yet wincing occasionally about the freedom she has of making fun of body.

We’re given so few images of larger women in the media who adopt serious roles. There’s Camryn Manheim from the US show called The Practice, Oprah (sometimes) and who else? Maybe that Kirsty Alley show will come here. I don’t think Kirsty or Oprah count really because they’re on a mission to become skinny.

I read an article somewhere recently about ‘fat is no longer a feminist issue’. Hellloooo!!?? Methinks it is, and its a (scuse the pun) a big one!. I am not talking about obese kids here, but about the discrimination against large women in the workplace, and about the distorted body images of obese women (who don’t realise they are obese, or can’t see it). I feel like I should respond to that article by writing something about the ‘large voluptuous female body’ as represented in the media. Maybe I will!

Received via email today:

Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations
Association of Internet Researchers
October 5 - 9, 2005
http://conferences.aoir.org/index.php?cf=3

Proposal title: e-selves: Understanding children’s online identity construction
Angela Thomas:
I am pleased to accept your paper for the IR 6.0 conference to be held Wednesday October 5 to Saturday October 9, 2005.

That’s Good!

Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to get to Chicago. It’s a long way from Sydney!!

That’s Bad

birds

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

Tulip bloom

Originally uploaded by Usako.

Did I tell you I loved tulips?
I spent about 4 months working on a flower farm just outside of Deloraine, a little country town in Tasmania. The tulips were my favourite flower to work with.

I had a secret romantic tryst with one of the other seasonal flower workers there at the time. Our eyes met over the dynamic lifter we were fertilising the soil with and shazaaaam, we were struck. Unfortunately the relationship ended up where it began - in the manure.

But the sight of tulips still symbolise that sense of excitement, passion and romance.

Ahhh those were the days. *grin*

2398-1024

Originally uploaded by creativity+.

Creativity+ is one of my favourite photographers that I came across by accident searching for tulips (my favourite flower). He is very kind and incredibly generous, he has an inspirational blog and, like Peggy, is actively working on the 43 goals project.

This sunset is stunning - spiritual even.

One of the Children’s Book Council of Australia shortlisted picture books of the year for 2005 is Alison Lester’s, Are We There Yet?

It’s a gorgeous book about a family’s camping trip around Australia. It’s full of really funny quirky family experiences and beautifully illustrated with many of the special places that make Australia such a natural wonder, from beaches, to rock formations, mountains, more beaches, landmarks like the Opera house and Uluru and many more.

In Tasmania they go bushwalking in Cradle Mountain (and hunt for Tasmanian tigers)…

and in Sydney they watch the fireworks over the Harbour bridge.

I love it! I am going to use it in my lecture on Tuesday. The lecture is about the textual metafunction so I will use it to show how adverbial phrases are positioned in theme position to mark episodes of progression of time and place in narrative. The students seem to love having books read to them so hopefully it will make the lecture memorable, or at least not too dull :/

LAN cafés: cafés, places of gathering or sites of informal teaching and learning? is a very interesting article that has just been published by Beavis, Nixon and Atkinson in the journal: Education, Communication & Information. Here’s the abstract:

Despite the interest of sociologists and educational researchers in Internet cafés as sites for new cultural and social formations and informal learning, thus far little attention has been paid to the function of café owners, managers and other staff in the mediation and co-construction of those spaces. Drawing from interviews with managers of commercial Internet cafés in Australia specialising in LAN (Local Area Network) gaming, this article seeks to examine their role and their attitudes more closely; in particular with regard to school-aged users of their facilities. We contend that LAN cafés are liminal spaces situated at the margins of Australian culture and located at the junctions between home, school and the street, online and offline spaces, work and play. The roles of LAN café managers are similarly ambiguous: in many ways they can be regarded as informal teachers facilitating the process of informal learning.

There’s another article in the journal called Presentation of self on the Web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs for those interested, but that one probably isn’t anything new to regular bloggers or blog researchers.

newtownhouses

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

In newtown there are a whole row of cute little houses, each named after a flower.

Every time I walk past them I dream of one day owning the house called Tulip. Wouldn’t that be perfect!

Anya,
Tulip,
Newtown,
NSW Australia

would be my address. How cool is that?

I will never be able to afford to buy a house in Sydney though unfortunately, so unless I somehow win the lottery this will just be one of those fancies we let oursleves have from time to time.

UPDATE: On my next walk it was earlier in the day so I took some more photos:

All was still one dusky evening in the streets of Newtown, Sydney.
It was that time of the day when shops were beginning to close, and the people who lived above them were beginning to come home. Windows were opened to let the fresh air in to circulate through the tiny, stifling rooms of city apartments.

Pigeons fluttered about the open windows as they smelt the prospects of a few crumbs of food.

But not all of the occupants of the apartments were of the human variety.
“Mmmmmm! I smell the prospects of a few bites of food!” meowed one such non-human-occupant, licking his lips excitedly.

He peered out from his window, whiskers a-quivering, trying to sense the direction of the delicious foul aromas.
“I know you’re here somewhere!!” he panted menacingly (the jump to the window ledge had been somewhat taxing).

“Aha!!! There you aaaaarrrreeeeee!”

“Here I come!!!!!!!!” came the squeal as the murderous marauder leapt precariously from his ledge to the next….

Oops.

And back inside he dashed, eager to hide the evidence.

This evening at dusk I went for a walk around Newtown (the suburb in Sydney where I live) with my camera. It’s been a lovely fresh Autumn day but slightly overcast and by 5ish everything seemed to have a blue hue to it (as you can see by the photos!).

I have many stories to tell from my walk, but here we start with a look into the grafitti artists in newtown. These artists work out of a shed in the corner of a park in Newtown and a street called Australia street and they’re incredibly good! I think they may even be commissioned by the council to create it but to be honest I am one of these people who walks about not noticing these things usually, so I am not entirely certain.

Look! Does that pole with the traffic symbol on it look like a Mona Lisa? Maybe its a signal for the grafitti all along this street? I didn’t even see that symbol on my walk, I just noticed it now!

Pretty incredible, isn’t it!!!

Then there’s a whole batch of political grafitti art, and LOOK!!!! LOOK!!!!

FOUCAULT GRAFITTI!!!! I was so amazed my hands shook and it came out all blurry. How exciting!

I thought the juxtaposition of the Hello Kitty! sticker underneath was either incredibly clever by some passer-by, or else a very fortunate fluke.

And… I think the same grafitti artists also did this huge mural - I don’t know whether to call it a mural or grafitti but I love the indigenous theme.

That section with the kangaroo is very pretty - it looks better in the bright sunlight of the day I think, but you get the idea.

(The inspiration for photographing grafitti actually came from seeing the great images from DrJoolz and Trois Tetes - thank you! I hope you enjoy the Australian artistry on display here *smile*)

I think I may have accidentally had comments disabled, so this post is to test them.

Today I uploaded some of my recent writings to my publication blog. One of them is my Sex and the City article and I woulod love to get some informal feedback about it while I am waiting for the reviewers.

Here’s a direct link to the paper.

Comments most welcomed. Thanks!

fluteandpicc

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

My beloved flute and piccolo!!!

flute

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

and on my flute, Bach

piccolo2

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

I love playing Sousa marches on the picc.

piccoloplaying

Originally uploaded by Anyaka.

Instead of blogging other people’s photos I’m doing some of my own today *grin*

Here’s me playing my piccolo.

I have a copy of the fantastic Spywatch located on my work server.

I have written about it and discussed lesson plans in chapter 5 of the book I wrote about children’s literature and computer based teaching.

It is a pretty basic story and some of the activities are blaaaaaaaaaaah but since there are so few examples of digital fiction for kids, I recommend the narrative part!

Recently I’ve had a number of emails from people wanting to read my latest pieces of writing (thanks so much for the interest!).

So even though the pieces aren’t all reviewed are not journal-publication-worthy, I’ve thrown up the drafts on my publications blog.

Please note: they are just drafts!! They are rough!!!! They may change!!!
And any advice is more than welcome as long as you’re nice about it *grin*
(Oh, and I also snuck in the pre-publication pdf manuscript of the book I co-wrote with colleagues about children’s literature and computers in the classroom, but shhhh!!!! I don’t want to get into trouble about it!!)

I gotta stop using exclamation marks - somebody told me that they make me look like a silly teenager :/

1133 red lilly

Originally uploaded by creativity+.

I have made some new contacts on flickr! I was so excited today to have a real message from one of them. Creative+ has the most gorgeous images of tulips and lilies among other things. I love photo sharing but until yesterday I’d been the one borrowing from other people but nobody had borrowed mine … or that was the was it used to be, until creativity+ blogged my brother’s cute cat! *grin* It made me laugh to see Holton become the subject of a networked-cyber-flickr-friend’s post. It made me clap my hands with excitement. I am loving this flickr - it has such potential and is bringing social networking trully multimodal!

Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the most influential films of my childhood. It’s showing again on television right now and I am still haunted by the ethereal images and the incredible music. The theme music was something I spent hours learning to play - first on the piano and then later on the flute.

The images are kind of David Hamilton-ish - innocent sexuality but kind of fetishising the adolescent female body. Some of the opening scenes are of the girls lacing up the ties of each other’s corsets.

I must have only been 9 or 10 when i first saw this scene but I always wanted to wear a corset after this - I don’t know why, it was just so exotic.

And many times over we see Miranda gazing at herself in the mirror, and she is also the subject of all the other girls’ gazes as they idolise her.

And when she starts ascending the path of the fateful rock, the French teacher says: “She looks like a Boticelli angel”.

There aren’t too many Australian films I like but this is a classic and its one I am still enchanted by.
And I still feel chills run over my skin when the girls disappear and when that voicover at the end announces “the disappearance remains a mystery to this day”. brrrrrrr!

Today I spent most of my working time writing next week’s writing lecture. It takes me ages to write lectures - it isn;t so much the writing of the text but its the searching for examples of children’s texts to use, the scanning in of images from books, and the fiddling about with powerpoint to actually make it interesting and engaging rather than boring bullet-point lists. There’s this one fantastic lecture theatre on campus and I am fortunate enough to have it this year - it has a document visualiser (so I can read picture books or show objects and things to the entire lecture theatre), a connection to the internet (so i can flip about and show not just the slides I put on line but go outside of the powerpoint lecture to other things), a DVD player (last week i used part of Noah and Saskia, the children’s TV show that I love, to discuss the language of opinion), and assorted microphones (not that I walk around too much but I could if i wanted to). It’s fabulous!

So next week’s lecture is about thematic organisation of texts and the genre of information reports. I’m going to use a heap of artefacts from the Antarctica as my sample texts. And I have a fantastic example of an 8 year old’s written text about Penguins to use to explain how to help young children develop their report writing. It isn’t thematically organised very well so its a great example to fit the lecture. Here it is if anybody else is teaching the same stuff and needs a good example! (I think it’s a really cute example too).

A penguin is a bird that cannot fly.
It also lays eggs.
If you look at a penguin from a distance,
it looks just like a man in a black and white suit!
A penguin has two eyes and feathers.
It has flippers instead of wings.
Penguins catch fish.
They love to swim in the water.
A penguin can win a race with a man by sliding on his tummy.
Some penguins live in the Antarctic on the ice and the snow.
Fairy penguins are 40 centimetres high.
An Emperor penguin is the biggest penguin in the world.
A Fairy penguin is the littlest penguin.
Penguin’s predators are seals.
There are seventeen kinds of penguins.
The king penguin is one meter high.
Penguins live in groups.
Penguins keep warm under their parents’ flippers.

There are some great papers in this seminar series at Cardiff!

Here is a synopsis of the series:

“This seminar series will explore some of the contemporary transformations in young women’s lives. It aims to bring together academics from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds (eg sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, education, youth and cultural studies, geography) as well as policymakers and practitioners (eg in youth organisations, charities and campaigning groups) to think about whether and in what ways young women’s lives are changing”.

Papers I really enjoyed include:

Valerie Walkerdine’s: Neo-liberalism, Femininity and Choice
Esther Sonnet’s: Just a Book, She Said
Jessica Ringrose’s: A New Universal Mean Girl

Wow there seems to be a lot going on in Cardiff! DrJoolz just went to a conference there about Gender and Education, which she discusses here.

Where are all the Australian conferences about feminism and youth culture, that’s what I’d like to know!

I found a great article online by Brenda Weber called Beauty, Desire and Anxiety. It’s a feminist critique of makeover shows like ‘Extreme Makeover’ and my personal pet hate, ‘The Swan’. It has some ironic illustrations too, like this one!

I came across this magazine, OneSixty, last year through my Honours student Beth, who wrote her thesis on sms text messaging. I loved the idea of receiving poetry on my phone!

The poems are also collected and collated online and its interesting to see how the magazine editors were very explicit about not ONLY including poetry that used “abbreviatons” - the usual shorthand of text messages - to make the distinction below:

We’ve been describing Onesixty as a magazine for “text message poetry” but from now on we’re going to change that description to the much less snappy and much more difficult to remember “poems that can be delivered as text messages”.

Why? Because “text message poetry” sounds like a special form of poetry that only applies to text messages, and it particularly suggests a connection with the mythical Text Message Language of abbreviations. Poems that can be delivered as text messages, on the other hand, can be anything the writers are truthful, inventive and careful enough to make them. They just need to be short.

The phrase is also a reminder that this is as much about reading as it is about writing. Getting a poem on a mobile phone can be a strange and powerful way to read poetry: the poems sometimes coincide with the circumstances in which they’re received – a poem about travel arrives while the reader is waiting for a train – and the ‘live’ nature of getting a text message gives an unexpected, almost supernatural charge to the words.

@ 1st ure msgs xited me
Paul Scott

@ 1st ure msgs xited me
a sudn stream of flrty txt frm 1 I hrdly knw.
bt now as I attempt 2 decifr yet anotha
all I can thnk is
‘I bet shes shit @ scrabble’

*chuckle* - fabulous isn’t it!!

And here’s another one that I really like since it covers the notion of embodiment within this mobile society:

E-LOVE
Sarah Boak

I give u a glimpse of me,
transposed thro tip-tap of fingers on keys;
my body lies
between the lines.

This is just soooo interesting a concept that I am thinking of buying a fancy mobile phone just to study it! Random Place is a new Australian soap opera to be shown ONLY via a mobile phone and the internet (using MSN messenger).

Set in gorgeous Bondi (a beachside suburb of Sydney) it stars a whole heap of reality stars and soapie stars who play surfers and so on similar to the TV show, Home and Away.

Apparently each episode will appear as a series of photos and words like a comic strip. There will be 2 episodes a day, five days a week for 26 (!) weeks.

This is distributed narrative at its most interesting - distributed across spaces and across time, distributed across genres and media. The remediation (?) / reappropriation (?) of reality TV stars from Australian Idol and so on is also quite fascinating. (Of course, the actual story leaves much to be desired based on what little I have gleaned about it so far - but then I can’t stand Australian soap operas).

I also think it says something about society / Sydney culture / or maybe the anticipated audience with the promotional tag: “Mobile subscribers get all the action pushed to their mobiles with a new episode Monday to Friday at 8am & 3:30pm. Liven up those boring bus and train rides.”

And of course, there are the prizes:

“As a mobile subscriber you will also receive free and automatic entry into weekly draws to win cool prizes.”
But can I bear to watch a soapie with such ghastly stereotypes is the question?

Maybe I’ll just stick to the wonderful and fascinating sms poetry at onesixty. (I think that deserves a post on its own.)

Amst05_8

Originally uploaded by Roberto Grassilli.

I’d liiiiike to go there….
and that conference is a good reason to do so!

Aren’t they beautiful!

I am Academic Girl
Click on the picture below to read more:

Take the ‘What Kind of Girl Are You?’ quiz at CookingToHookup.com
I guess the results of this quiz are no surprise, though I was hoping to be independent artsy girl! Yes, I’ve been reading the chicklit blogs again - and they’re all pointing to this book called Cooking to Hook Up.

So, apparently boys, if you want to romance me, you need to take me on a ‘Hemingway Picnic’ with tapas and sangria… hmmm, that could work…

My rating for this double movie feature set: 4 1/2 Anyas
I loooove Julie Delpy and after seeing this I have a huge crush on Ethan Hawke.

(In case you haven’t noticed, today’s posts have been brought to you by the theme chicklit and romance)

The Boyfriend List is a chicklit book by E. Lockhart. She also has a blog where she talks about the book, publishing and so on. She’s started a bit of a meme / challenge for people to write their lists and she’s publishing the funniest ones there. So, just for fun (I don’t think I can do an entire list, but…) here’s…

My First Boyfriend:

Rendall. In grade 6 I passed a note to my friend Louise saying: ‘I like Rendall’. She told Rendall and sent me a note back saying ‘I like you too’. We’d never really spoken to each other before the notes, but that’s when he officially became my boyfriend. The mark of an official boyfriend was to move our desks next to each other. The teacher had all of our desks arranged in groups by ability, and fortunately Rendall and I were both in the same group - we were called ‘The Free Group’ because our teacher had this radical teaching philosophy that the ‘bright’ kids in the class could be given a contract of work to do and sent off outside to work (we usually went to the gardens at the front of the school - the paths were lined with rose bushes and there were all sorts of scented shrubbery and flowers, not to mention the sound of the ocean close by - I loved grade 6!!). Rendall and I would go outside and sit by ourselves behind the bushes - no, we didn’t kiss - we did our mathematics work together.