Well, I must say this Mata Hari Quest is very challenging but lots of fun!! Today I enlisted the help of my friend Dell in solving all the clues and puzzles because I had spent an hour looking for the ring the day before to no avail. So I filledDell in, gave him the notecard with the obvious clue on it, and said let’s go! To my absolute amazement and embarrassment, Dell found the ring in under 5 seconds!!! Gah!!!! Here’s a close up shot of the ring (isn’t it just divine - all prims and no textures, imagine the HOURS of building work put into this!!):
This yielded the next clue, a cipher which this time at least Dell and I solved together! This led us to the bracelet:
Now you might think we were going well, and we were til then, but then it took a while for us to solve the next clue (involving a Bannister) and work out how to retrieve what was at the end of that clue: another clue! And this third clue is very difficult. We both spent ages tackling it and can’t decide whether its some sort of anagram or cryptic crossword puzzle or what…. It will lead to the navel ring jewel but so far I am afraid to say my navel is bare….. I wonder how I can get a little hint for this one? *grin* Stay tuned….
Yesterday I attended a brilliant linguistics workshop on heteroglossia (presented by Sally Humphrey and Dorothy Economou). I can’t believe how much I learnt! We spent a couple of hours immersed in the analysis of texts and discussing system networks (all very technical) but the most interesting thing that happened was a conversation I had with Sally when we were working in small groups. I confessed to her that this is one aspect of the interpersonal metafunction that I wasn’t as clued in to as I thought I should be!! Sally told me that the reason is that because I am a narrative junkie I don’t come across realisations of heterogloss in the texts I research and teach with (it is realised much more evidently in persuasive genres).
I’ve been thinking about that remark ever since and wondering whether in fact new forms of narrative have much more explicit realisations of heterogloss - particularly the distributed narratives (or as Christy calls them “polymorphic narratives“). When we get narratives that are distributed across different voices, different spaces, different times, and which are comprised of multiple micro-genres, I am thinking that the current linguitic system to describe heterogloss just doesnt stand up to account for this. At the very least, I think there’d be a PhD in finding this out! I am loving this linguistics and semiotics seminar series - it really pushes me into new ways of thinking and imagining.
