My interpretation of the Bolte Bridge is much more abstract than most of my images.
My camera just wouldn’t focus, but I thought I’d take the shot anyway. Most images of the Bolte Bridge are in sharp focus, so mine is, in a sense, an aberration.
Tim’s shot is here.
I did manage to get one in focus … I really like the stripes on the water.
The Melbourne Star revolves slowly on its unequal-star axis.
Colours pulse, change, move, are extinguished, then re-ignite the skyline.
***
Here is my literal interpretation of a Melbourne icon.
See Tim’s interpretation here.
I attempted a more abstract interpretation.
‘Fed’ Square is a place where people gather – to eat, talk, listen to music/those with something to say.
The buildings that surround the square become topics of conversation too … not just for what they house, but mainly for how they look.
On this particular morning the square was empty, apart from the occasional pigeon and a security guard or two, emphasising, to my mind at least, the gathering-space nature of this place. That’s how I’ve decided to interpret today’s Melbourne icon.
Tim’s interpretation of Fed Square is here.
You can get lost in the laneways.
When you do, remember to look up …
And look in.
Tim’s interpretation of Melbourne’s laneways is here.
We happened to be wandering around the city just after sunrise this morning.
Not that we could tell the sun had risen; it was one of those squidgy kind of sunrises where the day doesn’t get any brighter in a hurry.
There were no sunbeams to bounce off the Eureka Tower, no glints of sunshine to lighten the mood … but there was also no breeze to touch the surface of the river.
All was calm.
This is my interpretation of today’s theme of ‘the river’. Tim’s interpretation is here.
Tim seemed to think that I might be at a bit of a loss on my day off, particularly as I have no study to do, so he asked me to take a photo of one of the two roses in bloom in the back garden.
He was right. I was at a bit of a loss, so into the cold I headed and went in search of roses. It was a bit windy, and that always makes taking macro shots of flowers challenging, but the biggest challenge was trying to keep my hands still.
It was freezing and I was shivering so much that I couldn’t hold the camera still.
I hadn’t used my 90mm Tamron (macro) lens in absolutely ages, and for a while couldn’t remember how to switch it to auto focus. Eventually I worked it out, but then discovered that I’m so used to manual focus that I couldn’t use it in auto. I switched it back to manual and tried to time to shaking to the movement from the wind. I suppose I could have used the tripod … hindsight’s a wonderful thing!
Anyway, here are two shots from my winter garden.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, where I vowed and declared that I would never re-enter the institution of marriage.
Marriage wasn’t for me. It was an institution designed for the suppression of women, it was out-dated, it was no longer relevant for modern life, it was only for those who wanted to be tied to another by invisible but strong and deadening bonds.
Two years ago today I was tied to another by invisible but strong bonds in the sight of my family and closest friends.
Yes, I became married.
I was asked, around that time, whether I thought marriage would make any difference to a relationship that was non-traditional in one quite clear way (the age difference is very marked) but had never the less already made it past the five year mark.
At the time I wasn’t sure. Michelle seemed to think that being married was different from being together and I wondered if I would feel the same.
Is it different, being married to someone? Have the last two years differed in any significant way from the previous five?
Yes.
I like, despite thinking that I might feel otherwise, having a ‘husband’ – a person named up as such. It quite possibly has to do with the husband I have, but I do like it.
I like that I can signal to the world (through subtly flashing my wedding ring) that I am married. I like the security and comfort of that.
I also, despite thinking otherwise at other times, liked planning the wedding.
A wedding is something that you do partly for show. The wedding ceremony is just as much for others as it is for the couple – you show your commitment to each other in front of others who are important in your life. You get to ask the 12 year daughter of your best friend from high school if she will present the rings and so be an extra special part of the celebration. That can never be taken away. You get to hear your sister read a poem that has significance and meaning to you. You get to see your mum and dad with tears in their eyes because you look so beautiful and you look around the small gathering and see the faces of your adult children and your grandchildren and your extra special friends and your know that this is something they’re happy to be part of. And then you see your German sister on the laptop, Skyping in from Germany, and you feel thrilled that she can be part of it too. This big commitment, undertaken in a marquee in your own backyard and then celebrated upstairs in a room that looks divine, is significant because it’s shared.
Thinking back on that day, two years ago, I am particularly pleased that I changed my mind about marriage.
I like being married.
I mostly like being married because I’m married to Tim. He lets me be.
Inexplicably, it has become a publishing phenomenon.
Like Twilight did.
I really like what author Stephen King had to say about Twilight. Have you seen it? He said, “Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.”
I really can’t comment as I didn’t read the Twilight books and I haven’t seen the movies.
The author of Twilight is supposed to have had a dream, and when she woke up she wrote what is now Chapter 13 of the first book. It grew from there.
An inauspicious beginning.
I am generally suspicious of books that take the publishing world by storm – I have read the Harry Potter series, but not Twilight, not The Hunger Games, not The Girl with any kind of Tattoo.
And I haven’t read Fifty Shades of …
Except for the excerpts available from Amazon.
I thought I’d see what the fuss was about. I wish I hadn’t bothered.
You know how repetition is great in children’s books? Susan Gannon, writing in 1987, claimed that “repetition is one of the most familiar features of children’s literature. It clarifies the structure of narrative for young readers, and helps them to remember what they have read. It adds rhythm and the mysterious charm of ritual to the simplest of verbal formulas. It offers the pleasure of extended suspense and delayed gratification to even the youngest audience” (p. 2).
But it’s one thing that rubs me up the wrong in writing for adults. The writing gets so boring, the author appears unimaginative, and I’m left wondering why this book has become a best seller. The female lead, a stumbling, bumbling young thing (oh, for goodness sake, pick your feet up), “sprawls” into what’s-his-name’s office (who does that?) only to find that what’s-his-name is some sort of demi-god who came off the set of a Robert Palmer music video (except in the video all the clones have dark hair).
Here’s what another reviewer found (I wish I’d read this before I read the excerpt): “And oh, the repetition…and the repetition…and the repetition. I’m convinced the author has a computer macro that she hits to insert one of her limited repertoire of facial expressions whenever she needs one. According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian’s lips “quirk up” 16 times, Christian “cocks his head to one side” 17 times, characters “purse” their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana’s anthropomorphic “subconscious” (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana’s “inner goddess,” and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of “oh crap” (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to “holy crap,” “double crap,” or the ultimate “triple crap”). … She “blushes” or “flushes” 125 times, including 13 that are “scarlet,” 6 that are “crimson,” and one that is “stars and stripes red.” (I can’t even imagine.) Ana “peeks up” at Christian 13 times, and there are 9 references to Christian’s “hooded eyes,” 7 to his “long index finger,” and 25 to how “hot” he is (including four recurrences of the epic declarative sentence “He’s so freaking hot.”). Christian’s “mouth presses into a hard line” 10 times. Characters “murmur” 199 times, “mutter” 49 times, and “whisper” 195 times (doesn’t anyone just talk?), “clamber” on/in/out of things 21 times, and “smirk” 34 times. Christian and Ana also “gasp” 46 times and experience 18 “breath hitches,” suggesting a need for prompt intervention by paramedics. Finally, in a remarkable bit of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 “grins” and 124 “frowns”…
That’s a lot of repetition.
A lot.
Too much.
It annoyed me. It annoyed a lot of people.
My question is: why didn’t it annoy more people? Why didn’t it annoy everyone who read the book? Who went on to read more than one, because apparently, there’s more than one?
Apart from the repetition, the other thing I didn’t like about what I read was the detail. Do we have to know that they walked down the street and waited at the corner for the man to go green before they could cross? It’s so pedestrian. Writing that goes into that much detail about really mundane things says to me that the author is unsure of how to build tension. Without tension there is no story (I am a drama teacher still). I don’t know if any tension was created in the rest of the book, but I didn’t become interested enough in the bit I read to want to find out. That’s poor writing. “I can’t imagine what fans are comparing this to when they describe this as “good”(Amazon reviewer, with whom I happen to agree).
So, the upshot is, as my fingers move slowly across the keyboard, clicking the ‘a’ key before moving on to press the ‘s’ key and then pushing the space bar to create a space between one word and the next, then clicking the ‘m’ key before moving on to press the ‘y’ key and then pushing the space bar to create a space between one word and the next … the upshot is, I won’t be buying the book and I’ll be left wondering why it has become a best seller and why (when there is so much other material around in the genre – just look on any service station magazine shelf) the movie rights are expected to cost $5 million dollars.
I know I sound like a grumpy old lady (oh, don’t they drive you mad!) but that’s what happens when I read poorly written, repetitive stories, that try to cross Pretty Woman with a men’s magazine (and don’t do it very well).
It isn’t literature.
I’m not even sure why it’s read.
“What do you feel like doing this weekend”, asked Tim on Saturday morning. I had no work on, nothing to catch up on … a free weekend. I’d even stayed home the day before and caught up with the washing and ironing (now that Mum and Dad have gone home I’ve had to take that task on again).
“I feel like going to Sydney”.
So I did.
I felt the need to connect for real, by pretending that I lived there. If I lived in Sydney I’d pop in to visit Michelle. Just because I live in Burnie, in Tasmania, an hour and a half’s plane flight after an hour and a half’s drive to the airport, shouldn’t mean I can’t just pop in.
So I did.
Michelle had been feeling a bit nauseous, a bit poorly. Well, it was more than that, but that’s her story for her to tell. She wasn’t well, and I though that popping in to visit would be a good thing to do.
It was.
Hello and welcome to my blog. It’s a new thing. I imagine I’ll write one or two posts and then forget about it, but you never know. I could do something nerdy and schedule a time in my calendar to write a blog entry each week, but I doubt I’ll do that.
This blog is for me to determine whether I have anything to say. I’ve tried Twitter but haven’t been to see who’s been tweeting for a few months now. I very quickly became bored with the inanitites and I didn’t really need to know that much detail about what people were up to. I can survive without knowing that someone on the other side of the world is watching a baseball game, or reading a particular article.
I’m also Linked In, on Facebook, on Academia.edu (a Facebook type thing for academics), and just yesterday I was invited to become a member of Yammer. I became a member but I still don’t know what it is and what it’s for. I guess I’ll find out when I remember to log in.
I certainly can’t say that I’m not connected. But who am I connecting with – and why? What happens to my other, personal, connections when I’m so busy following this or that academic, or someone who’s been busily tweeting, or commenting on aspects of their professional life in Linked In? I’m so busy connecting to others outside my immediate known world that I have little time for those within my sphere.
And that isn’t right. That’s not how it should be.
The other thing is that I don’t really ‘connect’. I read what someone else – a stranger – says, but that’s not connecting is it? We claim, newspapers claim, social media sites claim that we’re all more connected now.
But we aren’t. Not really. We might clink together like billiard balls, but that’s not connecting. Not really.
There’s always the phone. Or a visit.
Novel ideas … I’ll have to write them down where I’ll remember to read them again. Perhaps I’ll write them on the fridge.
Musings from the cold.
Musings from the cold 