Compulsory New Year's Eve Post

Creative Commons image. 

2014 has been a crazy year for me. I had to teach Year 8 history. I only made one story sale(thank heavens for the wonderful Sophie Masson). We had an author visit by Sherryl Clark and were offered one for this coming year by the new Stella Schools Program. I did a lot of reading for the Aurealis Awards and read a lot of slush for ASIM and published an issue of ASM myself, #60. Go buy it! 

 I seriously think whether I should take a break from promoting other people's books and concentrate on my own writing. But I can't not read, can I? 

And I am inspired by the wonderful Ambelin Kwaymullina, author of The Interrogation Of Ashala Wolf, whom I meet at Continuum, who also has a full time day job as a teacher and still manages to write amazing fiction. And paint. And handcraft. (Ambelin, by the way, is the one I have to thank for the Stella freebie.) If she can do it, so can I.

Ambelin did  a great interview on this blog in June. Do check it out.

I'm hoping that this coming year will be a good one. Even though we're having to jump through ever more hoops at work, I will only have small classes and once I get them organised I may be able to focus more on the writing and look after my students in the library.

So, have a great NYE - I'm meeting my nephew David and his daughters Dezzy and Rachel at the Astor Theatre for the very last Rocky Horror Picture Show before they are closed down so the owner can make a fortune selling it as apartments. I don't do midnight any more, not since Dad died, it depresses me too much, but Rocky Horror will be good. And no champers either - a half glass of fizzy wine and my head fuzzes up and I say stupid things. Anyway, with daylight saving, who can tell when it's midnight? :-)

So here's a December 31 meme for you.

On This Day

The usual lot of battles and horrible stuff, so I found some quirky items for you in Wikipedia.

1759 : Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum. And the world gets a new beer! Wonder if the lease price has gone up?

1853: A dinner party is held inside a life-size model of an iguanodon created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen in south London, England. Will have to check this out. What a way to spend New Year's Eve, eh? And typically Victorian era over-the-top.

1907: The first New Year's Eve celebration is held in Times Square (then known as Longacre Square). This has, as I needn't remind you, become a tradition. 

2009: Both a blue moon and a lunar eclipse occur. This was a sad year's end for me, as my Dad had just passed away. I went to bed early and as there was a storm that night, I missed the lunar events, I'm afraid. But an interesting thing anyway.

Birthdays

Only two writers/editors I'm familiar with, so I've added actors I respect.

1937 – Anthony Hopkins, Welsh-American actor, director, and composer. Didn't know about the American. Time to read his bio.

1943 – Ben Kingsley, English actor

1945 – Connie Willis, American spec fic author and one of my favourites. If you love spec fic, do read The Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing Of The Dog, all those time travel stories, and Passage, which was a great story about near-death-experiences taking the form of finding yourself on the Titanic.

1949 - Ellen Datlow, American anthologist and author. Does a lot of themed anthologies, including fairytales. Pity she only takes commissioned work... Sigh!  But her anthologies have given me a lot of reading pleasure over the years.

In today's news

 A lot of depressing stuff, but one item I liked, the discovery of the world's smallest species of goanna, at only about 23 cm in length, in the Kimberley. She's on display at the Museum of Western Australia and yes, she's alive, I checked. I hope they find her a better place to live and a mate to cheer her up.

Nearly Finished Reading For The Aurealises: A Reflection So Far

Yesterday the final Aurealis entry arrived, a slim volume called Will You Be My Sweetheart? It's a graphic, so won't take long. Well, we'll see. I have another graphic that I haven't got far into yet, going crosse eyed over it. Some are harder than others.

I must admit, I'm glad there won't be any more, though it was exciting receiving all those parcels. I still have several to finish or even start. At this stage  I can't say which ones stand out, for me or anyone else. Some are very much better than others, but winners? I can't tell. There are some which simply don't qualify as spec fic but were entered anyway, because they had a MENTION of something that might count as spec fic if it had been real within the story. There were short stories, including one from an anthology in which I have a story. There were picture books and picture story books. There were even some choose your own adventure style stories. There are novels clearly meant for teens, not children, and, I'm sure, entered in both categories. What a variety! And I have to keep reminding myself that some books I didn't enjoy were not written for me, and ask myself, "Yes, but would children enjoy them?" There's one book I think dreadful - truly dreadful - which has a rave review on Goodreads by a child. It doesn't mean I'll revise my opinion - there are plenty of others that are much better written - but you do have to take another look in such circumstances, just in case.

I won't be keeping most of them. I simply don't have the space left on my shelves and anything I really want should be available in ebook. Most of them can go into my school library and some, which are too juvenile, I have offered to the primary school down the road from us. Anything I haven't given to them or the library I work in or to Eden and Jonah, my nephew's boys, will go into the Rotary bin at my local library, where they might find homes at a Rotary fundraising event.

But while the reading might be nearly over the discussion hasn't begun yet! That should be an eye opener. It has been an interesting experience so far. More to come.

Have a happy New Year, my readers!

In Which I Waffle About The Hobbit 3 And Boxing Day

The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water, 1937. (MS. Tolkien drawings 26) Copyright the Tolkien Estate, reproduced here under fair use.

Friday afternoon was delightful and sad for me. Delightful because I met some of my friends for a movie and sad because the movie, The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies is the last of the Tolkien-inspired epic films we will get to see on Boxing Day.  What wonderful films will we see from now on as we struggle our way through the sale crowds to the cinema? They will have to be very special to excite me anyway.

I'm illustrating this post with a Tolkien illustration which can be used under the copyright fair usage clause, because it's just too much of a headache to go with the movie poster which has so many ifs and buts attached it's not worth using lest someone orders me to take it down when I'm promoting their film. I don't think Tolkien would mind. And I'm sure you can all find those posters all over the Web anyway.

I didn't read The Hobbit till I was an adult. I remember going out with my then much younger nephew Max one summer day. His father was reading him The Hobbit at bedtime. I happened to have a copy with me for my umpteenth reread so there, on that hot afternoon in the gardens around the Shrine of Remembrance, I read to him from the chapter they were up to. I think it was "Riddles in the dark", Bilbo's meeting with Gollum. That chapter, by the way, was a favourite with my late friend jan howard finder(he liked to spell his name without capitals). Jan read it to the kids at our Aussiecon children's program. One of them asked for the lights to be turned off to provide ambience. Fortunately, he knew it off by heart. ;-) 

Since then Max, now a tall sixteen year old, has also read The Lord Of The Rings. His father, my brother Maurice, held out for years, then bought the beautiful three volume Alan Lee illustrated hardback edition which was on sale at the time, and was very glad he had finally read the book. Probably that was how Max got to read it.

Max is currently visiting family in Israel, but has asked me if we can see the film together when he returns, with his cousin Dezzy, who's in town. He feels himself too old to be going out with his auntie, but this film is special to him and we've seen the other two together. I asked Dezzy, who says she'd love to, as her father is taking her sister Rachel only, on a "quality time" outing. Dezzy has grown into a bright, articulate young woman who loves dancing but also talking about books - she helps in the school library and promotes the books of her auntie the writer. She wants to be a psychologist, though, not a librarian.

The third Hobbit movie has had quite a lot of rude reviews but as a Tolkien fan I enjoyed it very much. I know the whole thing was stretched out rather too much and I'm really not sure of what the Professor would think of the Elven shield maiden and her unlikely romance with one of the nephews of the King Under The Mountain, ie Kili, Thorin's sister-son. Well, actually, I do know what he'd think. It wouldn't be complimentary! 

 But you have to understand that there isn't a single female character in the original novel. Not one. For some time I thought Lobelia appeared in the auction scene, then I reread and no, it was just "the Sackville-Bagginses" though perhaps Lobelia was implied, only you didn't find that out till LOTR. At least LOTR has its share of brave and intelligent women, even if they do get less time than the men. But The Hobbit? Not one. And you can't produce an all-male film. Eight and a half hours with no women at all, apart from the extras? No. Well, yes, the movie had inserted Galadriel, but there was only so much they could do with her. I admit I thought the hints of her romantic feelings for Gandalf were just a little silly. Come on, woman, he's an angel! Not a fallen one. Definitely asexual. And you're a married woman, head of the Elven artist colony in Lothlorien, Elrond's mother-in-law. But I suppose it was meant to hint at the reasons for her sorrow when she hears of his death in Fellowship Of The Ring. The film gave her a good scene when you realised just what could have happened if she'd let Frodo give her the Ring. Fortunately, it happens to Sauron. And it makes sense. Galadriel's stuck in Middle-Earth in the first place because she was once a very naughty girl. No, I won't tell you. Go read The Silmarillion. Really. It will make you understand  that Galadriel is a lot more than the wise elf queen she appears.

Anyway, Tauriel! She was the one who reminded the viewers that there are women even in Middle-Earth. Brave, kickass women. And what's the point of having sexy young Dwarves like Fili and Kili if at least one of them doesn't score in the romance stakes? Even if the woman concerned is twice his height... Never stopped Miles Vorkosigan from sleeping every now and then with Sergeant Taura. ;-)

Despite all this, it's a largely action film. Billy Connolly appears, Scottish accent and all, as Dain, leading an army of Dwarves and threatening what he will do to Thranduil's "pretty head". Thranduil deserves it too. I liked the way this film, while showing Thorin's dragon sickness, also suggests that the Elvenking has some things not to be proud of. It's really more Silmarillion than Hobbit; though Tolkien does mention the stupidity of a quarrel over a necklace and payment he still describes the Elvenking as "wise". 

The  battles are breathtaking and yes, Beorn is in there, though you only see him very briefly, fighting in his bear form, as in the novel.

Bard's role has been extended, but in the novel Bard, who has been described as a proto-Aragorn, did get to do a lot more in the last part of the story than when he was introduced simply as a man with a grim voice.

In some ways, this one was, despite all the extra bits and characters, closer to the spirit of the novel than the second one and Richard Armitage acts his heart out as Thorin gone crazy. 

I really think that Martin Freeman was the perfect Bilbo as well. And it showed him telling his first lie about having the Ring. Not that Gandalf is fooled, but still... 

And that auction scene is in there and yes, Lobelia is in it, with those spoons! 

If you hated the earlier films, you won't be going to see this one anyway, but I hope you've enjoyed this unexpected journey as much as I have.

Compulsory Christmas Post

Today I went for my usual Christmas picnic on the beach, after a large breakfast of fruit salad of summer fruits, a pot of tea and raisin toast. It was quite hot and hundreds packed the beach - I was one of the few not going into the water, but the forecast was only 25'C and that's not my usual swimming weather. Also, I had a call from my sister, who spends Wednesday nights with Mum, and they wanted to meet me. So I packed my cool bag with goodies friends gave me at work, including a fruit cake so covered with nuts and glace cherries that when I was given the packet I thought it was just nibbles. I never did eat that, and the pack of chocolate coated biscuits melted. Mum suggested I throw it out. It has gone in the fridge. We'll see.

As I walked through the park on my way down to the beach, I counted eleven picnics, including one informal game of cricket, so there are a lot of people out there who prefer to make things easy on themselves and enjoy a pleasant day out with family and friends, on the grass under a shady tree. I waved and wished them a happy Christmas.

Lots of children, most of them under five, romped on the sand. Delightful kids, though not, IMO, as cute as our Eden and Jonah. ;-)

I was sitting on the sand, munching on my picnic lunch when my mother and sister arrived. I'd packed smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches, a hard boiled egg, Kalamata olives, cherry tomatoes, baby cucumbers(washed and eaten with the skin on), a peach and a nectarine, and cold water to drink. I had a thermos of hot water and some tea- a choice of afternoon, Earl Grey and English Breakfast - but ended up not drinking any of it. I didn't take the iPad, because, apart from all the sand, it just isn't possible to read anything in the sun. My reading matter was the Christmas/New Year bumper edition of New Scientist and John Flanagan's latest Brotherband novel, Scorpion Mountain, which I'm reading for the Aurealis Awards.

Not much is open on Christmas Day, but I was surprised at how many restaurants were open on Acland Street. Even two of the cake shops were open. Amazing. I can only hope the staff were given penalty rates. Too much to hope they did that at Macca's, but then, when you apply for a job there, the online form asks you if you're willing to work on public holidays, including Christmas Day. I know this because I've helped several students get started on their applications. And many of those said yes.

Now for some meme stuff.

First, some famous birthdays:

1583: the baptism, anyway, of Orlando Gibbons, a lovely composer of the English Renaissance.

1642: Isaac Newton, the physicist - yes, THAT Isaac Newton! He was also very much into alchemy. I once wrote a little piece about him for Cengage's set of literacy cards. I had to write it as fiction.

1771: the poet Dorothy Wordsworth

And since there are few other writers I know of with this birthday, I'll add an actor:

 1899: Humphrey Bogart! Hey, he was in a lot of films based on books.

And 1870: Helena Rubinstein, who built up that huge cosmetics business.

Some events:

336: first documented sign of Christmas celebrations on December 25 in Rome

597: A massive baptism of 10,000 Anglo-Saxons by Augustine and his helpers in Kent.

800: Coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. Goodness knows, he's been the subject of a lot of poetry in the Middle Ages. There's a whole Carolingian cycle.

1066: William the Conqueror is crowned King of England at Westminster. (Didn't wait long after his victory at Hastings, did he?)

1223: St Francis of Assisi assembles the first Nativity scene. Well, he is the patron saint of animals!

1492: Columbus's ship the Santa Maria runs aground on Hispaniola. Whoops!

1651: Massachusetts General Court orders a five shilling fine for celebrating Christmas. Bah humbug!

1914; The famous Christmas Truce in the trenches of World War I. Nice, but the next day they got back to the business of killing the people with whom they had exchanged gifts and played football. Oh, well. Pity the truce didn't turn into full peace.

Some Christmas-themed books:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (of course!)

The Grinch That Stole Christmas by Dr Seuss

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett (my favourite! My copy is all battered and well loved)

Once Upon A Christmas(published this year by Christmas Press. I have a story in it, so buy it!)

Hercule Poirot's Christmas and The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie.

Agatha Raising And The Christmas Crumble is one of two Christmas stories by M.C. Beaton. It's really just a novelette, but you can get it as an ebook. I forget the title of the other one, but I've read both. This one is very funny, showing the village-based sleuth Agatha Raisin getting the bright idea of serving Christmas dinner to some of the village's older residents. She makes a real mess of the pudding - Agatha can't cook but is determined to do this one. Someone dies and she has to find out who did it because she has been accused.

Some other festivals that happened this time of year before Christmas became big:

The Roman Saturnalia. Gifts were exchanged, people partied, slaves got to have a rest and be served dinner instead of dishing it up. There was a topsy turvy flavour, where slaves got to issue orders(naturally, you'd have to be careful - your boss would be your boss again when the festival was over). I'm wondering if there's any connection here with the mediaeval Lord of Misrule associated with Twelfth Night. I wouldn't be surprised.

The birthday of the god of light, Mithras - it was actually December 25. This is not coincidental. The date was picked up by Christians during the fourth century. (See above)

I have read that for quite a while, Christmas wasn't considered as important as Easter and didn't get much celebration. And we do know that the Puritans banned it, claiming it was pagan.

Whatever. For those of you for whom this is a holy day, or even a day you celebrate with your family, I hope you've enjoyed it.

The Last Ôf The Spirits By Chris Priestley. Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014

You remember that scene in Dickens' A Christmas Carol where Scrooge asks about two children, a boy and a girl, huddling under the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present? The Ghost tells him that the children are Ignorance and Want.

In this novel they are real children, street kids who, in fact, sneaked into Scrooge's home while he was off with the spirits and took refuge in his dining room, which is at least a little warmer than the streets. The story is told from the viewpoint of the boy, Sam and his sister Lizzie. They once had a home and parents, but their father died in debt and their mother soon after.

Sam is angry with the world, especially one Ebenezer Scrooge, who had snubbed them when they pleaded for a little money. So that night, when they are trying to sleep in the graveyard and run into the ghost of Jacob Marley, on his way to save Scrooge's soul, they follow, with Sam thinking that a piece of lead piping applied to the old miser's head might improve him greatly and get them some of the money he refused them the first time.

 

Sam, too, it seems, needs and benefits from visits from the three spirits...

This is a nice take on the original novella, with Scrooge's story happening on the side, with the children watching and listening to bits and Sam being a little irritated with the Ghost of Christmas Present for using them as props in the show he is staging for Scrooge. It probably means more if you are familiar with the original story, but can be read by itself and, who knows, might encourage children to look for the original story once they're old enough to follow it.

A good time of year to release this piece of Christmas fiction!  

December 18: On This Day

Time for another meme on this third night of Chanukah...

On This Day In History:

1655: It's decided in England that there's no law preventing the Jews from returning; they were kicked out in 1290 when Edward I and his family had squeezed the last penny out of them, but Oliver Cromwell's government let them back in. Whatever you think of him, that's something he did right.

1719: "Mother Goose's Melodies For Children" first published.

1796: First US newspaper to appear on a Sunday, the Baltimore Monitor. Ah, there's something nice about being able to sit back on the weekend and have a newspaper with breakfast!

1839: First celestial photo taken in the US, of the moon.

1849: Ten years later, William Bond takes the first photo of the moon through a telescope.

1912: Piltdown Man hoax - the "finding" is announced. Now, that must have been a scandal in its time, with that so-called "missing link"!

1958: First voice from space is heard, a prerecorded Christmas message from President Eisenhower.

1966: Discovery of Epimetheus, moon of Saturn

Birthdays:

1879: the artist Paul Klee, who did all those very pretty modern art paintings

Paul Klee: Tempelgarten. Public domain.

1907: Christopher Fry, British playwright. I once saw his play Ring Around The Moon. 

1913 Alfred Bester, SF writer most famous for The Demolished Man. As a tribute to him, the name was given to the head of the Psi Corps in Babylon 5(played by Walter Koenig, who was Chekov in Star Trek, of course)

1939: Michael Moorcock, British SF/F writer. Best known for the Elric stories, but I have only read his novel Behold The Man. Very strange story!

Holidays and Observances

There are a fair few holidays and observances at this time of year, especially in the Christian calendar, but my favourite is the celebration of the Celtic horse goddess Epona, which happened during the Roman Saturnalia. 

Some of the bits of Christmas we know well come from the Saturnalia, by the way. The exchange of gifts, for example, and I suspect the Mediaeval Twelfth Night Lord of Misrule must have started with the Saturnalia, when everything was topsy turvey and the slaves got to issue orders and be served dinner by their masters. I don't imagine they took too much advantage of this, since afterwards everything went back to normal...

December 16 Meme

Today is the first evening of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, of spinning dreidels, of kids getting cash gifts from the family, of eating oily things in memory of the miracle of the oil lamps in the Temple - hey, any excuse to eat doughnuts and potato latkes!

It's also, in history, the date of a lot of other things.

Here are some of them.

On This Day In History

1497:  Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope.

1707:  Last recorded eruption of Mt Fuji in Japan.

1773:  The Boston Tea Party. Protest against tea tax. 

1927 – Donald Bradman scores a century in his first game of first-class cricket for NSW agains South Australia

Birthdays - an embarrassment of riches!

1485: Catherine of Aragon, subject of a lot of writing, from biography to fiction. Imagine how different the world would have been if she'd given Henry a living son...

1775: Jane Austen! Yay!

1866: Wassily Kandinsky, Russian-French artist(there's a Google doodle in his honour. If you miss it, they do have a stash of them online)

1899: Noel Coward, British playwright and composer

1901: Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist

1917: Arthur C Clarke, classic SF writer

1927: Peter Dickinson, who has written quite a lot of spec fic for children and teens. For adults, among other things, there was King And Joker, an alternative universe crime novel set in Buckingham Palace. 

1928: Phillip K Dick. If you haven't read any of his books, I'm betting you've seen at least one movie based on something he wrote, such as Bladerunner.

1933: Quentin Blake, who illoed all those Roald Dahl stories.

1967: Miranda Otto, Aussie actress whom you would likely have seen in LOTR.  I believe she went to school with one of the ASIM members, so we have an interview with her in one of our earlier issues.

It may also be the birthday of Ludwig Van Beethoven(1770), but I'm uncertain. He was baptised on the 17th.

There are more, but these will do. As I said, an embarrassment of riches among all the people who, in one way or another, have made the world a nicer place to live.

December 14 Meme

And here's another interesting day in history!

Birthdays: 

1503: Nostradamus! Author of all those vague "prophecies" inspiring so many conspiracies

1546: Tycho Brahe, astronomer, back in the days when that job was new and exciting and possibly dangerous if you lived in the wrong country and got on the wrong side of the Church...( fortunately for him, he didn't). And he did it all without a telescope! PS He nearly became a lawyer!

1968: Rachel Cohn, YA novelist. I know her via her delightful co-authorship with David Levithan of some wonderful novels, such as Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist. 

1640: birth or at least baptism, of  Aphra Behn, who wrote far more plays, some of them still being performed, than the more famous Oliver Goldsmith, who wrote about three plays. She was also a novelist and a spy. Poor woman, she had some exciting adventures, did a lot of good stuff for her country, was never paid and then they issued a warrant for her arrest as a debtor!  Probably a good thing for us, because being broke meant she started her writing career to earn a living. One of the first professional female writers. I wrote about her in my children's book on spies. Possibly I would have made it into the Cranky Ladies anthology if I'd chosen her instead of Margaret Bulkely aka Dr James Barry. 😒

Public Domain portrait of Aphra Behn, by Peter Leły

Events: 

1542: the baby Mary Stuart becomes Queen of Scots and inspires a whole lot of writing, from bios to historical romance to SF, if you count that story by Fritz Leiber in which Elizabeth I is replaced by an agent/actress who has to make the vital decision.

1900: Max Planck, physicist, presents a paper that leads to the birth of quantum physics. I'm sadly deficient in the knowledge of physics, but even I know this is exciting! 

1962: Mariner 2 flyby of Venus. Yay!

1972: The last men on the moon leave. (Sob! No women ever got the chance to go)

2012: Sad event, but I must mention, the Sandy Hook school massacre. 😥 And the NRA, far from admitting maybe there should be a change in the gun laws, suggests teachers should be armed. I did NOT sign up for murder of ANYONE when I qualified as a teacher. 

Today has some Christian connotations, such as John of the Cross(Spanish Saint). He also wrote poetry and stuff about the growth of the soul, so I guess he counts as a writer.

It's also Martyred Intellectuals Day in Bangladesh, to commemorate some intellectuals who were killed in 1971 when the enemies in the Liberation War apparently tried to stop the new nation from having an intellectual focus. There's a memorial built to them in Bangladesh.

And it's an international Monkey day, dedicated to apes in general. Let's hope they aren't all DipEd out in the quest for more palm oil and human "lebensraum". 

December 13 Meme - Happy Birthday, Bianca!

For my nephew Mark's lovely wife Bianca... Here are some things that happened on your birthday !

On This Day: 

Not much in history about books or writing that I could find, so I thought I'd go for exciting explorer stuff because of the sensawunda it inspires in SF, my first love.

1577 : Sir Francis Drake sails off from Plymouth on his first round-the-world voyage.

1642: Abel Tasman, after whom our beautiful Tasmania is named, reached New Zealand. This is the closest I can get to something Aussie-related.

1972 : the Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked on the moon. This is the last time, to date, that humans have walked there. I remember reading an interview with Michael Collins where he was asked if he'd accept an invitation to go back to the moon. He said no, but he'd be all for going to Mars if he could. My favourite of the three Apollo 11 astronauts!

Author Birthdays: 

Slim pickings here, but I did find one I'd read and enjoyed.

Lucia Gonzales, children's writer and librarian

Ross MacDonald, author of a lot of hard boiled detective fiction about a sleuth called Lew Archer, was known as the heir to Dashiell Hammett.

AND - Ta da! The wonderful Tamora Pierce, author of the Lioness books and many others. Her heroine was a girl who wanted to be a knight and swapped places with her twin brother, who had other ambitions, disguised herself as a boy and went off to be a page. Go read them if you haven't and ... many happy returns, Tamora, one of my Goodreads friends! Tamora blogs regularly and is one of the few big name author members of Goodreads I know who actually reviews other people's books and lets people friend her instead of just becoming "fans" who can't communicate. I get the feeling with some of these folk that they're only there on the advice of agents and publicists to get a social media profile.

Celebrations

Today, by the way, is St Lucy's Day (aka Santa Lucia). Thought I'd mention it because my much-valued and respected library technician us a Lucy/Lucia.

I gather it's a festival centred around light because it used to be the (European) winter solstice before the calendar changed. Which reminds me, time to get the Chanukah candles, as our own feast of lights begins Tuesday night. Time to stock up on potatoes for the traditional latkes and find my way down to the doughnut stand at Footscray railway station, as doughnuts are also a tradition(anything oily to eat, you see, though I don't recall chips being a tradition...)  

Below is a Public Domain image of Saint Lucy. See the eyes in the dish? Part of the legend, in which her eyes were poked out or maybe she poked them out herself to put off a suitor. Ew! Yuk! But she's the patron saint of the blind.

December 11 Meme

December 11: On This Day

What Happened: 

Nothing literary that I could find, so here are some that caught my eye: 

1620: landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock(this one for my US readers)

1901: Marconi sends first transatlantic radio signal - wow! When you think of where that led - just wow!

1936: Edward VIII announces on the radio that he's abdicating to marry Wallis Simpson and history takes a turn for the better(he was known for sympathising with the Nazis)

1997: The Kyoto Protocol - in which 150 nations get together to do the right thing. And all these years later we're STILL facing climate change because short-sighted politicians would  rather look after the economy and jobs - their own jobs - than look after the planet their descendants will inherit. 

Happy Birthday To:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Author of a lot of books that got him into trouble in the Soviet Union, including The Gulag Archipelago and - the one that got him exiled - One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. (I once saw a Year 7 boy reading this and assuring me he loved it. Pity this was in my pre-TL days. The boy had the unforgettable name of Vincent Price)

Laini Taylor, YA novelist, author of Daughter Of Smoke And Bone, which I still haven't read.

Aussie writer and illustrator Roland Harvey, whose cartoon style has become very familiar to school librarians and kids over the years. 

Today also seems to be Upper Volta's Independence Day.

Aurealis Reading... Continuing

The entries for the Aurealis Awards closed last Sunday, but that doesn't necessarily mean there will be no more books to read - they can enter in advance, then send the works till the end of this month. As it is, there is a pile of George Ivanoff Chose Your Own Adventure-type titles I don't have yet, but that are on the list. I've been adding them to a "shelf" on Goodreads as I receive them. They automatically come up as "reading" even if you haven't started.

It has been a real eye-opener to see what is entered - from children's picture books to the latest volume of some fat fantasy series, to short stories to self-published ebooks, and small press and self- published paperbacks. Some perfectly good contemporary novels seem to have been entered because they mention fantastical creatures, though these never appear. 

The other night, I was about to go to bed when there was a ring at my doorbell. It was my neighbour, who had kindly accepted a box of books on my behalf. They weren't even on the list yet. There are some Catherine  Jinks books, the latest book in the Troubletwisters series, the latest Geoffrey McSkimming Phyllis Wong novel, an Allison Rushby book very different from her novel The Heiresses...

I have a long way to go! Even if they don't send any more, there are thirteen books on my "reading" shelf on Goodreads...

This Year...And Next...Mostly Reposted From My Other Blog

Yesterday we had the campus awards afternoon. The students who had been nominated for a prize went up to receive it - several of my students and former students were among them. I said a fond farewell to those who had reached Year 10 and were ff to our senior campus where, incidentally, there is no longer a library, just a great big space empty of shelves, with tables and chairs. 

For the time being I still have a library to run and kids to use it. And I have heard what I'm doing next year, apart from running my library. 

Each year I have had to do something different. From Year 11 English to junior ESL (or EAL as it's now known), then on to Year 8 English and Pathways, the homeroom subject. And each time I got the hang of  a subject - and I did very well at Pathways - I was given another challenge. This year's challenge has been teaching history.

I love history - but loving something isn't necessarily the same as teaching it. Just because you enjoy reading about something doesn't always mean that you can pass it on.

Have I done well? I'd like to think so, but the truth is, I have had to do the same as everyone else and bullshit my way through, asking for help every now and then from more experienced staff. Sometimes you have to do that. Some things have worked, others haven't.

Making iMovies worked the first time. If I had to teach history again, I would use that, but find a way to make the kids comfortable with it and learn more about it myself. For example, in English, Literature Circles, this year students were allowed to use iMovie to prepare book trailers. They had learned from me in history how to do it.

 That sort of worked, but what none of us had realised was that you couldn't get back to the unfinished task on the school iPads unless you had left it there. So some students who had made a book trailer - unfinished - on iMovie and saved it to the school's Public Share couldn't finish it. What they had done was quite good, but looked a bit silly in the blank grey bits. We - my colleague and I -accepted it anyway, because they had done their best. If I was doing this next year, I would make sure that they spent the entire double period on it, first collecting photos, then slotting them into place.

We had two classes joined for Literature Circles because mine was too small to do it without merging classes - and since we were on at the same time, we would have been competing for resources and space. Two classes together worked last year, but not quite as well as last year, because we had a larger number of difficult students and several integration students and only one aide available to help - last year we had two.

Still, we worked out as best we could which students would go into which groups and which books they could handle.

Some things worked, others didn't - and there were a few students who were given books too difficult for them, which it took us too long to realise. We did make some late changes, giving those students easier books which they were to read by themselves and produce a PowerPoint as their response - the simplest thing to do.

There were a few who had handed in very little this year and were not about to begin now, but we did what we could. I hope they'll mature next year.

We finished with a reflection by the students about what they had gotten out of it. That will help for next year.

One difficult student admitted to me "My behaviour hasn't been stellar this year, has it?" I agreed that it hadn't, but at the time I was talking with him about a story I had asked him to rewrite so it can go into the school anthology and persuading him to put his name on it, since he now had something to be proud of.

That's now happening. His story will be in the next anthology and he will be able to show off a bit. Maybe next year he will have matured? He was the student whose group messed up their podcast.

My history students did their posters and Powerpoints and booklets on the Aztecs. I've put up the posters, which are very good. I've done their last test for the year and am pleased at how well they all did - apart from one student who had been away a lot, everyone got high marks, including my most difficult student who has been improving and got full marks.

My survey of my literacy students worked well. Despite there being some who had been noisy and rude, even they ticked "agree" or "strongly agree" for questions as to how supportive/helpful,etc. I had been (and I overheard one say, "Oh, yes, she is, she really is!" And he was one who had given me a headache many times.

If I had these classes next year I would have a better idea what to do.

But I have been told that next year will be different again, with yet another challenge. . Creative Writing! I have never had writing lessons myself, so how do I give lessons to others? I have been thinking about this carefully. All I can do is offer them the chance to write and submit and the benefit of my own experience as a writer. I'm taking a little survey of students who have signed up for it, to find out what they hope to get out of it. There hasn't been the chance to get together with the other two CW teachers, though I have sent emails and spoken to one. They're both English teachers and will have to make the best of their own experience.

I will have a Year 7 EAL class, but I believe it is straightforward, just a double period a week while the other students are doing Vietnamese or Italian. I think I can handle that, if I discuss it with the EAL teacher.

I'm looking after the Year 10 Psychology students once a week, but I used to do that anyway till this year and it didn't count as part of my allotment.

And of course, there will be Sunlit (literacy class). Hopefully, I will continue with the same reading level as this year. I'm quite comfortable with this subject and actually felt left out one day when everyone else had begun and mine hadn't been sorted out yet.

I'm very tired and there's still so much to do!

Recent Goodies Downloaded!

You know how it is when you're reading something, perhaps a folklore article, and that makes you think of something else and then you want to read -or maybe reread - that?

Thanks to the WWW and our friend Mr Gutenberg, you can do that instantly these days. This week, I've grabbed a couple by Joseph Jacobs, who was around at the same time as Andrew Lang, of the multi-coloured Fairy Books and others - English Fairytales and More English Fairytales, because I wanted to check out a couple of stories that were supposed to be in Andrew Lang and didn't seem to be in my Gutenberg version. Dick Whittington was one. You know, poor boy makes good with the help of his cat. I sometimes wonder if there were already stories around in the time of the real Mr Whittington and how he felt about them. It's interesting that there are no fantastical elements in it, unless you count the idea that one cat could rid an entire kingdom of rats, or that the king wouldn't simply take the cat instead of paying a fortune for it...

While I was about it, I also picked up Popular Tales From The Norse, because of that story "How The Sea Became Salt". You know, the one where someone gets hold of a mill that grinds food and such for you, but he forgets, or isn't told, how to stop it, so it goes right on grinding salt, which salts the sea. I had some vague memory that it was pre-Christian, but no, not in this book.

On Project Gutenberg I also found some more out-of-copyright classic SF, this time by John W Campbell, the great Golden Age editor, after whom an award for new writers is named.

You know, I'd never read E.Nesbit's classic Five Children And It and this week I decided it was about time. And what a great romp it is! Our five middle-class children, whose parents can be missing because the maid can be left to babysit them, get into all sorts of trouble when they find a grumpy sand fairy, the Psammead, who can grant one wish a day, but not permanent - it all vanishes at sunset, which is mostly just as well. Somehow, they never seem to get it right and all sorts of disasters happen when you get what you wish for...

I got the first issue of an online magazine called Alt Hist, which the editor leaves up for free as a sample of what he's after for potential contributors. The magazine pays a token fee to contributors, but it pays and I am currently looking for another market for the adventures of my cranky lady of history. I don't know yet, but I'm reading. It takes both historical fiction and alternative history, which I think is interesting. So far read only a couple of stories. One of them I liked, a very silly story about a couple of characters in the early Midde Ages trying unsuccessfully to destroy a statue of the Virgin which had fallen on a noble lady, whose grieving husband had sentenced it to execution.

It's always worth checking the iBooks store to see if they have their free "first of a series" offer. You can get some great stuff there for a limited time and I have, in the past, such as Kerry Greenwood's Earthly Delights and a Kate Forsyth volume. I also got a first book in a series of which I was sent the sequel to review and couldn't because it made no sense by itself.

 This time it was only crime fction, mostly thrillers, but I found one called Spying In High Heels, part of a series in my local library.

My paid book download this week was The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, on which the movie is based. Enjoyable so far.

Of course, I also have a couple of  ebook Aurealis entries, which I won't name yet, because I don't want to go trough the whole "this is only my opinion" thing. Later, when the judging is over, I might.

So, that's my haul for this week. Anyone else got something to share?

December 4 Meme!

To dearest Rachel, my nephew's younger girl, who turns 11 today,

Here are some things connected with your birthday. I couldn't find too many writing-related things, but some - and the others are still interesting.

Without further ado, here they are!

Birthdays

1777: Juliette Recamier, who kept a salon where a whole lot of famous literary and political figures visited. A kind of sofa was named after her.

Jacques-Louis David painting, Madame Recamier. Public Domain

1795: Thomas Carlyle, Scottish historian and essayist. He wrote about the French Revolution.

1883:  Katharine Susannah Prichard, Aussie writer. Journalist, novelist(the first to receive international recognition), film writer, playwright, founding member of the Australian Communist Party. 

1910: Alex North, film composer. Most famous for the score of Spartacus. Less well known is that he wrote a score for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, before it was decided to go with  the classical music we know so well, which was only meant to give some idea of what the score was meant to sound like. 

Things That Happened 

1674: Founding of a settlement on the shores of Lake Michigan that eventually became Chicago.

1791: First edition of The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.

1872: Finding of the mysteriously deserted ship Mary Celeste, which has inspired a LOT of fiction!

1923: Premiere of Cecil B DeMille's silent Ten Commandments.

1986: Premiere of Neil Simon's play Broadway Bound.

Special Days

St Barbara's Day - a possibly fictional saint who is the patron of armourers, architects, firemen and, oddly, mathematicians.

St Barbara Public Domain

In the Eastern tradition, it's also her day as Eid il-Burbara, which is a celebration similar to Halloween, though it's possibly even older. Kids go around the houses in costume, people give them a sort of pudding with sweet things in it and the bakeries do very nicely with festive pastries. It's also a tradition to start sprouting plants that are later used with the Christmas decorations.

In the Roman Empire it was the holiday of the Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, which was strictly secret women's business. You could get into HUGE trouble if you were a man trying to get in to see what was going on!