Posts by Kerry Weston
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A public library I used to frequent marked all their risque books with a purple spot and kept the very risque ones in the stack room and borrowers had to ask for them. Heh.
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Seems to me this should be some sort of human right, enshrined somewhere, but I bet it isn't. Sigh.
Indeed. I've got a gut feeling "school" is going to have to change drastically in the coming years - I've come across a lot of families with kids struggling with v. similar issues and none of the families are what I would call dysfunctional. The Age of the Big Stick is over, but those in the top jobs still seem to be living in the past. I think they're too scared to make flexible, alternative education available in case *heaps* of students take it up and leave all those classrooms empty. The Nats have just okayed building five new schools as part of their economic stimulus package, so I guess they're still back in about 1982.
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Tina Weymouth ringing people up in the middle of the night to cast aspersions on the size of Byrne's penis.
So that's why he went around in that huge, inflated suit...
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I think formula fiction also functions as a kind of meditation tool - it distracts that side of your brain that is task-oriented and gives it something to do, while the other side chills out and is free to wander. I can speed read a chick lit or mystery pretty much at one sitting and ten minutes later couldn't tell you what happened in it, but I might have come up with the answer to something else - or even just had "time out". You're not paying attention in the same way you do to more serious novels.
Some people jog (aaarghhh!), i read.
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What's nice is that it suggests that the fact that he's been out of school for two and a half years and basically dysfunctional there for three years before that might not matter too much.
Amazing, really.
Yes and well done to Leo, says it like it is, doesn't he! A character all right. Interesting that he's proving himself well able to perform outside the school system - my boy, Kieran, who's in the same boat, out of school for about 4 years now, but on a new Pilot Project now doing modified Correspondence stuff, is also doing well. He consistently performs well in literacy tests, over the national average, and this from a boy who doesn't read books. Gets all his input via computer, tv. As long as he can manage his own environment & work at his own pace, he is okay.
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I just came across this quote from PJ O'Rourke:
"...always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of the night."
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To True Blue (Pakuranga)
I wouldn't be too quick to let that cat out of the box if I were you. Some biology boffin (another one of these Einstein types) at Auckland University* says cats have their own brand of HIV - Feline Immunodeficiency virus (FIV) - one in five feral cats have it, so how long will it be till all our housecats, boxed or not, get it?? The potential for species crossover is unknown, he says. It has never happened but that doesn't mean it won't. And what i want to know, is who gave puddy-cats HIV? Is nothing sacred?
* Allen Rodrigo interview, p. 10 Listener, 7-13 Feb. -
i did a series of dream workshops a long time ago, that involved keeping a dream journal handy, to write down/draw dreams as soon as you awoke from one. Followed by a bit of musing on the content later. After a while of this paying attention, your dreaming self seems to respond to your conscious musings by using the images/symbols you're concentrating on, often clarifying the meanings. It's an extension of going to sleep with a question on your mind and having the answer the next day.
Our dream group met every few weeks and used the more significant scenes from our dreams as starters to act out/perform and otherwise develop the possibilities. It sounds a bit weird, i know, but the whole process intensified everyone's dreamworld and we began to figure out what our own dream language was. Fascinating stuff for artists and writers.
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Also very much enjoyed "Opportunity" by Charlotte Grimshaw.
Agreed. I've read most of her work and I think she gets better every time. I also try and read masses of kiwi fiction, albeit from libraries. And I read everything Kate Atkinson writes, she's a superb storyteller and characteriser. Is that a word? Oh well.....
Have you read the ones with the detective character, Jackson Brodie? They're good, too. Ah, I just checked, When Will there Be Good News is one of them. She is so clever - i never twigged to Reggie's brother and the Latin books. And i cheered for Joanna.
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Oddly I also finished a book when I had two children under three. I'd get up to feed and then stay up and write.
Yeah, when I finally got one or both kids asleep, I'd be the wide awake zombie who didn't know what day it was. The husband worked really mixed hours, day or night, so all routine was lost.
And it was useful experience for doing creative writing papers at uni, not genre-wise, but the construction stuff. Altho I did manage to piss off a professor with a story he considered mere pron fantasy - I'm sure you would have appreciated it Emma!