Author, David Finkel and Tom Hyland – converse – #Melbourne

Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of The Good Soldiers, David Finkel, in conversation with The Sunday Age’s Tom Hyland at Readings Hawthorn (Melbourne) on March 9 – presented by The Walkley Foundation.

Finkel followed the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers, as they put into action President George W. Bush’s “surge” strategy for the Iraq war. Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. In The Good Soldiers Finkel asks, what is the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? The book has been critically acclaimed as an unforgettable work of reportage, and an eternal tale – not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Leigh Sales described The Good Soldiers as “not only the best non fiction book I’ve read this year, but one of the best I have ever read.

“It was riveting, unputdownable journalism at its very finest. David Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist, spent the best part of a year with a US army unit sent to Iraq at the very beginning of the surge. It makes no judgment on the merits of the surge as a policy; it simply tells the soldiers’ stories. A masterpiece.”

The Walkley Foundation is proud to support this discussion about reportage and the importance of great journalism.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
6.30pm
Readings Hawthorn
701 Glenferrie Rd, Hawthorn, Victoria
Free, but please book your place
Bookings: 03 9819 1917 or email events@readings.com.au

About David Finkel:
David Finkel is the national enterprise editor of The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 1990 and has worked for the paper’s national, foreign, and magazine staffs. He has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and throughout the United States, and was part of the Post’s war coverage in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Among Finkel’s journalism honours are a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 for a series of stories about U.S.-funded democracy efforts in Yemen. He has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, for both explanatory reporting and feature writing.

About Tom Hyland
Tom Hyland is International Editor at The Sunday Age, where he reports on foreign affairs and defence issues. He’s been a journalist for the past 30 years and joined The Age in 1997. He co-ordinated The Age’s coverage of the war in Kosovo, the East Timor crisis, the September 11 attacks, the Afghanistan war, the Bali bombings and the Iraq war. He’s been on The Sunday Age since 2006, writing news, features and commentary. He has a particular interest in Afghanistan

Princess Internet – Katherine’s Strange Blessings #Melbourne International Comedy Festival #geekgirl

Katherine’s Strange Blessings for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Or how to put on a variety show with one person or less.

Katherine has experienced many strange blessings in her life. Her new show entitled Strange Blessings being amongst them.

Strange Blessings is the story of the Blessington Community Variety Show. Every year the citizens of this small town strut their stuff: the librarian reads her saucy poetry, the plumber shows off his skills at air guitar, and Lord Mayor Frank the Bunny-Eared Angel demonstrates that his toes are indeed twinkly, performing a dance number with the mistress of ceremonies. This year something special happens when two of the performers discover true love.

Katherine says, “As a child if an activity proved creative, I was in it boots and all. So the only job that seemed to ’sensibly’ combine my interests in comedy, writing, singing, dancing, acting, and macaroni necklaces was creator of Broadway musicals. I studied playwriting at the University of Washington where one of my schoolmates was Kyle MacLachlan.”

Katherine’s first job out of uni was editor-in-chief for a computer game magazine. This job led her to become the author of Australia’s first Internet book for the average punter, Surf’s Up: Internet Australian Style. The book sold out in a week. The media dubbed her “Princess Internet”. The book then led to a PhD scholarship for studying storytelling for computer game design at RMIT. Later it was sung on Spicks and Specks.

Since 2006 she has been working on her skills as a stand-up comedian and TheatreSports
improvisational actor performing at such venues as The Rhino Room, Comix Comedy Cellar and The Grace Emily in South Australia, and Willow Bar in Victoria. She has even done some writing for Monkeystack Animation and Nickelodeon. “I’m back doing theatre, but now I have the technological know how to do it myself using multimedia. Blessings don’t come much stranger than this.”

Strange Blessings is a one person show making use of soft toys, balloons, and audience
participation to bring quirky and endearing characters to life. It will be on throughout the Melbourne International Comedy Festival at POP Upstairs, 68 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD, 24 March–17 April 6-7pm Tues-Sat.

Tickets through Ticketmaster outlets or call 1300 66 00 13, Comedyfestival.com.au.

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If you’d like more information about this topic email muse@glasswings.com.au

Female sci-fi writers at Sydney futurian event #geekgirl #outhere #goddesscyborgs

The Topic for March will be – SF by Women Writers that differs from Mainstream SF writing:

Friday night Sydney Futurian SF discussion meeting Dates and Topics are;

March 19 – SF by Women Writers that differs from Mainstream SF writing (as close to Int. Woman’s day as could be organised)

April 16 – Mythological and Religion inspired creatures in SF Stories

(Saturday May 1 – the Katoomba SF&F Gathering of Sydney and Blue Mountains SF&F fans, Writers and Artists)

May 21 – Second Life and other virtual world adventures in SF stories

June 18 – SF stories of Doom, Gloom, Despair, Hopelessness and any other really Bad things

Other 2010 meeting dates include;
July 18, August 20, Sept. 17, October 15, November 19 and December 17

UTS Sydney, under the light sabres / Perspex Deathstar globes.  Meet in the Broadway entrance of the University of Technology Tower Building’s lobby, Sydney, (Australia) at or before 6.30 pm.

More info “Garry Dalrymple” <Garry.Dalrymple@det.nsw.edu.au>

The Undiscovered Press #Zinemakers in Melbourne at Sticky Shop

Unleashing the zine habit to the masses.

12 zinemakers from all around the country are unleashing their extreme and slightly undiscovered zine making practice on to the masses. Evolving into a pretty eclectic show of the art of zinesters, the participating zinesters are Androniki Douramakos, Arlene TextaQueen, Marc Martin, Brendan Halyday, Fergus, Mary-Helen Daly, Sarah Foster, On Wednesday, Diego Bonetto, Pat Grant, Michelle Vandermeer and Mel Stringer.

Any questions? Contact Melissa at theundiscoveredpress@gmail.com or 0448595571.

Start Time: Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:00pm
End Time: Friday, February 26, 2010 at 6:00pm

Sticky ShopDegraves Street Subway, Platform
Melbourne, Australia

Suggested gift, Dominick Dunne’s – Too Much Money.

By JANET MASLIN
Published: December 13, 2009

Excerpt:
When Dominick Dunne died on Aug. 26, an online guest book was set up so well wishers could leave condolence messages for his family. The site assured visitors “that the tears of millions of loyal readers were dried by a sudden wind.” The gust was said to be caused by “the collective sigh of rich and famous bullies on multiple continents” because Mr. Dunne’s nonpareil society-crime reporting and his glaringly fact-based fiction would bedevil them no longer. Not so fast, globe-trotting bullies. Mr. Dunne left behind one last, stinging roman à clef. And he most assuredly used it to settle scores.

“Too Much Money” pits his autobiographical character, Gus Bailey, against the New York nouveau riche types of its title. And it keeps Gus constantly aghast at their gall. It commemorates Mr. Dunne’s favorite obsessions — crime, wealth, status, backbiting and power — into a story with a distinctly valedictory flavor, to the point where some of it unfolds at New York’s most elite funeral home. And it includes a line that can serve as Mr. Dunne’s own epitaph, delivered by Gus as a slap to the book’s most moneyed and graceless social climber. She has just made a donation large enough to get her name plastered onto New York’s most important library. Reminding her that libraries exist not just as sites for cocktail parties but as places to house books, Gus tells her: “I don’t have to buy my way in.”

More from the New York Times article

Still Settling the Score, Even Beyond the Grave

Fibreculture Journal 15 – Remix launched. Good reading that will keep you busy for a while. #fb #in

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.
—

What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/

It became a minor phenomenon during 2007. By September 2009 it was a virus out of control. Described in Wired as a ‘popular internet meme’ (Wortham, 2008), the obsessive serial mash-up of a key sequence from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film of the last days of Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (The Downfall), is suggestive of the cultural logic of the contemporary formation known as remix. Remix culture is comprised of what could loosely be termed amateurs and professionals engaged in the practice of creatively re-using found material. The distinction is useful in identifying the aesthetic and material differences between dedicated intermedia remix artists (Negativland, Martin Arnold, Craig Baldwin, Soda_Jerk), artists who incorporate elements of remix into a broader audiovisual practice (Philip Brophy, Candice Breitz, Christian Marclay, John Zorn) and the vernacular audio-visual mash-up/remake/dub/scratch aesthetics associated with a broad range of online practices. The domestication of audio-visual literacies in the digital age has meant that the processes of sampling, editing and compositing – once the province of dedicated adepts – have become second nature for a generation weaned on computers and digital technology. Audio-visual remix attests to a utilitarian competence in ‘writing’ for the communications paradigm of the internet and networked conditions that Gregory L. Ulmer famously termed ‘electracy’; a concept that prioritises the notion of the ‘remake’ and the use of found material (Ulmer, 1989, 1994, 2005, Tofts, 1996). As well, this pervasive cultural competence (in Chomsky’s linguistic sense of the term) attests to the dramatic distribution of the material means of production into the hands of consumers.

Streamflow Conditions and Timestamp. An online exhibition, 24 hours of networked #writing starts Dec 5, 09.

Streamflow Conditions
Charting a poetics of language, code, and networks
+
Timestamp
24 hours of networked writing

an online exhibition and live writing event launching Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009 @ Subito Press
http://streamflowconditions.subitopress.org

~Beacons~
John Cayley (CA)
Roderick Coover (US)
Ian Hatcher (US)
Mez Breeze (AU)
José Carlos Silvestre (BR)
Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (US)
Rui Torres (PT)

code poetry ~~ code proper ~~ ghosts in the network ~~ river expeditions ~~ edges of chaos ~~ immersive horizons ~~ eco-poetics

TIMESTAMP: ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT DECEMBER 5th @ 4:35pm UTC-7 [MST]

Beginning at 4:35pm MST (sunset in Denver, Colorado) on December 5, 2009, the artists of the online exhibition, Streamflow Conditions, will perform online for 24 hours* through networked writing, live coding, streaming video, or other means.

Each artist will occupy a 4-hour shift, and the schedule is designed to facilitate audiences outside of the artists’ individual timezones. Writing or links to activity will be posted to the shared twitter account, “timestampstream” and intercepted at Subito Press. You are invited to follow along and respond.

The performances will end at 4:35pm MST on Sunday, December 6.

*see schedule of shifts at the end of announcement and use this link to translate into your timezone:http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

SITES: http://www.streamflowconditions.subitopress.org

+
twitter.com/timestampstream (follow/respond)

STREAMFLOW CONDITIONS: EXHIBITION & EVENT DETAILS

Streamflow Conditions** is an online exhibition of electronic literature and networked writing curated by Judd Morrissey at the invitation of Subito Press at the University of Colorado. Beginning with a site-specific consideration of the Colorado landscape and its engineered waterways, the selection of works examines discrete markers in the contemporary data-scape of writing within networked culture. The artists and works chosen each represent an innovative use of language in conjunction with code, data, or networked spaces. The exhibition as a whole engages the overflowing boundaries between presence, process, and object at a time when currents of digital literary practice meet the culture and corpus of writing online (& the imminent google waves).

**gallery of works still under construction but please explore the site.

TIMESTAMP SHIFTS
[ use this to translate into your timezone:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ]

1. Dec. 5, 4:35pm MST: Mez Breeze

2. Dec. 5, 8:35pm MST: Ian Hatcher

3. Dec. 6, 12:35am MST: Rui Torres

4. Dec. 6, 4:35am MST: José Carlos Silvestre

5. Dec. 6, 8:35am MST: Roderick Coover

6. Dec 6, 12:35pm MST: John Cayley

Even Books want your 101 word story

Write a story of exactly 101 words. it can be about anything – but lets be real, MOST stories are actually about love.

send to evenbooks@evenlovershavefights.com by TUES 24 NOV!

it’ll be easier than offline flirting, more fun than oversharing on your first date.
+ + even books + +

DIY news website created by Journalism 2.0 author Mark Briggs

Journalism 2.0 author Mark Briggs has created, a step-by-step guide to creating an independent news website from scratch. Presented by J-Learning, an online guide for creating hyper-local community media and a project of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, the site emphasises accessibility and open-source technology.

Find out more about “Newspaper in a box”

Disability journalism award

The inaugural Yooralla Media Awards, celebrating excellence in journalism on disability issues, is currently looking for entries. Awards cover print, radio, television and online media.

If you’ve run a story on disability issues this year, visit the awards website for details on how to submit your work. Entries close October 30.

http://www.yoorallamediaawards.com.au/