littleworkpage

The last day of Term 2 proved to be a very colourful event. Jarvis Liddington of Room 7 organised the Red and Black day to "raise money and cans for people in Christchurch who dont have power and water". As you can see from the photos, everyone got into the spirit and $160 and a heap of cans were collected on the day! Jarvis will be one of the children delivering the goodies to one of the schools on the east side of the city. Well done to Jarvis for showing kindness and consideration to others. Awesome Addington Qualities!

Epiphanies go in and out of fashion. Joyce used them extensively in "The Dubliners" but in an age where closure is distrusted and deep truths ironised, the tidy epiphany has been sidelined. As pointed out in Epiphanies on film , it doesn't help that they're " overused in television series, where they are usually a cumbersome attempt to add depth ". An epiphany that's supposed to make all the pieces of the jigsaw suddenly fall into place can end up looking as contrived as the final scene of an old whodunnit. Dickens' Scrooge is often mentioned as an example of a character transformed by epiphany. Another example (without a self-realisation component) is the end of the first "Planet of the Apes" film. Gambling the effect of your story on a final epiphany is a bit like gambling on a punchline - if the epiphany of a short piece fails, the whole story does. Epiphanies needn't be near the end of a story though. Instead they can signal a sign...

Wow, time flies when you're having fun! It also flies when you've got builders in, when you're redecorating a house by yourself, when you're ferrying kids back and forth across country, when you're trying to finish a novel, and when you're trying not to turn your three and a half złoty Carrefour pizza into a carbonised frisbee. Yes, this is the big 'hello, I'm still alive and still updating the blog' post, at which I'm becoming unhappily good. So rather than make grand promises of impending content updates, I'll just say, don't give up hope yet (all one of you left there), there's still life left in the old girl yet!  (Oh, okay, one grand promise then: Next Week Na Pewno!) Jim :)

"Fractals may be the most complex and the most subtle examples of patterns found in both mathematics and poetry ... When poets borrowed ideas from fractal geometry and applied them to the reading and writing of poetry, they made a remarkable intellectual leap " (M. Birken and A.C.Coon, "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry", Rodopi, 2008, p.167). So what are fractals? I only have a rough idea. Symmetry is when you can do something to a shape so that it matches itself - with rotational symmetry you rotate the shape; with reflection symmetry you reflect the shape. You can look upon fractals as another type of symmetry where instead of rotating or reflecting, you magnify. In real life you can get a rough idea of how this works by looking at a tree (the pattern of the boughs is like the pattern of twigs when you zoom in) or a coastline (the jaggedness of a coastline is similar whether you're looking at a satellite image or through a microscope) but pure fr...

Well, that's what I'll call them - facts (sometimes contextless and isolated) that are put into poems. They can be interesting in their own right - strange but true. They can be a piece of information everyone's expected to know (e.g. "London's the biggest city in England"), the reader thus expected to ponder on the implications (easiest city to be lonely in?). They can be a minor piece of knowledge shared by reader and poet, perhaps a piece of public knowledge that had a particular significance to the poet. As an example of their usage, here's the first and the final stanza from "Then in the twentieth century" which won 2nd Prize in the 2002 National Poetry Competition. It's by David Hart. Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape, the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move, and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges. ... Men quarrelled about scrolls found in...

Hail, friends. I'm writing to you today on Friday, when according to all my stated plans, I should have done this on Wednesday. Well, sometimes I forget or get swamped with work and I do miss a post, as you might have noticed lately. But that's okay; this is just a blog, and as informative and useful a tool as I'd like it to be for you, at the end of the day it's a purely frivolous addition to your translating diet. But, there are some things that as language professionals (I love that term, it almost makes us sound dangerous), we need to bring a more fastidious approach to. Deadlines, invoicing, fulfilling promises of cooperation and keeping appointments when we make them. Filing taxes, paying bills - these are but a few examples of the staples of a translator's life, especially if you're freelance and working from home as many of us do. Recently, I've had a few experiences with student translators, and with some older, experienced agency staff that have ma...

Well well, not only did I totally black out on Wednesday and forget to do anything, but I wake up and find it's July already! Strangely, about thirty people I know all have birthdays in July, with most of them falling in the first two weeks. I always think of them as the Martial Law baby-boomers since they were all born early to mid eighties. So happy birthday all you July birthday people! Speaking of the book of Face, we had quite an interesting and fun week over on The Bad Article's page there. On Monday, I stumbled bleary-eyed across a link to one of those fashionable 'Facebook Fail' type sites, with an amusingly pedantic slant which we can all enjoy. Haf a luk hear and C wot U fink. Early Tuesday I tripped over an old friend, enables to . Check this out: The availability of consumables in the form of solid wires and modern welding equipment enables to undertake tests of welding materials for operation at higher temperatures. enables to is a broken phrase that ...

Do you worry about writer's block? When Camus had it he rushed to his then mentor, Andre Gide, who said "you mean you can stop writing yet you still complain? What's up with you Albert?" Camus' problem was that he had decided to be a writer. He was, after all, an existentialist. Why do you write? Did you jump or were you pushed? Who do you write for? Thomas Love Peacock said that poets are wasters of their own time and robbers of that of others. Is writing by its very nature a selfish activity, a solitary sin? With the need for voluntary tutors to help illiterates, with Africa starving, with the Samaritans understaffed handling all the young poets that phone in, can locking yourself away ever be justified? Some justify their selfishness by emphasising that their sacrifice is for the benefit of all, because they are society's antennae, the nearest to prophets and telepaths that this nihilistic age has. These starving artists in their uniforms from Oxfam charge ...

I posted previously on the Black Sunday thingy and painted a positive picture of the direction we could be heading. It would be good if the non-prosecution of the black-shirted patrons at Starbucks leads to the opening up of the space permitted for free expression of ideas and opinions. However, I would like to throw in a note of caution. Hence, this 'Take 2”. Arguably, the Black Sunday concept is a form of civil disobedience. If we take civil disobedience to be the refusal to comply with a law on account of deeply held views about the injustice of those laws, then the gathering of black-shirted persons (on the assumption that it infringes the Public Order Act) would be a form of civil disobedience. Whilst I support the amendment of some of our laws to create greater space for free expression, I certainly would caution against disobeying current laws simply to make a point about the need for free expression. The Pink Dot event that took place at Hong Lim Park demonstrates how...