Blog Archives
MWF 2010 authors on… their first computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Classic
She was a first gen Mac, I was but a starry-eyed Year Eight student.
We got to touch for thirty minutes a week. Mostly awkward fumbles with a square mouse playing Minesweeper while humming Go West’s ‘We close our eyes’.
I don’t so much remember my first computer as my first word processor. It was called ‘Multimate’ and they put ‘mate’ in the title just to try to defuse the inevitable falling out that would occur within fifteen minutes of the user getting acquainted. The Ctrl key was a big part of Multimate, as was the Shift key and the Alt key. If you wanted to, say, indent the paragraph, the user would have to press Ctrl, Shift and Alt all at the same time, punch in some IBM function keys with his forehead while trying to elbow the spacebar.
As I grow older, I plan to bore children by telling them about the Commodore 64. ‘You know that wasn’t 64 megabytes, it was 64 kilobytes. What we would have given for even 64 megabytes. And yet we still had fun. ‘Choplifter’, kids. Look it up online. You can still have fun with 64 kilobytes.’
Angela says…
Silkworm FTW.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… dinosaurs
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
STORY: A wisteria vine grows on the terrace outside my study window. Tiny blue wrens come there to swing on a particular
branch that balances on the cross-bar of another branch. I never succeed in getting there fast enough with the
camera. So one day recently I substituted a swinging plastic dinosaur for the wrens. As you do. He seemed to enjoy
the experience.
When did ‘dinosaur’ become a pejorative term?
As the author of ‘Grannysaurus Rex’, I am officially part of the dinosaur industry. This sometimes causes problems at schools as child dinosaur enthusiasts tend to know a fair bit more about them than I do. I know the Raptors, because they are a Canadian basketball side, and I know stegosaurus, because who doesn’t, but I can get in real trouble when I mix up my brontos and brachios. And not all the ones with wings are Pterodactyls – make that mistake and a room full of Grade 5s will rip you limb from limb.
Having a four year old has refreshed my perspective on these creatures. I am still unsure about what exactly is the reason for their magical appeal to little boys. Henry at age three could distinguish between a whole catalogue of dinosaurs and is especially interested in the distinction between herbivores and carnivores. He obsessively watches and re-watches a movie shown on a loop at the Australian Museum in Sydney that reconstructs what supposedly happened one day at some lake in ancient Queensland, and ends with one big dinosaur eating a small dinosaur for lunch and roaring in a terrifying way. ‘They eat each other,’ he announced, with sombre and resigned amazement, the first time we saw it. Ankylosaurus is my favourite. I love that this one dinosaur is known as both Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus. We spend hours every month in the dinosaur rooms at the Museum and it’s the one part of it that never gets boring. They have crazy looking ones there with feathers and scales and claws all at once, like something out of Maurice Sendak. I love trying to get my head around the meaning of the time scale they make you confront: millions of years.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… Melbourne
If Sydney is the loud good looking kid in class who everyone gravitates towards but who you eventually discover has ADD and an eating disorder, Melbourne is the quieter, more measured kid who you don’t really like at the beginning of term but who is interested in the same things that you’re interested in, and whose parents own a really kickarse record collection.
A city that still strikes me, a lifelong Sydneysider, as unaccountably foreign and exotic. Every time I hear a tram bell I close my eyes and brace for impact.
I see myself living in Melbourne. Vividly. I do, no doubt, in a parallel universe. It took me too long to get there for the first time, but when I did the city was like certain people you have just met but seem to know already in some special, intuitive way. As if you’d dreamed them. I’d already discovered the landscapes of Clarice Beckett by then, so I had dreamed Melbourne.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… mornings
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
I’m more a day-break person than I am a morning person. My wife is neither a day-break nor a morning person, and so I thought to invent a vibrating wristwatch that woke me and only me during my six years of breakfast radio. I thought to invent it, but unfortunately my complete lack of technical ability and the fact that it had already been invented stopped me making my millions.
I love dawns. For six years, it meant Triple R Breakfasters and time spent waking up with the rest of the city. Now it means sitting on a couch, sipping coffee and watching my ten month old strain through his morning nappy. We both watch The Gruffalo as he does this, and both love the owl.
Mornings start earlier and earlier now that I have children.
‘At this hour of the morning,’ he said, addressing nobody in particular, ‘people who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already.’
So says a character in Italo Calvino’s story ‘The adventure of a wife’ to the protagonist, who has wandered into a cafe at six a.m. She, like the speaker, falls into the first category, since she is on her way home after being out all night.
In 1994, I was up at six a.m. almost every morning, but for the first part of the year I was a ‘still’ and in the second part I was an ‘already’. Initially I worked on the night shift as a security guard at a cardboard factory. (I think that’s what they made. I didn’t really care, so I never bothered to find out). After that, I worked as a postman, and I started work at 5.45. In both jobs I set a record of sorts: I had the longest hair of any security guard in Glasgow that year; and later I was the slowest postman in the entire city.
I became a connoisseur of tiredness during this period. The first critical distinction to be made on that subject is related to Calvino’s observation, since the tiredness of staying up too late is qualitatively different from the tiredness of getting up too early.
Mornings? Don’t do ’em.
I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
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