Update in the World of Jonblog.

Let’s see, been busy busy.

The weather has been darn fine in Aberystwyth this week. A wee bit nippy and, as my mother always said, ‘bitter’. What does that mean? The weather gives you a bad after taste?

It’s like those nonsense jokes she used to tell me:

‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ she said.

‘Erm…’ I said.

‘The higher it goes the fewer,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I said.

Which is a bit like postmodern language poetry because they like to put seemingly unassociated words next to each other and to disintegrate narrative and sentence and structure and poetic line.

Like this:

 

apples in the middle

L

A

M

P

S

ntoeoobk wirntnig

 

Ok, that is a terrible example. Actually, a good example is to look at digital poetries. That’s kind of there, almost, but a little different, but still, it’s quite a good example.

Digital Poetries

I attended my first lecture of the semester this week. I arrived early. Sat down near the back to be conspicuous. Got out my notebook. Got out a pen. Got out a stick of gum. And waited.

Then a man arrived who can only be described as a New Age Robin Williams and he proceeded to spend the next two hours gawbling about how he spent years travelling in South-East Asia becoming inspired to write what he called Digital Poetries.

I’m guessing you haven’t heard of it either but it looks a little something like this. Click on the image to see it in true moving form.

So, it’s kind of interesting. Annoyingly though, the two hours weren’t spent teaching us how to produce a piece of work like the fish, but instead we heard how to create a series powerpoint slides to look like a flip book. And I don’t want to make this personal but this guy used Internet Explorer when Firefox was available. I mean Internet Explorer…! I think that is probably the biggest faux pas amongst computer literate students.

The concept of Digital Poetries is interesting I think, but will only become popular in 10 or 20 years time when everyone will be able to read it on their iPad v.10 or Amazon Kindle v.15. But I guess boundaries don’t get pushed without some experimentation first. Anyway half interesting stuff, but mainly a disappointing lecture.