!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <-- me
I tried a new coffee house: Merlo; the QUT Garden's Point campus coffee house. It's got an okay atmosphere; nothing like Vienna (oh, I miss that quaint little shop). Merlo's got paninis which are, again, okay, and they have hot chocolate with marshmallows. It was just slightly above what I would consider mediocre. I learned how to play a new card came. It has a horrible name (shit head - you know a guy dubbed it), but, all the same, it's quite fun. The guys in my Core Project Management - aka CPM because that's so much easier to type - group taught me how to play. The highlight of the day, second to chatting with Adam, was when the fire alarm went off during the last hour of German class. Normally I wouldn't consider that a highlight but after 4 classes strewn across 10 hours I was ready to go home. So class letting out half an hour early was nice.
Today, after my CPM tutorial (aka tute) I took the shuttle bus to Kelvin Grove for my first Creative Writing lecture! I'm such a dork for looking forward to lecture, haha! The instructor is great! He has a wonderful sense of humor - it's just right and works in well with the subject. He's responsive and challenges our minds. I really like him! In today's class he opened up the hour with a couple raps - yes, raps. We listened to Kris Kros' "Jump," haha, I know! And watched the video to Kanye West's "Touch the Sky." Certainly a classic of my generation, "Jump" isn't much of a song lyrically if you ask me, although we were able to apply it to poetry. I really liked "Touch the Sky!" Kanye West is very talented in my opinion, despite his songs typically having strong political themes. Any way, the point of the rap songs was for us to see that rap is a modern take/application of poetry; in other words, rap is poetry to modern music. Pretty cool. There are more aspects that we covered with regards to rap and poetry, but that was the gist of it. The rest of lecture was well enjoyed and I'm excited for next week's class already!
Since I only just added my Creative Writing course at the end of last week, I had some catching up to do. My first assignment was to write my own "ars poetica." An ars poetica is any sort of response to the question "what is poetry?" Here are my thoughts:
Poetry is beautiful. It's beauty lies in entirely in the eyes of the beholder. It is deep and meaningful, yet light and concise. Poetry is expressive and thought through, yet conjured abruptly. Poetry is defining; shaping. It is literary history, marking eras through its words.
The ars poetica is designed to help us gauge how far we've come as creative writers when we look back on our response later in the semester. Even after just one day of lesson I've revised my ars poetica in my mind.
After lecture I decided to tan, read and study. On the way to my unknown tanning location I noticed that the Kelvin Grove campus seems to have housing options close-by for students so they don't have to commute like everyone does at Garden's Point. Their dorms are pretty modern-looking:
Just down the Victoria Park Road was a golf course named Victoria Park (I know, how fitting!). Across the greens was a nice, quiet little lawn in a bit of a valley. I decided it worthy as a tanning location and dubbed it The Greens Valley. Here is my happy self settling down for a couple hours of sunbathing and studying/reading:
Speaking of reading, I finished Wicked. Great book - I absolutely loved Maguire's ingenuity to entwine the Wicked Witch of the West's story with Baum's well-known tale of Dorothy's adventure in Oz. It was a great book and I look forward to opportunity of seeing the musical. So now I've started reading Picnic at Hanging Rock. I'm not sure about this book. There was a movie based off it, and it had great reviews. Before I left the US for this trip it had been recommended to me that I watch the film to give me a taste of Australia culture. I didn't have the chance to watch the movie so when I was in the library and saw the novel I decided to read it. Well, on Facebook's Books iRead application the novel didn't have such hot reviews. In fact they were quite disappointing. But! I'm going to give the book a go any way. Because maybe I'll have a different take on the story, and maybe I'll just happen to like it. Who knows?!
I had my Creative Writing tute at 4.30p. I'm not decided on what I think of the tute leader. She's a bit too energetic in that I'm kind of overwhelmed. Enthusiasm is good, but too much energy is too much, I guess? Any way, she's nice but kind of snappy, too. I dunno - just not sure what to make of her yet. Aside from her, she does know her stuff mostly (and I say mostly because I lost count of how many vocabulary words she couldn't think of - not impressive, lady). But, like I said, she knows her stuff - when it comes to analyzing poetry. I really enjoyed the poems we went through. We went through a sonnet written by Seamus Heaney; he was one of the translators of Beowulf - the first old-English poem). The piece of Heaney that we went through was called "Sonnet IV," and here is my favorite bit:
[...] small ripples shook
Silently across our drinking water
(as they are shaking now across my heart)
And vanished into where they seemed to start.
After tute and on the way to the shuttle bus back to Garden's Point I saw the moon shining brightly at me through the buildings. I decided to take a photo of our friendly, stellar pearl. I tried and tried to upload the photo but it refused to work. = /
On the way home from being dropped off at Garden's Point I picked up my copy of Mx. Top News According to Amanda: there will be 8 Harry Potter films because they've decided to split the 7th book into 2 movies. Cool - can't wait to see the 6th film, haha.
Tomorrow Inga and I are heading off to Noosa until Sunday evening. We're gone!
5 comments:
Mandy, do you remember that song your Grandpa Baugher sings? He learned it when he was stationed on the Fiji Islands during the war. How cool is that? I'll have to send you some pictures I have of his that he took while there. He will be amazed when I tell him you are going there. Have a blast for me!
Testing
Ok, I figured it out. I'm not anyonmymous anymore. Tee-hee-hee
anonymous-geeze
the wicked musical is awesome, I need to read the book tho still lol
Post a Comment