I was going to post about how uncomfortable it is becoming to live in the UK, because one risks being declared a criminal if one responds spontaneously to a child, whether in greeting, helping, comforting or challenging, … but I’ve just read an article that says it brilliantly.

So please read Jenni Russell’s article ‘Crazy law leaves a child out in the cold’ in The Times Online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6898212.ece. I very much agree with her assertion that the “insistence on the importance of distrust is eating away at our society. “

She doesn’t describe yet what campaign might be appropriate, but offers her email address, presumably for suggestions.

Addendum (17:07) I emailed Jenni to let her know I had blogged about her article. She replied today and included the following suggestions for action each of us can take right now:

” I think we have to start both by changing peoples’ minds ( we don’t need more laws- terrible things will sometimes happen, and we can’t eliminate risk) – and by lobbying politicians. It’s worth writing to your MP and to Ed Balls and Jack straw now, before Singleton reports on his review in December. Most of all its worth lobbying the Tories, especially Cameron, Chris Grayling, Dominic Grieve and Michael Gove. The Tories want to do what the public wants – we have to let them know. Best wishes, Jenni “

Tia Azulay 01Nov09
Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

It’s hard to believe two years have passed since we lasted hosted a play reading in London (Antony and Cleopatra). Now that my MA is finished, I can return to pleasant pastimes like this, so we’re looking forward to our next reading, of All’s Well That Ends Well, on 3rd October.

The Shakespeare-interpreting part of my brain was decidedly rusty when I first plunged into the text a couple of weeks ago, but the fantastic production we then saw at the National Theatre went a long way to lubricating it. If you can’t get to London, then check out NT Live, an initiative to broadcast the play to cinema screens around the world on 1st October 2009.

While preparing for the reading and allocating parts, I’ve made the following notes to encourage the readers, new and old:

1. Adopt the attitude that this is a workshop rather than a performance. We’re figuring it out together as we go along. This is why we don’t allow spectators—we’re all in it together.
2. Don’t hurry.
3. Keep in mind your character’s basic motivations and role in the story. If you don’t have time to pre-read the whole play, or even your own part/s before the group reading, then make an effort to read at least a character summary. There are many resources online; one example is the Hudson Shakespeare Company which offers a good Character Directory.
4. Remember the play is for the stage—much of the meaning should be conveyed visually, so use the stage directions to help you imagine the scenes, the actions and the tone of the exchanges… e.g. whether indoors or outdoors, who is present, how many are present and what they are doing—there are differences between the pomp and ceremony of a royal court and the intimacy of a private exchange in a parlour, between men’s voices in the rough and tumble of the battlefield and women’s voices in a safer setting in town, between an address to an equal and an address to a subordinate.
5. Therefore, when reading Stage Directions, do so clearly, with appropriate emphases, to assist the group in imagining the scene. Note: Do not read the words [Aside], [Reads] or [Sings] – we leave it to the reader of the part to convey that they are speaking quietly to avoid being heard by someone in the scene, or that they are reading, or singing.
6. Use the punctuation. Respond with appropriate emphases to exclamation and question marks. Pause with full stops, commas and em dashes—they give you and your hearers time to absorb what has just been said, and they help you make sense of the sentences. Don’t pause at the ends of lines unless punctuation says you should.
7. If you realise by the end of a sentence, a paragraph or a poetic section that you have misunderstood it and placed emphasis incorrectly and you feel you could improve it with a second reading, by all means read it again. This is not required, but it’s perfectly acceptable in a workshop: you can re-read it yourself or invite someone else to have a go. Of course, we don’t have time to analyse every word or even to understand every sentence, but if you think the particular sentence you’re struggling with is important to understanding a conversation or a plot development, everyone else will welcome the repetition too.

Tia Azulay 12Sep09
Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

So much there was, so much, so much
That isn’t there, was never there!
How could so much nothing take up
So much space and time and tear
Me from myself with such solicitude?
I have spun and spun with spider-touch
A web of words to hold and care
For answers that may never come
From me or you—that truth so rare
We seek and hide in solitude.

Tia Azulay 29Aug09
Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

My MA project is well under way. Submission date is 1st September, so I will be pretty busy with that for the next six weeks or so. After that, I intend to get back to earning again! The full time year of study has been a wonderful privilege, but I’m tired of not being able to afford things that were an easy part of my life a year ago. A lot of people have had to adjust to a leaner life due to the credit crunch rather than to study choices, but we’re in the same boat in the sense of not being able to look to an employer for income. If I want to make some money, I need to do it on my own, and I want to do it all online.

The topic of how creative writers can monetize content on the web interests all those on my course. There are several barriers to overcome if you want to make money on the web as a writer. For word count reasons, I’ve decided not to include these five main barriers in my dissertation text, preferring to concentrate on guiding writers to think about solutions, but these are what I address.

Barrier 1: Competition from free content on the web.
Anxiety about the future of print media is widespread. Authors, publishers, journalists and editors across the world are scrambling to understand the import of the global access to information and entertainment that the Internet is bringing to increasingly technologically sophisticated audiences. They are desperate to find or develop monetization models that will still pay skilled professionals. Jolyon O’Connell, in weekly news digest, The Week (30 May 2009, Issue 717, 5), summarised as follows:

Yes, but that’s not bad, is Chris Anderson’s conclusion in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. High quality free stuff is actually good for business; you just need to think creatively about how to persuade people to pay for other high quality stuff that appears alongside it.

Barrier 2: Time constraints
Conceptualising and writing may take the same time as for print publication, but implementing and testing new media content, especially bearing in mind global audiences and different platforms, takes longer. Even presuming you are commissioned, or have a definite target market willing to pay for the product, can you charge enough to justify the time spent? Making time is an important survival skill for the online world, but even with time management and automation of processes, writers making their living in new media (and this may eventually be all writers) cannot rely exclusively on any model of income where earnings are directly related to time spent on work, because those earnings will always be capped by the number of writing or creating hours one can squeeze out of any 24-hour period. You need to sell some things that are not time-dependent.

Barrier 3: The technology
As mentioned above, technology has a time cost, but it also costs money and effort. Hardware and much software, plus time and expertise for learning, implementation and testing across multiple platforms, must be included in the writer’s time and money budgets. The learning never ends: the creative writer who wants to stay at the cutting edge needs to master the latest tools as they come out. On the other hand, posts like the Institute for The Future (IFTF)’s Hello? Most Americans not superempowered IT people (which quotes an Accenture report) and The Mobile Difference report from Pew Internet indicate that most of the potential online audience will not be familiar with the latest tools. Therefore, writers must make decisions about the use of tools depending on their intended audience. If the audience is unlikely to be familiar with a tool, then either it must be abandoned or persuasion and facilitation may be required to help them use it.

Barrier 4: Lack of vision
Despite our excitement at the possibilities unfolding before us, many of us still lack “digital imagination” (a term suggested by Chris Meade of The Institute for the Future of the Book). Publishers and writers accustomed to old print media just cannot see how it could work, financially speaking. There are too many opportunities and we feel overwhelmed by them; we feel we will never master the necessary e-literacy; our concerns about privacy and over-exposure hamper our experimentation. We do not yet have enough case studies comparing online and offline working for us to be clear about which approaches will be both effective and financially lucrative. The only alternative is to look at what others are doing, make some educated guesses and try out various models for ourselves.

Barrier 5: Lack of business nous
Despite the digital medium, in most respects online business is like any other business. Even if none of the other barriers apply to you, a lack of business sense, of the ability to market and sell a product at the right price while keeping an eye on the bottom line, and to keep customers coming back for more and referring others, might scupper your chances of success.

In the mean time, the antidote is to understand that while the media change, the same principles apply online as offline. Writers care more about getting their story out to people, than which form of print they use … why not extend this attitude to the screen? When considering the form your writing takes, why not think of it as choosing packaging for your ideas that is appropriate to the medium? Why not assume that social media provide new ways of doing the same networking done at cocktail parties? To win friends and influence people (and to sell your work to gatekeepers, peers, sponsors, and customers) you still need to convey genuine interest in others. You can stay human while using different media.

Tia Azulay 23 July 09 Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

Anyway, just to exhibit signs of life, I thought I’d post my latest poem… this is the text version of something which will probably become an e-poem at some stage, so I don’t consider it a final version. I submitted a spec for this for my E-Poetry module assessment this year. The powers that be seemed to think it has potential. Any constructive comments are welcome.

Smooth Red Woman

Piled under an Italian sky, red marble gleams at me:
“Rosso Ammonico di Verona”, “Rosso Levanto”,
“Rosso Francia”, “Rosso Laguna”, “Rosso Lepanto” …
Seduced, I let the rosy names roll richly off my tongue.
My husband moves on with the guide, but I am enthralled by a red marble woman:

Shining in the sensuous sun, her whole body is deep tongue-texture,
Poised for creamy pleasures.
I cannot pass without caressing her; without sending forth probes
To scan the galaxy of textures just below my reach.
I must stroke her; explore her cool warmth with my fingertips,
Marvel at the harsh practice that produces smooth perfection.
Her delicacy suggests a gentle touch,
But soon I want to lick her, kiss her deeply.
Did she respond to the artisan’s hand as he chipped and chiselled and polished?
Did blood roil in her seething veins?
Did she strive with him to produce this beauty?

My medium’s not marble or any other deserving stone
That earns its right to care by its beautiful existence.
No, my chisel hits flesh, and draws blood, each time.
Its lumpen labour breaks surfaces; bruises.
It’s always amateur art, always a work-in-progress.
I search to expose the beautiful woman,
But each blow chips so little away.

What do I earn by being? By being what I am,
What my mounds, my cracks, my crevasses dictate I must be?
The right to be tossed aside, dismissed, like inferior stone,
Or to be reshaped (misshaped) into something unrecognisable.
My capillaries and crannies are not lovingly polished to reveal their textures.
No, smooth is different for warm-fleshed bodies.
In the world below the marble mountain, there is no real red.
I have spent much life on the effort to be equal:
I could not fashion a man’s sword for myself,
But, with assiduous application of all man’s expertise,
I do not age, have no cramps, show no blood.
My tampon fits discreetly in the palm of my hand.
I am a smoothed-out person, with a smoothed-out life.
No wo(e)-, just -man.

But, inside me, blood breathes and surges.
When the moon is full, it calls and urges.

Why do I fear that place where the Goddess waits?
“I am a woman,” I cry, “See my wedding ring, the pink coat,
The love of roses, the plucking of eyebrows, the Brazilian!”
I don’t want to go to No Man’s Land, where the Goddess waits;
That place where, she says, my name is Woman.

But I hear her calling, “Come, give me your hand.
Let’s wander down the river of blood.”

Tia Azulay 07May09 Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

So… it took a while, but this poem is now more than text! To experience it you’ll need Adobe Flash Player, preferably v9 or v10, and to turn on your sound.

Click the image to view the poem full screen:

The [Respond] button at the end of the poem will bring you back here to comment or offer a poem of your own.

Alternatively, why not respond by creating your own version of Watercolour? Grab the word cloud below, go to http://www.wordle.net, paste it in and have a blast! If you like the result, supply a link to the Wordle version in your comment.

Notes:

1. Wordle gives greater weight to words that occur more often. If you want some words to appear bigger than others, copy and repeat those words a few times in the word cloud, e.g. repeating “jazz jazz jazz” and “pizzazz pizzazz pizzazz” and “imagine imagine imagine imagine imagine” could produce a Wordle like this: Watercolour imagine jazz pizzazz.
2. Wordle strips out common words like “of” and “the” unless you change settings via the Language menu.

Word cloud for Wordling:

Watercolour primaries pounce on the primitive page usurping space with bizarre pizzazz opposing waves squall and break brim-brilliant crests crash create a jazz of chaos interference drags a screaming thread of blue through careless orange splotches tia azulay raging red gobbles new green panicking through cooling pools of sulphur a purple pulse breathes whirls of fire willing them to swirl against caking air to savage expectations flay the fair and even strokes of intent with edges of the depths fan water into flame with split-atomic spatterings of aquamarine and shame shatterings of line design all reason Oh Image imagine Imagination’s breathing Ruwach

Tia Azulay 13Feb09 Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

Pierce breeze
Dazzle sky
Haunt star
Laugh universe

Tia Azulay 30Nov99 Copyright © 1999 Tia Azulay

It’s amazing how a fresh project and the smallest amount of feedback can help one to see old work with new eyes. I’m working on my first e-poem – a conversion of an existing paper-based one. Discussion in the E-Poetry module of the MA made me realise that some of the poem’s “argument” had never made its way from my head to the page. In trying to describe my first experience with watercolour painting, which challenged all sorts of preconceptions I’d held about the medium, I was so focused on my emotional response that I hadn’t given a clear enough picture of the activity to justify my response.

I’ve brought back some structures (layout, punctuation) that I used in earlier versions, but also introduced a few new words, including a whole new line, and deleted some unnecessary ones. I’m pleased with the textual result now (the e- bit is still to come), although in two minds about the title – should I revert to the original title of “Watercolour”, or retain “Primeval Watercolour”?

You can see one of the many earlier versions here, if you’re interested, but here’s the latest version:

Watercolour

Primaries pounce
on the primitive page,
usurping space with bizarre pizzazz;
opposing waves squall and break,
brim-brilliant crests crash,
create a jazz of chaos:
interference drags a screaming thread of blue
across careless orange splotches;
raging red gobbles new green;
panicking through cooling pools of sulphur,
a purple pulse breathes whirls of fire,
willing them to swirl against caking air,
to savage expectations, flay the fair
and even strokes of intent
with edges of the depths,
fan water into flame
with split-atomic spatterings
of aquamarine and shame,
shatterings
of line, design, all reason—

Oh, Image, imagine
Imagination’s breathing:
Ruwach!

Update 12Aug09: See the digital version of this poem here.

Tia Azulay Nov94–13Mar09
Copyright © 1994, 2009 Tia Azulay

Following the “film of  your life” exercise in our Memoir workshop with Jonathan Taylor, one of the next instructions was to create ” the photo of your life” by choosing one of the memories to “write a passage describing minutely where you were, what you were wearing, what was around you (scenery, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, flowers, etc.), who else was there, what happened, what was said, and so on. Be as detailed as you possibly can. If you can’t remember details, make them up.”

I found this exercise interesting  because it caused me to doubt the accuracy of my memory, and also because it engaged my interest in research!

One thing that struck me as I read the question and looked for instances in my descriptions to answer it, was that I have absolutely no memory at all of what I was wearing at any point.

I had decided to write about climbing the loquat tree, but as I tried to describe the texture of the bark, and its smell, I suddenly wondered whether I was remembering it correctly, so I looked it up on Google. I found very many sites giving descriptions of “Eriobotrya japonica”, with varying assessments of the size of the mature tree, the number and prevalence of its varieties and fruit colours, and contradictory descriptions of it as a “shrub” or a “tree”.  I am sure that the tree in our garden in Northcliff was very large; clearly it had been there for many years (although a smaller tree may be “large”, when one is seven years old, of course, but I know that it was climbable).  I am also sure that it was not a “shrub” – I remember a  large single trunk, although it was vertically ridged, so possibly the individual “shrub” branches had grown together over many years. This is possibly why I found hand- and footholds to enable me to climb. The shrub-like growth of the higher branches may also be why I remember that it was not very comfortable to sit in the tree for long periods of time (as I sometimes did in other trees).  Suddenly, simply “remembering” is not very simple at all! But the discoveries I make during the process are intriguing, and I see why it may be necessary to “make things up”. Even if I base my descriptions on research, so that they are “likely” to be fairly accurate, that does not make them into my own memories.

Anyway, here’s what emerged:

————–

My hands slid over the bark of the tree, seeking purchase. The bark was smooth over the sinuous vertical ridges of the separate boles that had grown together long ago to form this wide trunk, but split in places by small lumpy outcrops or the base of a broken-off twig.  I loved the occasional harshness that pressed against my skin, and the smell of the dust disturbed by my hands as it mingled with the strong oriental perfume of the few white flowers that had not yet given way to fruit. As I found a handhold, then another, then a foothold, I entered the world of the tree, leaving sunshine and everything else behind. My goal was the sweet orange-yellow globes that I could see hanging amidst the shiny dark green leaves above me. I heaved myself up, scraping my tummy against the cool wood as I stretched for branches small enough to hold onto securely. It was only when I had settled, breathless, into the sharp fork between two of these branches, that I noticed I had grazed my knee. It wasn’t sore. I studied the greenish-grey dirt around the broken skin. It must have rubbed off the tree bark as I climbed. Then, as a shaft of sunlight played across my shoulders, I lost interest in the wound and looked again towards the golden fruit. Placing my left foot uncomfortably into the sharp fork beneath me and the right on a knot in a neighbouring branch, I seized the branch in front of me with both hands and stood up. From this position, I was able to reach up and break off a cluster of the fruit. I had done it! I noticed that I could now see through the leaves into the lower garden. Apart from the fact that the grass was fairly short, there was no sign of human habitation or civilisation. Inside this tree, clutching my prize, I was king of my own wild world.

Tia Azulay 11Feb09
Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay

Today we had a fun exercise for the E-Poetry module – take a classic (out of copyright) poem and convert it into an e-poem. Using Wordle feels like cheating, because it’s so easy, but I think the effect is rather pleasing. I just played around with colour choices a bit to obtain an Autumn palette, and fiddled with the randomization and shape to get the impression of Autumn leaves swirling in a park.

Click the image to be taken to the larger version on the Wordle site.

Oh, by the way, “Anonymous” is me. I didn’t realise the implication of attribution when I chose not to input my name. Moving too quickly…

Tia Azulay 16Feb09 Copyright © 2009 Tia Azulay