Feather

The other day, while walking towards my building from the carpark, I found a feather. I din't know what bird it comes from, but it just happens to be the Estonian flag: blue, black and white.

It's quite nice, actually. Makes me wish I was a graphic designer so I could turn it into something people could share...

Speech and Drama - or, A Curriculum

I studied Speech and Drama (and a close cousin, Speech in Action) for a good ten or twelve years. I actually have an Associate Diploma in Speech and Drama, and I was partway towards assembling a programme to sit for the Licentiate exams when I moved to Tasmania. I always meant to finish putting together my programme and go for the Licentiate Diploma, but I guess I lost momentum.

I have my Associate Diploma through the Australian College of Music, although I did take some exams through the Australian Music Examinations Board. I also took Grade Three piano exams through the AMEB - which was enough to convince me I didn't like taking music exams. I once took a look at the curriculum offered by the Trinity College of Music, and I was interested in trying to sit an exam through them, but I ended up sticking with the ACM.

I've been thinking, lately, about these colleges and the way they operate. You see, ideally, children and teenagers take classes though a private tutor/teacher. The teachers (normally) took these classes as children, kept going through high school, took the Licentiate exams and maybe the Fellowship exams and are now in a position to make a career guiding students through the process of sitting for the exams.

The way it works is that the college publishes a curriculum, hands it over to the student (with the help of a teacher) to assemble and practice the material to meet the curriculum (for a practical exam) or find and learn the information asked for by the curriculum (for a theory exam), and then sends around an examiner to examine the student on how well they have fulfilled the curriculum.

A typical curriculum for, say, the upper grades of Speech and Drama would involve something like this:

• The student would choose a novel to read. They would read the entire novel in preparation for the exam, have a preselected passage from that novel which they have practised and can recite by heart in addition to being able to read randomly selected passages on demand. They must also be able to answer questions regarding any aspect of the book including: the life and works of the author, the plot and characters, the period of time in which the book was first published, other major works of the period.
  
• The student would compile an anthology of poems. They would be expected to recite one of the poems (of a certain length) and be prepared to read any of the other poems on demand. They must also be able to answer questions regarding any aspect of any of the poems in their anthology (see above).
  
• The student would choose a play to read. Everything that applied to the novel also applies to this play.
  
• The student would choose a Shakespearean play, and ditto.
  
• The student would prepare a speech/talk of a certain length regarding a given subject (there is usually a selection of subjects to choose from). They may have palm cards or notes, but should be able to maintain adequate eye contact with the "audience" throughout the presentation. They must be prepared to answer any questions regarding their presentation.

Usually, these curricula were themed according to literature from a particular place or time. For example, take everything I've just mentioned above and limit it to works from the 18th Century. Or the Victorian period. Or a particular country, such as Australia. This is all with the exceptioin of Shakespeare. You may be asked to specifically choose a Tragedy, History or Comedy, but you always had to do Shakespeare.

The theory curriculum would usually consist of knowledge of several areas of literary history, a bit of literary theory and the theory of speech (organs of articulated speech; the role of breath; the use of pause, pitch, pace and volume; etc).

Basically, a student is given a list of things to explore and is expected to gather a solid knowledge of literature, history and good pronunciation (with the aid of the teacher).

I've been wondering, lately, why something similar doesn't exist for language learners. Surely that would be a brilliant way to sink into a language - in addition to the "theory" of the grammar and vocabulary, you also have to explore the history and literature by finding material for a programme and knowing it inside-out?

How well would a student learn a language if they had to be able to cover the vocabulary of a selection of books, plays and poems and be able to answer questions about all of it (perhaps in 1L for the early grades and in the target language)?

I know it improved my knowledge of the English language no end - not to mention my reading skills.

An existential question

When you scroll on a web page, is the part of the page you can't see on your screen still there?

Does it actually exist, or is it merely a series of coded bits of nothing that will only be actualised in any meaningful way if it is processed through the screen?

Does the screen show me part of a whole, or all there is to see at that given point in time?

Mouses

The rule goes: for living things, ouse turns to ice for plurals (mouse - mice, grouse - grice, louse - lice), while for inanimate objects ouse turns to ouses (house - houses, scouse - scouses [that's "scouse" as in "stew", not as in "Liverpudlian"]).

Therefore, the answer to the question "what's the plural for 'computer mouse'?" is 'computer mouses'.

Now, having gotten that out of the way:

I currently hate all of my mouses. They all suck. My mouse at home is a dodgy little portable laptop mouse that doesn't even have a scroll function on it (I gave my "good mouse" to my mother along with my old computer), and it has recently decided that, even though I can find nothing wrong with it, responding appropriately to movement is not high on its agenda. My mouse on my desk at work scrolls nicely, but has also decided this whole "moving the pointer when the mouse is moved" thing is overrated. The mouse at the reference desk is cordless and the batteries are at that stage where they don't want to work all the time, but they don't want to stop working enough to warrant new batteries...

In short, I am surrounded by mouses that are annoying the heck out of me.

To make matters worse, the other day I tried one of those new "mighty mouse" things at shop and it was really good. Those are nice mouses, I have to say. I really want one, but I really don't want to spend $99 for the privilege of having it. Yet, now I can't see the point of buying another mouse which won't be as nice.

So, I'm stuck with crappy annoying mouses and I can't bring myself to by a new one as they'll either be a) to expensive, or b) not as good as the one that's too expensive.

I think I'd be better off with mice.

Follow the music

Every now and then I hear of a musical instrument I have never encountered before, or I just get curious about one I heard of a long time ago, and I have to find out what they sound like.

So, I do what every good librarian does and look it up. The Internet's a great thing, isn't it?

However, the last few times I went looking for instruments, I found a few bands.

My curiosity about the autoharp lead me to discover Doofus and Catseye (why oh why won't Catseye put out a second album?) - who in turn lead me to discover CDbaby.com, through which I discovered Simple Gifts and Circe Link (okay, she's actually a person, not a band).

Recently, I've been curious about the nyckelharpa, which has lead me to discover Ranarim. I'm waiting to see what I find by following them...

By the way, nyckelharpas and autoharps are both instruments I will probably never play myself, due to the fact that they have an awful lot of strings which one would have to tune. Give me four strings any day of the week, and I'll be happy.

I need to find some vanavanemad

I've run out of my own, unfortunately, but they wouldn't have been able to help me anyway - what with them not living in Estonia during the time I want to ask about.

I've been wanting to ask someone some practical questions about what it was like living in Estonia in the middle of the 20th Century - especially in the years after Stalinism took force.

What was movement between countries like? Especially non-SSR countries? How would you get to Tallinn from Helsinki? Or Helsinki to Tallinn? Was it different going in one direction than it was going the other?

If an Estonian tourist wanted to visit Paris, could he? If a French tourist wanted to visit Tartu, could she?

Were Soviets patrolling the waters, with all those many islands? Could someone sneak in or out by boat?

If/when an "outsider" was allowed in, were they allowed to move around by themselves or did they have an escort? Was everyone expected to have some sort of papers on them when moving about in the town or country? If they didn't have papers, or if they had the wrong papers, what would happen to them?

It would be lovely if I could find someone's vanavanemad and chat with them about this sort of thing, but sadly I live in a vanavanemad free zone. My own grandmother left the country before the period I'm interested in, so she was never able to tell me these stories. And, of course, now she's gone so I can't even pump her for information about the 1920s.

Such is life.

Leisure, continued

Well, there is Pärnu, but that's really far away from where I'm currently living.



Besides, this is a photo I took of the beach at the beginning of summer:



I'm sure it's probably wonderful on a nice sunny day, but that day it was freezing. No frolicking.

Leisure

I remember reading something at some point which mentioned the surprising fact that leisure, as we know it, was invented in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Prior to this, when most "common" folk were farmers, farmers never took two weeks off. They kept farming all year round. Sure, they might take a day off for religious observances, but even then they still did the basics like milking the cows and making the daily bread and all that jazz. After the Industrial Revolution*, the working classes were lucky if they got a half-day on Sundays. They pretty much worked until the couldn't work any longer. Then they dropped dead shortly thereafter.

The upper classes didn't really count with the whole "leisure" thing. That was just the way they lived. Yes, they'd toddle off to the country to take a break from the city, or they'd go to the city to take a break from the country, but their past times and sports were seasons rather than "leisure time".

It was after the middle classes became the main social power and the working classes finally decided to band together to campaign for a Life (both events more or less a product of the 19th Century) that the concept of a "holiday" with "leisure time" was born.

Suddenly, the clerk in the haberdashery had two whole weeks a year in which to go some place and do something completely un-work related.

Suddenly, people needed places to go and things to do. And both had to be something your average clerk in the haberdashery could afford.

And so holiday resorts and camps came into being. Seaside towns that not only offered beaches and change rooms, but also "stuff". Stuff like ice-cream shops and confectionery stores. Stuff like dining rooms and dance halls. Stuff like the kind of side-show attractions that tended to travel with circuses. Toys to play with on the beach. Parks to frolic in with your family. Wooden bandstands complete with brass bands. Roving barbershop quartets. Steamboats to take you for jaunts up the large rivers and punters to take you, well, punting along the smaller water courses.

The seaside or lakeside resort was very much a product of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Which explains why, on some level, design elements popular during the turn of the century were still touching theme parks right up until the 1980s. For some reason, nothing says "foot loose and fancy free holiday fun" quite like a wooden building painted white and red with a big hall and a stage at one end (decorated with bunting - everything looks festive if you add bunting). Especially if you can walk out of this building onto a lawn that spreads down to some body of water.

I'm rabbiting on about this because I had a strange dream last night. I dreamt that I was talking to someone about a "theme park" (actually a smallish water park) that used to be in Townsville when I was a kid, called "Willows Water World". I don't remember this place very well as I only went one or two times before it closed down. For a great many years it was a wasteland situated unusually close to a shopping centre, and then they fixed the land and put another block of shops there. I do half recall, however, that it borrowed a bit of the Edwardian look for some of the buildings - that wooden look with the white and red paint.

In this dream, I accidentally stumbled upon a place I'd never found before - some obscure little shop selling ice cream and devonshire tea where they had salvaged the parts of Willows Water World I remember and made something in that vein. I was so very pleased to find this place and spend a few minutes indulging in the nostalgia of it all. It occurred to me, after I woke, that I was wrong. This strange little coffee shop of my dream wasn't constructed out of WWW at all. Well, there was the shooting gallery which was attached to the shop, and that was definitely from WWW, but the rest of it wasn't quite right. It was actually closer to the DreamWorld I used to visit as a child.

DreamWorld is a theme park on the Gold Coast that was once entirely based on the old resort towns of the Edwardian period. Trains, cars and rides around the park all had an early 20th look, the "shops" in the "town centre" were all based on that "ye olde toffee shoppe" style design and there was a River Boat which would take you to watch some show involving bushrangers. There was also a large wooden hall were one could order sandwiches and other timeless goodies for lunch, and where one might encounter a barber shop quartet doing the rounds. In a different part of the park there was a "music hall" - actually an anamatronic show with a bunch of Australian animals performing songs like "Do What You Do Do Well".

As a young child, I loved this place. I didn't know it was a salute to a bygone era, but I thought it was beautiful. It was full of things you just didn't see every day. Going back later, as an older child, I was less enchanted - but largely because the place was falling into disrepair. It's hard to feel captivated by an anamatronic kangaroo when the fur is getting threadbare. And the cars weren't working. And the bushranger show was only running twice a day. And the barbershop quartet was gone...

Now, it's completely changed tack. It's been bought out by some company connected with Nickelodeon. Half the park is full of the "latest and greatest" theme park rides, and most of it is themed after one or another television show. My lovely old lunch hall has been replaced with "Wiggles World". Not only have they taken out the "music hall", but they've actually turned the entire area into some kind cartoon-themed roller coaster. Oh, and the lovely old roller coaster which used to look like it came from early 20th Century America? Gone. Too "old hat", I guess. All that's left is the toffee shop. Oh, and the train. At least they've still got the train.

All in all, it's more like stepping into a giant advertisement than a "dream world".

I wish there was someplace like the old DreamWorld I could visit one day. Even if it was just a coffee shop selling ice cream and devonshire teas...

banaan

For some reason, and I'm not sure what it was, today I pulled a banana out of the fridge and proudly declared:

"Mul on ananass"

Which was, of course, wrong. And, I supposed, slightly surreal. I suppose it could be considered a little odd to have someone hold up a banana and state with conviction that they have a pineapple. Probably more so if they were doing it in a language no one else in the room understood...

I'm suddenly feeling like a deconstructivist from the 20th Century. Why is a banana not a pineapple? If no one understands what you say, does it matter if you say the "wrong" thing? These are but signifiers arbitrarily applied to the signified, and we may challenge them if they do no suit our purposes. Or, indeed, our porpoises, who are better suited by tweed.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, what happened to all the birds and woodland creatures?

This is not a pipe.

No, really, it's not.

Gone about as far...

I have two songs stuck in my head at the same time, and it's like the notes of the songs are sliding around each other like coloured pebbles in a glass jar.

I'll be humming "Kansas City" from Oklahoma!, then open my mouth to sing a few lines, only to find I'm actually singing Coward's "A Bar on the Piccola Marina".

It's very strange, and slightly disconcerting. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I've been working for 8 days straight and I've been trying to replace sleep with coffee again.

Aino - Chapter Three: van Havien Has an Idea

I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath for the third installment of Aino to come out.

Well, the wait is over. No more must your breathing be subdued or restrained under the influence of awe, terror, or other emotion.

Indeed, the third chapter, in it's ever so rough form, is here:

Aino - Chapter Three: van Havien Has an Idea.

You will, of course, remember the story so far. Our narrator (whose name has not been revealed yet, but since it isn't important I could probably give it away without damaging any part of the story) is holed up in a gentlemens' club with a few friends during a miserable winter's night. They amuse themselves by telling each other ghost stories - except van Havien (the most charismatic member of the group) insists the stories must be "true".

In the first chapter, van Havien told his story involving strange wild things in the Saskatchewan forests. In the second chapter, Davis told his story of a strange presence in a bedroom, and our Narrator told the first half of his story involving what appears to be a haunted mansion.

You will, I trust, remember the mysterious woman roaming around the dilapidated grounds of the manor house? And the old man who told our narrator about the girl who walked off into the woods decades ago and was never seen again? Well, almost never. I'm sure you remember what happens on a midsummer night during the full moon?

If not, maybe you should re-read the first couple of chapters. They're still available. Just click on the tag for "Aino" at the bottom of this email and you'll find them.

Anyway, this chapter provides the second half of our narrator's story, and introduces van Havien's idea.

Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? Will it lead to more people being attacked by wolfmen in the woods?

And just who is Aino, anyway?

Stay tuned.

As usual, the first few paragraphs are available on the Siege Works blog.

Mystery Solved

Estonia hadn't fallen off the web. It was a problem with the log-in identity we use at the reference desk.

For some reason, we couldn't access a couple of services we have "off site", and any webpage from Estonia. I don't know why. I meant to check if the same problem was blocking pages from the rest of Europe, but I never got around to it.

Yes, I occasionally look up Estonian newspapers and language instruction sites while sitting at the reference desk. Maybe that makes me a bad librarian, I don't know. I have plenty of good excuses to justify it to myself. Plus, I often forget to go home and keep working on various work projects after they stop paying me for the day, so I think that kind of makes up for it...

Has Estonia Fallen off the Web?

I'm having great difficulties getting on to any site from Estonia. Yesterday, I couldn't get onto any of them at all (whether they be .com or .ee in nature), and it's happening again today.

Last night I managed to get onto a few of these sites from home, so I'm wondering if the problem is at the Eesti end or to do with the computers I use at work.

Is it possible for an entire county to "drop off the server"?