The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Launched on the 26 February, The Edge is a new initiative of the State Library of Queensland, with an emphasis on digital media and innovation.

The Edge is the State Library of Queensland’s newest initiative, sitting alongside its established programs and continuing the library’s growth as a cultural and knowledge destination.

It is a place for young Queenslanders; a place for experimentation and creativity, giving contemporary tools to young people to allow them to explore critical ideas, green initiatives, new design practices and media making.

The Edge enables the creation of all sorts of art and technology, research, training, mentoring and being mentored, networking, and entertaining and being entertained.

Informal spaces abound for discussion and the pursuit of individual and group activities, which foster a sense of community, a commitment to collaboration and a spirit of openness.

It runs programs devoted to innovation in craft, music, film, writing, and other areas, with workshops and presentations, as well as areas where you can just drop in and play.

It’s still early days, and it will be interesting to see how all this turns out: whether it becomes a vibrant area of digital arts in Brisbane, or whether it turns out to be a multi-million dollar (I assume) white elephant.

The early signs are promising.

If you are in Brisbane, feel free to come along

Writing and Getting Involved in ARC Grants

Special Guests include Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham

Friday, 12 March 2010
3:00pm – 4:30pm
Room Z6, 208
Creative Industries Precinct,
Queensland University of Technology
Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove

We invite post-graduate students, ECR’s or anyone else interested to attend the first MACS meeting for 2010 at the Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology on Friday 12 March between 3 – 4.30pm. The theme is “Writing and Getting Involved in ARC Grants” and will include a talk by special guest Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham.

MACS provides a regular platform for discussing issues relating to these roles as well as an opportunity to contribute to wider debates taking place in the field. MACS is currently active at the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology, and meetings are hosted alternatively across these two institutions.

The idea for the MACS network arose from a sense that PhD students and junior staff are often at a distance from existing forms of collaboration between researchers in different universities within the one city. While much emphasis is placed on the end product of research, and there are plenty of avenues for presenting and publishing our work, the early stages of an academic career involve particular anxieties that can be ameliorated with the support of a community of peers. The MACS group is an attempt to create a space for discussing everything to do with our work aside from the end product, to share accumulated knowledge and resources to gain insight into the options available within our field of research.

According to some reports about 17,000 people joined in Tuesday’s Vindaloo Against Violence event to demonstrate solidarity with the Australian-Indian community, following a number of apparently racist attacks against Indian nationals—mainly students—in Melbourne.

Now this strikes me as mainly a consciousness-raising exercise. No, it probably won’t have much effect on its own, but 17,000 agreeing to do something (admittedly something with very little cost to themselves) creates a community of sorts, and fosters a sense of solidarity with Indian students and with other people who abhor racist violence.

I started thinking about then when I came across a discussion on Twitter with a couple of people, including Barry Saunders, who asked the question:

While I appreciate the gesture behind Vindaloo against Violence, isn’t reducing Indian culture to, um, buying a curry, a bit problematic?

This is a good question. For a start, Vindaloo was originally a Portuguese dish, and is largely unknown in India, being far more popular in Anglophone countries. As DPN pointed out on Twitter, it is ironic that this was the dish chosen to be emblematic: it underlines the huge gulf of understanding between many Australians and their India guests.

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In 1978 I remember reading an interview with (I assume) Richard Donner, director of Superman: The Movie, who pointed to the new superhero shows then popular on TV—things like The Six Million-Dollar Man—and said something like, “We can’t have Superman just picking up a car to save someone: Steve Austin does that every week.”

This was by way of justification for the film’s climax, in which Superman turns back time by spinning the Earth backwards on its axis—one of the most cringe-worthy pieces of anti-science cinema I’ve ever seen. The argument was that everything had to be bigger, better, and more spectacular than anything that had gone before. I think I preferred the end of Superman II, where the denouement was at a much more human level.

This interview dredged itself out of the depths of my memory last week when I watched the second part of “The End of Time,” the final Doctor Who episode for the tenth Doctor, David Tennant. Writer/producer Russell T Davies has a bad habit of wanting everything bigger and bolder than last time, and with the climax of season four involving whole planets teleporting across the galaxy (with bizarrely few negative consequences to the atmospheres or structures of the planets), I guess we all knew we were in for a challenge to our abilities to willingly suspend our disbelief.

The comments thread at Circulating Library live blog of the episode indicates the level of disapproval from even hard-core fans. I won’t rehearse the objections here, so go and have a look.

Such a pity for Tennant’s send-off, when he has been one of the most popular Doctors (I thought he was great, but Tom Baker will forever be my Doctor).

Anyway, we’ve got that young Matt Smith and scripts by Stephen Moffat to look forward to, so let’s hope the series regains a little sense.

The Nebula Awards shortlist was released overnight. The winners will be announced on May 15.

Unlike the Hugo Awards, which are popular awards voted on by registrants at Worldcon, the Nebulas are peers awards, and nominations and votes are limited to active members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

There are six categories, Short Story, Novelette, Novella, and Novel, as we as the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Continuing reading this article for the full list of nominees.

I got this via email a couple of days ago. Another of those well-intentioned spam emails that purports to show how we should get back to “common-sense” (always of the conservative variety, of course). Things were always better in the “old days,” before political correctness.

I’ve added a few comments…

Scenario: Jack goes rabbit shooting before school, pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.

1957 – Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack’s rifle, goes to his car and gets his rifle & chats with Jack about guns.

2009 – School goes into lock down, Star Force called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counsellors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Comment – A culture that normalises and glorifies guns leads inevitably to obscene tragedies such as Columbine High and Virginia Tech. But of course, guns don’t kill people—apparently it’s heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons that kills people.

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Since I originally posted it in June 2006, the most read article on Memes is one called Forever Young and the Politics of Meaning, a short meditation on the way in which context and personal experience change the meaning of a text. It generated a reasonably brisk debate at the time, but then I moved on, and most of the commenters did also.

But for the last three and a half years we have had an average of four visits a week from people googling something like “meaning of forever young.” I’ve visited other sites that come up in this search, and I think that it is time I added my view on the song, because I don’t think many people get it.

The song was originally written by German synth-pop outfit Alphaville, and “Forever Young” was the title track on their 1984 debut album. For me the clue is in the date of the original release: 1984 was smack in the middle of the Cold War and the song captures the sense of existential dread and fatalism that afflicted many young people at that time:

Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst
Are you going to drop the bomb or not?

This isn’t a political song; there is no advocating about arms reduction or political solutions, just the plea to forget politics and go out dancing. While the songwriters don’t want to die, anything seems better than waiting around for an apocalypse that ordinary people felt they didn’t have a way of stopping.

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Thank you to Jason Gross at Popmatters for naming us alongside writers like Trent Reznor and publications such as Salon and The Wall Street Journal in their 2009 Best Music Scribbling Awards.

It’s nice to get some acknowledgment, especially from a professional in the industry.

The post he liked was this one.

But make sure you visit Popmatters and read the other articles as well—they are some great ideas, well put.

Just over ten years ago now, in the face of the Howard Government’s favouring of private education, I wrote a paper for a little in-house journal which discussed the problems inherent in league tables and their effects on educational, and thus social, equity. Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Now under a Labor Government, the same fights are being fought, this time, though, in the name of accountability rather than choice.

As you are probably aware, the government has today launched its MySchool website amid much controversy: it gives data that can enable the ranking of schools due to its publication of, among other things, national NAPLAN test results.

If you want to know why the publication of these results is so problematic, take a look at this paper by Professor Alan Reid, presented to the 2009 Australian Curriculum Studies Association National Biennial Conference in Canberra in October.

The winners of the 2009 Aurealis Awards for Australian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror were announced at the thirteenth annual ceremony at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane on Saturday 24 January 2010.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: Andrew McGahan, Wonders of a Godless World, Allen & Unwin

BEST SCIENCE FICTION SHORT STORY: Peter M. Ball, ‘Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens’, Apex Magazine May 2009

BEST FANTASY NOVEL: Trudi Canavan, Magician’s Apprentice, Orbit

BEST FANTASY SHORT STORY (Tie): Christopher Green, ‘Father’s Kill’, Beneath Ceaseless Skies #24; Ian McHugh, ‘Once a Month, On a Sunday’, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #40, Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-operative Ltd

BEST HORROR NOVEL: Honey Brown, Red Queen, Penguin Australia

BEST HORROR SHORT STORY (Tie): Paul Haines, ‘Wives’, X6, Coeur de Lion Publishing; Paul Haines, ‘Slice of Life – A Spot of Liver’, Slice of Life, The Mayne Press

BEST ANTHOLOGY: Jonathan Strahan (editor), Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books

BEST COLLECTION: Greg Egan, Oceanic, Gollancz

BEST ILLUSTATED BOOK/GRAPHIC NOVEL: Nathan Jurevicius, Scarygirl, Allen & Unwin

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan Trilogy: Book One, Penguin

BEST YOUNG ADULT SHORT STORY: Cat Sparks, ‘Seventeen’, Masques, CSFG

BEST CHILDREN’S (8-12 YEARS) NOVEL: Gabrielle Wang, A Ghost in My Suitcase, Puffin Books

BEST CHILDREN’S (8-12 YEARS) SHORT FICTION/ILLUSTRATED WORK/PICTURE BOOK: Pamela Freeman (author), Kim Gamble (illustrator), Victor’s Challenge, Walker Books Australia