A Handmade Contingency Plan

Anyone who was foolish enough to note that I have a Tumblr feed down the side of this blog might have noticed the following phrase has been sitting there for a few months:

Ich möchte (und werde) eine Spielzeugmacherin sein!

(And, no, I don't update my Tumblr page often, so there's almost no need to keep track of that feed...)

Anyway, if you had a familiarity with German (or could use Google Translator) you would have noticed that this is my best attempt to say the following:

"I would like to (and shall) be a toymaker."

In other blogs in other places I've been rambling about wanting to own a toy shop and wanting to make toys.  I know, as a librarian, I should have a strong hankering to own a book shop and write novels.  I want to do that, too.  But - even more than being someone who owns a book shop and writes novels - I want to own a toyshop and make toys.

Part of the reason for this is I have a desire to make something people can hold.  Okay, people can hold books, so that's probably not the best way to phrase this.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to be able to make things with my hands - not just my brain - that require no translation.  A teddy bear is a teddy bear, no matter where you are in the world.

I like the idea that I could up-stumps and move to a place where I barely speak the language - but still be able to make a living by creating something that people will love.  I could even be itinerant, for a while, and sell hand-made toys in markets all over the globe.  Doesn't that sound perfectly marvellous?

And I think teddy bears will still be relevant after the Great Wipe.

The Great Wipe is always a possibility.  A good solar flair (or an errant nuclear reactor in the wrong place) is all it will take for our eSociety to lose everything electronic.  Then what will we have to show for ourselves?  I do almost all of my writing on a computer, and rarely (if ever) print any of it out as a hard copy.  When the solar flair wipes the memory on all my electronic devices (it can, and one day it will), all of my pointless scribblings really will be pointless.

And non-existent.

And what good will it do me to be a librarian in this heavily digitised age if everything digital is gone?

My job (as it is) becomes completely irrelevant if a possum dies in an inconvenient location and takes out the power supply.  You can scoff if you will, but it has already happened twice.  Twice.

Not the same possum, obviously.  And, granted, the second time it happened it only took out a couple of buildings and the library still had power, so I have only been rendered completely superfluous by a possum dying once - but it could have happened again.

It could still happen again.  Anything is possible.

So, what I want is to develop a set of skills that are not dependant on a power supply.

If I can sew and perform feats of basic woodwork using nothing but my own hands and some human-powered tools, then I'll be able to do something useful regardless of what manner of decay and disarray society finds itself in after it can no longer turn on electricity with a flick of the switch.

It will also be useful should I find myself accidentally sent back in time.  A teddy bear is a teddy bear no matter when you are in the world.*

Some people may think it is unnecessary to create a contingency plan for time travel or surviving the electronic apocalypse - but, hey, at least my crazy survivalist plan involves hand-stitching plush toys and whittling trains out of found wood.  I think that's much better than building an underground bunker and filling it with automatic rifles, don't you?

*Prior to the early 20th Century most people won't know it's a teddy bear - but teddy bears are inherently lovely, so I don't see why I wouldn't be able to introduce them anachronistically early.  I'll be creating a new alternate time-stream simply by existing in the past, so I may as well have fun with it.

The Opera Project

Some time ago I started toying with the idea of creating a "chamber opera" in Esperanto.

My idea was to create something so small scale that it would be very attractive for touring companies with outreach projects (it's a lot easier to tour with 8 singers than 50+).

I thought it would be interesting to make it in Esperanto as I personally think operas in English always sound stupid.*  Plus, if it was in Esperanto, it would be almost guaranteed to have someone staging a performance somewhere in the world once every 2 or 3 years.

Esperanto speakers have regular "conferences", and they love to do things to celebrate their language - what's more celebratory than an opera?  If the opera was small scale and easy to stage, it could be rehearsed by the cast and musicians on their own until a few days before the conference, and then they could schedule a few intensive rehearsals prior to performing it.**

My original plan was for the opera to be written for 8 voices (2 sopranos, 1 mezzo, 1 alto, 2 tenors, 1 baritone and 1 bass), a string quartet, a brass quintet, a piano and a percussionist.  Some pieces would be written for just the quartet or the quintet, so that they could be regularly trotted out by instrumental groups of that nature.

My idea was to create something that was attractive to a number of different groups for a number of different reasons, so that whether you were an opera company, a brass quintet or a group of Esperantists, you would think about either staging this opera or at least using one of the pieces from it in your concert.

Then I started wondering whether a Concert Band would be better than the quartet/quintet combo.  Granted, more musicians means more work to stage the thing, but on the other hand it would mean that the various pieces from the opera could become part of the standard Wind/Concert Band repertoire.  Every good band would play pieces from my opera the way they play Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever or Fučík's Entrance of the Gladiators.  Pieces from my opera could become the 21st Century's standard Wind Band set pieces...

There is a slight problem with my developing an opera - regardless of whether I go for the chamber music ensemble or the Concert Band version:  I'm not a composer.  I don't know the first thing about writing music,*** or orchestrating it.  I'd have to either hire someone to do that for me, or try to find someone who is happy to "collaborate" on this project.

I've been listening to Two Steps From Hell lately while doing some web-site migration grunt-work (I find tedious tasks at the computer easier to complete with dramatic music), and now I'm wondering what my opera would sound like with their kind of music driving it.

They don't do chamber music, or Concert Bands, but I don't think I care.

Their kind of music is what you hear in the ads for movies - not the movies themselves, but the ads.  Also, ice-skating routines and artistic gymnastics.  It is, quite frankly, awesome - and often much better than the real music in the movies that were advertised.

I think it would sound very, very good.  I also think it would be a pretty good fit.  A lot of their music has vocal pieces that are in a style I call "wordless words" - that is, it sounds like someone is singing words, but it's not in English or any other language.  Esperanto, sung to that kind of music, would be earth-shatteringly good, I expect.

So, if Thomas Bergersen or Nick Phoenix is reading this:  Call me - we'll talk.

There's another problem with this opera idea, though, and I'll talk about that in another post.


* It really, really does.  French opera sounds great.  Italian opera sounds awesome.  But there is something about English that just sounds daft when you try to sing it in an operatic way.

** It's likely to be a crap performance, having had such limited rehearsals, but if I know Esperantists they won't care.  No, really, they won't.  They have no standards - they're worse than a church youth group.

*** Actually, I do know the first thing, just none of the other things.

Things found in notebooks: Advice for conference papers

I'm cleaning my desk.

I've been wanting to clean my desk for quite some time.  I've been very slowly decluttering it on and off for a few months, but I've reached the point where I must clear the decks and dust (and dust, and dust and dust), and wipe away the dirt and grime.

I'm also finding all sorts of pieces of paper I kept for some unfathomable reason, and a bunch of half-filled notebooks from over the past 7 years or so (and I haven't even gotten anywhere near my filing cabinet yet).

One notebook I'm just going to throw out (even though it still has plenty of blank pages) is the one I used for a course I did back in 2011.  There's a spot of interesting advice in it, though, and I'm noting that here because I think it's worth noting somewhere:

"Never do the conference paper first."

The woman who gave us this sage advice noted that conference papers were easily adapted from journal articles, but journal articles disappear from your list of "things I can actually muster up the energy to do" once the conference is over.

If you write the journal article, then adapt it for a conference, you're then just left with the task of finding a publisher for the article, rather than doing all of the work for the article.

Having recently co-written a conference paper that we were totally going to turn into a journal article to get published (totally), and then singularly failed to put even the smallest amount of work into writing the article, I can see her point.

Repeated Reading Project: Metadiary, entry 1.5

So, it turns out that I'm really bad at keeping up with something unless I have a due date involved.

I have continued with this project, just not as much as I should.

And the longer the gap is between my "repeated reading" activities, the more I forget from what I read last time.

The moral of the story is:  this repeated reading thing is more effective when you don't allow large gaps of time to occur between readings.

No Apostrophes for You!

Okay, I give in.

I've just seen too much, and I realise this problem cannot be fixed, so it must be removed.

People can't deal with apostrophes.  They just can't.  Oh, sure, some of us can - and we are so very hung-up about it - but the general population of the English speaking world just can't wrap their heads around them.

Specifically, they don't know when not to use them.

I grow weary of all of the signs and assignments I have seen where people clearly don't know when they should or should not put an apostrophe before an s.  Some times they neglect to use one when they should us it, but most of the time they use one when they shouldn't.

And, as a final straw, last night I saw a sign (that had been photocopied multiple times and plastered all over a particular space) that spelled "your" (as in "your cooperation is appreciated") as "you'r"

You'r.

This must stop.

The way I say it, there are two options:  we can either continue to give people an opportunity to fail, and then continue to get annoyed with them when they get it wrong...

Or we can take away the apostrophes.

You can't stuff up apostrophes if you just don't use them.

This is language and spelling reform - and I know English speakers in general are against it.  They like to believe their language is perfect and unspoiled - born that way and never changing (thus ensuring that all of the many constant changes that occur in our language happen completely by accident, rather than design).

But the fact of the matter is that sometimes we have to stand up and say "You know what?  This word would make more sense if we stopped spelling it with that letter/punctuation mark/whatever".

The Americans did it with their Webster's Dictionary.  They managed to lose a bunch of silent letters and use z instead of s when the sound called for it.

It must become standard and normal for apostrophes to simply not appear in texts.  Those of us who still insist on spelling things according to the traditional British model are probably anal retentive enough to know what apostrophes are for, so there will be no approbation against people who chose to continue using them (although the wrath of a thousand pedants will fall upon the heads of those who continue to use them incorrectly - myself, unfortunately, one of the people who know better but still trip up occasionally).

But the rest of the world should be able to breathe easy, knowing that they will never get it wrong if they simply never use them.

Repeated Reading Project: Metadiary, entry 1

Monday 22 July, 2015

My original plan with the learning diary was to type it up and put it on my blog.  Perhaps I’ll do that too, but I started writing it by hand in a notebook, and I’ve found the fact that I’m too lazy to “undo” (with an eraser) anything beyond a few spelling mistakes may actually be a benefit in this case.  When I type, I re-process what I’m going to say and go back to change it to match what I’m currently thinking, rather than what I thought at the time.  I’ve already done this several times with this paragraph.

When I write by hand, however, I don’t erase my previous jottings when I think better of them, I just cross them out and make a note to skip down to the point where I’ve recast what I’m doing.  This means my previous mistakes are still there to be read – and we all know how much information about the learning process can be gleaned from mistakes.

So, theoretically, I’m going to try to keep the learning diary going as a hand-written thing and type up my reflections on the process (this “metadiary”) to go online.  My original idea was to have the whole thing go online – just to really push the “Open Access” side of things.  Forget being able to access and use whatever papers I may or may not produce as a result of this project – my raw data will be available for other researchers, if they know where to look.  And, heck, let’s face it – I’m hardly the best person to analyse what’s happening here, am I?  I’ll do my best, but I think the best thing I can do is let other people play too. 

I’ll probably scan the hand-written notes at a later time and put them up somewhere.  I’m hesitant to type them up at this point, as I’m already double dipping in the diary idea by writing this reflection on the diary writing process.  Typing up the notes will just be compounding the observer’s paradox even further, and I’m pretty sure I’m already at a point where the data is highly compromised by the design.

Just to give myself a decent skeleton to work with for the learning diary, I’ve given myself a series of questions to answer after each session.  I’m also quite deliberately not answering them immediately afterwards, but a day or so later.  This is because I’m trying to avoid tiring myself out so that I can put more effort into it.  After reading a passage of text with a dictionary to help me with every third word (for some sentences, much more than that) I’m not ready to do something with a high cognitive load.  If I wrote in the diary immediately, I’d probably do a very poor job of it.

On the same track, I’m also making sure the questions I ask myself aren’t too onerous.  I want to eliminate possible excuses for avoiding the dairy in the future.

The questions are as follows:

·         What did you read?

·         How many words did you need to consult?

·         What’s the story so far?

·         Note two things you had to look up again

·         Note two new things that caught your eye

·         Have you learnt anything since last time which explained something you read or reread?

·         Are there any outside influences which may be affecting your perceptions or understanding?

·         Choose a sentence and dissect it.

I can see a number of “issues” arising from this project.  For one thing, my learning diary is part exploratory and part reflective.  That may be really useful for learning, but it’s probably going to be a nightmare for analysis.  For another, this metadiary is likely to be having a strong influence on what I remember/notice/process, so the double diary thing is also going to make analysis terribly awkward.

Oh, well, these things can always be discussed in the Discussion section.  Isn’t that what every paper ends with – telling the readers what the major issues with the paper where and why we “need more research” to confirm any findings?

So far I haven’t actually reflected on my learning diary entries.  Well, there’s only one so far, and I wrote it over a couple of days, and to write it I went back over the pages I’d already read a second time, so I’m actually reading each section more often than I thought I would originally – I’m repeating it for the preparation for reading the next section, and I’m repeating it for the journal.

However, I have noticed that the number of words I had to consult for the first passage I read practically halved the second time.  I also noticed that I had completely forgotten about postpositions and about the fact that particular prepositions and postpositions go with particular cases.  It was only when I started to dissect my sentence of choice and consulted Tuldava (my grammar text book) that I remembered this.  Having remembered it, I began noticing it in other instances throughout the text.

So far, I think both the repeated readings and the diary are helping me process some vocabulary and syntax that I would previously have skimmed over and forgotten.

The Repeated Reading Project: Estonian children's books

In my last post in this series, I mentioned that I was going to start a project in which I keep a learning diary to eventually use as the basis for a diary study.

The project itself is deceptively simple:  I'm going to read Estonian children's books (as in, books that are written in Estonian for children).  I'm going to read them rather slowly.

I've always struggled with reading in Estonian - much more than German.  With German children's books I have a fighting chance of nutting it out as I go along and getting some sort of flow happening, but not so much with Estonian.

English and German belong to the same language family, so they play according to similar rules.  Estonian is a completely different kettle of fish.  As a result, whenever I start trying to read in Estonian (particularly authentic texts) my brain gets really tired really quickly.  There's no flow.  So I tend to give up sooner... which means I don't read as much... which means I don't build up good reading muscles... which means it's hard for me to read in Estonian and my brain gets tired really quickly...

Its a vicious circle.

Plus, in spite of the fact that I've been learning Estonian for some time now, children's books never seem to get any easier.  My fluency in reading passages in textbooks is improving, but whenever I go to authentic texts I hit the same problem: too many unfamiliar words and too many unfamiliar forms of familiar words.

I can't select texts based on the Five Finger Rule, partly because I'm not in a position to look at books before I order them, and partly because I've yet to encounter a sentence in the wild where I'm 100% sure of every word, so I run out of fingers quite quickly.

So, what I'm going to do is a sort of Repeated Reading/Intensive Reading activity.  I'm only going to read short sections (say, one page) of a children's book, leaning heavily on my dictionaries to translate as I go (I know people say you shouldn't do that, but I haven't got much choice), and picking apart a couple of selected sentence with the aid of some grammar books.

BUT, and here's the bit that will hopefully make it interesting, I'll reread every section I've already read before starting a new section.

So by the time I finish the book, I'll have read some pages multiple times.  Especially the first page.  I'll have read that one a lot.

In my learning diary, I'll talk about what I noticed, what stood out for me and what seems to be getting easier.  I'll also pick a few sentences that tickled my fancy and dissect them.

Here's what I think that will achieve (my hypotheses, if you will):

1. I'll start to become so familiar with the words on the first pages that I'll pick up a bit of automaticity concerning them.  As I continue to encounter those words later in the text, I'll (hopefully) start to just know what they are, and gain a bit of flow.  When I encounter those words in other books, I'll won't need to consult the dictionaries so often to remind me what they are.

2. I'll also start recognising particular grammatical constructions and noticing morphological patterns, which will make those same constructions/patterns easier to identify and interpret as the project continues.

3. By the time I reach the end of the book, I'll be consulting the dictionaries and grammar reference books less often, and reading with more fluency.  This will (I hope) improve with each subsequent book I read.

4. As a sideline, I think this will also improve my ability to write in Estonian, as my understanding of the written language will improve.  I'm not sure how to pre-test and post-test, especially since I've already started reading and I didn't think to try to write a passage before hand.  I might do that over the weekend anyway.  At the very least, I'll be able to talk about how I "feel" about my writing ability.

I'm starting with Kust tuli pilv? by Epp Petrone because, of all the Estonian books I own, this has been the easiest one for me to try reading in the past.  I have attempted to read it previously, so it's not completely new to me, but I never *read* it in an "I know what those words actually mean" kind of way.  More of a "I've scanned it, recognised a few words and used the pictures to fill in the blanks in a hap-hazard fashion" kind of way.

My study is somewhat limited by the fact that my library is somewhat limited.  I can only use the books I have access to, and I live in regional Australia.  I'm going to order a few more books by the same author so I can at least do the "proper" Narrow Reading thing to an extent.

My ultimate goal is to magically keep this up as I progress through the books in my collection and get to longer works like Kunksmoor by Aino Pervik and Nukitsamees by Oskar Luts.  With the longer works, I'll have to think strategically about how I'm going to divide the books into sections and how many sections I'll reread before starting a new section, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

It may take some time.