Spring is in the air!

The end of week 3 and the start of week 4 and this weekend Rose (my wife) and I planted some Waratahs in our bush garden… a great weekend for planting given the off and on deluges! Then today we caught the first boronias in flower in the bush behind our place. This is the sure sign that spring is round the corner:

As we came back down our drive we were bowled over by the intensity of yellow in the decurrens wattle overhanging our garden… it is actually not a pure-bred native plant but comes from further out west ( I think )… but with a colour like that it can stay:

I spent a lot of today catching up with the Chicago Conference which left me with a bag full of notes and ideas. I have processed these now and am keen to share some of the ideas and tools that came my way. One of the best tools was http://del.icio.us/ which is an extraordinary tool for bookmarking and keeping track of all your internet bookmarks. You can actually tag them all keeping a list of words that will help you find them… try it- it is pretty amazing. Then if you are interested in working with videos on-line check out: youtube http://www.youtube.com/ and vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/ (this will convert video to flash). Also there are some claims that the ultimate Web writing handbook is http://writeclick.com/. If you are interested in education resources in humanities, education and elsewhere it is worth checking out MERLOT: http://www.merlot.org. You can also find good, free web-site creation software at http://www.nvu.org.
I shan’t confuse you with anymore at this stage.
Summary of last week: fantastic session with Megan Heyward… already covered. Her publisher Mark Bernstein from Eastgate Publishing is visiting Sydney in September and I may get to see him. Check out his blog at: http://markbernstein.org/.
In Twentieth Century Literature we meandered through the sordid world of Heart of Darkness and looked into the hearts of some of the First World War poets. This was a great session because it drew attention to the ways in which the impact of the war experience produced a new kind of language… something more immediate and real, hard hitting and less sentimental. War in this instance drew out the best from those who had to endure it!
In William Blake: Visionary Poetry… we watched a fantastic doco on Blake’s Radical Vision- political and mystical. It had clips in it from a whole cast of some of the great Blake enthusiasts: his biographer Peter Ackroyd; Kathleen Rayne, the world’s preeminent Blake scholar and a fine poet herself… great session…. and we (third year and I) are amicably working out how to make the wheels of the Blake “cart” run more smoothly…will keep you posted on this one!
Ciao… see you all during the week.
MG