Time is running out

Fun Fact of the Day: “Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later” (http://www.tealdragon.net). “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Do you agree?

Topic: Time

Time limits our freedom or helps us be organized ... Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects. The temporal position of events with respect to the transitory present is continually changing; events happen, then are located further and further in the past. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars. A simple definition states that "time is what clocks measure".

1. The word “time” has multiple meanings. What comes to your mind when you hear this word? How do you spend your time currently? Is there anything you wish you could change about time spent? Do you feel like you waste time on certain activities and don’t have enough for others? Do you ever have to “kill time”? How?

2. Do you like to stick to a routine or are you more spontaneous? How important is organizing time and following a schedule to you? What are the positives and negatives of these actions?

 3. How important is it to you to be on time for something? What kind of message do you think it sends if you arrive somewhere early or late? Can punctuality or a tendency to be late sometimes lead to conflict or problems?

 4. Can we really manage time or does time manage us? Do we create our routines and schedules based on time, or a lack thereof, or does time limit our actions?

 5. Do you think people have different perceptions and uses of time here in Ukraine and in America? Do you think Americans are too obsessed with time?

 6. If you could pick a different time or age to live in, what would you choose and why? Would you rather go to a more simple time in the past or an unknown period in the future? How would you spend your time? Where would you go if you had tons of time to spare?

 Schedule:

Saturday 14 January at 10:30

Thursday 19 January at 5:30

This Day in History: Jack London in his Art of Creativity (January 12)

On this day, Jack London, the illegitimate son of an astrologer father and a spiritualist mother, is born in San Francisco.

Jack London Credo

London's literary executor, Irving Shepard, quoted a Jack London Credo in an introduction to a 1956 collection of London stories:
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

I shall use my time.

Bio:

John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. 

London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.

Read More about Jack London:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London

http://london.sonoma.edu/

http://www.parks.sonoma.net/JLStory.html

Find More on the Shelves at the Center:

http://ia600308.us.archive.org/11/items/call_of_the_wild/call_of_the_wild_1_london_64kb.mp3

“A room without books is like a body without a soul”

"A room without books is like a body without a soul"
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa
“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
 (Goodreads)
Read More:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/242963-a-collection-of-poetry?chapter=1

"The Perfect Book" by Iviana Moop

She turns the pages,
One by one,
Sitting in that library.
It's always been there,
The library,
Stacked high with books,
All of which she has read,
One time or another.
But there's something different
About the one,
That lays on her lap,
That she now reads.

The little book,
So delicate,
So perfect,
The little book,
That will never end.
The little book that holds her dreams,
Her nightmares,
Her past,
Her future.

The little book,
Is far too perfect.    

Digital Poetry

The concept of digital creation in terms of making art & music seems straight forward enough - you use software to manipulate and/or create sounds or images in ways not possible before we had computers. How can a poet make words do more than they would if they were spoken or typed normally /http://www.poetscoop.org/dada/blog/2007/01/concept-of-digital-creation-in-terms-of.html/.

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms and on the World Wide Web or Internet.

Examples of DP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwjUfPhGvy0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KviB-Y4frHw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g7910L9iGg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXCEqhHWn0U&feature=related

A significant portion of current publications of poetry are available either only online or via some combination of online and offline publication. There are many types of 'digital poetry' such as hypertext, kinetic poetry, computer generated animation, digital visual poetry, interactive poetry, code poetry, holographic poetry (holopoetry), experimental video poetry, and poetries that take advantage of the programmable nature of the computer to create works that are interactive, or use generative or combinatorial approach to create text (or one of its states), or involve sound poetry, or take advantage of things like listservs, blogs, and other forms of network communication to create communities of collaborative writing and publication (as in poetical wikis).

Digital computers allow the creation of art that spans different media: text, images, sounds, and interactivity via programming. Contemporary poetries have, therefore, taken advantage of this toward the creation of works that synthesize both arts and media. Whether a work is poetry or visual art or music or programming is sometimes not clear, but we expect an intense engagement with language in poetical works.

Notable people:

Jean-Pierre Balpe Giselle Beiguelman Alan Bigelow Philippe Bootz E. M. de Melo e Castro John Cayley Caterina Davinio Klaus Peter Dencker Tina Escaja es:Tina Escaja Belen Gache Loss Pequeño Glazier Ladislao Pablo Györi Patrick Herron Eduardo Kac Robert Kendall Richard Kostelanetz Orit Kruglanski Rip Kungler Lello Masucci Yucef Merhi Jason Nelson Philip M. Parker Scott Ransopher Jim Rosenberg Bill Seaman Teo Spiller Stephanie Strickland Duc Thuan Gianni Toti André Vallias Paulo Aquarone site Senel Wanniarachci

Hyperfiction: What is it...

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The term can also be used to describe traditionally-published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela's La Tournée de Dios (1932), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch) are early examples predating the word "hypertext", while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks.

The first hypertext fictions were published prior to the development of the World Wide Web, using software such as Storyspace and HyperCard. Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story, first presented in 1987 and published by Eastgate Systems in 1991, is generally considered one of the first hypertext fictions. Afternoon was followed by a series of other Storyspace hypertext fictions from Eastgate Systems, including Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, its name was Penelope by Judy Malloy, (whose hyperfiction Uncle Roger was published online on Artcom Electronic Network on The WELL from 1986 to 1987) Carolyn Guyer's Quibbling, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and Deena Larsen's Marble Springs. Judy Malloy's l0ve0ne, created in 1994, was the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop.

Shelley Jackson (born 1963) is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her groundbreaking work of hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl (1995). In 2006, Jackson published her first novel, Half Life.

Born in the Philippines, Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California, where her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years; Jackson later recalled, "I was already in love with books by then....and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them!" She graduated from Berkeley High School, and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is self-described as a "student in the art of digression".

While at Brown, Jackson was taught by electronic literature advocates Robert Coover and George Landow. During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Jackson began drawing "a naked woman with dotted-line scars" in her notebook, an image she eventually expanded into her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl. Jackson later said that she never considered publishing Patchwork Girl as a print novel, explaining, 

“I guess you could say I want my fiction to be more like a world full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings. The quilt and graveyard sections [of the hypertext], where a concrete metaphor that resonates with the themes of the work creates a literary structure, satisfy me in a very corporeal way. I salivate, my fingers itch".

A  nonchronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 to acclaim; it became Eastgate's best-selling CD-ROM title and is now considered a groundbreaking work of hyperfiction."Patchwork Girl" uses tissue and scars as well as the body and the skeleton as metaphors for the juxtaposition of lexia[disambiguation needed] and link [disambiguation needed]. While working in a San Francisco, California bookstore, Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body (1997), and The Doll Games (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela.

Read More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Jackson

What are your predictions for the year 2012

You wonder what the future holds for you or what lies ahead for humanity. Will we get to see 2012 peaceful? A rogue planet, solar storms or a planetary alignment, a magnetic pole reversal on Earth? What should you expect in your private life?

You’ve got a chance to discuss the following questions with us:

Introduction Question:

 Task with Partners
- How did you meet the New Year? What was the best New Year’s   celebration of your life?

- Did you ever give/receive any nice gifts for New Year? What kind of presents are the best to give to the people you care about?

Discussion Topic: 2012

1.    What are your predictions for the year 2012? What will happen this year?

·       What new inventions will there be?
·       What will change in Ukraine?
·       Will Euro 2012 be a success?
·       What will be the most important world news stories of the year?
·       What celebrities will be the most successful this year?

2.    What changes would you like to see in your life in 2012?
·       A new job?

·       New friends/contacts?

·       A new adventure?
·       A visit to a new city or country?
·       A new hobby/language/activity?

Our Schedule

Thursday, January 12 – 17.30
Saturday, January 14 – 10.30
Visit Our Group on www.Facebook.com – English Club in Vinnytsia
English Club Blog - www.woavinnitsa.blogspot.com

The Best Book-to-Film Adaptations of 2011

'As the year 2011 winds down and we begin to look ahead to awards season, let’s take a moment to look back at the year in adaptations. And what a year it was. High drama met high-brow in more than a few book-to-film/tv adaptations, and gave us plenty of fodder for the “What’s better – the book or movie?” conversation. Herewith, in no particular order, the dozen productions from television and theaters that Word & Film considers the best of this year...'

Read More: http://www.wordandfilm.com/2011/12/12-best-book-to-film-adaptations-of-2011/