The creative industry operates largely by holding ‘creative’ people ransom to their own self-image, precarious sense of self-worth, and fragile – if occasionally out of control ego. We tend to set ourselves impossibly high standards, and are invariably our own toughest critics. Satisfying our own lofty demands is usually a lot harder than appeasing any client, who in my experience tend to have disappointingly low expectations. Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go…
London Met hit with huge admissions fall.
London Metropolitan University has seen a large drop in numbers after losing its licence to sponsor overseas students.
Figures seen by the BBC show as well as a fall in numbers of students from outside the UK, there has also been a decline in the number of domestic students.
So far in the current academic year the university has less than half the number of students it had the previous year.
Source: London Evening Standard.
I’m in this. Poetry Salzburg Review. They love me, apparently.
Some poems and a review of my last book, Spyglass Over The Lagoon (The Knives Forks And Spoons Press). I don’t know what’s in the review since I haven’t received my contributor’s copy but I ‘ve been told it’s highly complimentary. More later.
The Poetry Hit – Pocket Venus 3/277 (your dose of spoken poetry).
Third of The Poetry Hits from Pocket Venus, your dose of spoken poetry: here.
The Poetry Hit – Pocket Venus 3/261
Second in the series at Audioboo here.
A hazard of new fortunes: a review of Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems
WITHIN THE CAMERA FRAME we see a block of text the size of the Empire State Building smashing its way through lower Manhattan. A writhing tangle of poetic lines reaches out and grabs a pedestrian reader, lances a billboard, and masticates a movie theater playing MI3: Ghost Protocol. A member of the graduate faculty averse to dealing with texts she can’t explicate, contextualize, psychoanalyze, or deconstruct runs into the frame, turns to the camera, and gives a piercing scream. It’s the Attack of the Difficult Poems!
Source: Joshua Weiner in Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Poetry Hit – Pocket Venus 3/256
Literature is becoming data.
In 2002, on a Friday, Larry Page began to end the book as we know it. Using the 20 percent of his time that Google then allotted to its engineers for personal projects, Page and Vice-President Marissa Mayer developed a machine for turning books into data. The original was a crude plywood affair with simple clamps, a metronome, a scanner, and a blade for cutting the books into sheets. The process took 40 minutes. The first refinement Page developed was a means of digitizing books without cutting off their spines — a gesture of tender-hearted sentimentality towards print. The great disbinding was to be metaphorical rather than literal. A team of Page-supervised engineers developed an infrared camera that took into account the curvature of pages around the spine. They resurrected a long dormant piece of Optical Character Recognition software from Hewlett-Packard and released it to the open-source community for improvements. They then crowd-sourced textual correction at a minimal cost through a brilliant program called reCAPTCHA, which employs an anti-bot service to get users to read and type in words the Optical Character Recognition software can’t recognize. (A miracle of cleverness: everyone who has entered a security identification has also, without knowing it, aided the perfection of the world’s texts.) Soon after, the world’s five largest libraries signed on as partners. And, more or less just like that, literature became data.
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books.
Erasmus endangered?
Reply
Advocates of international education are ringing alarm bells about a €90 million shortfall in the Erasmus budget. Erasmus, a European Union program, provides grants for students to study or work outside their home countries in one of 33 participating nations (the 27 member states of the European Union, plus Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey). More than 231,000 students received grants in 2010-11, with the average award being a modest €250.The most popular destinations were Spain, France and Germany.
Source: Inside Higher Ed.
Listen to Finnegan’s Wake – it’s easier than trying to read it.
All of it on Ubuweb.