Goodbye to Twitter

For the last two or three years I’ve opened the day with coffee and Twitter.

Well, email first, and the weather and then the familiar feeds from trusted sources I’ve carefully curated over the years.

News from the Guardian, BBC, the ABC, the Saturday Paper and then links and insights from authors I trust, colleagues, former colleagues, ex-students.

I kept my reading selective, used a twitter client called Tweetbot that got rid of the ads and didn’t see a lot of hate.

But that’s been changing, and the whole experience has felt a lot less stable under new ownership. Increasingly, I felt less and less comfortable with the idea of participating in Twitter and passively endorsing where it seems to be going.

So, like a lot of people, it seems, I’ve moved over to a smaller, more decentralised version that can’t be bought by a megalomaniacal billionaire. Mastodon, specifically the zirk.us server. You can find me there at @warrick_w@zirk.us

Web Work

I spent some time today in tidying up my poetry page and finally grabbing the warrickwynnepoetry.com domain name that WordPress promised me when I went from the ad-free version of that site earlier this year. So, as well as warrickwynnepoetry.wordpress.com I now have warrickwynnepoetry.com

I’ve made the ‘books’ clearer on that site too , with an individual page not only for the three print books but also for two Kindle only editions and the new selected poems (The Other World) I published earlier this year.

I also plan to do another Kindle only electronic chapbook edition of poems about my first trip to Europe with the family, in 1993, early in the new year. More on that later!

Finally, I’ve tinkered a little with my Amazon Author Page to make sure that it’s all working and that the blog posts made here are reflected on that page to keep it topical. Below is what the Amazon page looks like.

Next thing for me is working out my annual Book of the Year awards; always a challenge and always a nice signifier of the end of the year. I don’t think I’ll quite make my goal of 40 books read this year, but I’m looking forward to revisiting what I read, and what I enjoyed most. I’ll post that list here soon. Meanwhile, click through to READING on this page for a quick summary of all the previous winners or check out the warrickwynnepoetry site if you’d like to dig deeper on my favourite books over the last eighteen years!

Walden

I was lucky enough to visit Walden Pond on a trip to the USA over ten years ago now, in a time when travelling overseas seemed a normal thing that one might aspire to. It was a pilgrimage of place, to the place that inspired Thoreau in his life and writing.

You can read a bit more about that trip on my earlier post HERE

I was reminded of all this by this short film I came across, just called Walden, a Ewers Brothers Production with input from Ken Burns and narrated by Robert Redford. I enjoyed it on a rainy late winter morning. You might too.

You can read more about Walden HERE

Weebly Site

I’ve been looking recently at new possibilities for a web site and/or blog space. I like WordPress, but the ads not so much, and I can’t get it to look as I’d like sometimes. My latest foray is moving my poetry page to Weebly. I looked at whether that was possible and it’s not, so in the meantime they’ll stay here. But you can take a look at the new site here: https://warrickwynne.weebly.com

Australian Poetry Library

I’ve had a long held dream to promote some means for teachers to get hold of contemporary Australian poetry, for classroom use, and this week I learned that the Australian Poetry Library was attempting to do just that.

Funded by the Australian Copyright Agency, there’s none of my poetry there, but there is a pretty good range of poets with extensive range of poems: 1600 from Les Murray, over 700 from Peter Porter, nearly 500 p oems from Diane Fahey. Downloading is a little clunky (PDF by PayPal) and maybe they might have been better going for a broader spread of poets (they’ve closed the site to new poems I see) and spent a little more time on better searching, but it’s a pretty impressive start.

Lit Maps

One of the things that interested me about the Sebald film I saw last week was the mapping and the way that one of the researchers was plotting the Sebald walk on something that looked a lot like Google Maps. I liked the idea, and had already been toying around with the idea of mapping some of my poems and where they are set; a bit like the way Instagram is now mapping photos you upload.

In my looking around I can see there are quite a few projects that are into mapping literary places: for tourists who want to walk the walks of Wordsworth (like I do!), for historians, for students and teachers and just for the fans. 

One interesting one is Google Lit Trips, a nice tool for teaching some literature.