So, can twitter and book club work?
We found out on Wednesday when the NSW Writers' Centre Book Club kicked off on twitter. It was hectic but a lot of fun. I was a bit worried no one would turn up, but we ended up with enough people to have me head down at the keyboard typing responses and trying to keep up.
There were some thoughtful questions and it was challenging to come up with answers that were cogent and short. It really makes you think about the heart and soul of an answer without any of the caveats, waffle or padding.
If you want to have a read then the twitterstream can be found here. You don't have to have a twitter account to look - it opens up just like an ordinary web page. Click on the bottom link to older tweets to get the full discussion.
An interesting morning before the bookclub - I sat in on a session with some very, very, very smart architects presenting papers on their forensic architecture case studies in Beirut as part of an intensive workshop they were doing with Eyal Weizman Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London. Weizman was also giving a series of lectures titled Political Plastic at UTS.
Why was an ex-cop, crime writing, part time librarian in that room?
Well, the idea was to listen to the papers and offer feedback from the perspective of a cop, on evidence gathering, compiling a brief, considering material evidence. It was fascinating, however I suspect I got more out of it than the students got out of me. It was one of those situations where I spent the rest of the day (between tweeting) thinking "Oh, I shoulda said that" .....
Quite a week, working with High School English students and MCing a Get Reading event on Monday at GleeBooks, discovering a whole new and exciting area of research and a new way to talk about books on Wednesday.
Meanwhile back at the ranch ...... an academic book chapter to wrestle through its third (and please final edit) then I can get stuck into the final section of Book 2 draft 1.
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