Jubilation

I’m ready to party. But I’m not really a party animal. Not any more. But I can see how you would want to go out and celebrate on a Friday night after getting three assignments completed, as well as preparing a tutorial paper.

In fact I feel jubilant. Like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Of course there are now different, larger weights lining up, but at least this weekend I can relax a little.

We had an interesting exercise this morning: – write a news story using – a dog – a young man – a car – a mother. There were some interesting and creative stories, but I didn’t get a chance to read out mine – so here it is:

“Young man bitten by dog. Rescued by mother in a car.”

There. Short and simple. It is not really much of a news story, more like a plot, or a headline. But it got me thinking. In fact it got me thinking intertextually; because, just like you must be doing – I’ve been reading a lot of theory lately. So: what exactly is a dog, a young man, a car and a mother? What are they? What makes them what they are? What do they really represent? You cannot drive the word ‘car” and the word ‘dog’ will not bark at you.

The choices offered in this exercise are all nouns, these protagonists have roles in our story, they represent the ‘characters’, but we have to provide our own verbs, and embellishments. It is these verbs that will provide the spheres of action that our characters will move in and alter the equilibrium that existed before these actions.

The word ‘by’ informs who did the biting and rescuing; the word ‘in’ tells us where the sphere of action exists.

Our young boy becomes the princess, the dog is the villain and the mother is the hero. The car, is it just a prop or is the car really the helper?

These verbs, in my story, are ‘bitten’ and ‘rescued’; biting disrupts the equilibrium, which is restored by the rescue. (And everyone lived happily ever after.)

On myuni a thread has been started with an interesting question, to do with binary oppositions like good and evil or black and white shaping the narrative. How do good and evil shape my news story? Biting is evil, rescuing is good.

But maybe the biting was accidental, or the boy was hurting the dog and the young boy died in hospital from something else he caught there, or the mother was such a bad driver that she had an accident and he died. Then the biting might be good and the rescue might transform into something evil.

I am reminded of a skit from the Goon Show, you all know Spike Milligan and the Goons? Que? It goes something like this:

“Shut up, you – or I’ll hit you with a picture of a hammer!”

“Oh! Here’s a picture of five pounds, go away!”

Time to go and turn myself into a party animal. Where’s the coffee? Goodnight from the blogloft.

PS: Please have a listen to Dungle Concerto by Silicon Strings and let me know what you think. Silicon Strings play classical music with a techno influence, just click the play button on the player in the right column.