I joined Twitter last week, Thursday, as mentioned at the end of the last blog post. I had this idea that I wasn’t going to be micro-blogging every few minutes, like when I changed the TV channel or got a cup of tea. Well three days and 50 tweets later I realised how easy it is to get sucked in. I had to rein it in as I realised that I wouldn’t get anything else done at all. The twatter addiction wreaked havoc with my facebook page once I’d found the app that automatically sent the tweets to fb, and I almost forgot to post a popandcrisps blog this week. What with a major deadline today for my PhD progression report, I really should not have been twatting around on the internet. But that seems to be a pattern for me. The more pressure I have, the more distractions I find.
[Diversion to Tadpole Art]
Also this week as mentioned briefly last post, I have been indulging in some new art. Inspired by the tadpoles (now living in a <==lovely habitat in shade on the patio), I began some ‘dotty pictures’ as Alys calls them. It was her that developed this technique a few years ago and I wanted to have a go at it but never got around. She had read that Australian Aborigine art is made with points of sticks rather than brushes, so she uses the ‘wrong’ end of a paintbrush to do the dots.
Using basic emulsion paints in bright coloured tester pots, she made an amazing moon phases design for a magical board and this week she decided to do another one. As the table was already set up for make’n’do, I dug out a blank wooden box from my art trunk and decided to join in.
I took photos as I was going along so will be posting them to my website in a ‘how to make a frog box’ page on my website art section once I’ve got around to it. It is tadpole inspired in part because the tadpoles were the first things I dotted and also because they are a little bit dotty themselves. Aboriginal art uses the natural world as inspiration: plants, animals, mountains, moon and sun etc. I have a lovely crocodile pic on a bag, which I bought in Amsterdam, so frogs seemed appropriate.
Once the box was done, I had got addicted to the hypnotic effect of dotting (and the welcome distraction from stress of progression report) and searched my brain for other things to dot. Walking the dog by the river I saw piles of flat stones and struck lightening. It’s become something of a production line as this pic below will demonstrate.
I will be varnishing these before putting them outside in the cobbles on the new patio, and saving some for gifts for friends who appreciate home-made presents.
Now The Boy has joined in with his own designs. I love sitting at the table working on some art with The Boy. He talks to me about stuff and it’s nice family time. No stress.
There is something relaxing and meditative about the repetitive dotting. It reminds me a bit of knitting, and the end results look a bit like knitting too, don’t you think? If you squint.
[Back to PhD]
So this week has been a round of dotting and tweeting while one row of dots dry, doing a bit more of my report (and a paper I have to write as well) and back to dotting. My paper, and the majority of my progression report, is about the study I ran this year on the dream-lag theory. This is related to very interesting phenomena whereby events that happen during your day become incorporated into your dreams in a ‘day residue’ effect – noted by Freud. But some events (and there are various theories about why these are different) don’t pop up in your dreams until a few days or a week later – noted by Jouvet. If there is something you’re learning and particularly if it is a practical concentrated task, then dreaming about it might actually improve your performance. This is the nucleus of my PhD topic.
If you’re interested in this then the people to read up are Jouvet (in French but there are translations), Nielsen and Stickgold. There is one study by Stickgold et al that struck me because he used Tetris as the task, and as I was addicted to Tetris years ago and it did pop up in my dreams so this seems very relevant. I also remember dreaming about knitting when I was knitter obsessed at around the 13-16 age and was churning out a jumper in a week. There was no internetz back then and I needed something to do with my hands that was socially acceptable!
I have been dreaming about Twitter since Tuesday night, but have not yet remembered a dream with dotting. Will ponder the significance of this if/when dotting appears in my dreams. And wonder about whether twitting is different to dotting and in what ways.
So the report as I said is due today, and I’m presenting to my progression board in a couple of weeks. I haven’t submitted it yet as I’m waiting for feedback from my supervisor on the draft I emailed to him at around 11.10 last night (once I had finally stopped twattering and dotting and realised that I just had to write the bloody thing). Then I was back on twitter again for one last tweet and listening to The Menstruator’s padcast which was strangely soothing, but not recommended for anyone who is easily offended.
[Diversion to Female Genitalia]
Twitter has increased the number of times I use the word twat exponentially as it is not a word I am accustomed to using. Don’t get me wrong – I am happily offensive with regard to women’s genitalia but prefer the C word as it causes much more offence (though also blocks websites hence my euphemism when writing). I am interested in etymology and note that the C word was not offensive 400 years ago but as easy as pussy is now, and even appears in Shakespeare. Quim was the offensive word of choice back then, and it has all but disappeared from modern mouths, for shame! It does pop up every now and then, and is in Joyce’s Ulysses according to wiktionary. I first heard of quim because there was a magazine of that name edited by Lulu Belliveau and I submitted a story to it, which was published in The Common Denominator (which Lulu also edited) in 1996.
But why am I offensive about women’s genitalia, surely as a lesbian I should be loving and gentle (and all those other things that I’m not going to blog about for fear of blockings)? Of course I am, but when I say I’m offensive, I mean that people hearing me are offended, as people often are offended at the very thought of a lesbian (unashamed living among us!) and my mere existence may be offensive, and *shock* that I may speak openly about genitalia. Twat to that. Dick, prick, pillock, plonker… I could go on but would rather not, are all mildly offensive banter insults yet any reference to women’s bits is Not Polite. And what a lot of people don’t realise is that the word vagina, which as the medical term is what a lot of people use when they are absolutely forced to discuss their bits, is derived from a Latin vulgar expression meaning ‘place to sheath your sword’. As I said to the lovely Sky Arts woman in the tent at Hay last week, while explaining quim as my favourite word, words have this nasty little habit of changing over time.
So yes I am using twat, twatt and twatter often when referring to twitter just because it’s fun to do and for no other reason. I can’t lay claim to the invention of this although I did come up with it all by myself. Once I started using it as an alternative to twitter, I noticed that there are other people already doing that, The Lesbian Mafia being one (although listening to Sandi, it sounds like ‘twot’). I don’t use twat as an insult or threat, like people say ‘he’s a twat’ or ‘I’m going to twat you’ because that is offensive to twats. I’m more likely to say that I’m twatting around like I say fannying around, meaning that I’m faffing or jumping from one thing to another and not really doing anything, which seems appropriate for twitter. But may be offensive to women’s genitalia? Does this imply that they’re not really doing anything? Oh dear, I will have to think about that. *sigh* language use is such a a trickster.
[Back to Twitter]
But what am I twattering on about? I’m not telling everyone what I’m doing all the time but a lot of things going through my mind get tweeted. And I hadn’t realised how compelled I would be to answer other people’s twittering and retweet (when you repeat something that someone else has twittered). People are retweeting my tweets now as well, which does feel good. I also discovered these hashtags after reading the lovely Stephen Fry’s advice and am dutifully posting #followmestephen at least once per day until he sees it and follows me. The thing about following is that it does seem as if a lot of people are on there just to recruit followers. Like with Facebook and Myspace, there’s a popularity contest thing that goes on with people feeling more important if they’ve got a lot of followers. That’s not the reason I’m recruiting followers, I’m one of the people who want to publicise my wares and thinking that this way I will reach more potential purchasers of my book or maybe even a film director who will option it or someone famous who will give me some promotion.
[Selective Following]
I have various theories already on how to best filter for quality follows. First off I followed all the famous people I’m a fan of, so Ellen (2nd most popular twatter it appears), Pink, Terry Pratchett, and my darling Stephen Fry. Then I picked up on loads of LGBT and news feeds to pander to my on-the-button habit and then went after literary people: Penguin, Faber Books and other publishers and small presses like Pocket Books, book-review groups and other websites, newspapers like The Guardian, radio shows like The Today Programme. To see more of any of these, check my tweets for today as I’ve been linking to them.
I found this place called Twitpipe which is amazing. To any internetz junkie just go there to see the sweetshop even if you’re not a tweep (twitter user) because it will hook you with the realtime refreshes. So you type in a word or phrase to one or all of three boxes and it gives you all the tweets currently being tweeted about that. This way I found a load of lesbian book readers to follow. Watching all three flow is like sitting in the foyer at the BBC Wales headquaters in Llandaf watching all the channels on a row of muted TVs. Hypnotic. Wefollow is another useful site where you can go and add yourself with three tags, then search on people using tags. A bit annoying that you can’t search on more than one tag, e.g. lesbian+writer. That would be a good suggestion for an upgrade.
Today is #FollowFriday and I feel compelled to promote my followers. And hope that they return the favour. Tweeps (or twps as I affectionately call them, this being the Welsh for slightly dimwitted) have a tendency to automatically follow you if you follow them, so following these lesbian book lovers got me a few more followers and perhaps potential readers. I notice my number of followers jumping up and down and up again as people follow me and then unfollow me and more people follow me. Perhaps they follow me automatically and then realise that they don’t want me after all when they see my blurb or my tweets. I try not to be too much of a sheep with it and will follow people who follow me only if they look interesting. I initially got a lot of follows from people trying to sell things and porn inevitability and blocked some of these. But I’ve started getting follows from relevant people who’ve obviously seen me following others or seen my tweeps and think I’m interesting. I just got an unsolicited follow from HarperCollinsUK so obvs I am a worthwhile person after all (lol). They probably followed me from seeing me following other publishers. But are we all following each other around in circles?
[Connected]
I started following the people who were following the famous people, but this got tedious. I noticed that a lot of famous people (darling Stephen Fry excepted) tend to follow less people than they had followers so that made me wonder, who are these famous people following? So I went onto who Ellen follows and found a whole load more famous people! Woot. I am not a famous person junkie or anything but I have my favourite celebs, usually authors, musicians, artists or someone who is actually talented rather than being famous-for-being-famous, and it’s nice to have tweets from them streaming past me, makes me feel more connected. And that’s the point of twitter, the feeling connected. Because it’s all about interactivity now isn’t it?
It is not only teens and tweens riding this wave, as with blogging there are a fair number of mature tweeters with things to say about the world and how we may change it. I checked out #hackedu via the Time Magazine article which has a lot to say about comfort social networking as well as the ability for conference ideas to disseminate in real time. Although currently #hackedu is all twps twittering about how they followed it because Time told them to, so not quite sure whether I’ll be able to find any actual stimulating education discussion among all the twpsin.
[Literary]
And it’s not just the bite-sized info, there is also a fair amount of literariness, such as Twitter Haiku. I was inspired to try and write a twitter novel, seeing as you get blooks now maybe there could be a twook? (That is another annoying twatter habit: the propensity to make up new words that begin with tw.) But then I found out that the twitter novel has already been done, several times. I have tried the Very Short Story whereby you have to write a story within one tweet (140 characters inc spaces) and add the #vss hashtag (so in fact it’s 135 characters). That’s fun, my latest one is: They narrowly escape tragic death. After the celebrations they begin to disappear one by one. Only I survive, but is it me killing them? #vss I do wonder though whether that is more of a premise/blurb than a story. But like I said, it’s fun and it gets my writer-juices flowing.
[Back to PhD and close]
I have now heard back from my supervisor and submitted my report. Huzzah! Yip-yip-yip *dancing around the living room*. *falls over exhausted* I always forget how much it takes out of me.
Well I’d better sign off as this has become TEH LONGEST BLOG POST EVA. Perhaps this is due to the 140 restriction I’ve been under this week. I am editing with some sub-headings to make it easier to read. Congratulations to anyone who waded through the whole lot. I admire your devotion to my outpourings.
One last thing to say: I am definitely not joining that second life thing. I am already far too busy in my first life.
Filed under: PhD, Pop&Crisps, Writing, blogging, life, media
