American based Indian author Salman Rushdie says he is struggling to write again, following a violent attack in August 2022, in a New Yorker article by David Remnick:
At this meeting and in subsequent conversations, I sensed conflicting instincts in Rushdie when he replied to questions about his health: there was the instinct to move on — to talk about literary matters, his book, anything but the decades-long fatwa and now the attack — and the instinct to be absolutely frank. “There is such a thing as P.T.S.D., you know,” he said after a while. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”
Entries are open for the 2023 Val Vallis Award for an unpublished poem, until Sunday 26 February 2023. Named in honour of late Queensland poet, lecturer, and opera critic Valentine Vallis, who died in 2009, the award recognises unpublished works, by Australian poets, of no more than eighty lines.
Dan Hogan, a poet based on the NSW Central Coast, won the 2022 award with a work titled Aduantas.
Update: the 2023 award winner was named on Tuesday 2 May 2023.
We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways — and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.
But you’ll need to use Edge, the browser Microsoft has been relentless foisting onto Windows users, for the copilot to function. A cunning way if ever there was one to boost market share of the Edge browser. Now did someone at Microsoft think of coupling the AI powered version of Bing with Edge, or did ChatGPT make that suggestion?
Tasmania based Australian author Robbie Arnott, has been longlisted in the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, for his 2022 novel, Limberlost. Established in 2006, the Dylan Thomas Prize recognises the best published English language literary work, written by an author aged 39 or under, globally.
The shortlist will be announced on Thursday 23 March 2023, with the winner being named at the awards ceremony on Thursday 11 May 2023.
Another reason to add Limberlost to your TBR list.
The same research shows 1995 to be the worst on record for Hottest 100 danceability, though a steady rise follows thereafter. This can likely be attributed to the greater presence of electronica and dance music in countdowns from the late nineties onwards, as those genres began to flourish.
The winning track — Flume’s Say Nothing, featuring MAY-A — was also the least-dancey track to win the countdown since Muse’s six-minute, prog rock epic Knights of Cydonia in 2007. Data also shows that the average tempo of the 2022 Hottest 100 was the second-fastest on record since counting began back in 1993.
At this stage the drop in Hottest 100 song danceability looks more like a blip. The long term trend shows a rise, even if 2022 danceability is markedly lower than the peak recorded in 2019.
I was the first person in my Indigenous family to be counted as human under Australian law. Let me say that again. When I was born I was the first person in my Indigenous family to be counted human under Australian law.
Also, it seems hard to believe from the third decade of the twenty-first century that less than ten years separate 2001: A Space Odyssey and the first Star Wars film.
By 2025 Australia will have a poet laureate, who will presumably be selected and appointed by the proposed Writers Australia peak body. As with many aspects of the National Culture Policy which was unveiled last Monday though, details remain thin on the ground for now.
For instance, how long would an incumbent serve, and what exactly would their role be? Poetry, certainly in Australia, is a niche form of literature, given less than five percent of the population chooses to partake of written rhyme, so one of the mandates of an Australian poet laureate would be to bolster interest in local poetry.
“An Australian poet laureate would elevate the status of Australian poetry domestically and internationally,” Holland-Batt says. “Australian literature can struggle on the world stage so there would be a soft diplomacy element to it.” She said the laureate would be an advocate for Australia and Australian writing and the benefits would be beyond only poetry. “It would be a big boost for Australian literature to have someone with that authority invested by the state.”
“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note. It took TikTok about nine months after its global launch to reach 100 million users and Instagram 2-1/2 years, according to data from Sensor Tower.
ChatGPT is going to change the world, and everyone wants a piece of the action.
