Open-Learning Workshops

Abstract

MorningAdvice to a novelistSupply the characters of the story with a set of travel-brochures, then let them talk amongst themselves. NB: Your characters must always be vastly more intelligent than you are. This puts you immediately above critical notice. Buy a sheep dog and avoid blondes at cocktail parties. A sober, disgruntled approach to the reading public is advisable. Short bursts of articulate invective highly recommended. Take up darts.Advice to a poetDon't take the whole business too seriously. Adopt long-distance walking as a hobby. Don't become a typographical cowboy or you will be mistaken for a sign-writer. Guard against becoming a funambulist sans balancing pole. Failure means you are one step away from becoming a successful copywriter. Success means you are one step closer to never having to write another lousy word.Advice to a playwrightInvite all those detestable people in your circle to first night. Then leave alone by taxi for the nearest nightclub. This will prepare you for the morning review notice. Structure your dialogue as you would a scaffold: vocal pictographs around an imagined community of individuals. Discard long monologues about the world gone to hell. All people want to do is get home safely. The more avant-garde your play the better; the audience loves nostalgia. Acts are for the apostles.Advice to a performance artistAdmit defeat in the face of rap-take up line dancing. Train as a CD ROM/DVD salesperson. Personality-plus has replaced everything. Television / and interactive media are the magnetic pole of achievement You are a neo- vaudevillist in a cyber-dream. To be taken at face value is recognition. To be taken under contract to endorse a product is out there. In your profession this is the pinnacle of success. Retire into the Talking Books Business. Advice to a landscape painterIgnore the existing mytho/historical landscape that you have either inherited, or migrated to. You are Adam. Nothing can be created without the imposition of your unique will. Size is important and affirms to the viewer's eye that you are a monumentalist in breadth and neo-classicist in scope. They fail to see that you are a dedicated billboard artist. One day you will move to Las Vegas.Advice to a linguistLanguage? Hardly. Hair-bound words slavering at the mouth's cave. Speech clubbed to falsehood. Why is this so? Listen to Production's moist purr that blocks the way back. To where? No sacred groves remain to ask in. Get a job as a taxi driver in a third-world country. Storerooms are regarded as primordial, sacred places.Advice to an English lecturerYour future lies with the private sector. Stage dinner parties for book reviewers. Court publishers as your intermediate friends. Start up a literary magazine with an east European bias and nominate yourself as a cultural commissar. This is your birthright. Push pet critical theories through other writers. Culture = Power = exclusivity. You are a cultural supremacist whose root cause is self-loathing and hatred. Join the local Press Club.AfternoonAdvice to a philologistConverse with tramps. Record the patois of those who prefer to live under viaducts as opposed to storm-water drains. For a location guide consult your local Centrelink unemployment center. Avoid detention camps. The language of the tin-cup tapped out on bars in high security prisons is central to your understanding of visualizing primitive speech patterns. Read George Borrow's Lavengro. Move into a housing estate.Advice to a medievalistLecture Notes: Catholic church as living reliquary of medievalism. Opulence continues to flagrantly contradict each new interpretation of modernism and contemporary thought. Catholic authority prevails as anachronism. The last stand of medieval land-baron mentality in an IT world. The website viewed as religious icon and new covenant.Advice to homepage designerYou are the modern equivalent of the sandwich-board man and the world is your pavement. …