Hi Alphas,
Welcome to Alphaday 9. Here in the northern hemisphere the creative juices of spring are definitely stirring and nature is busy and full of promise (although sometimes hiding these virtues behind stormy clouds). It’s quite a contagious feeling and I hope we all catch it – including those of you outside its range.
Additional creative inspiration can be found in today’s Alphaday agenda that’s been prepared with your diligent help. It will find its way to your inbox some time today and of course everything is tailor-made especially for you.
Here’s the Alphaday 9 agenda:
- This bulletin from me
- The results of the music journalism challenge from Chris
- The collated entries for the poetry challenge from me
- The brief for challenge 9 from Stephen
- The Writers’ Reads column from Morgen
- The Log news from Sally
- A showcase piece from Suzanne IF somebody has kindly offered us such a treat
We’ve just demonstrated our journalistic skills as commissioned by a popular music magazine. The Alphaday agenda, I think, actually provides our own private rag where we contribute in the style we think suitable for the Alpha readership. It’s lively, informative and Alpha-friendly.
General news:
Umberto Eco died the day after our last Alphaday. Some time later a French TV channel showed the film of The Name of the Rose followed by a long interview with Eco recorded some time ago.
He chatted away in a lively and engaging manner and one of the anecdotes he related was how he came to write The Name of the Rose. He was an influential academic and had a long line of publications behind him on medievalism and semiotics. Then one day he told his publisher he wanted to write a novel. What genre would be best? The publisher suggested a crime thriller as they were very popular. Eco considered this briefly, then said he’d write a crime thriller set in a monastery in the 14th century. The publisher said that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, but Eco went home and started planning it. He said it was the ideal setting for a crime thriller. He mentioned that the English word for this was a ‘Whodunit’ and that was precisely the question everyone wanted answered on the secular as well as on the spiritual level. We need to know Whodunit? Who is the perpetrator who created the world, and who is responsible for the strange things that happen in it? His setting and his novel would explore these questions.
I rather like that.
Christine