{"id":1107,"date":"2022-04-07T09:42:57","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T08:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:42:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T08:42:59","slug":"season-xviii-alphaday-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/season-xviii-alphaday-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Season XVIII &#8211; Alphaday 11"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hi Alphas,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welcome to Alphaday 11, Season XVIII. This is the last full Alphaday agenda before our annual break; the three remaining Alphadays will be spent winding up \u2018matters in hand\u2019 and assessing the season to see how we should plan the way ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right now, however, we have plenty of writerly treats prepared for us by the busy hands (and heads) of this Alphaday\u2019s team \u2013 as they dish out all the goodies provided by everyone, including a full workload of the type we enjoy. No holidays for Alphas just yet with an agenda like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>This bulletin from me<\/li><li>A call for contributions for the Open Page 3<sup>rd<\/sup> edition from Ros<\/li><li>The collated entries for the \u2018Thank you letter\u2019 challenge from Morgen<\/li><li>The results and feedback for the \u2018Fill the gap\u2019 challenge from Cat<\/li><li>A call for contributions for this season\u2019s final Alpha Log from Phil<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>No particular <strong>Alpha News. <\/strong>As far as I can see Gmail has stopped interfering with my emails, so that\u2019s good news \u2026 However<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the <strong>general news <\/strong>is dominated by the brutalities of war, and our civilised society is not well equipped to deal with that. We can turn our backs on the perpetrators, exclude them from our society, help the survivors, but we can\u2019t stop the destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here\u2019s an anecdote. A long time ago I was proudly showing off the rockery to my \u2013 then \u2013 mother-in-law. When we got to the corner by some steps, she pointed a condemning finger and said, \u201cThat\u2019s a weed.\u201d &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To me the periwinkle was perfect: evergreen groundcover and full of pretty blue flowers from the earliest days of spring. It stayed on as a much-loved part of the rockery community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those with authority and condemning powers have already done far too much weeding in our culture. The latest I heard was that a university weeded out \u2018colonialist\u2019 Jane Austen and replaced her with Toni Morrison. Shouldn\u2019t they both be on the syllabus?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Russian literature, music and art have an important place in our world\u2019s culture. Wouldn\u2019t it be wrong to rip all that out for political reasons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wagner was dead long before Hitler was born. Yet his music was maligned because Hitler liked it. Wagner has since been \u2018forgiven\u2019 (more or less), but his name has now again been smeared by an army of brutal, Russian mercenaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oscar Wilde was for a while classed as a dangerous weed \u2013 along with many others. Milton wrote political propaganda for the Puritan Roundheads without serious consequences, whereas Solzhenitsyn spent nine years in a Gulag labour camp for criticising Stalin in a private letter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What would Christmas be like without the Nutcracker Suite? As for Putin, I suppose , \u201cHe\u2019s a real fruit and nut case, tra-la-la\u201d and I admire \u2018Crime and Punishment\u2019 immensely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let\u2019s look after our cultural treasures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Christine&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Alphas, Welcome to Alphaday 11, Season XVIII. This is the last full Alphaday agenda before our annual break; the three remaining Alphadays will be spent winding up \u2018matters in hand\u2019 and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphaday-bulletins","tag-alphaday-bulletins-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}