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Saturday 23 October 2010

By way of Introduction that will look shockingly naive a few months from now.

Hello there no-one as yet,

I think the best way to begin my inaugural post to the phd/ph-me-me-me experiment is do the actual work I've been assigned by my phd supervisors. Favour needs to be won at this stage, what with the specifics of the phd being as yet unannounced to anyone outside of my close friendship group, and never in a state entirely characterised by sobriety.

Briefly, the core plan is this: to investigate the practice of online textual dissemination, I am going to become the most famous writer in England & Its Associated Isles over the next three year period. I am going to do this through a strategic campaign of shameless and resolutely un-English self promotion across all online media, building networks that span the Atlantic, globe, beyond, forcibly befriending writers and artists who are doing interesting and useful things across the web.
It's intended that this weblog will be a chronicle of the Way We Read Now & Are Going To Read In the Near Future, both in an ideological, and a neurological sense.

A phd is usually a process of summation, because it is extraordinarily difficult to evaluate a moment when you're sitting in it. I am going to attack this problem of a lack of hindsight by embodiment. By writing myself into a tradition that only just exists People who write about Jane Austen don't get to ram a bonnet on their head and marry Mr Bingley to observe the socio-economics and moral sensibility of the late 18th century.

Well, bracketed inner-critic, it seems to me that the most interesting writers working wholly or in-part in online dissemination of text, work a kind of vertical integration angle wherein they are the producer, promoters and chief spokesperson for the text. What I'm trying to do is perhaps a cousin of Genetic Criticism - the ephemera is equal to the text, because online the distinctions between the two break down pretty damn quickly. I can't coolly evaluate the moment that I'm in, so where distance is impossible, let's get embarassingly close.

Obviously, this throws up myriad questions of privacy and biographical studies and appropriateness and dress code but I think the best course is just to get started and address as we go.

Hello. My name is Rebecca and I am going to become the most famous writer in England & Its Associated Isles.

I am just as embarrassed as you are.

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