Split me a new one

Hello no-one as yet and the obliged,

I am not going to lie, the week has been disappointing. With three days and 5 hours to go on the outfit, it seems that no-one is buying.

If you like, we can extend the metaphor on that.

UEA is unremittingly demanding in its expectation of rigorous academic theory and ability to perform. Mondays mean the fabled Breakfast Club, which is much more impassioned and bombastic arguments concerning critical theory and poetics, held at a level of academic discourse I cannot hope to achieve, and much less Molly Ringwald gyrating wildly in through and about the montage form, blissfully oblivious to a world that neither understands nor appreciates her potent adolescent sexuality.**

It is academia's loss.
I am finding it difficult to situate myself in the context of phd Breakfast-based discourse and it goes without saying there are no donuts.

I did a presentation on my quest to become the most famous writer in England & Its Associated Isles and I hope I'm not incorrect in stating that the reception the project received was somewhat chilly. I tried, oh faithful, non-existent readership to dramatise my concerns in the form of a filmed review of 'The Social Network' in which I enlisted my undisputed mastery of Final Cut Express to talk about the failure of the movie in tone, form and execution.

Appropriate to the project is the film's refusal to function after countless hours of uploading. I will let it stand here as a memorial slab to excessive ambition and general desperate sparkle shirley sparkle!-based discourse.
EDIT: link now functioning. Click click and click away.

The Epic Fail is a notion very dear to me. I consider this blog a failure. I know you do too. Don't lie to me I can't even monetise my underwear, which is something that any decent Japanese student can do, and at a pre-undergraduate level.

I am going to have to rethink everything. Soon enough the traffic will arrive from the UEA website and I must show the people the full force of my power.

Verily Walter Benjamin and his Arcades and his theory of mirrors was thrown at me like so much wet spaghetti. I will be forever grateful however as it brought me to this majestic little site,
which was made in 2007 and is blissfully redolent of 1999. Authored by the gloriously monikered Heather Marcelle Crickenberg, it's a study in hypertexts of Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Keeping to the immediate surface as is my custom, the site design is largely: Chrome (not the browser, the virtual brush of metal) purple, repeated Pinky & The Brain wallpaper motifs.

It's like my teen psyche regurgitated online with an developed interest in aesthetic theory.

I can't help but think if I get Heather Marcelle Crickenberger on side, everything will be fine. I can't help but feel we are one. Heather Marcelle Crickenberger, you will be mine.

It will be earnt.




**If 'potent adolescent sex' doesn't slide me on up the Google rankings, I don't have any faith in a higher deity or adwords.

Realisation - Futurebook 2010

I need £400 to attend this conference

It is crucial to my phd, it's the very thing I am talking about: the way in which publishers will disseminate text in the oncoming tide of e-books. There will be handwringing and analysis and by god, there will probably be donuts.

I wrote a polite e-mail to its organiser asking for discount. Her Twitter said this 4 hours ago:

I have never been so mortified by a hashtag. I need £400. UEA will spit in my face if I ask for that much for research funds. I only have 52 Twitter followers and most of them are bots: The Tao Lin share option is far far away. I can't imagine the marketeer Leo Tolstoy will give me a tenner. I am surprised his zombie ghost has taken so heartily to the 140 character form and I am further surprised that he re-tweets a jetsetting cartoon bear with such frequency. He clearly has his monetisation worked out. He is on point.

I am not as popular as Tao Lin or as media savvy as Tolstoy. I need a plan.

In other news, I am about to run to UEA and attend an phd ethics seminar. In order to suitably impress and silence those that would oppose me, outfit today is as multi-layered and shot-through with complex semiotic references as anything Prada has put out in the last 5 years.

I will sell you this unwashed outfit for £400.

You can buy my outfit. It is the least you can do.
It's time the internet started working for me.

Sleeping with the enemy/fishes.

Right, lay of the land time. One of the tasks assigned to me was to evaluate the playing field of online literary magazines/blogs/whathaveyous. Over the next few days, I am going to be evaluating a number of creative writing online spaces (yes, I'm going to call them spaces like some kind of TV-based interior decorator, despite this having no practical corollary to the laws of physics as we currently define them*

The first on the roster is Goldsmiths University online repository for MA student work: Goldfish

First Test: Navigation.
In case you're wondering, academic readership, the internet term, is EPIC FAIL. I entered the site at www.gold.ac.uk and set myself the task of finding 'Goldfish.' It took me about 5 minutes of hopping in and out of course profiles and then scrolling (scrolling!down the MA Creative Writing page to a link that describes itself thusly:

Further information:
Goldfish on-line journal - work from students currently enrolled on the programme.

Okay, so we're already in the presence of an institution that's clearly only comfortable with positing their journal as a web extension of print. And as 'Further Infomation' no less, like it's a ratty offcut of the prospectus. Nothing is touted, there's no distinguishing or branded graphic and the redundant use of 'on-line' with its little hyphen intact, is so antiquated as to be almost adorable. This is an institution that has a Flickr, a twitter account and a Facebook page. The building blocks are there, but you almost palpably feel the exasperated throwing up of hands, the need, the desire to treat all of this as much like traditional media as possible.

Look & Feel
I have a particular horror of faceless and amputee cover art in mainstream literary fiction.

But for its sole piece of banner artwork, Goldfish is going for the classic Picoult foot

Signifiers: Literary, vaguely sensual, commercial, feminine, in the proud tradition of Richard & Judy BOGOF bestsellers.

Goldfish itself is embedded into the overall classic 3-column design, plenty of white space, neutral, inobtrusive colour scheme. It's programmed largely in Java We are, in theory anyway, all about the words. A nice sans-serif makes reading easy - I had no trouble on my Mac at all.

Tech stuff for dummies (aka, stuff even *I* know)
A quick glance at the code tells us SEO optimisation is minimal (shoddy h-tags, no page titles &etc.) - it speaks volumes that I can type in "goldsmiths creative writing journal" into google and not get a direct hit. Brand name recognition is non-existent so I'd really have to know specifically what I was looking for in order to locate it.
Verdict: We are not at home to Mr Google.

Editorial Policy
Appears to be 'you takes-a the course, you gets a published.' Which is fine - this is a MA showcase after all.

Nature of the work
Divided into categories: Poetry, Life Writing, Short Fiction & Novel Excerpts

Is it specific to the web?
Nope. It's a straight cutnpaste job from the page to the screen. The poetry is all aligned left in the centre column, making it look rather anemic on screen. Poetry is notoriously hard to present effectively on screen, as here, more than most novels, the space between the words requires attention and precision. This means coding by hand, a luxury that a small publication like Goldfish could conceivably afford, but is maybe more of a worry for the larger publishing houses. Salt isn't going to sweat it (cuz seriously, check out their site, which is alive to the possibilities of the web and its a publisher small enough to give each book its fullest loving attention) but, say, Faber & Faber might.

With fiction, life writing and the novel extracts alike, there's no attempt to exploit image, audio, social networking, commenting (or even your garden variety commenatary - one of the pitfalls of sites like this is that although they sit neatly within their university's branding, they can no conceivable creative or aesthetic identity of their own. There's no editorial hand here and it really blands up the joint in a way that feels like a missed opportunity. The work, as with all MAs who are forced to excerpt is variable in quality but there's some strong interesting stuff here and there, and it deserved a better shake of things. Or a shake at all.

Any attempt to monetize?
Bless you. Nope, it's bare bones all the way, they're clearly not even interested in the casual browser finding this site, much less selling something off the back of it. I've contacted a few participants to find out if I'm wrong, if the website did generate any conversations or subsequent work off them. We shall see. Students have been given Biographies that are hidden in little drop-downs, accessible with a click. They usually contain the standard 50 word bio, and occasionally an e-mail address, and even less occasionally a blog (ding-ding-ding!) or a myspace

From what I can gather from the prospectus, Goldfish is the only published outlet for the Goldsmiths students. Like most MA anthologies, print or not, Goldfish is run by the postgraduate students on the course and appears to have been funded at least in part by the Goldsmith Annual Fund if the dedication at the base of the site is anything to go by. So we're dealing more with a tippy-toe in the e-waters, a charitable enterprise rather than an entrepreneurial attempt. An e-book, however rudimentary would've been a useful attempt at indirect monetisation, particularly as literary agents are so wedded to their smart phones. Yup, although this was clearly a classroom-based project with a huge editorial team (12 people!) all promoting their own work and with all the problems inherent in that setup, some bolder experimentation in formal presentation would not have gone amiss, even if the work is broadly traditional in tone.

Next up: Writers' Hub (Birbeck University)

*Hello my name is Rebecca Wigmore. Over the next three years, I am going to redefine the laws of physics. You will know my name.

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.