W.N. Herbert

Preambulation

That's right, the Wired Diary, or the Whyary, as in: why am I doing this? Firstly in the positive sense: because I wish to become more computer/Web competent and learn how to create my own website (thank you TrAce). But secondly in the dark brooding sense of: this stuff seems difficult and I'm even less clear who I'm talking to than usual.

The first thing I have to admit is this is a fabrication after the event. Frankly, friends, I have not been keeping a diary. For many years now I have not kept a journal because, for many years before that, I kept a fulsome journal of my inactivities (AKA thoughts) that got me into trouble with my ex-wife when she read it (such are the tribulations of being open -- you can share anything but what the other person doesn't want to hear).

Ah, now you'd rather read that than this -- and that wasn't even why I didn't keep a diary. I just got bored with whining on about things I wanted to do and why I hadn't done them yet, which I hope this won't turn into. And you always sound pompous when you're talking to yourself. More to the point, I didn't want to hear about it. Most of the creative process involves taking yourself by surprise, sneaking up on what you thought was going to happen and doing it in an utterly different way. Diaries are fine for this if you can't remember what you've already written, but if you get to recognise the smell of whine, strut and fumble there comes a time...

Recovered Approximate Memory 1: Pointy Man-Thing

I really wanted to undergo this learning process, to become totally wired, to become Website Boy -- because I had acquired a degree of computer incompetence which enabled me to see what could be accomplished. I could send emails and do that kind of surfing where you don't stand up and the board is like a rounded tea-tray. I wasn't itching to be slick (I tend not to), but I could see there was further I could go. More directly I'd set up a CD-ROM project with Northern Arts and New Writing North called Book of the North (BON) which involved various artists, novelists and poets in acquiring enough computer skills to compose work specifically for this medium. I was involved in each stage of this -- learning, discussing, editing, and performing (this is covered in more detail on my website without becoming any more interesting).

But I realised that, instead of becoming proficient in these new skills -- working with various programmes (mainly Director) to animate and organise images, text and music, I was actually becoming a kind of Pointing Man-Thing. There was always someone there who could do these things so much more quickly and effectively than me that my role was reduced to pointing and saying 'Could you do that for me please?'

This was partly because I was trying to document these events instead of saturating myself in the skills on offer. So I actually ended up with probably much the same level of actual computer ability as when I began, but a considerably reduced fear-of-the-machine level (and a burgeoning Von Stroheim-like need to get others to do my bidding). I saw this project as a way of getting the close attention which would enable me to ask all the stupid questions, get all the simple answers -- and then have to apply them myself to a task in hand.

RAM 2: Anorak Sings the Blues

I started off by trying to assess what it was I enjoyed about websites and the technology they deployed in relation to writing generally, in the hope that would give me an insight into the particular application for poetry. Almost the first thing I realised was that I didn't much go for the sites devoted to poetry and literary/cultural discussion. Oh, there were plenty I did enjoy -- more the litcult essays than the wonders of hypertext. But I got just as peed off with the throat-clutching Significance of some sites as I was with the make-your-own-Moebius-Strip (out of my genius) meanderings of others. Oops.

What I did like was the flip n happy word-world, the explorations of trivia and obsessions that clutter the Web, the combination of rareties displayed and demotic deployed. I liked the way images and sounds surrounded the words: the almost cartoon dimension that was added. It was like promotional material for some unbuyable product, ads for the soul.

I liked sites that were about something rather than trying to be something. About something exterior to the Web, because I found the thought of MOOs and so on spooky and dull to the same intense degree. I liked the chaos of the Web, rather than the attempts to make it do something nice. I liked the cheerful way the Web was full of Sad People: it was uplifting in the way the blues are. It was Blues for Anoraks.

And because I've come to terms with my own deeply uncool sadness, my profound right-offness, I knew it was the place I wanted to be.

RAM 3: Posadadoble

I was in Newcastle's lovely Crown Posada on my own on a Saturday afternoon contemplating a pint of Conciliation-- a kind of total idyll for me -- when a number of thoughts and events starting cohering for me about my involvement in this project. Thing Number 1: I didn't want a purely literary site at all, I wanted a mixed site, a combination of all the obsessions that impinge on my work to the disgust of refined critics. Thing Number 2: I didn't want a site devoted (how true the verb) to my lumps of verse, I wanted to refer out from them to all the people and projects that have surrounded and inspired said lumps.

From that moment on something began happening. The Mexican embassy rang me about translating my work (yes, in the pub; yes, this is unusual for me). Jackie Hardy, a local poet I hadn't met before (Canuting the Waves, Bloodaxe Books, recommended), introduced herself to me on overhearing that conversation. Two people sitting next to me appeared to be talking about translating from the Russian (I was reading Elaine Feinstein's biography of Pushkin (also recommended), but not so's anyone could see -- and I was in Russia last year and am still dreaming of editing an anthology of the extraordinary St Petersburg poets I met). Then I was bumped into by Keith Morris, a jazz composer, and Ellen Phethean, a Poetry Virgin, who were celebrating Keith's birthday, and we fell to discussing various collaborations we'd done.

I realised that this was what any website I could create should be devoted to: catching up all the threads that influence your life and therefore your work. That I should be cataloguing the events surrounding the poetry in order to provide a context in which the poetry could sit, not smug and privileged, but an ordinary part of things. Because it is all the extraordinary things around a poem that compel its utterance to become extraordinary too. The website as negative space -- now that made sense.

There were a large number of projects I'd gotten involved in that were never intended to make it into books. Lots of work in the area, by which I mean Northumberland and Cumbria and Dumfries and Galloway, as well as Newcastle: collaborations with artists in other media, schools projects, community work, films and music and (quasi-) theatrical events. Lots of writing that existed in relation to its audience just as vibrantly as published work, but where publication would come hedged around with explanations and images. It occurred to me I'd done a body of work which might be better represented on the Web. Maybe even (after the events or environments which inspired it) that the Web was its natural home.

RAM 4: A Tentative Crater

OK: then came the actual work thing. Andy Oldfield, my mentor figure, pointed out all the magazines I could get CDs off the front of, and answered my more moronic questions (if you write somebody's address in the middle of an email and send it to someone else, will the address then be clickable on and go to the first person? -- This really bugged me for some reason). And then I had to make the lists of things I wanted to include, and the information or the blahblah I wished to put in about each of these. And then I had to work the Front Page Express gizmo. And the Photoshop doobry (if that's how you spell 'doobry' ). And the programme that would enable me to get sounds -- because music was going to be part of this. And figure out why Keith Morris's Quicktime movies made my system crash.

I found I would do things for a day -- all day -- then couldn't get back into them for several more. Technofatigue. I found that the organisation of the type of programmes I was going to use, the downloading of item Eek, or the editing of segment Ook, took days at a time. And it wasn't because these things were individually difficult -- I'd master one, but then the next thing would take as long again. And not only was the learning curve steep, there was the unfinished symphony aspect of it: all of this was pouring into a tentative crater that would take a long time to fill under present plans.

Now I'm the sort of writer that has six or seven projects going at once -- either at planning stage, full execution, or elongated completion. I believe if you want anything to work, you have to go for everything, and then two or three things might actually get done. I also teach Creative Writing at Lancaster University, where the marking never stops. So every time I took two days to recover from one day's activity, a parcel of efficiency ghouls and promptness hounds would leap on my shoulders and howl about their own deadlines.

This usually works out fine in the end -- we can ordinarily achieve some compromise between when everyone else thinks something is supposed to be done and when we think we can manage -- but then I moved house. To a lighthouse. A square tower with many many stairs overlooking the Tyne estuary, to be exact, which filled up in no time with boxes of books and papers and computing equipment (the lighthouse, not the estuary), very few of which were labelled beyond 'Study' or 'Living Room' . None of them seemed to say 'Internet Project with Rapidly Approaching Deadline' .

RAM 5: Invisible Bicycle

But the more I tried to catch up with myself (it was like starting to fly in a dream, where you're walking along and lift one foot and simply don't put it back down when taking the next step, so you sort of skate in the air; and then you don't put the other foot down either, and you sort of invisible-bicycle your way into the sky) the more I enjoyed it. The more I recognised that the act of trying to make a website was in itself capturing and making definite a shape that otherwise I could only apprehend by putting together lots of sub-activities.

The things you take pictures of (rocks and litter). The articles you cut out of the paper (mostly scientific). The passages you mark in books (for future quotation, or to rephrase them later?). The misheard record lyrics, or turning the sound off the TV and finding more 'appropriate' soundtracks. (Make TV Silent).

Most importantly, the slow, accumulative 'Oh that can go there, so this'll have to change' approach I was taking to the whole project was a mirror of the way I work. It was a portrait, not of pug-ugly me, but of my creative process. And the shapeliness of that is of interest to me. You try to make poems shapely -- each according to their own: sometimes you end up with a species of one, like that prawn-creature with several anuses they found. You try to make books shapely and natural in the way a habitat is. But this big negative space wasn't just a coastline around the inner islands of one or more imaginative events, it was active in itself. Now, we all knew that already, but I like the idea that I could show it.

So I began to want the website to be even more particular: a series of eeks in a system as much as an ecosystem; a literary and extra-literary environment. More labyrinthine, full of contrasting aesthetics, full of harmonies for the Bigger Ear (Noddy might not get this one). The question is can I fit it all in, will it all be visitable?

RAM 6: Larger-than-Shelf Life

The frustration of only half-knowing what one is doing technically feels greater than that of only half-knowing what one is doing creatively. No sooner do I get things sorted out one way than I see a programme which offers to sort them another way. No sooner do I get my computer set up here than I have to go to Ireland to teach and get a computer set up there that's too slow to be believed (it ran on bees: you had to insert a new bee every hour or so). No sooner do I get the hang of one way of doing things than I say, 'Why can't it do X?' -- And it probably can, I'm just not expert enough to try.

Then I run up against the limits of my long-suffering home computer: such and such requires a huge amount of memory before it will load (Yeah, thanks MGI Photosuite II), and I've already junked all the stupid devices it was sold to me with (and bumped the memory up once). If you work on the top floor of a lighthouse the thought of carting your computer down all those stairs for a little trip to PC Camp is hardly appealing (almost as unappealing as the thought of taking it apart and adding the memory yourself).

And then the things I'm trying to record aren't exactly dead -- I'm still trying to finish BON even as it spawns a jazz event scored by Keith with work by Sean O'Brien and Katrina Porteous played by Paul Jayasinha and Annie Whitehead (along with many other highly talented musicians). Captain Beefheart's just had a heap of material released after 17 years of silence and I still can't find the piece I wrote after seeing his paintings in a gallery in Cork Street in the early 80s (I could have bought the painting on the cover of Shiny Beast if I'd had the money then I got to do this project now). Part of the point is that these activities are not texts that lie down and let you close the book on them, and it's exactly that -- their larger-than-shelf life -- I'm aiming to capture.

I have to admit at this point I'm still pretty underskilled. I'm still hoping that salvation will come via a free CD or a particularly moronic question to Andy. I have to admit that a lot of the writing I want to put onto the Website is still not done, or still not retrieved from perfectly accessible files. I have to admit that twelve weeks is not a unit that figures in my creative chronologies or hectic schedules. I have to admit that 'celebratory' end event is looming up at me rather than being something I'm looking forward to. I have to admit I'm rather enjoying all this.

Postambulation

Been there, not finished that. The toe I dipped into cyberspace suddenly acquired huge mass, and dragged me in after it. Page spawned page. Computer rage begat computer rage. Ook begat eek (but you already knew that). I had to upgrade one computer which decided it was too smart to accept a shiny new hard drive and shut down for a week or two. Naturally it was the one the scanner was attached to and my other machine didn't have the appropriate port. And naturally I needed to scan things in urgently. On the plus side everything now had the right feel. I could see ghostly further pages extending from my core pages. I could feel the website transmogrify itself into a webzine, making the leap from uncomfortable me to interesting others.

I began to understand where essays could sit, like a range of mountains at the limits of Webzania. But I was running out of time.

I'd already extended the concept of 'twelve weeks' to mean 'a series of chronologically-distant points when I can work on this.' I could feel bureaucratic nerves flapping between the lines of polite emails. Even the unflappable Andy Oldfield, who appeared to have moved house to Cornwall out of sympathy at my own translation into lighthouse, expressed curiosity as to what I was up to. And then I realised: out of misguided perfectionism (is there any other kind?) I still hadn't uploaded any of this to the TrAce site. For months, curious visitors had stared briefly at my simpering mugshot, and, discovering no link, had clicked on.

So I uploaded, pausing only to remove the irritating farting synthesizer noise I'd experimentally attached to the 'front cover', not registering that this would start up every time the page was returned to. Now I could see the effects of my poor skills: pages appeared without their images because I hadn't included the file; links pointed to now extinct drafts of pages; routes ended in blank walls you had to reverse back from; a cold wind of incompetence blew. And still I was immensely pleased with myself, out of the demented arrogance which alone sustains the poet.

What needs doing? I've extended the lobster-related theme to 19th century Dundee journalist William Latto: he needs to be linked to 20th century crooner William MacKenzie (whose second posthumous album is now out). The MacDiarmid subsection, which includes crucial footage of him winning the marathon at the Helsinki Olympics, needs putting in (he was helped over the finishing line by Arthur Conan Doyle, and later disqualified).

Some poets' work still needs to go into the Calendar; I have still to index the poems -- having experienced a real reluctance to post my own work, valiantly overcome, but still an unusual reluctance for me, and therefore perhaps indicative of an uncertainty about the self-publishing nature of a website.

Finally, I'm considering upgrading the whole site, having reached the limits of Front Page Express, and begun to cast envious glances at Dreamweaver sites. I spent an entire day making a movie in Flash 2 only to discover I couldn't load it. (What? Check this out first? Are you insane?) But in a way that 's emblematic of the whole endeavour. I spent the whole day as I've spent the entire project: engaged in discovery through extended play with specific technical resources. What didn't work was just as informative as what did, and the resulting draft (my cover) moved on. And if that isn't a model for creative activity I'll eat my mouse or preferrably my lobster.

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