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Culture Other

wikipoetry and the wikinovel

[WARNING: very long post]

On TUF, there’s a forum called Morning Electroshock where someone starts a story and other people can come along and add to it. Basically it’s intended as a bit of fun. But Scavella mentioned on her blog that the other day it had, pretty much uniquely, actually created a complete story which with some polishing might stand up on its own merits. You can read the result here.

I have a residual interest in this kind of thing because I once set up a site called The Poetry Wiki. Technically I suppose I still run it, but it never really attracted enough interest to need any running. I never even look at it anymore, especially since I moved this blog to a new hosting service. Checking the Recent Changes page, it seems someone last edited it only 6 days ago – but the changes are coming at 2-month intervals. Presumably any edits are by people who wander across it via Google.

Anyway, the point of the Poetry Wiki was to experiment with collaborative poetry writing. Most people have encountered Wikipedia, I imagine, so the idea is fairly familiar. Wikipedia is created collaboratively – anyone who wants to take part can just dive in and start editing the content. It may not be the perfect encyclopedia, but it’s at least successful enough to demonstrate that the process can work. The idea of the Poetry Wiki was that anyone would be able to edit any of the poems, and that (aided by some discussion) something would emerge – who knows what. In the event, it didn’t catch on.

I really started it just out of curiosity and because I could, in the purest spirit of experiment. But I do find idea of collaborative literature is intriguing. People’s usual reaction to the idea is negative – in fact, we talk about something being ‘designed by committee’ when we mean it’s mediocre, damaged by compromise and a bit of a mess. There’s certainly no great tradition of it being done; whether that’s because it can’t be done or because it hasn’t been tried, I don’t know. There are a few examples of collaborative arts, though. Some forms – opera, film-making, TV – are intrinsically collaborative. But as well as being collaborative by necessity (the actors can’t operate the cameras) they are usually more collaborative than is minimally possible. It would be theoretically possible for one person to do the script, score, costume and set design, casting, directing and production, but it’s not the norm. With lots of specialist roles, division of labour becomes an obvious idea.

Poetry-writing doesn’t involve lots of specialist roles, of course. The closest parallel I can think of is the teams of writers who work on US TV comedies (and other series? I don’t know). Friends may not be poetry, but it’s still good of its kind. Would twenty poets sitting around a table be able to work together in the same way? If they were being paid enough, of course they could, but would the result be better than any one of them would be able to produce alone? I don’t know. But I don’t think you can dismiss the idea out of hand.

There is one form of literature which is (sort of) collaborative: oral literature. It’s collaborative in the sense that each scop/storyteller builds on the tradition which has gone before, and each telling inherits material from all the thousands of tellings which have gone before. But each telling is still the work of one individual. And there’s renga, but that still doesn’t involve people editing each other’s work.

Really, the only way to find out whether writing collaborative literature would be possible or desirable is to try it. The real point, perhaps, is that it is easier now than ever before. The internet is the most profound change in the way we present and receive writing since the invention of the printing press. Sooner or later, it’s going to produce a new form of literature, just as printing eventually made the novel possible. Someone has to try out the possibilities – why not me?

I’ve been considering some of the issues as they apply specifically to using a wiki to write poetry and novels. There would be other ways of organising the process, of course; any software which allows people to post text and others to comment would be just about usable. The advantage of a wiki is that it is designed to allow repeated editing of the original text by multiple users; most of the other kinds of online community (blog, forum, mailing list) involve threaded discussions, which means that much of the action would happen a long way down the thread. With a wiki, the latest version would be the first thing a visitor would encounter.

Even using a wiki, there are a range of different possibilities. Most of them emerge from the conflict between two perspectives on wikidom. Is the wiki just a tool for achieving an end, or the manifestation of a whole philosophy?

Wikis are designed to be democratic (anarchic, in fact), open-access, non-hierarchical, intertextual and dynamic. For some people, this is not simply the way that wikis happen to work; it is an ethos which the wiki embodies. As a comparison, Wikipedia is actually quite heavily structured compared to the original wiki software, and there are people who feel that the hierarchy of users with different powers and, for example, the ability to lock pages, is a betrayal of the WikiWay. Despite this, if you spend some time editing Wikipedia, you’ll still encounter plenty of wikienthusiasts who feel that wikiness is actually a positive virtue in itself.

Take the question of open-access. The classic wiki model allows any visitor to edit any page anonymously without even registering with the site. Wikipedia allows this, and is successful because there is a sufficient mass of well-meaning users to compensate for the casual vandalism of passing idiots. Partially this is because the site appeals to exactly the kind of people who are best suited to it – geeks. That’s not intended as an insult, btw; I’m enough of a geek myself to have accumulated a few hundred edits on Wikipedia (and to have started a poetry wiki, for that matter). That geekiness, which is so well suited to painstakingly arguing over fine points of detail, works well for fact-checking. Attention to detail is also important to writing poetry and literary prose. The question is whether you’d ever get a critical mass of people who were not just well-intentioned, but had the literary judgement to know whether an edit was improving or killing a sentence. The bulk of poetry posted on the internet doesn’t give much cause for optimism. Nor does most of the prose style on Wikipedia. The obvious but unwikilike alternative is to restrict membership to people who you trust.

Another question to consider is whether the process has an end in sight. The nature of a wiki is that it is intrinsically dynamic and unstable. There is no point where it is ‘finished’. On the other hand, most people engaged on writing a novel would probably want to produce a finished piece at the end of the process. I tend to think a dynamic model would work better with short pieces – poems or short prose – where one could absorb the whole piece relatively quickly and then start digging into the history to see how it has changed in the past. It would be much easier to get a sense of the dynamic quality because one could compare diffferent versions more easily. A dynamic 700 page novel makes less sense because few people would be willing to read through several versions from beginning to end. It might be interesting, mind you, to produce a book with four or five versions of a 100-page novella, though; that would provide some compromise between the idea of a work in a finished state and the dynamic possibilities. The different versions could either be different stages in a history or different forks of a tree.

Wikis also have a distinctive structure; they’re modular, distributed and accretive. They have no centre, no hierarchy, and they grow a bit at a time in no particular direction. That structure is perfect for an encyclopedia, because encyclopedias are inherently modular; if the article on Dickens is crap, it doesn’t affect the article on Thackeray. Although Wikipedia’s category system imposes a kind of hierarchy for the purposes of navigation, the site is basically an accumulation of independent articles. By comparison, a novel is (arguably?) more holistic. If something is wrong in chapter 4, it can kill chapter 5; if there’s something distinctive about the characterisation in chapter 1, it can affect the way people will read chapter 20. The wiki structure doesn’t naturally provide for the kind of over-arching commentary that would be needed to deal with those kinds of issues. Something could no doubt be improvised, but there is a natural fit between encyclopedia and wiki which doesn’t apply to the novel.

Even more profound as a change from printed literature is that wikis are not normally linear. They make use of links between articles in the way which has become familiar for anyone who uses the internet. There have been various internet attempts to accomodate hyperlinks in literary forms; none of the ones I’ve seen have been very convincing. But to use a wiki to compose a novel or a selection of poems without linking would be to eliminate a major part of the functionality of the software.

All these possible conflicts – open access vs. membership, dynamic vs. convergent, modular vs. holistic, linear vs. hyperlinked – are conflicts between whether to just use a wiki as convenient software for collaborative authoring, or to embrace the wiki as a way to do something new.

If we imagined literature that embraced the full possibilities of the wiki, it would be a radical vision indeed – the wiki as one big hyper-poem or hyper-novel, openly authored, non-linear, hyperlinked, associative, evolving, mixing traditional narrative prose with poetry and who knows what else, and with a thousand routes through the text. It’s a sexy idea; radical, progressive and dramatic. And if you’re interested in the ways that new technologies shape our art, it makes more sense to produce art that is shaped by the technology available, rather than using the new technology as a way of slightly extending our ways of making traditional forms. None of which is worth much if the result is an unreadable mess. Would it ever offer anything beyond novelty value, let alone any kind of advantage over traditional forms? It’s one thing blurring the line between writer and reader, another to produce a text which is only any fun if you edit it yourself.

For once, I’m not claiming I know what the answer is (there could be several answers). Perhaps the very idea of collaborative literature is stupid; perhaps a wiki is the wrong software to produce it in any case. But I find it interesting to consider the possibilities.
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A link: writehere.net is another wiki where people are playing with these ideas.

Categories
Culture

Tristram Shandy – the movie

There’s a new film of Tristram Shandy which is showing at the London Film Festival. They’ve given it the title A Cock and Bull Story, from the last lines of the book:

‘L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –
A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick – and one of the best of its kind I ever heard’

All the comments you read about it make reference to the fact that it’s regarded as ‘unfilmable’. You can see what they mean, but I can’t help thinking that, of all the early novelists, Sterne is the one who would have just loved making films. The book is full of great dialogue and slightly extraordinary characters, slapstick, set pieces, and technical innovation. The man who wrote a novel that includes a marbled page and those little squiggly lines to indicate the shape of his narrative would have loved playing with all the possibilities of film.

Whether or not the new film does a good job of it is another matter. I’m slightly underwhelmed to see all the usual britcom suspects in the cast – Steve Coogan, David Walliams, Stephen Fry, Ronni Ancona, Rob Brydon – because it suggests a film being played for fairly broad comedy. And I’d almost always rather see an actor doing comedy than a comedian acting. Still, it could be fab.

Categories
Culture

Lynne Truss

If I’d already written a book whinging about how no-one knows how to punctuate properly anymore, and was just starting to do the publicity rounds for a new book whinging about how no-one has proper manners anymore, I’d start to worry about the karmic payback for all that negativity. I used to enjoy Lynne Truss’s journalism in the Times; it seems a pity that she’s turning herself into a one-woman Daily Mail editorial.

Actually, though, I have more sympathy for her new cause than the old one. Whether or not I’d be convinced by her argument, whatever it is, I can at least see that courtesy is important. The way people treat each other in all the mundane exchanges of everyday has a real impact on the enjoyability of life. I really don’t care whether the greengrocer knows how to use an apostrophe, but I do care whether or not he’s rude to me.

Categories
Culture Nature

‘The Mating Mind’ by Geoffrey Miller

I’ve just read The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. The book’s argument is that many of the typical characteristics of human behaviour are best understood as products of sexual selection. Sexual selection is the process where you start with some ancestral bird species where the females have a bit of a thing for longer tails, and a few thousand generations later, they’ve evolved into peacocks. I suppose there are two key insights I’d take from the book, neither of them completely new to me but worth being reminded of.

The first is this – it’s easy to think of natural selection as being driven by adaptations for survival, with sexual selection being almost cosmetic in its effects. It doesn’t matter how good-looking you are if you starve, die of disease or get eaten by a lion before you get a chance to breed. But from an evolutionary perspective, there’s no point in living to a ripe old age if you can’t attract any sexual partners. Both scenarios are evolutionary dead-ends. Also, selection is not necessarily an either-or process (either you survive or you don’t; either you breed or you don’t). Rather, it’s driven by differential rates of reproductive success. And within a well-established species, it’s easy to see how the biggest single factor in determining reproductive succcess will often be the ability to attract a mate. The results of sexual selection will often appear cosmetic – coloured feathers, or an attractive song – but that’s just because those are the things a potential mate is able to perceive. It doesn’t mean that sexual selection is a less powerful force than ‘normal’ natural selection. In a sense, this is an obvious insight; anyone who has ever heard a nightingale or a blackbird singing must be aware of how much effort it is costing them, and there are few more spectacular adaptations than the plumage of a bird of paradise. And just because sexual selection mainly operates on external features, it doesn’t mean that it is limited to those features. Applied to humans, it doesn’t have to be limited to skin colour, breast size and hip-waist ratios. There’s no reason why it can’t also operate on people’s ability to hold a conversation, or dance, or sing. The only requirement is that there must be some genetic component.

The other insight is that anywhere in nature where we see an oganism with a physical feature or behaviour that doesn’t seem to have any survival benefit, it’s worth considering sexual selection as the explanation. Natural selection is inherently thrifty – we should never expect to see energy being expended without there being some reason for it. If that reason isn’t survival, pretty much the only other possibility is an attempt to attract mates, either directly or via increased status. And sexual selection can take almost any form. There are reasons why some adaptations are more likely than others, but the process is essentially arbitrary; once some trait becomes associated with sexual attractiveness, it’s a self-sustaining trend. The explanation is almost too powerful – you can see how it would become a lazy assumption faced with anything slightly unexpected, but as far as I can see, it’s very difficult to disprove. Geoffrey Miller certainly sees sexual selection everywhere – he uses it to explain sport, art, poetry, music, language, dancing and indeed just about everything that makes us human.

I find this argument moderately persuasive, I must admit. As ever, there are questions about which human behaviours can really be seen as written into our genes; can music making really be seen as an evolved trait? Or sport? They seem to be human universals, so it’s not a ridiculous idea, but I’m still slightly wary about making the assumption. But for more obviously evolved traits, like language, it seems very plausible that sexual selection would be the principle driving force.

On the whole, though, I found the parts of the book about human behaviour less interesting than those about sexual selection generally. I’ve read about sexual selection before but to have it treated in depth as a subject in its own right was helpful. For example, the classic examples used to illustrate sexual selection involve dramatic sexual dimorphism, as with the drably-plumaged peahen, or the difference in size between male and female elephant seals. But Miller points out that those are a special case where a few successful males account for the vast majority of offspring. Even in species which form largely faithful pairs, there is an advantage in being able to attract the best (healthiest, most fertile) mates. In that situation, the effects of sexual selection will be less dramatic, but will still be present. For example, in bird species where colourful plumage is found in both sexes, they have traditionally been referred to as ‘species markers’; Miller suggests that these could still be the results of sexual selection.

So I would have liked more of the book spent on sexual selection in general, with more illustrative examples from other species, and slightly less of the human stuff at the end. But it’s a good book, and I recommend it.

Categories
Culture Nature

‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins

I’ve just read The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. The book traces back human descent to the earliest forms of life as a ‘pilgimage’, marking the points where other branches of our family tree ‘join’ us; the first rendezvous is with the chimps, then the other apes, then the rest of the primates and so on back to the simplest forms of life. At each rendezvous, Dawkins picks out one or two species from those who have joined, and tells their Tale, which is used to illustrate some point about natural selection – the Peacock’s Tale is used as an occasion to talk about sexual selection, for example. Some of these points are theoretical, others deal with practical issues like the difficulties of dating some of the points on the tree, or interpreting fossil evidence.

The approach allows him to touch on all sorts of different aspects of biology and build up an overview of evolutionary science, while also maintaining a kind of narrative structure. If you’ve read some of his other books, many of the preoccupations and some of the examples are familiar, but there are always enough surprising bits of information to keep you interested (in many plants, the thread-like roots are actually created by a symbiotic fungus). The family tree is interesting in itself; I was surprised to learn that we are more closely related to sea urchins than to snails and bees, for example. Or if that relationship is a bit distant: We are more closely to trout than trout are to sharks. That is, we share a common ancestor with trout which is more recent than the common ancestor of the trout and the shark. We and the trout both have bony skeletons; the shark is cartilaginous.

It’s a big fat book, and occasionally it drags a bit, but on the whole I found it absorbing and Dawkins’s prose is (nearly) clear as ever. So I’d recommend it.

Categories
Culture

‘Cosmicomics’ by Italo Calvino

I finally got round to reading Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. Amazon.com’s editorial review describes it as

An enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. Calvino makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves amongst galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms — and have time for a love life.

which is pretty fair, though it possibly makes it sound even frothier than it is. Key words would be – surreal, whimsical, intellectually playful, that kind of thing. Which I found wore thin pretty quickly. It’s clever, it’s well-written, it’s often funny, if not belly-laugh funny; but in the end it just seemed a bit silly. Rather than engage with the science in a really interesting way, it just used semi-digested fragments as a kicking-off point.