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BONday 3 (21.2.98)
Present: Me, Claire, Andy, Bridget, Linda, Margaret, Joszefa
As I was trying vaguely to explain my notes from the previous BONdays, I only had rough headings for the first chunk of ideas/conversations: I'll try to expand on these as best as I can remember.
Salami Criminal: we were looking at a site devoted to thin slices of the human body, male on this occasion, and apparently that of an executed criminal. The body as book.
Platform Neutral: Andy used this as an adjectival phrase meaning the software wasn't dependent on the type of PC or something more precise, but everyone latched on to it as a location. Where do you go to from Platform Neutral, and how do you feel while you are waiting there? This led into Margaret's idea for a dialect comparable to hard-boiled detective talk: a manner of speech derived from computer, geological and other sources which might be the dialect of our created world.
Omphalocations (and -locutions): thinking of our different norths, and the axes of key words idea, we began talking about the landscape as a body or series of bodies, each possessing a location and a centre (For instance the yew tree at Fortingall, reputed birthplace of Pontius Pilate, is claimed as an axis mundi, the axial tree round which the world spins). Perhaps wells sunk from each navel would connect at a single point (of presence).
The idea cropped up of clicking on photographed heads to direct us toward such landscapes. We began to wonder how integrated the rule systems we were suggesting must be. The phrase "owl necromancy" appeared when no one was looking.
Over lunch
We talked about the directionality of computer links: that you were always going to some particular point which was the end of that road; how roads weren't like that usually, they went everywhere. Thought about roads on an island, roads within a defined territory: everything must link to everything else eventually.
We talked about invisible borders: the central continental divide in the US, rivers flowing to their separate oceans on either side of it; the myth of water going down a plughole in different directions on either side of the equator. (Actually Andy said it was a myth - we were all disappointed to hear this, and had tales of people (presumably shysters) stopping buses etc. to demonstrate it.)
We thought we might need to create a different kind of compass, e.g. the one used for Feng Shui, and talked about the maze as a therapeutic journey. The end-stopping of computer routes still bothered us. I think it was Margaret who mentioned the room she had seen in a hospital in a children's ward marked "Shrouds": put it in a building in the landscape.
We talked about the preservation and recording of body parts and speculated how many foreskins it would take to make a new person, a sort of Foreskinstein monster (this seems to be my questionable obsession, others were happy to employ other body parts). Thinking of the Ship of Nails. Salami Criminal gave rise to Luncheon Meat People at which point an entire population came into being:
Crash Test Dummies=Tired People=Migraine Sufferers (who see flashes of light like Joszefa's traces of particles)=Feng Shui Survivors Group
A slight variation was necessary to include the last group, which was either people living in the house with the worst feng shui or the best, i.e People who are too harmonious=People who are too Swiss.
This led on to people who are subject to sensory deprivation: what happens to a group of such? This related to Edmund Hopper's The Sun-Bathers. We thought these people might have telescopes pointing to various objects you could not otherwise visit. I misheard "shale heap" as "shell heap": either as an example of such an object.
We talked about people's reluctance to be photographed while they were asleep: how this seemed a survival of fear of photography as a soul stealer. Composite images of the sleeper: this related to those people being constantly photod on websites. This led to a general discussion about waking dreams, lucid dreams, compulsive thought processes in fever or anxiety states. Basically we thought we might be defining the mood or atmosphere of the created landscape.
Lastly we remarked on the way the restaurant we were sitting in would change if it was put into that landscape: its "continental" decor would lose its context.
On the way back Andy and I discussed the "fourth wall" in sitcoms and soaps, and Brookside's set being built without it: was this important in relation to the design of rooms we might build? Did the audience feel privileged or constrained depending on the size of this "wall"?
Bridget and I discussed the creation of a hotel or apartment block each room of which was devoted to a different stage in relationships: the six month fear of commitment room, the three week flingy room, the seven year itchy room. Perhaps a whole flor of designated relationships that guests could experience: First Wife room, Chamber of Wierdest Boyfriend. There could be mood rooms, rooms could have secondary exits to any landscape. Name: Throat Hotel?/The Hotel of Love and Nothingness? You could pick up Heart Miles, it would require the Boring Ballroom with dreadful dancers, worst music.
This meant we could re-apply the idea of clicking on people's heads for text: it would be possible to click on mouth, brain, heart, genitals; to double-click for further levels of "truth" or confessions; their health would be revealed.
BONday 4 (7.3.98) Ideas Day
Location: Live Theatre, Newcastle
Present: All except Claire and Joszefa, Helen leaving early, plus Beryl Graham and David Rinehart.
Began with folk reporting back on last informal meeting at Live:
Newspaper idea: possible title The Daily Periscope, byline "A Mine of Information"; pseud's pull-out, The Tremor (it lies on your coffee table and shakes).
Entrances and exits: various toilets seemed to be preferred; through the Angel of Gateshead's oxter; head first down a toilet?
We were warned to be wary of the Womble Effect.
Discussion of pi bred sub-creatures: pi-dog, piefish, Pie face from The Beano.
It was suggested we replace the barcodes on books in our virtual library with videos of the reviewer or reader's true thoughts on trawling through the text.
Brainstorm
We then attempted to recap the main groups of ideas we had come up with on individual Bondays to see how these related to each other:
1. Mappa Borealis
The governing notion of the territory as defined through manipulation of image into map, this being excavated or navigated or populated or visited according to the individual responses of participants. This relates most strongly to the theme of turning each art from into its neighbour: text converting to image, image converting into sound. Also to the theme of the axes of text: certain keywords which link the various kinds of text being created through the construction of a hypercube. Also to the notion of individual territories possessing an omphalos or axial tree, a centre which not only creates a pole (presumably linking to all other poles at a central point or a limited number of such nodes), but also permits an analogy between landscape and body. This sets up various models: the humunculus, the Salami Criminal, the desert as skin. It permits us to link the sound version of images to the human voice, and thus to narration.
Puns: axis-axes ("Off with their heads!" takes us back to Wonderland/Underland)-access-axminster (Cathedral of Carpets?)
Alan suggested there should be a "Nuke Underland!" option constantly available on the toolbar. If activated the whole thing would blow up incandescently with just a subliminal final image of Christ's foreskin (cf his Circumcision in the USA story and hit single)
Reference to: The Living Planet, an animation in the Hancock Museum.
2. Entrances/Exits
Not perhaps a major theme, but an important negotiation between participants and audience.
Here are the issues and instances raised and cited:
Entrance through toilets, through batcave-type poles, through cupboards.
The doorman or customs official (a la Kafka's parable): Le Douanier Armstrong (Neil or Keith), equipped with little earphones people can listen in to. On the door at the Underground Ballroom.
The bureaucracy (this should not perhaps be perceived as equal to the Project administrators): a need for a Coiuntry Code, 10 Commandments, Health Warnings.
The tourists: we would like their traces to be left as footprints or attritions of some sites.
Fake Itineraries: we may well be constructing Libraries and Art Galleries, but there are also the Museums of Underland: of Pencils, Atheism, Linoleum Tarmac, a museum devoted to the bones of the ear (The Year of the Ear is an Arts Council initiative). Displays of body parts following on from Criminal Salami: Toenail clones, Riddle of the Sphincter, free foreskin given away with every issue of The Tremor.
Reference: mood movies we might want stills from. Brazil, Barbarella, The Conversation, Get Carter, Girl on a Motorbike, various Godzilla films, The Omega Man, Poltergeist.
3. Throat Hotel (Possible main theme)
The relationship rooms, the Tired People, being too Swiss.
Added notions: the end of relationship peely wall room, the 25 year "What did we do that for?" room.
Needs an Iron Bar (related to Andrew's comments about cooloing metal becoming a magnet, choosing its own pole: "an iron bar has no sense of direction") which would have Poetic Licensing Hours (bad pun queue form here). The magnet idea sets up a number of options for any compass: Tru North, Magnetic North, Fictional North. It would require all the accoutrements of a hotel, including: sinister bellboys; 130 holiday reps having a reunion; its own nightclub (The Shallows, The Underground Ballroom); and a restaurant (sample menu follows)
Plat du jour
Rat Delicacies
Blind Fish Gumbo
Giant Cockroach Paella
Monkey brains a la Hartlepool
Minced pit pony in Filo Crackers
(just dessert ideas welcome)
The windows that open on anywhere relate to a childrens story I haven't quite written down called Webster the Magic Window, it also relates for Julia to "fields of babies swaying".
4. The Underland Echo (broadsheet), The Tremor (Pseud's supplement), The Daily Periscope (tabloid) - or some such combination
This paper, strewn around the hotel lobbies or whirling at you in movie headline style, arriving with authentic doormat "thud!" FX, would contain:
Lots of photos of women pointing
Headlines like "PIT PONIES HAVING SEX IN LIFT"
A correspondence page on which the "shard" and other debates rage
Philosophical articles in "simple language ("Enthusiasts of the intertextual will be chuffed to buggery…")
Missing Persons Column: "Fallen Off the Edge of the World this Week", Ronny Gill one such; those who are Sent to Banff ("gang to Buckie and bottle skate")
Columnists such as: The Very Very Very Very Fat Person
Unstable appearance: if you don't scroll on, then fish and chips slowly manifest over the text, along with slogans like "Read faster than your Food" or "You Slow Reader"
The paper should amount to a continuous narrative complete with cliff- or coathanger ending. It should have the air of departing from the diurnal to record a momentous shift in awareness, like the Guardian page which discovers water on the moon and a fresco of ancient Rome, though (as Andrew was saying) it has also to deal with the way we accept such revelations as "ordinary", given that a newspaper demands that there be more such tomorrow and tomorrow and so on (I'm not going to take the risk that it's not bad luck to quote the Scottish Play on the Internet).
Jokes page
Q: How does a pit pony ask for sex?
A: Gizza shag hinny
(better jokes welcome)
5. The Drowned Book (Possible main theme for poets)
The Drowned Book is a scattering of poems from all periods and times, some possibly from a folk tradition, some obviously the works of specific poets now unknown. It contains both fragments and complete works. It crops up anywhere in the landscape: between pages in library books, on toilet paper, on walls. Some of it fades or triggers the appearance of other texts. It contains or makes reference to epics, bestiaries, glossaries, hagiographies, ballads, alphabets, rebuses. It corresponds perhaps to the works of a dark age scriptorium; to the surviving manuscripts of medieval makars; to the regional literature of ballad-collectors and forgers; to the collected works of un- or under-acknowledged nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets from the Underland area.
It's possible that certain texts will have a number of layers corresponding to the axes of the mappa borealis idea, so that the alliterative or late Latin version gives way to a more medieval structure, or the treatment of a certain theme goes through Romantic or Modernist approaches, though all these would be allusions to styles rather than pastiches of them.
6. Magnesium
Basically this theme announces the industrial and mercantile heritage of Underland, with access to the geological and mining themes.
It generates factories with their alchemical transmutation of raw materials and their deployment of technology (X rays), also cliffhangers and formica.
And it creates shops, such as the various Worlds of (Wood, Leather); IDEA, the ghosts of shops
It possibly leads out into an important narrative theme: that of industrial espionage, crime, drugs, the underclass (society is divided into the Drowners, the Swimmers and the Dry - not forgetting the Bone Dry).
Also to the creation of a language which blends technical terms with computer speak and slang creations:
"Platform Neutral…booksuckin good…chuck out the thinks…hanging the monkey…the overcoats…the Shardies"
Invention of drugs: shard (broken glass which is stabbed into the flesh to access mirror self; stained glass for mythic states)
indifference (the drug of can't be arsed)
A large number of terrible puns were formed around the poets' feigned antipathy to the word "shard", including: Leshard of the Yard and his sidekick Fragment, Shard of the Light Brigade, Shardonnay, Shards in their Eyes.
Reference: The Snow Queen. In fact the whole Underland theme connects to another childrens book, The Silver Chair. Perhaps the question of accessibility to children might be considered in relation to this.
8. Mythical Beasts
Pit ponies (particularly blind librarian pit ponies) seem to be a recurrent feature of this project, though the most prominent beast is presumably the black cat, witnessed and reported in the Echo or the subject of a search. Fear and anxiety is one "mood" of Underland, as symbolised by these creatures: fear of the beast=fear of the computer=fear of the unknown.
Missing folk, and those reported dead or alive also figure under this heading. Various entities real and otherwise have been named who may play a further role: Jaques Cousteau, Alan Hull, Milton Boon, Francis Copula, Ronny Gill, the Godzilla-like creature Lobsterman, who perhaps only appeals to Chaz and I. There's Chaz himself, still potentially the subject of a John Buchan/Hitchcockian hunt. Then there's Goretex, fearless upholder of the Country Code.
The landscape itself could partake of the structure of books and text: the Stacks being a geological feature rising out of the sea, made of books stolen by the Old Man of Howay (I might as well include the rest of the "Howay" puns here: Howay 5-Oh, and Home and Howay). The Island of Foula=Mount Purgatory, its scree resolving itself into text that gradually becomes more pietistic as you ascend its slopes.
A letter from the Librarian might be included somewhere on the CD demanding its return - not only is it overdue, but the whole project is only intended for reference.
Reference: Arcimboldo's picture The Librarian or The Bibliophile (basically a portrait constructed from books).
9. Bontempo
Music for the Underground Ballroom supplied by BON's own record label. This significant subheading raises the issue not only of what DAT recordings do we need and can we sample them? But also: do we need training in composing on computer? And: does the project require a unifying soundtrack?
There could be different soundtracks for different listeners (you specify before you hear); there could be subdivisions of the label: Boring, Industrial (please supply others).
10. Pi
Basically the magic of numbers bit that only three or four of us understand, but which is possibly crucial to the presentation of most of our swirling vortices of keywords, axial navels, and successive layers of poetic texts. Certainly the dramatic unities, the Golden Mean, the fractal, and the relationship between the octave and sestet of a sonnet are not completely irrelevant to this project.
End Business
People now felt there were too many ideas (six weeks before, of course, we were concerned about a dearth of ideas). I feel I must side (however reluctantly) with Kingsley Amis on this one: "I doubt if many writers get more ideas than they know what to do with." Extending that to poets and artists.
There was a reluctance to call the next step "Training Days", as people were basically wanting to get going, or at least start experimenting: perhaps experimentation days would be a compromise term.
People expressed a need to see the 10/15 CD ROMs recommended by Beryl and David as cutting edge, so that we had some idea of what we had to measure up to and how practical we were being.
People also wanted in some numbers to go down to the ballroom and do some recording (or at least go to Alan's and do some drinking).
Other places where recording and videoing were felt to be necessary were: Newcastle (the Malmaison as a model for Throat Hotel), and Hartlepool (the football crowd).
People also requested a website session and a session on advanced things to do with text (these might constitute a single day).
Then there was an animation session and a composition session. Both of these requiring outside experts: Andy suggested Sheila Graber for the first, and I suggested Keith Morris for the second.
The main request, however, was for reasonably open access to computers with the necessary stuff (internet access, Photoshop, Director, Bryce), both for those who wanted to play around with them, and for those who were still not wired up. This would seem a priority in all three potential locations: Alnwick, Newcastle and Hartlepool.
Lastly a very legitimate complaint from Alan that the writers were getting rather dominant and the artists appeared to have less of a say in the way things were heading. Perhaps because of the literalness of a writer's thought processes, or the verbal play indulged in, certainly that seems to be the case when I look over these notes, and I welcome any suggestions from people as to how to counter it. It may be the case that the writers have done all the talking they need to, and we can now all get on with trying things out, or it may be that there's a great deal more to be said on this issue.
(NB: I've incorporated into the notes on the Drowned Book and the Mythical Beasts some of the results of a meeting of some poets (me, Sean and Katrina) on 28.3.98.)
BON editorial group meeting, 13.3.98
Present: Me, Paul Stone, Margaret Wilkinson
We'd nothing to look at, so we discussed principles of editing, and came up with these:
1. It can't all fit (i.e. we got to chop something out somewhere somehow);
2. It must cohere to an agreed degree (i.e. we can agree to disagree or have contradictory elements in there, as long as we're working toward an idea of unity);
3. There must be no repetition of effect (i.e. if one theme uses a certain device another theme can't simply do the same thing, whether that's whirling newspapers or the Quicktime VR more-than-360 degrees effect);
4. We should be attempting to find the unique contribution of our chosen medium to this new medium (i.e. what is narrative particularly good at that relates to how CD ROMs work?);
5. We should be identifying those themes or projects which belong more properly to their original mediums (i.e. no shoveling in stuff that would work better in a book or on a wall. This relates to no. 4 but is not merely negative: it may be the case that we identify legitimate side-projects by this means, what should go into a publication or an exhibition but not on the CD ROM).
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