26 June-9 July
trAce at the ICA! Sue gave a very full account of trAce, and I felt proud to be part of it; and Bernard's talk was dazzling & funny; also rather scary in its account of junk e-mail. Great to meet them, and Helen (sorry I failed to introduce myself to Margaret), and also Mazzy, who comes to the trAce meetings and who turns out to have lived in Reading and to know another writer friend of mine there. Mazzy, btw, has built a Lost Property Office in LinguaMOO -- a brilliantly appropriate idea! since it is a place where everyone is entitled/invited to deposit objects. At present I don't think it is signposted, but you can "join MazThing" (even if Mazzy's not online) to get to it. (Thanks to M for allowing me mention this, under a little protest that the Office is still under construction. Anyway I think it's great.)
Finally broached my scanner. The usual problems, and leading this time to the worst disaster I've so far (touch wood) had with the computer. First, found I couldn't load the Optical Character Recognition software that came with the scanner. Then loaded a document management program from the same disk; decided I didn't want it; uninstalled it -- and immediately developed several error messages and lost use of all my internet software and the virus checker. The uninstall had apparently taken some crucial system file(s) away with it. It was Saturday night; no help available. Cried for an hour. To cut a long bore short, I finally (several days later) appealed to David next door, who has a computer science degree and runs a network for a publisher. He sorted everything out, and also was able to explain a few basic things about the way the machine is set up. I was (am) indescribably grateful.
Scanned my first photo, in 2 versions, to go behind the bits of my poem with Miekal And. Probably no-one will ever look at it because it's a huge image & takes forever to download. Typical beginner's effort: I couldn't work out how to scan it smaller and stop it tiling behind the text; and I was too impatient to wait... Anyway I love it how it is! Miekal, a real Web veteran, was kind enough to be pleased. His Literature Nation collaboration with Maria Damon is a huge, really marvellous hypertext (and for the quality of the poetry as much as for the design & images).
Having frittered away my week off, I managed to hit the white heat for 2 days and put together a whole little book for Writers Forum to publish in time for my reading (and even more amazingly, to follow up with a long poem that I could read; but there was no new technology involved in the latter, so it's of no particular interest here). The book is called 'Recognition', and uses what OCR does to text if you scan it upside down. I imagine this is a cliche akin to playing tape backwards in music -- I hope readers of this journal might let me know where it is done elsewhere -- but I had to get it out of my system. I used another piece of computer error too: the distorted printing of certain fonts when the printer is connected via the scanner (mentioned previously in these pages). A week later a friend who liked the effect came round to have a go with a poem of his -- and would you believe, the bloody thing's fixed itself! Don't anybody tell me computers aren't alive.
My friend Kim Morrissey, whose play about the Pre-Raphaelites, 'Clever as Paint' opens soon at the Finborough Theatre in London, came up with an idea: an online party / discussion meeting to celebrate the birthday of Lizzie Siddal, the ill-fated wife, and sometime muse and model, of D.G. Rossetti, and a poet in her own right. The discussion to centre on the topic of Women and Poetry. Kim's play includes complete texts of several of Siddal's poems. It presents a view of Siddal crushed and eventually destroyed by the male artistic egos around her, especially her own husband. This doesn't mean our whole discussion has to be a moan about / defence of blokes however (we could moan about our computers instead for instance... but seriously, the ir/relevance of the topic today, and in the online environment, is itself just one of the things we could debate). I contacted Sue to see whether we could use the trAce meeting room in LinguaMOO, and she agreed with enthusiasm! So: all interested are welcome at 8 p.m. on Sunday 25 July (the hour before usual trAce meeting).