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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Annotations, the book club & the wiki

21:25 / 31.03.05

I've been enjoying the hell out of the wiki lately by playing around with the Seven Soldiers annotations, and it strikes me that this kind of thing would also be great fun with a book that is
a: already finished, and
b: doesn't have quite so many pictures in it.

That thought led me, of course, to the old Barbelith Book Club, where there were some great discussions of the Iliad, the Inferno and, oh, probably some other classic that started with "I."

I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in, instead of a simple discussion of a text on this here message board, perhaps an ongoing, interactive, free-form annotation of a text?

This can be as subjective or as scholarly as you like, since it's a wiki. Like, it doesn't all have to be trivia and related information, but also oohs and ahs and ums and weeellllls about certain points in the text.

Me, I'd love to start seeding a discussion/annotation of Le Morte D'Arthur (which I've read) or maybe even The Mabinogion (which I haven't), but I'm also getting into Cryptonomicon right now, which seems like it could get dense.

The system could work for just about anything -- and with however many people are interested. It's just more fun with a crowd.

So is anyone else curious about this?

23:05 / 31.03.05

Yeah, I'd be interested in something like this - the current Cornelius discussion has piqued my interest in re-reading those books, and I'd be interested in tapping the minds of those who've been involved in that discussion.

How would it run? Give everyone a few weeks to read the book and then set a date for starting the discussion?

m.

16:58 / 01.04.05

Yes, I think. Set a text, and then a date.

It could be a bit loose, though, since it'd be based around the wiki moreso than the board -- comments wouldn't have to run in chronological order, necessarily, so if you started a month later, you could chip in on things that happened a few weeks earlier without seeming to come out of nowhere.

What books do you think would work nicely?

19:24 / 01.04.05

I'd throw in with this. Depending on the book, anyway.

Would definitely be interested in seeing what other people'd come out of the Cornelius books with, for one. The Hitler-bird-cop thing had to be spelled out to me in slow, simple words, but the costume ball was loaded enough I felt witty because I could actually pick things up.

12:40 / 02.04.05

This seems like an excellent idea - I think varying levels of interest might be more easily coped with in a wiki than in a thread as well (I found that one of the frustrating things about the Book Club was that the most enthusiastic poster would often end up posting by hirself as other readers dropped by the wayside).

I like a spot of Arthurian business, so would be up for that. My copy of the Mabinogion is at home though...

22:53 / 03.04.05

I'm a little unclear on how wikis work - and the history of the barbelith book club. can someone bring me up to speed?

m.

19:39 / 04.04.05

I am, as is well known, totally gay for annotations, though being a retired comic reader I was unaware that this "Seven Soldiers" project had begun.

W/R/T a choice of book for an annotation/book club project, maybe - and this is probably too ambitious, but I thought I'd throw it out there - maybe instead of one book/one set of annotations going at a time, maybe a handful of books with overlapping themes/concerns could be going so that the annotations themselves are bound in with each other. Sort of comparative-annotations.

to give an example that a lot of people might be familiar with, perhaps there could be simultaneous projects for Foucault's Pendulum, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and (ahem) the Davinci code

Or if grant wants to do something Arthurian, perhaps we can have sort of competing Mallory, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Gawain, Tristan and Isolde and something like "from ritual to romance" sub-groups.

10:42 / 05.04.05

I also like the idea of having more than one book -it would be useful for pointing out more and similar books to read, a bit like the seminar idea someone (can't find who, sorry!) had in the 'State of the Board' thread. Not that that's normally a difficult thing to find out anyway, but having annotations already there would be good.

16:06 / 05.04.05

Papi: Or if grant wants to do something Arthurian, perhaps we can have sort of competing Mallory, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Gawain, Tristan and Isolde and something like "from ritual to romance" sub-groups.

I, sir, have now become gay for you.

matsya: I'm a little unclear on how wikis work - and the history of the barbelith book club. can someone bring me up to speed?

The Barbelith Book Club -- well, it's just a series of three or four threads on here where people got together to read something and talk about it on here as they went.
I think the most recent one was Dante's Inferno, which was more or less exactly one year ago. Jade started it. More here.

Wikis work like this: you read the wiki page like any other web page. But at the top, there's a button that says "edit". You click on that. In the case of Barbelith's, you then have to log in with yer same ID & psswrd as here. And you can edit the page. Anyone can edit the page.

The markups for italics and bold are reeeally easy (''italics'' and '''bold'''), and making links to other wiki pages is pretty easy (because [[Wiki links]] look like [[this]]) and making links to other webpages is almost as easy (since [http://www.otherwebpages.com other web page links] look like this).

So instead of filling in submission forms, you're basically just hitting edit and going off... so it's a great way to create a collaborative, interlinked text.

Really, if you just follow the first link up top of the thread and start monkeying around, you get the hang of it very quickly. You can't break anything that can't be fixed.

20:43 / 07.04.05

Quick suggestion: is the Barbelith wiki the best place to do this, or should we consider a book-club specific wiki? I can see arguments both ways; one leads to openness about what the board's like/about, but there's the potential for cluttering it.

16:54 / 08.04.05

I think we should use the Barbelith one and see how it goes - if it gets very heavy usage we could open another one, but I actually think it would be quite nice to keep it in the main one - and they're flexible things, aren't they, wikis?

20:06 / 08.04.05

Yeah. I mean, if you look in the Books forum page on the wiki as it stands, you can hear tumbleweeds rolling by.

Compared to some of the other FAQ spaces, like, say The Temple.

19:16 / 10.04.05

So, somebody should suggest a really workable, intricate sort of node-book from which these can spring, branch other works, and engage in random reproductive activities, then, yeah? If we pick something utterly wrapped in itself we'll end up deadended, and only people interested in that particular work will check the wiki. Which would make it a book wiki instead of a books one.
I'm still gunning for those Cathy Cornelius novels that somehow almost always end up starring her brother. Cath and Una are so obviously the proper stars. I just want the reread excuse, honestly.
But, I have impractical tastes, so somebody else suggest something, quick, and I'll just agree enthusiastically. Unless it's the last Tom Wolfe book, or a set of 'Resident Evil' novels.

15:26 / 11.04.05

It should preferably be something quite meaty, yes; I suppose the only other thing would be to make sure that it would be of interest to as many Barbeloids as possible (the Cornelius books might be a good option here, I suppose, though I've never read them). Can't see any reason why we shouldn't have more than one on the go at a time, though; in fact, I would say that the wiki would make this easy to manage.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:26 / 11.04.05

Can I suggest as a project to start with something like the Philip Pullman 'Dark Materials' books or perhaps China Mieville or 'Jonathan Strange', I like the idea of wiki-ing, but the prospect of doing something like Homer seems boring to me, and really didn't you all have enough of doing that on your Uni Eng. Lit courses?

20:42 / 11.04.05

Second the motion that the project should be on something like Pullman or Mieville. Or that there could be two projects running parallel. I'm not that interested in Homer and the like, but would like the chance to dissect Mieville.

13:16 / 12.04.05

I would be very interested in this, preferably with 20th/21st century stuff.
What about starting with something like Pynchon's 'Crying of Lot 49'? It's relatively short so would allow things to get moving quickly, but also ridiculously dense and jammed full of themes and ideas that could lead to all sorts of interesting books and places.

13:45 / 12.04.05

Plenty of space for Pynchon, Pullman AND Homer - as I said, there's no reason why there couldn't be several going on. Pynchon/Pullman et al quite likely in fact to lead into Homer at some point anyway...

14:52 / 12.04.05

Ok, to try to bring order to these proceedings, I am nominating a List of Three.

If everyone does this, we can tally votes in a couple weeks and then band together and start attacking a text through the mighty power of hyperlinks.

1. Le Morte D'Arthur/Arthuriana. Could include the Mabinogion, Prieddu Annwn, The Sword in the Stone and whatever else as parallel texts (thus linking to some of the Seven Soldiers stuff).

2. Seconding the His Dark Materials materials. Accessible, I enjoyed reading them the first time, and could link up with Gnosticism, which seems to be one of the major topics of this site (at least it's one of my key interests) -- valuable in the Temple in general, in various Philip K. Dick projects, and possibly in the Bomb in Comic Books.

3. Somewhere halfway between those two is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which I'm suggesting mainly because it's a fat book, seems to be immensely interlinked within itself, and I happen to be reading it right now (so if I'm doing it anyway...). Accessible, but dense.

How's that?

15:12 / 12.04.05

I set up a page here to help start the choosing process -- either nominate in this thread or else just add to that page.

And if you feel like taking a swipe at anything that's there already, by all means go ahead.

15:46 / 12.04.05

If there’s to be any Cornelius-themed stuff, can I also vote for The Alchemist’s Question and The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century over the usual old Cornelius quartet? They’re more, y'know, political. There's less of Jerry doing Cool Stuff, but they’re much better for re-reading than the Final bloody Programme.

16:14 / 12.04.05

'Adventures of Cath and Una P.' is also out of print, innit? Being somewhat not difficult or pricey to come by may incline people to participate more.
And any sort of annos for one Cornelius book would have to immediately bleed into the rest, yeah? Any Moorcock, really - see: spelunking C Bros. in 'War Amongst the Angels' or Elric-the-ass in er, 'Messiah of Time' was it? 'Messiah at the End of the World'? The primarily Una-driven timehopping novella.

16:20 / 12.04.05

And in what way more political? Seriously? Even the first Cornelius novel is undeniably and thickly political - even if Jer's not/tries to be not. World without Hitler all the way to the couple-years-ago collection-of-shorts-turned-novel's Gandalf and Popcorn and BBQ Kids... they're all political, if nothing else.
There's more lesbian loving going on in 'Advent.' certainly. Two of my three favorite Moorcock characters getting front and center treatment, names in title and everything, but I can't let that 'more political' stand without question.

16:09 / 14.04.05

Something tells me a debate like this would really go over well on the wiki. But I would say that.

I've changed the thing so instead of "Cornelius Chronicles" it's now "Tales of Jerry Cornelius" or something -- I don't know what to call the stories together. A saga?