Wiki and I

a self-indulgent temporal and topical counter-positioning


I love that line from Withnail and I. It's a line that actually places its moment of speaking historically in the film. A rare moment in a film, to place the events in the film quite that way, to remind us that this is a film embedded in history.

Withnail and I is about two out of work actors living in romantic squalor in N London in Sept 1969. They want to escape, so go on vacation in the north, where Withnail's uncle makes a pass at I. In the end, I gets an acting job, and Withnail is left to recite Hamlet's 3rd soliloquy (What a piece of work is man) to the caged wolves at London Zoo.

Part 1

I have attachments to this film. When I was living in romantic squalor as a student in London in Sept of 1978, I bought greatcoat like Withnail's at Portabello Rd Market for five pounds. A coat eleven years out of date in London, but I didn't know. I fancied myself as self-important as Withnail, and as close to the bone as I. Someone so existential it hurt. I walked through West London at 3 in the morning. It was racing towards the Winter of Discontent, so I stood on the steps of the National Gallery looking over Trafalgar Sq in a November drizzle, and walked home to Maida Vale, past mounds of black bin bags in Leicester Square. I was reading Joyce and Donne, and attending Stoppard plays on a student discount. I was utterly alone as the Winter of Discontent began. I was living on bread, cheese, tea, cigarettes, bitter, and the occasional cod and chips. Lager was a luxury.

It was a brilliant time.

Withnail and I hadn't been written yet, so I wasn't echoing the film. The thing is, the squalor of 1969 that the film would portray in 1989 was around, embedded in W9, the district I was living in, in 1978. The music was different - not Hendrix but XTC and XRay Specs - but the people and the squats were still there. Parties at the local squat played Ian Dury, Gen X, The Jam, The Police, The Pistols, Kate Bush, Whalers. The dope was still there. I did not have the honor of witnessing the construction of the Camberwell Carrot. That came later, in Bristol, mid-1979 - but I can't say more for reasons I am not free to discuss.

Withnail and I hadn't been written yet, and in 1978, wikis hadn't been invented yet. But the Internet was around, sort of. By 1978, ARPANET was up and running. Englebart had invented the mouse, hypertext, the word processor, and the graphical interface but, despite PARC-Xerox filming The Mother of All Demos, few knew about these things yet. Since the fall of 1975, I had been goofing with email and IM (not what we called it then) using VAX terminals via the MERITS system between SCSU and the U of M. The web would wait until 1989, then making its real break in 1991 or 1992. Wikis were 1995. Blogs 1999, and they hit the mainstream in 2001.

Never mix your drinks.

Part 2 This second 20 minutes or so of the film is a real piss take of anything Sartre. Starting on a bench in Regents Park, and moving, eventually, to the pub and the discussion about "what's his name" - Withnail's uncle. This is No Exit. Fear. Loathing. The confrontation with reality and the hopeless attempt to cover it up with perfume on the boots.

I first ran into wikis in the late summer of 2001.

My wife and I were back in England in 2001. I was doing some research work for the IET at the OU in Milton Keynes. But the day I ran into wikis, we were staying in Braunton, N Devon, and I had been checking into the nascent blogger.com. Somehow, along some line, I ran into the word "wiki" which led me to looking for what they were, and then an example. c2.org. Then UseMod. Then Ward's book, The Wiki Way.

When I first played with a wiki - clicking on the Edit button and realizing I could edit that page - I had an epiphany a realization similar to the one I had when I ran into the web for the first time in 1993 (1993 saw in grunge, The Sundays, ...), running a very early iteration of Netscape on a creaky MacPlus. It was


The wiki was invention at its best: Not just parsimony but the wheel.

2001 put us in the middle of Brit Pop: Oasis, Pulp, The Verve, Stereophonics, Cold Play. Summer 2001 is six years after the wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham. So much for being an early adapter. Wikis were a well-kept secret from the academic pool. When I first mentioned them on listservs, no one, but no one, knew what they were.

Demand the finest wines

Wikis were never meant to be superior to anything. Just the simplest database that can work.

According to Wikipedia (as of June 2008), the tea shop scene in Withnail was shot not in Penryth, as suggested in the film, but in Stony Stratford, a hand's breadth from Milton Keynes and the OU. I think I remember that shop from walking through Stony. It wasn't a tea shop, but a chemist's.

The wiki, as I discovered it, became very much like an I at it's most malleable. It isn't like anything. It's empty until someone fills it. Until users begin to organize content in it. This is not a matter of essence preceding existence but the other way round.

Thematically, W & I is about becoming a pro, finding a direction, courting friendship, about itself. So, too, the wiki.

Scrubbers!

Up yours grand dad!

"I'm trying to drive this thing as quietly as possible."
An often quoted scene. This is the escape from London. Withnail explains how to side step a urine test using Danny's device and the "urine of an unadulterated virgin." The scrubbers Withnail just yelled at. Hendricks' version of All Along the Watchtower. And country walk.

Not the attitude I've been given to expect from the H E Bates novel I'd read... Clearly a myth.

Part 5.
Wikis challenge myths. Like the myth of the writer, the myth of the sole man. Makes sense. They were invented in a realm where collaboration is the watchword.

An Evening at the Crown

Part 6
Pretense is the theme of this chunk: "A coward you are, Withnail. An expert on bulls you are not."

The Crow and Crown
The pair spend an evening the Crow and Crown, Withnail pretending to be a former territorial, with "a crack at the Mick."

Bastards. You'll all suffer. I'll show the lot of you. I'm going to be a star." Lear-like. King Lear, not the other one. Shouting into the might on the moors.

"Black pudding's nothing good to us. I want something fresh."

"Don't you threaten me with a dead fish."

Over on YouTube, where I'm watching the film episode by episode, viewers are collecting up their favorite quotes and explaining period and British references. ("What's a 'large' whisky? There are only singles and doubles. Or is that a British thing?") This is the way we watch films now: bit by bit and annotating as we go. Probably always have, really, but now watching is out in the open, shared. Collaborative. Wiki-like. Viewers isolate and annotate what they are viewing, attaching the thread - and this is important - attaching the thread of discussion to the object being discussed. The clip is there for random-access reviewing as participants work with it.



ending with
And that's how I came to do lite theory.