Many of the posts on this blog originate as ideas sketched out in note form. I work on these ‘ideas’ until I think they are ready to post or else I decide to discard them. Not all my binned blogs reach the stage of completed first drafts – but here is a list of 10 that underwent varying degrees of revision before I decided against posting them….
- “The First 3 Letters of Espresso Are ESP, So Is Coffee a Psychedelic Drug?” – I guess I was high when I came up with this blog title. In the cold light of day it didn’t seem worth following through!
2 “Chatham Is Fucked” – inspired by my first trip to that town in 15 years. It was almost as depressing to write this as it was to visit one of the more blighted parts of the so-called “Garden of England”. A post on this subject would have been way too much of a turn off for my readers. - “Bill Ayers: Fake Leftist” – a critique of the former Weatherman explaining in simple terms why he is a reactionary tosser despite the pseudo-revolutionary posturing in his crap book Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. In the end I preferred not to give this right-wing twit fulsome coverage on my site. It just isn’t possible to take Ayers seriously when he talks about ‘joining’ the working class in the same way as he might join the masons or the boy scouts. Ultimately I figured a relatively short review without direct citations from the book and placed on GoodReads (rather than here) was the best way to deal with vanguardist scum like Ayers.
- “Synchronicity II at Tiwani Contemporary” – a lively exhibition of African photography running from 3 February to 17 March 2012. I went to the opening and spent as much time talking to Grace Ndiritu (who is in the show) as doing anything else there. While I had fun, the private view didn’t attract your usual London art world rent-a-crowd, so there weren’t enough people about who I recognised for me to be able to write an insider account. Indeed, apart from Ndiritu, I only recognised the likes of curator Caroline Hancock (who has been based in Paris for some years) . Shame as the work is definitely worth seeing, although I was only really familiar with James Barnor’s pictures before I went.
- “Reading: A Town More Like All The Others I’ve Been To In England Than Any Other I’ve Ever Visited….” – middle England considered as a postmodern simulacrum. At first this idea seemed funny but the more I worked on it the scarier it became! The Stepford Wives can eat their hearts out!
- Review of “Untouchables: Dirty Cops, Bent Justice and Racism in Scotland Yard by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn” – necessary background reading if you want to understand how the phone hacking scandal unravelled into also being a sordid exposé of corrupt relations between the cops and the media. In the end I felt reading the book was a lot easier than providing a summary that covered all the ground.
- “Chicks On Speed at The Showroom, London: 14 February 2012” – a great night but writing about it didn’t add anything to what I’ve already said about COS.
- “Uncreative Writing, Conceptual Literature & Flarf Poetry” – checking what was online under these headings, I found more than enough information to satisfy me. And so in the true spirit of ‘uncreative writing’ I decided not to add my voice to this discourse. Of course, this doesn’t preclude me from copying and pasting something written by someone else on the subject (without crediting them) at some point in the very near future!
- “10 Reasons To Be Unfaithful To Your Lover” – in the end I didn’t really feel it was necessary to explain yet again why smashing monogamy is an integral part of destroying patriarchy! And my attempts to come up with laugh-out-loud lines floundered at point six.
- “Why I’m Even More Bored With Facebook Now Than I Was Last Year (If That’s Possible)” – like point one, this never got beyond me typing up and saving the title. Facebook proved too boring to contemplate!
In many ways blogging has been superseded by the status update and the tweet. Information just keeps getting more and more compressed. But shrinking 10 potential blog posts down into one – as I’ve done here – is one way of keeping the superannuated form of blogging relevant! Back in the 1980s your typical postmodernist hack made an academic career of disappearing up his or her own arse. Web 2.0 has taken us way beyond postmodernism and the academy. Our turdy tongues have passed through our own guts and re-emerged from our mouths; enabling us to really shoot the shit in style!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Comments
Comment by Soap On A Rope on 2012-02-18 02:27:20 +0000
Just don’t expect me to give you summaries of the last 10 comments I didn’t post!
Comment by Postman Pat on 2012-02-18 03:01:08 +0000
If I gave you summaries of ten letters I couldn’t be bothered to deliver I’d be in real trouble!
Comment by Mike Goodwin on 2012-02-18 21:26:08 +0000
I went to Chatham once but you wouldn’t have got an espresso in that town back then.
Comment by Tom McGlynn on 2012-02-18 22:28:46 +0000
Recoup de grace. Sew that deadhead back on with counter stitched threading!
Comment by The Tiger In Your Tank on 2012-02-18 23:54:00 +0000
Ha – the first three letters of espresso are ESP, well the last four letters are ESSO, so you might as well be drinking petrol! Looks like you’re only seeing what you want to see and not what’s actually there!
Comment by Valerie Solanas on 2012-02-19 00:26:08 +0000
With regard to point 9, in my experience men wishing to smash monogamy are generally more interested in getting their end away than doing away with patriarchy.
Comment by Gene Pitney on 2012-02-19 01:16:12 +0000
Last chance saloon, last chance to turn around!
Comment by George Palmer on 2012-02-19 13:35:38 +0000
Point 5 is very silly. Reading is not like any other town in the world, and I made it what it is today!
Comment by phil hall on 2012-02-19 16:47:59 +0000
The third and fourth letters of espresso are PR, so is this a marketing exercise?
Comment by Bianca Jagger on 2012-02-19 18:52:11 +0000
Doesn’t Billy Childish live in Chatham – and if that’s the case it can’t be all bad!
Comment by Random Play on 2012-02-19 19:29:50 +0000
Why always 10 points? Why not 7 or 13, or 5 or 100?
Comment by Pedant on 2012-02-19 20:07:44 +0000
And if I didn’t read it here, where did I read it then?
Comment by mistertrippy on 2012-02-19 23:51:38 +0000
You probably looked to the sky and read it in the stars…. reading like Reading is over-rated by some….
@ Random Play – 10 points is a convention just as the name you’ve chosen is one that would usually be taken as indicating you might be looking online for some meatworld sexual fun!
@ Bianca Jagger – didn’t you used to be married to a complete tosser?
@ Phil Hall – in a world of capitalist social relations the commodity is always king… that’s why we’ve got a world to win.
@ Valerie Solanas – you died a long time ago… so you’re either a zombie or a nom de plume….
@ The Tiger In Your Tank – actually we’re all drinking electricity!
Comment by I Was Tom Anderson’s Double on 2012-02-20 01:51:19 +0000
No one is talking about Facebook any more! Has it peaked and started to go the way of MySpace?
Comment by Freelance Publicist on 2012-02-20 10:36:44 +0000
Points 4, 6 & 7 (and maybe even 3) indicate you seem a bit down on reviews right now – which is a shame!
Comment by Stephen Farmer on 2012-02-20 23:20:31 +0000
Why on earth didn’t you post all these as individual and full blogs. They’d have beeen great!
Comment by Bobby Day on 2012-02-21 01:54:07 +0000
I prefer an abridgement to the full blog! Tweet tweet!
Comment by Christian Fraser on 2012-02-21 15:36:32 +0000
Forget Chatham – Dominique Strauss-Kahn is fucked!
Comment by John on 2012-02-21 15:42:12 +0000
Some of them, I understand you not posting them, I wonder how could you write in a post about them, but some sound interesting. Like “Chatham is fucked”.
Comment by Oliver Hardy on 2012-02-21 17:35:50 +0000
I didn’t read it there either!
Comment by Michael Roth on 2012-06-24 20:47:20 +0000
Summaries are what blogging is all about! The replacement of content with something empty that resembles content. Toot toot! Number one is a good place to start and certainly true; I see things after a good cuppa. However, my personal favorite is number 8 as I’ve been uncreative for years!