Tuesday, January 31, 2006

telling the truth

I always simply wanted this blog to be a forum-of-me in which I could pontificate endlessly on ridiculous issues no-one else would even dare to formulate into a thought, let alone publicly discuss. I suppose Dave Eggars is partly responsible for this (although I find his long digressions terribly dull to read, I immediately thought when I first read them, wow this would be fun to do and it's a great idea) (I once interviewed the lead singer from the Choirboys who told me that he preferred new wave bands like The Birthday Party but that the kind of heavy metal pop the Choirboys did was more fun to play).

However, I must admit that I am inhibited by a need to keep everything more or less acceptable to more or less everyone involved. I don't really feel I can snipe at various people who make my day-to-day life more annoying, unless I don't know who they are. Like most people (I hope) I have a catty, elitist view of those at my social/work perimeter whose motivations and quirks I only half-understand. I really enjoy bagging them to Mia or other close friends. If I was going to do it here, I'd have to completely disguise the proceedings, and it wouldn't work at all. So I have to turn the other cheek and concentrate on higher things, which is the last thing my generation was trained to do.

For a short time I considered doing a parrallel universe blog where I could do that kind of thing and add in large doses of fantasy (no, not sexual fantasy, be serious) in fact I even set one up but when it came to my first post I realised I had precisely nothing to say within those fierce limits - I'd have to work overtime to disguise myself, etc etc. So I dumped it and walked away relieved in one sense from having avoided a lot of work, yet still unsatisfied in the sense of still not having an outlet for my poison pen.

I suppose the alternative is to keep a diary. I do actually have a diary, I think I last put an entry in it about two years ago. I always envied Joe Orton his ability to keep a diary that wasn't in a book with 'Diary' on the cover, but was a typed up MS. Isn't that peculiar. I suppose I am beholden to the idea that everything has to be published, or publishable, and if it's not viewable by a wider audience than oneself there's no point. I guess that's what being published in a metropolitan newspaper at the age of 12 and in the music press from the age of 16 does to you.

By the way, lest any of you wonder if I ever wonder what truth really is, no I don't. I am a modernist, and we are set to take the world back from confusion quite soon. A five-year-plan, I think.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try David Foster Wallace, Lorraine, his digressions are legendary examples of comic genius.

lucy tartan said...

Inhibited or not, I assure it doesn't show. I really like this blog, for whatever that's worth.

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