K-Punk

luka

Well-known member
Blogs, even very good blogs, make terrible books. See zero's backlist for confirmation.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Blogs, even very good blogs, make terrible books. See zero's backlist for confirmation.

Recall one Zero author asking me what I'd thought of their MS, and replying "well, I liked it all well enough the first time around", which was cattier than perhaps I quite meant to be. (Mine was mostly OC, fwiw, written on the train between Northampton and London on the days when sheer tiredness didn't pull me straight down into leaden slumber)

The Jenny Turner piece is the best appraisal so far published in English, imo.
 

version

Well-known member
I found the Sebald criticism funny after seeing him praised on here the other day:

... he did once mention how much he distrusted the way W.G. Sebald, in his much admired Rings of Saturn (1995), ‘morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them’. This was ‘mittelbrow miserablism’, Fisher continued, ‘an anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Because I wasn't involved in it and wasn't paying attention at all at the time, I find the psychodrama of that whole Vampire Castle episode interesting and surprising. I wonder how it was received by The Gang at the time.

The Gang I was in was, to all intents and purposes, no longer The Gang at that point. I had effectively been excommunicated by Mark long before that, and I wasn't the only one. (I never did find out why - the furore over the Atzmon book? Some other transgression I barely noted at the time? If one wants to talk about "cancel culture", it's worth noting that Mark was himself an enthusiastic and very definitive practitioner, on a personal level - and his judgement was extremely final). He had assembled a quite different following, whose sympathies I can only guess at.

Amongst "us" there was mostly foreboding: this wasn't going to go well. Some of what he was saying made perfect sense, and needed saying; some of it, while arguably true, was phrased so baitingly that no constructive response was conceivable; some of it was just hopelessly mistargeted. The defence of Russell Brand seemed an especially strange hill to die on - at the very least, he might have acknowledged that Brand had on several occasions been a toxic nobhead, not just sexist-by-accident like your Nan who hasn't quite got her head around contemporary gender politics, but rather crusadingly obnoxious like that one mate of yours who half the time seems fairly sound and the other half is a coked-up sex-pest bellend. He simultaneously castigated the "neo-anarchist" faction who he held responsible for the worst excesses of bourgeois vampirism, but made a special exception for SolFed who at least in his view had some decent class politics - omitting to notice that most of the individuals who'd especially irritated him were SolFed-adjacent if not actively affiliated. There was an underlying personal animosity about the whole thing which he simply wasn't open about, preferring to parlay his frustrations and irritations with particular people into a grand typology of Bad Subjective Positions - not the first time he'd done that, but by far the largest platform he'd done it on. When it's just you on a blog bitching in thinly veiled theory-speak about someone who's got on your wick, that's one thing; this was, supposedly, a Political Intervention.

It went over disastrously, created a huge furore in which (as I said at the time, to some people's extraordinary annoyance) everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves very much while simultaneously accusing the other side of stealing their enjoyment, and accomplished precisely nothing in terms of altering anybody's behaviour. Now and then some left-baiting dickhead like Nick Cohen picks it up and uses it as a stick to bash the intersectionalist snowflakes with. As far as I'm concerned it's a wholly cursed and tainted document, but it's also doomed to circulate forever - a testimony to Mark's power of opprobrium, which on so many other occasions was wielded so judiciously and correctly.
 

luka

Well-known member
Craner has a great story about being excommunicated and group-shamed at a party k-punk and acolytes were at. They all formed a circle around him and starting jabbing their fingers towards him chanting "fash-ist, fash-ist, fash-ist SCUM!"
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Craner has a great story about being excommunicated and group-shamed at a party k-punk and acolytes were at. They all formed a circle around him and starting jabbing their fingers towards him chanting "fash-ist, fash-ist, fash-ist SCUM!"

It was one of Nina's parties, ironically enough.
 
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