Kaitei Shonen Marien

How important are Blogs? The BBC's Bill Thompson has been wondering about the appeal of Blogs. From my reading of other blogs it is very difficult to see that many of them have any interest or relevance. We should not let that get in the way as there are so many out there, there are bound to be more than enough to keep anyone interested. I read this one quite a lot but it gives me Javascript errors. Alice is obviously trying to steer a line of controversy right down the middle of every accepted 'ism' in the same way that Julie Birchill does. You are right Alice; you do need a Newspaper column. Don't ask me to agree with much of it, but it will be interesting. And yes, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea is very good. I have it here ready to play.

How do you sort out your own thoughts? How can you put down what you are thinking so that the meaning is clear and yet the writing is good? It seems impossible to make writing sound intelligent and interesting in they way that writers manage to. In "Thinks" David Lodge seems to write in a way devoid of all emotional colour, a little like Orwell does in "The Road to Wigan Pier" and I am sure that this is the proper way to write if you want to create the most factual image possible. I can write poems and I can write factual (technical stuff) but if I try to write creatively, it seems like one big poem. That is not always a bad thing but Simon Armitage is known as a poet and yet he was more than capable of writing a novel (Little Green Man) and a collection of prose (All Points North) both of which are very good. Maybe I should stick to poems. And here comes another one now.

Just what is wrong with a big long poem? DJ Taylor comments that they were already going out of fashion when Orwell was trying to write them. Actually, I think that most of Orwell's poems were far worse than mine which probably sounds sweeping in the face of him being published and well know and me being an oik. I used to write huge, ugly poems which were simply diaries like Clive James' and though I can drag out interesting themes they were strings of cliché rather than any serious attempt at literature. (No change there then).

What is it about a well-placed guitar squall that makes you want to write something powerful? It is the same thing which makes you think of the worlds best Poem/Novel/Music after a couple of beers. I used to thinks up pages of stuff while sitting at tables, at the student's union, on Saturday nights. Just for clarity, this was after I had stopped being a student and was working for this very company. They used to employ placement students and I had far more in common with those guys than with the family men that made up most of the department. The students all lived across the road from here in halls of residence, made up of lots and lots of tiny rooms. Most of them were art students and it is from them that I got the idea for collages when one of them saw the pictures stuck on my wardrobe door and started putting them in different conversations. I did a few in the style of John Heartfield - this was the time of Gulf War I - and then started the scrapbooks after digging out the catalogue for the Liverpool Tate Gallery's opening exhibition on Surrealism. Still need to post that first page.

We are living in one giant scrapbook - a continuous line of pictures, music, smells and feelings which we can never quite place the start of and never know the end of. All our life will be incomplete in our heads because we can never remember all that has happened or know all that is to happen. I get this incredible sense of unease at not being able to complete everything. We would all like the world to be perfect but what is perfect for me would be horrible to others. Try and imagine what the ideal programme schedule would be if you could control a TV station for one night and could show anything you like. I tried to think of what I would show and there was so much choice, that it was impossible. And of course there is an element of what you think of as your current favourite stuff. My Daughter got The Secret Garden" from the video shop they other day (and watched all of it) so that was on the list but I kept thinking of everything I had ever watched and enjoyed from Marine Boy to Gods in the Sky and there was just too much. Life is too difficult to compartmentalise. You will never solve every problem or even make everybody happy.

Marine Boy was brilliant and the theme song was so catchy that I can still play it today at least thirty years after I last heard it.