Sunday Evening Resolutions
I’m thinking of starting blogging again. Partly inspired by reading a collection of Mark Fisher’s lively writing culled largely from the now legendary K-Punk blog, and perhaps equally by watching my wife write about her birth experience with a focus and endurance I haven’t managed in a long time. The words were pouring out of her in such a way as testament to the necessity of their inscription. Whereas my novel has trickled to a halt. Bukowski said unless the need to write burned in you, you shouldn’t bother. There’s something in that. At one point there was nothing I wanted more than to write a novel, and one that hopefully would be published. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe the reality of it isn’t as great as the idea of it. Or maybe I just couldn’t get in the flow. If it happens it happens, but so much has happened in (real) life that the storyline is eclipsed. So the (perhaps temporary) failure of my novel is a factor in wanting to write to keep my hand in and to get my thoughts on the page. The third factor in the desire to start blogging was watching episode 5 of lauded Netflix series Sex Education and enjoying the Spartacus moment. I will save any attempt at neo-Lacanian analysis of the (hang on) …
… baby Charlotte was crying. Where was I? Oh yes. I made the fairly remedial observation in a whatsapp to my friend James that the cultural references knitted into Sex Education are from an older generation than the target audience. How many millennials have seen Kirk Douglas in Spartacus to get the standing up thing? Yes maybe it was lampooned in the Simpsons but even Matt Groening’s enduring cartoon is boomer fodder primarily. The whatsapp message, perhaps because we are reaching 8-o-clock tablet taking watershed and my lithium was at low tide, was becoming somewhat prolix* and meandering, resembling perhaps, if anything, some kind of blog post.
*”nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix”
It’s not much, but a statement of intent is a start. At episode 5 of season 1, I’m behind the Sex Education curve. And I haven’t even watched Tiger King yet. I watched Breaking Bad about two years after everyone else and didn’t have anyone to rave to about it. I’ve identified a need to tap into contemporary culture more steadfastly, if I’m to have any material to wax analytical, not that I’m overly qualified for that anyway. I’m an artist, not an analyst; but I am also a writer and that runs deeper still than the art. But I can go months without writing anything. I think if I give myself a ‘slot’ when after the 8pm lithium watershed I have a cuppa and put thoughts down in Calibri 12 point after a while I’ll get into the swing of it.
