BREAKING NEWS: JOURNALISTS AREN'T BASTARDS AFTER ALL.
Except for them at The Drudge Report, who seem to have gone to the Anna Mikhailova School of Journalism.
Perhaps that's a little unfair of me. Make that incredibly unfair. I think that journalists are amazing people: patient, dedicated, focussed, and scarily good at turning copy around. Thank God for journalists when you've got an evil corporation screwing people over or when a massacre is covered up or when government statements are bearing increasing resemblance to Soviet propaganda. But there are the other sort - Anna Mikhailova and Matt Drudge among them - and a more smug, manipulative, malicious, shit-stirring bunch of malcontents you couldn't find anywhere. Why was it necessary to break the media blackout about Prince Harry? Where was the public interest? It was kept quiet because making it common knowledge would have put other people at risk, and because it is a sensitive issue, having a royal fighting in an unpopular, controversial war. But no, those self-satisfied bastards had to pull the "I know something you don't know" trick, and you know what, guys? It's no more mature now than when you did it in the playground.
Jeez.
In less rage-filled news, Prince Harry's voice is surprisingly deep and amusingly like Prince Charles (probably to be expected, I spose). And he is adorably inarticulate.
And in less embarassing, shallow news, I owe you many many posts. Next up, The Literary Adaptation For Telly. Quake, mortals, and quiver!
Friday, 29 February 2008
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
I Capture the Castle - and hopefully, an audience
So, I was considering how one started a vaguely-literary but generally aimless blog (none of this niche rubbish), when my favourite opening line from any book ever popped into my head. Or rather, a paraphrase of it did, and the paraphrase was this:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink, to catch the last of the light.
Of course, it isn't true, I'm sitting in my chair in my little room in Cambridge (nar). But that is no way to start a book, or even a blog. With that line, though, Dodie nailed it. Funny, she is one of many writers whose books have become independently famous; I wonder how many people would know that she wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians, for instance, or that Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22. Whereas you will have heard of Dickens or Shakespeare or Jane Austen even if you could not name one of their books/plays.
I have a horrible feeling this is already overbearingly pretentious. NEVER MIND, onwards and upwards etc etc. I am off to the library to return my habitually late books and get some new ones out for this week's essay (‘The Partition of India created more minority problems than it solved’. Discuss this view of the post-colonial states in South Asia.) And then to Waterstones, to find out what the opening lines to I Capture the Castle actually are.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink, to catch the last of the light.
Of course, it isn't true, I'm sitting in my chair in my little room in Cambridge (nar). But that is no way to start a book, or even a blog. With that line, though, Dodie nailed it. Funny, she is one of many writers whose books have become independently famous; I wonder how many people would know that she wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians, for instance, or that Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22. Whereas you will have heard of Dickens or Shakespeare or Jane Austen even if you could not name one of their books/plays.
I have a horrible feeling this is already overbearingly pretentious. NEVER MIND, onwards and upwards etc etc. I am off to the library to return my habitually late books and get some new ones out for this week's essay (‘The Partition of India created more minority problems than it solved’. Discuss this view of the post-colonial states in South Asia.) And then to Waterstones, to find out what the opening lines to I Capture the Castle actually are.
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