You shouldn't think I don't have things to say, things to think. I just find it hard - as I have for as long as I can meaningfully remember - to get them down
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It's all very well, and I wish you luck, only you don't seem to know a lot. Fair enough, you seem to know who cabinet members were in the 1950's (and appear to congratulate yourself for same) but you don't appear to know how they came to adopt their political stances, what they did during the 2nd World War (the decisive predicator on most post-war political positions) or even what they did pre-war. This ignorance is reflected in your obsession with pop-cultural minutiae and trivia, where you tend to ignore obvious ideological and behavioural triggers in favour of personal political hobby horses (usually anti-american, which would be fair enough if only you hit the correct targets).
You should spend a lot less time expounding, and a lot more time reading. Only then will what you have to say be actually useful.
I could not have admitted this until now, but I think you are - to a considerable extent - absolutely right. I *have* read much less than I should. I *have* far too much of an anorak's mind to be healthy. I *have* focused my attention far too much on relatively superficial aspects of US influence rather than the genuine problems (and I wish now that I had written more on US interference in Eastern Europe, the full aftereffects of which provocation have now become so clear, and will probably get worse rather than better). I should never have written most of the chartblogs - I simply had neither the instinctive feeling for most of the music involved nor the personal recollection of it to really make them work as Marcello Carlin did - and to be honest that awareness of my own faults was why I stopped
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"I have only recently...become aware of...the complete distance from other humanity in much of this blog..."
Well if you have that is a major step forward. What I find exasperating is how ridiculously ideological you are in discussing music, i.e. anyone who has a soft spot for a recent Keane single must AUTOMATICALLY masturbate over images of limbless Iraqis. This kind of ridiculous reductionism in which certain music and its listeners represents absolute evil is the sign of someone who knows very little about people. On a slightly shallow level I do enjoy the erudition of your writing - the minutiae of British political history and so on - but I take a lot of the analysis with a pinch of salt. On a more positive note, I loved that Roger Scruton satire "Cigarettes Are Sublime" you did on ILX. Extremely funny.
It is intellectually dishonest to look backwards with all the facts and judge the decisions that were made with almost none of the facts. A disappointing blog with little or no substance.
Agree with the first, not the second. I find reading Robin frustrating, occasionally confusing given I have had the sense that one really has to be Robin Carmody to understand the references and implications, but always interesting, and different.
I'm aware now - as I probably wasn't before - that my work is not inherently easy to understand. I should have explained more of the allusions. But, as you hint, it has at least always made me distinct from all those around me ... though I wonder whether that has necessarily been a good thing, with all the harm it has done to my social relationships.
One problem I've faced in life is whether to be merely a walking encyclopaedia or an intellectual loose cannon. I've tried to be both at once, and not really been either very convincingly.
Thanks. As detailed above I have acknowledged my faults (the first commenter had some points which, until very, very recently, I would have been too proud to concede) and deleted/revised some old material (which until now I have never done on principle, but I could not let some of the more dubious moments stand).
I'll still have somewhere on the internet, perhaps sooner, perhaps later. And there will be other things, hopefully ...
I saw part of that in the Snail itself (not my own copy, I hasten to add). For the most part, completely beyond parody - Quentin Letts often strikes me as resembling an imagined persona, all the presumptions and prejudices of a certain part of English life thrown together into one, and programmed to come out with all the most obvious lines imaginable (in the bit I read, he even nominates Jimmy Savile - this is a world that still regards the seatbelt laws as a profound infringement of civil liberties). At least Peter Hitchens thinks for himself, whatever you think of *what* he thinks. In 2002 I started a let's-all-laugh-at-Letts thread on Usenet after he had sneered at the government for being so vulgar as to regard faster internet connections in rural areas as a priority (as if he himself was a fucking farmer) - a risky business on as far-right-dominated a group as I was posting on, but it turned into a thread singing the praises of Ludacris (don't ask), so that was all right
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"regarding the miners as the enemy within, when in fact many of them were profoundly socially conservative (as indeed they were - the NME of that time was supporting many people who would have viewed its own ultra-liberal socio-cultural stance with every bit as much scepticism as the denizens of Henley-on-Thames would)"
Yeah, a bit like PH's rhetoric about "oh, it was good when we had decent, patriotic, masculine, manly, church-going, Churchill-qouting men working down the coalmines, men who sustained eight million wounds in world war 2 and who were versed in the sublime cadence of the King James Bible, unlike these effete, foppish, pro-EU woofters in call centres today."
Quite. I hope you don't think I'm endorsing Letts/Hitchens because I'm not. There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the nostalgic stance that Old Rightists now take re. Britain's industrial past, remembering that they were the ones who were so quick to call for its abolition when it was still the present, because it bred Marxist traitors who brought down a government or simply because our energy could be obtained quicker and cheaper elsewhere (not to mention their promotion of an essentially pre-industrial image when they controlled official images of the country, as they pretty much did fifty years ago). A few years back, This England magazine (vide Patrick Wright passim) ran a feature in one of those "aspects of old towns" sections about (I think) Middlesbrough - the first time they'd ever really acknowledged industrial Britain, as far as I was aware. The thought of the magazine's readers mourning its demise when they were the ones cheering on the police during the miners' strike was quite stomach-churning for me, and I suspect
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The Kammite/Pollardite trolls have been maliciously editing/vandalising my wikipedia entry- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Clark_(writer) the page gives a very unbalanced view of my journalism, only putting in the stuff they think shows me in a bad light. Would you have time to take a look, as someone familiar with my work, you would be the ideal person to put in a more balanced edit.
Hi, and sorry for the delay (haven't checked LJ since Sunday).
I've put in a few more references that I think give a good picture of your writing, and sorted out the links as well (two of them no longer worked). I've kept in a link to "Keep these quislings out", though, if only because of the stir it caused.
Any chance of writing a piece about how much less evocative this time of year has become since Hallowe'en was Americanised and Guy Fawkes faded from mass consciousness (and also since it started, on the whole, to get warmer)? I think I can trust you to blame it on the power of global capital rather than - as I suspect some right-wingers would - on the strawman of PC and not wanting to offend Catholics (which is a very, very minor factor).
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You should spend a lot less time expounding, and a lot more time reading. Only then will what you have to say be actually useful.
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Well if you have that is a major step forward. What I find exasperating is how ridiculously ideological you are in discussing music, i.e. anyone who has a soft spot for a recent Keane single must AUTOMATICALLY masturbate over images of limbless Iraqis. This kind of ridiculous reductionism in which certain music and its listeners represents absolute evil is the sign of someone who knows very little about people. On a slightly shallow level I do enjoy the erudition of your writing - the minutiae of British political history and so on - but I take a lot of the analysis with a pinch of salt. On a more positive note, I loved that Roger Scruton satire "Cigarettes Are Sublime" you did on ILX. Extremely funny.
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One problem I've faced in life is whether to be merely a walking encyclopaedia or an intellectual loose cannon. I've tried to be both at once, and not really been either very convincingly.
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I'll still have somewhere on the internet, perhaps sooner, perhaps later. And there will be other things, hopefully ...
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You need to read the linked article on that entry, and comment on it here. I'm interested to see what you think.
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Yeah, a bit like PH's rhetoric about "oh, it was good when we had decent, patriotic, masculine, manly, church-going, Churchill-qouting men working down the coalmines, men who sustained eight million wounds in world war 2 and who were versed in the sublime cadence of the King James Bible, unlike these effete, foppish, pro-EU woofters in call centres today."
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The Kammite/Pollardite trolls have been maliciously editing/vandalising my wikipedia entry-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Clark_(writer)
the page gives a very unbalanced view of my journalism, only putting in the stuff they think shows me in a bad light. Would you have time to take a look, as someone familiar with my work, you would be the ideal person to put in a more balanced edit.
Many thanks,
Neil Clark
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I've put in a few more references that I think give a good picture of your writing, and sorted out the links as well (two of them no longer worked). I've kept in a link to "Keep these quislings out", though, if only because of the stir it caused.
Any chance of writing a piece about how much less evocative this time of year has become since Hallowe'en was Americanised and Guy Fawkes faded from mass consciousness (and also since it started, on the whole, to get warmer)? I think I can trust you to blame it on the power of global capital rather than - as I suspect some right-wingers would - on the strawman of PC and not wanting to offend Catholics (which is a very, very minor factor).
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