September 03, 2004

SPEAKING OF PRETENTIOUS CRAP

Is this sad case worth any more of our energy, readers?

' Even a cursory inspection of my blog...' is all my eyes can take before the 'glaze' override kicks in.

I suggest three competitions. Lucky winners will receive a thesaurus signed by Dylan Trigg (he won a boxload when scientifically proved to be "writer" most unlikely to be able to complete a sentence without its use).

1. Worst DT sentence. Plenty of candidates clearly --- but what do we mean by worst? Most pompous? Most portentous? Most unreadably convoluted? Most humourless?

2. Best DT parody. Now, this must include incorrect use of apostrophe obv, sentences so stodgily packed with verbiage that the concept of flow is entirely alien to them, and must convey that sinew-busting attempt to appear authoritatively detached and mature (I sometimes see this in teenagers' writing at work).

3. Can anyone find a worse written blog than Poetics of Decay?

Dylan assures us that he's never suffered from depression. Dylan, sweetie, I doubt you've suffered from anything... besides delusions of competence as a writer and theorist.

Enjoy your rioja and your Cioran though. Very stylish!

Posted by mark at September 3, 2004 07:51 PM | TrackBack
Comments


Is this really necessary? You may not like the guy but this post seems a pointless waste of energy. I don't like to criticise people's choice of subjects this 'argument' happened a month ago at it seems incredibly schoolboyish to bring it up again.

I read his blog, he's commented on mine and I don't have a problem with him. What does bother me is seeing people I respect partaking in such puerile activities. But then that's just my opinion.

Posted by: glueboot at September 3, 2004 11:15 PM

He's not dead, and he's not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified. After all, you can only ridicule the ridiculous.

I am not a liberal like you. I'm sure he's very nice to his granny. So what? He should get a proper job.

I'm supposed to just sit back and let him make his pompous pronouncements am I?

If you want peurility, read 'Poetics' of Decay.

Posted by: mark at September 3, 2004 11:19 PM

"Quivering in an anecdotal malaise, plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddles: without the benefit of a sickness towards impressions, you reduced yourself to an invalid of appearances."

Is he writing his own autobiography here?

(I am sitting in a hotel waiting for Hurricane Frances--this is an amusing way to widdle the hours away--when I start to feel sorry for myself, at least I can say that I am not the author of this blog!!)

Posted by: CarterM's Wife at September 3, 2004 11:24 PM

LOL -- the hard question is: what is worse? The prog lyrics or Dylan's drivel? It's a tough one...

Posted by: mark at September 3, 2004 11:27 PM

Hate's not your enemy, love's your enemy

Posted by: at September 3, 2004 11:31 PM

Hey man, you should change the name of this blog to k-hippie liberal let's hold hands with those who insult us --- PUNK is too agressive, man

Posted by: Stoner passive cops at September 3, 2004 11:33 PM

underwater merkman

Posted by: mms at September 3, 2004 11:34 PM

Hey, call off the hyenas!

Posted by: andreas beyer at September 3, 2004 11:35 PM

These things are obv a good way of splitting... who is liberal and who is not?

who recognize that life is a war and you have to be one side or another and who think you can cosy up to ppl because they're nice...

Posted by: K-rage at September 3, 2004 11:42 PM

Tony Blair's nice though....

Posted by: Stoner passive cops at September 3, 2004 11:44 PM

who recognize that life is a war and you have to be one side or another and who think you can cosy up to ppl because they're nice

that's not entirely what war is all about is it?


Posted by: mms at September 3, 2004 11:45 PM

Tony Blair's nice though....

we were talking about his use of the word humanity today regards the stuff in russia,
didn't seem to accept that humanity
ie those chechen's have no humanity

doesn't equal christian moral ideals, big problem when dealing with warriors surely

Posted by: at September 3, 2004 11:48 PM

"He's not dead, and he's not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified."

You're displaying your issues for all to see and coming off like a prick.

Posted by: Roger at September 3, 2004 11:49 PM

He's not dead, and he's not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified."

does sound like painful belly ache

Posted by: mms at September 3, 2004 11:50 PM

What issues Roger? You're just demonstrating yourself to be a liberal. Fine. Run along now.

Posted by: at September 3, 2004 11:50 PM

You’re demonstrating yourself to be rattled by something you apparently think is drivel.

Posted by: Roger at September 3, 2004 11:52 PM

What exactly do you mean by 'issues'? Can we please cut the tedious therapy speak? When did it become a crime to call a twat a twat?

Posted by: Philip at September 3, 2004 11:54 PM

These things are really really worthwhile.

Here we see what ppl's agenda really is.

Do they want to change things? Or do they just want an easy life where you tolerate mediocrity and stupidity?

If being completely intolerant of either of those things means that I have issues, then bring them on. I'm glad I have them.

What's it like NOT to have issues Roger?

Posted by: mark at September 3, 2004 11:54 PM

Yeh... thanks Philip ... the rise of this kind of therapy speak is of course commensurate with two things over the last 25 years (1) a culture of quetism and mediocrity (2) the rise of depression amongst the population of western societies to almost endemic levels.

'So, Mr k-punk, you are angry about being insulted by a pompous, continentalist fuzzonaut? Was your father a big man?'

'What? You are angry about the stupidity of Kapital.... take a chill pill...'

(Chorus from outside): Yeh, come down the pub! have a laff!

Posted by: mark at September 3, 2004 11:58 PM

Issues: resentment. I find it pathetic that you debase your blog by bringing up this bullshit.

Posted by: Roger at September 3, 2004 11:59 PM

It's because it's drivel that it rattles me... what's worse though is people that I respect having time for it...

bring back marcello, at least he isn't a liberal, and at least he can fucking write...

Posted by: mark at September 4, 2004 12:00 AM

Resentment and anger are not the same thing.

Posted by: Philip at September 4, 2004 12:02 AM

It;s NOT resentment.

Is attacking Tony Blair resentment?

Is attacking capitalism resentment?

or let me put it this way: what can we attack without it counting as resentment?

Let me say it again until I'm blue in the face: it is not wrong to call stupid things stupid.

What is wrong is letting them go without subjecting them to ridicule.

Jeezus, the emollient power of Blairism runs very very deep...

The Nietzschean critique of resentment is based upon the idea that the slaves envy the masters but cannot admit it. If you seriously think I envy DT, well LOL. what I have I got to be jealous about from Trigg? His prose style? His command of theory?
rotfl

Posted by: at September 4, 2004 12:04 AM

what's also fascinating about liberals is that they will defend tooth and nail aggressors --- and only attack those who defend themselves ---

Posted by: neville chamberlain at September 4, 2004 12:10 AM

It's hardly a noble cause though, is it. I mean - who gives a shit if you've got some beef with another blogger? It makes for a boring read.

Posted by: Roger at September 4, 2004 12:10 AM

Anger is an energy -- john lydon

Anger is holy --- mark stewart

Posted by: Love isn't all you need at September 4, 2004 12:12 AM

It IS a noble cause

crushing bourgeois individualism without mercy is one of the most noble causes going

It is NOT about a beef with another blogger...

It is about combating miserabilist-subjectivist abstract machines

Posted by: at September 4, 2004 12:14 AM

and btw, I find DT's writing hilarious --- in the same way that I find prog rock covers hilarious and roger dean hilarious -- though of course they have an absurd nobility that bourgeois individualists lack...

Posted by: mark at September 4, 2004 12:18 AM

Bullshit – it’s about your ego and that gratification of readers becoming voyeurs to your ‘anger’. Here’s an idea: why don’t you write to him personally.

Posted by: Roger at September 4, 2004 12:18 AM

NO!

I have no interest in him 'personally' --- i want readers to share anger not to be voyeurs to it --

but if you are an egotist then all you can see is ego

Posted by: at September 4, 2004 12:20 AM

this one is really the living end

why write to him personally? Because we should keep our emotions out of public forums so that we behave like Kantian autonomous rational subjects?

It is important to publicly ridicule damaging machines

Posted by: mark at September 4, 2004 12:24 AM

Thank uttunul i can remember the 70s -- when punk was around and there was anger -- and best of all ANGRY WOMEN -- and thank uttunul I remember Monty Python and Chris Morris --- both of whom were about relentlessly exposing and ridiculing pomposity and stupidity.... in other words, thank uttunul that I remember a time when you didn't get tarred and feathered for attacking complacency wherever you see it...

Posted by: mark at September 4, 2004 12:29 AM

I think they only thing they're sharing is a sickness that you choose to concentrate on this fucking waste whilst actual wars occur in the background.

Posted by: Roger at September 4, 2004 12:31 AM

Thank uttunul I'm not an old fucking man glazed over in nostalgia.

Over.

Posted by: at September 4, 2004 12:33 AM

He's not dead, and he's not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified."

does sound like painful belly ache

I wanna destroy passers by

I think they only thing they're sharing is a sickness that you choose to concentrate on this fucking waste whilst actual wars occur in the background.

my guess, herr doktor, is that you are an American liberal.

I can't do much about what you call 'actual' wars. Can or are you btw?

I can do something about the war that I am fighting.

Thank uttunul I'm not an old fucking man glazed over in nostalgia.

I plead guilty to the old, but thank uttunul I'm not locked into a Blairite gliberal Present and that I can deploy the resources of the past to make a different future.

Posted by: mark at September 4, 2004 12:50 AM

MR. TRIPP EARNS A TUPPENCE PER EVERY USE OF THE WORD "WHILST", OR, NOTES FROM THE WINEBAR UNDERGROUND

Here's a lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp. Guess which lines belong to whom. (Hint: I put all of Mr. Tripp's lines it italics.) All Sinfield lines taken from his lyric website; all of Tripp's from his blog. Enjoy!


'Ringed By Ants And Musing Over Man, featuring "Poets of Decay", and including "I Cannot Resist His Solemn Pomposity"'


Lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp

Wagner blows his tuba whilst another fracture of the ceiling erodes
Harlequins coin pointless games, sneer jokes in parrot's robe
Lizard bones become the clay –
An evocation of Chauncey Gardiner gliding down the hallway


CHORUS:

Who'll give me comfort when the moon rides in the pines
An aesthetic commitment to fatigue, silence, and decline
The wise men share a joke; I run to grasp divining signs
It permits a sense of moral autonomy whilst Simultaneously affording the aesthetic pleasure of decline


Worship!" cried the clown, "I am a TV”
I do not suffer from depression so the formula is alien to me
Burn slow to ash just as my days now seem to be
It is like returning to Mahler and remembering how rich things can be


REPEAT CHORUS


A sublime sense of elevation amongst the pitiful waste of the asylum transpires
They slide across your frying pan and fertilize your fire
And thereafter the everyday recedes,
Poets' starving children bleed


(MELLOTRON FLUTE SOLO)


Here, the surface, rotten through dampness, upturns whilst its gaze lingers in suspended decay
Burnt with dream and taut with fear, the yellow jester does not play
Resonances of Schopenhauer’s disinterestedness simmer,
All veiled in a quasi-prophetic tone whilst still maintaining an academic rigour


REPEAT CHORUS


Grass in your hair stretched like a lion in the sun
I renounce Cairo whilst I furrow deep beneath the waste of the asylum
Snuff brown walls where Spanish lizards run
I am maintaining Baudelaire’s view that dandyism is incompatible with being a woman
Damn iron minded, gold braid blinded, officers and gentlemen!


REPEAT CHORUS


Blown autumn leaves shed to the fire where you laid me
We look to open expanses of glass and accordingly feel open and free
For now Prince Rupert's tears of glass make saffron sabbath eyelids bleed
Ontological space clarified not through the appearance of stability but through the presence of the unhomely, the world depicted in debris


REPEAT CHORUS (x 2)


Quivering in an anecdotal malaise,
Plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddle

Now tales Prince Rupert's peacock brings
Waves sweep the sand from my island,
From me

Posted by: CarterM at September 4, 2004 06:45 AM

>thank uttunul that I remember a time when you
>didn't get tarred and feathered for attacking
>complacency wherever you see it...

yeah, wish I did

Posted by: undercurrent at September 4, 2004 01:06 PM

if blogs are going to offer anything more than an acceleration of the dominant, bankrupt genre (newspaper columnists, or diarists), then this incontinence should be renounced.

calling something stupid, "stupid", simply rests at the level of opinion. You're performatively demonstrating your liberal attachment to your self.

Get abstract. Generate knowledge not puff.

Posted by: at September 4, 2004 01:32 PM

blast from the past - Hegel

"The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itselfm and by striving to look on it and express it as something else." PS para 377

Posted by: munch at September 4, 2004 02:01 PM

I can't believe people are defending DT's right to blog without ridicule when a) he's, like, a PRO and therefore certain standards can be expected and b) his stuff is so obviously wannabe nonsense it's embarassing. I believe in Love, but I don't think there's anything wrong with laughing at a philosophy writer who can't write.

Anyway Roger, your comments are always mean spirited and poisonous in a way that Mark and the Kollective just aren't... maybe Luke's right and the comments boxes should be closed, leave Mark more time to stick up cool writing... what's your blog again Roger? Oh, I see...

Posted by: paul "bone thugz and armoury" meme at September 6, 2004 03:36 PM

"leave Mark more time to stick up cool writing"

Did you write that on the blackboard?

Posted by: clap-clap-clap at September 7, 2004 01:07 PM

>thank uttunul that I remember a time when you
>didn't get tarred and feathered for attacking
>complacency wherever you see it...

>yeah, wish I did

Perhaps you could start doing it then, instead of exemplifying it. If kneejerk anti-glam cult studs 'feminism' from 25 years ago isn't complacent (AND oppressive), then I don't know what is. Part of the almost charming quaintness of your and ruth's completely out of touch position is imagining that it isn't blandly hegemonic in universities and other high culture bourgeois hang-outs (n.b. please don't reply here, we don't want to hear it again, sound off on your own blog if you have to).

>calling something stupid, "stupid", simply >rests at the level of opinion.

No it doesn't. See forthcoming post on teenage ontology (first thing you have to try and destroy in teenagers when you teach them philosophy is the absurd idea that 'it's all just opinions'). Arguments are like machines, some work and some don't.

>You're performatively demonstrating your >liberal attachment to your self.

Perhaps you could demonstrate this would-be deconstruction of my position instead of blandly asserting it.

I'm performatively demonstrating my anti-liberal attachment to Reason.

The fact that you and Roger insist on personalising this is of course indicative of YOUR liberal attachment to self - both at the level of your own subjectivity and at the level of ontology.

I don't have a self. You might think that you do.

Posted by: mark at September 8, 2004 07:23 AM