Blog hater DONALD CLARKEstarts a blog
Don’t you hate blogs? Think about it. That baboon next door may have acquired enough rudimentary technical prowess to “publish” his inane ravings on the electronic ether, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay him any more attention than you would if you met him in the pub.
Just look at this stuff. For the last few centuries (this is internet time, remember) the world’s most conspicuous fan-driven film website has been the infamously unreliable Ain’t it Cool News. Ain’t it Crap, more like.
Now, if you think that joke was inane, you obviously haven’t spent much time ploughing through the ghastly prose and half-baked criticism on Harry Knowles’s ugly, disorganised website.
Initially a genuine product of the basement, Ain’t It Cool News has, by allowing itself to be seduced by the film companies, become as convincing an organ of the current counter culture as, well, The Irish Times.
Okay, that’s not a fair example. The internet being what it is, the blogs worth heeding are those that are still emerging from their chrysalises. If you’ve heard of the thing then it’s probably over. Let’s make up some examples.
In Gunnar Björnstrand’s Opening Gambit, a big, serious blog written by a grad student from the unfashionable bit of Brooklyn, we learn that Andrei Tarkovsky is “perhaps one of the most transgressive thinkers since Dostoevsky”.
In Movie's Rule, a blog that is unlikely to last past the author's next geography exam, homophobic remarks are made about those critics of Transformerswho can't "appreciate megan fox's rockin ass!!!"
Even if all this stuff were more readable, you’d still have to cope with those horrible, horrible four letters. “Blog” is, after “buggy”, the second ugliest word in the English language. It’s even more unpleasant when used as a verb. Every time somebody says they’ve “blogged about” something, I imagine them vomiting noisily in the general vicinity of the relevant concept. Eugh! Declan Ganley makes me want to blog. Blooog! Blooog! Can I have another bucket, mum? Blooog!
Have you guessed where
this is going? From today, Screenwriter will expand into a blog at the online edition of The Irish Times. Far from offering a bulwark against the pretensions and idiocies parodied above, Cyber-Screenwriter will be every bit as opinionated, unhinged and intemperate as the digital rant- buckets parodied above.
The truth is that the crazier and more unreasonable the material, the more the average reader is tempted to post a comment. See if you can identify some of the thousands of words I have spewed up at the bottom of various blogs over the last decade. We offer a Ticket T-shirt to anybody who can correctly attribute a Screenwriter post. (Yeah, right).
The Screenwriter blog will be what it will be. Retaining film at its centre, but roving over various pop-cultural domains, it will take in whatever peeves, enthusiasms and diversions pass through this writer’s mind during the day.
One thing you will not see, however, is “blog” used as verb.
From today, Donald Clarke’s blog is at www.irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter
