Mea culpa

I know it has been remarkably quiet around here for the last couple of months.

To be honest, it is not that I have been lacking in inspiration, the problem is that the inspiration has been to write about topics that I find tedious when reading through the draft. It is almost as if the orgasmic explosion of actually getting the words down in some form is the thrill – then I tend to walk away for a couple of minutes and return to something that is lacking in so many areas and a disappointment in general.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to try and rework any of these drafts – my writing style (if there is such a thing) has always tended towards density (maybe the many years of German have compelled me to write in a Teutonic style – even in Czech (in which I am far from proficient at present), a simple presentation ended up as some pseudo-intellectual tripe, full of subordinate clauses, phrasal verbs and general masturbatory case usage). I lack the journalistic clarity and lightness of touch of my contemporaries.

In fact I notice, as I write this, that I still have two drafts waiting for work, one following my holiday in Ireland last June, and the other about Led Zeppelin from November. I can’t even remember what I actually wanted to say any longer, and it is no clearer to me on reading them – I am sure there are points to be made, but they are obfuscated by the unnecessarily dense text and my insistence on using cultural theory buzzwords that I am not entirely sure I understand.

Anyway, I am off for a chocolate brioche and some nuclear-strength Italian coffee to start my day-off off. In the meantime, though, here are a list (again a list) of things that have been interesting me recently:

Geert Mak’s In Europe
Jan Štolba
Mac certification
Goldfrapp’s Seventh tree