I got sent an article again this morning about some cretin that has been making lots of noise about decolonising Shakespeare in relation to the birthplace trust etc. It’s all a load of amplified nonsense now of course, and my passenger observes “These people don’t realise it but they are responsible for Trump”. The remarks will have been taken out of context, amplified and drummed up into “THEY’RE TAKING OUR SHAKESPEARE! DURKA DURKSPEARE! DABURKSPEER! DAGRABAROOOO! COCKADOODLEDOOOO!” Which to be honest is most debate these days. These revisionist niche anti-how-it-was type thought-holes will always feel progressive when espoused but in the end will push the more instinctively conservative people closer and closer to populism – and so so many people are instinctively conservative. “MUMMY, HE TOOK MY LEGO!”. Look at Trump for crying out loud. Cunning like a fox, dumb as a blanket. Great at survival, crap at logic, null at nuance. Simplifying things so he can fit them into his frame, hacking all detail away, visually duped, utterly useless, loved by anyone who really just wants things to be as simple as he needs them to be.
“So come on, what does Woke actually mean?” I’m asked at dinner this evening. “It has no meaning,” I responded. “All meaning has been sucked out and now it just means ‘people we don’t like’ to a certain type of commentator. It used very briefly to mean to be aware of the different life experiences shared by people of colour in America, but as soon as people who didn’t give a fuck felt excluded by it they went hard to reduce it to a simple meaningless insult, which is reductive and ultimately empty of any true meaning but distaste.” You call somebody “woke” if they make you uncomfortable now. Or like me you avoid the word. It’s a weapon now, nothing more.
I’ve been driving lots, thinking too much, existing. Good to have a head day, recovery from yesterday, all that.
Went to Ipswich. I finally took some old reels I want digitised. Fuck knows what they are. One of them is called “Tragedy of a Nation”. I’m dreading that it’s someone’s video of something they think is wrong with the world now. “People don’t wear hats like they used to,” or “Why aren’t there trams?” “We should be allowed to have asbestos,” or “What’s wrong with a bit of good old fashioned hate?” Still, they were gonna rot in my attic, they might have something good on them, they might be of interest, who knows. I’ll find out in ten days with a download link. One of them might be something genuinely interesting.
I’ll get the films in ten days. Left that place, then we loaded the car with boxes and took them all back up to London. No breakfast. No lunch. I had a pint of beer before dinner and it came back up so quickly it was still fizzy. “I can’t think of any physiological problem that would cause that,” my brother says. “A pint of fizzy cold poison liquid on an empty stomach,” I reply. I’m really going towards Lou in this now. Why did I spend seven quid to hiccup into a drain? Who knows. I feel fine now, post dinner, in bed, off back around another sun and night cycle, ever onwards, somewhere at the end of it, stuff on the way, joy and sadness, life and death. Onwards.
AlBarclay 