MELLIPOP IS BORED AND INARTICULATE
Ok, so I'm meant to be doing a whole bunch of writing (paid - yay) for the glossy lifesyle mag. I'm being coy and non-specific about specifics, see, because I read an article today in the SMH. It was one of a rash of articles I have noticed recently, meant to serve as cautionary tales to us incautious Bloggers.
Blog and thou shall be sacked.
Blog and it may come back to bite you on the bum one day if you ever become Prime Minister or the President of the P & C.
Blog and thou life shall be ruined.
The commercial media backlash is in full swing, see.
I work in the commercial media. I write for commercial media. I'm supposed to be doing that now. But I'm writing for this blog instead.
Have you noticed that this blog post is incredibly boring? And my sentences are really short. And unimaginative. This, my friends, is what re-writing press releases does to the human mind.
I was thinking about Tolstoy today. The mind of Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote in the pre-TV era. I'm currently reading Anna Karenina. I chose Anna Karenina over War and Peace because Anna Karenina is 800 pages and War and Peace is 1200 pages. It's all about Time and Investment. Who has the time to invest in 1200 pages of the same book? Where all the characters are called Alexey Ivanov Something-or-other-ovitch. Why can't he just call them Mike? Or Jeff? Or Bec? Or Lleyton?
And as much as I am loving Anna Karenina, it's 800 freakin' pages long. Here I am thinking that an 800 word blog post is a fucking epic, which it is by Mellipop standards. Tolstoy is churning this brilliant stuff out, page after page, and I can barely string at least one coherent sentence together. Tolstoy didn't have one eye on the clock and one hand on the remote control, waiting impatiently for Lost to start on Channel 10.
Tolstoy was a great writer. How many great writers of our generation have been lost to press releases and niche-marketed television programming?
posted by Mel @ 7:17 PM
10 Comments:
Not a single one. The great writers write, regardless of destractions.
I'm waiting for Big Brother Up Late to come on...
The same could be said for any worhty endevour. How many concert pianists are lost to fast food outlets, how many algologists to the petroleum industry. The bottom life is that we are given talents, life and time. It is up to us as individuals to choose how to combine the three; ultimately the loss of a great writer to media editing isn't the fault of the job, rather it's the unwillingness of the writer to persue writing. The excuse of being burnt out from work is a poor one to stop one from doing one's passion.. :) :)
How weird: I was thinking about Tolstoy this afternoon because of an assignment at uni.
I already read The Brothers K by Dostoyevsky early this year so my quota of weighty Russian tomes is more or less fulfilled for a while. Easily one of the best novels I've ever read by the way.
...isn't Lost on Channel 7?? :)........or is Perth such a friendly incestuous little town that TV networks are so buddy buddy that they share their programs around :)......either way the sooner you vacate WA for NSW the sooner you can tell us all these stories in person :)
LOL Nick - though I'm not sure if you're serious. I can see BB being just the kind of thing you have a pre-prepared rant about.
Amen tmz. Though I would also add that the term "starving artist" exists for good reason.
Russian literature is a strange beast. So much of their style of prose is gloomy and turgid. So I was pleasantly suprised by old Tolstoy. My only stab at Dosto was The Idiot. I found his style kind of hard going, but am determined to give the Brothers a crack on your recommendation.
Aah Wes...you got me there. See how much of a hold Channel Ten has on my psyche. Were it not for Lost I wouldn't actually require a remote control.
i looove russian literature, and Anna Karenina is my favourite book. -bree
I loved AK too, but the last thirty pages were a crock...Levin is a brilliant and complex character, but who wants to read thirty extraneous pages about his spiritual awakening after all the main action had ended... It just kinda seemed superfluous after AK threw herself under the train. Or it could have been done in somewhat less than 30 pages and have had more impact...
Or maybe I was just getting impatient to finish by that stage...
Re: weblogs, it does seems like we're in for it. I want to take on a pseudonym, but it's too little too late. One day, when I'm running for president of the rifle club or treasurer of the local KKK chapter, my vendetta against Darren Hanlon will suddenly hit the front pages. Or my tirades against Robocop. (If there's one person the KKK looks up to, it's Robocop.) Dammit.
Howdy Mel,
I reckon you gotta write all the time. It has to be an obsession. And you were so right . . . you have to let it go and learn. Meanwhile, always writing.
Did Tolstoy have an obsession? One gozillion pages later . . . Did Bach have an obsession? One hemptillion notes later . . . Do the fractured math!
Every word you type is yours. Einstein was a patent clerk.
Either a poem that rocks the world, or instructions for a new nasal spray are yours, if you wrote them.
Yours,
Mike
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