So META it implodes and shits itself out...

I've reread my first post and realised that I really need to practise writing. I can identify where my syntax is clumsy and where my phrasing doesnt fit at all, I suppose good writing comes with practise. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I hardly write. I'm jealous of the 30,000 words of your novel you've got on your hard drive; I'm super envious of the music blog you've kept up on-and-off since you were fifteen. Cos I seemed to have peaked when I was younger, and now I just can't bring myself to write. I have no self-discipline. There's just TOO MUCH STUFF already out there.

Back in the early times of European literature, there were poets who performed memorised epic verse for the courts as a way to earn their living, because not many people knew how to read or write. They would recite works like Beowulf, and all the alliteration and strict metrical rhythm meant that the minstrels could remember it pretty accurately. Then the Romans, then Christianity, came, and all of a sudden more people could read and write. Sure, it was only the monks, but nonetheless things started to get written down and we began a more concrete written record of literature.

This is how it went on, and by the fifteenth century the really wealthy learned to read and write, namely the people who were involved in the Church. That's where your Bunyan and your Chaucer comes in. And patrons would commission scribes to write out all their works of literature by hand, and all that existed was the manuscript. But then the iPad of the early renaissance came and lost a load of people their jobs, as well as creating a whole new industry - the printing press.

Suddenly the written word was a commodity. Political pamphlets, Bibles, newspapers, even fucking dictionaries... and the novel. People bought picaresque volumes, and they gained popularity. The industry grew and grew over time, leading to writers like Dickens getting paid by the fucking WORD in his serialised dramas, to the dismay of so many hapless twentieth century schoolchildren. Reforms in the late 1800s led to mass literacy, and people who were never able to have a voice before could now be heard. More than ever, the written word shaped the discourses of society of the time.

As we all know, this grew and grew over the twentieth century. There are so many writers and fringe movements and genres now that it feels like any kind of writing we want to access is out there. The language poets, the collage poets, the Harlem Renaissance, poststructuralist anarchist writing, situationist writing, surrealist writing, Fat Black Woman's poems, the so-called Northern working class novel... All these movements and splinter groups in such a short space of time, where hundreds of years ago there was more... unification? in trends in  literature.

And then what happened? Then came along the fucking INTERNET. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet. But now how are we as readers supposed to sift through the endless narratives and discourses of this intangible cyber database in order to select all possible options for ourselves so we can define our own place within it? What we read shapes what we writes. TS Eliot was onto something when he talked about that. And how are we, as writers and contributers to this cultural milieu supposed to not get so fucking disillusioned and confused when the faced with the endless possibilities of authorship and readership and freedom that we just get fitility and pack it all in? I guess that's why I don't write.

But, hey. I'm doing it now. Maybe I've turned over a new leaf. Or maybe I'll give it up in a few weeks... I guess I just thought it was a good idea to start a blog (the most modern and innovative of the serialised forms) as a platform for all this, with the backdrop of the 2012 PHENOMENON as a nice little bit of literary symbolism and actual fucking LIFE symbolism to tie it all in.

The end of history has passed us; that's what everybody was talking about years ago.

This generation's narrative is that of youngest child syndrome...