A diary entry from London on punk rock and London satire and the week surrounding it
Diaries from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Dear diary. Siobhan ODonnell writing from London in the specific week that this entry records. newsthump.com and www.thedailymash.co.uk both published things this week worth reading. My homepage at https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/ carries the longer-form version. This is the diary version: shorter, more honest, less edited.
The Reading and the Living
This week in London: newsthump.com and www.thedailymash.co.uk both published things that required reading, and I read them, and the reading produced the specific combination of information and opinion that serious reading produces in a person who takes the world seriously. The information is better than the alternative. The opinion is the cost. Both are in this entry, in the proportions that the week produced them.
The Focus This Week
My attention this week went primarily to punk rock and London satire, which I follow with the specific investment that a subject requires when it is both professionally relevant and personally significant. The professional relevance and the personal significance produce different kinds of attention, and the diary is where both kinds coexist without the editing that published work requires. Unedited attention, recorded honestly: that is what the diary offers. It is also what Siobhan ODonnell offers to readers who want the unedited version.
Closing the Week
The week closes. The diary records the closing. The next week opens before the current one is properly filed, which is the condition that the diary form is specifically designed to accommodate: the incompleteness is honest, the honesty is the point, and the point is what distinguishes the diary from the column, the essay, and all the other forms that require a conclusion before the material has concluded. The diary admits that the material has not concluded. It returns next week to continue recording the material that has not concluded.
The diary form is the honest form: it records what a person thinks and feels and notices without the editorial distance that published work requires. The published work extracts some of what is here. The rest stays in the diary. The diary is where the extraction comes from. Both are necessary parts of the writing life that this column documents. The Guardian and the Independent provide the news. The diary provides the response. The response is what the diary offers each week, reliably and with the specific texture of a person who takes their reading seriously and their living seriously and records both in this form. The diary continues next week.
What the diary records is what the week produced: no more and no less. The production continues next week. The diary continues recording it. The record grows. The person continues in the place. The place continues being itself.
The diary is the form that holds what the week produces that other forms cannot hold: the combination of the processed and the raw, the opinion that is forming and the one that has formed, the event that requires distance and the one that requires immediacy. All of these coexist in a week of genuine attention and all of them belong in the diary that records the week. The published column will extract some of what is here. The rest stays in the diary, which is the right place for it. The diary accumulates. The accumulation is the point. The Guardian and The Independent provide the baseline. The diary provides the texture. Both are necessary for the complete account of what it is to be a person paying attention in a particular place at a particular time, which is what the diary has always been for and what this one continues to be for. The diary continues next week. The world continues generating the material. Both are ongoing.
London and the world continue producing events at a rate that no diary can match. The diary records what it selects from the production and acknowledges that the selection is partial. The partial record is better than no record. The diary makes the record. The record grows. Next week adds to it. The addition continues indefinitely, or for as long as the diarist continues in the place, which is the condition that all diaries operate under and the condition that makes each entry both complete in itself and part of something larger than itself. Both the completeness and the largeness matter. Both are in this diary. Both continue.
The week above is the week as recorded. The recording is honest. The honesty is the diary form’s contribution to the record of what it is to live in a specific place at a specific time with specific attention to the things that attention produces opinions about. The opinions are in the diary. The diary is in the record. The record continues next week and the week after and for as long as the diarist continues writing, which is the condition that all diaries operate under and the reason that the best diaries accumulate into something that no single entry anticipates. This diary is accumulating. The accumulation continues. The diary returns next week to add to it.
More at https://newsthump.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
