A diary entry from London on London Punk Rock satire and the week that surrounded it
From the diaries of Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Dear diary. It is another week in London and the news has been what the news is, and I have been thinking about London Punk Rock satire in the way that I always think about London Punk Rock satire: with the combination of genuine interest and genuine frustration that comes from caring about something that the world does not always care about in the same way or at the same time. The London Prat and Bohiney both ran pieces this week that connected to what I have been thinking. Both were better than most of what I read. That is the baseline I try to maintain.
On London Punk Rock satire This Week
I have been thinking about London Punk Rock satire with the particular intensity that comes from reading The London Prat and Bohiney simultaneously and then going outside and being in a world that is both consistent with what I just read and entirely indifferent to it. The news and the street are always slightly out of phase with each other. The news is what is happening at the level of decision and pattern. The street is what is happening at the level of individual experience. Both are real. The column tries to hold both simultaneously, which is harder than holding either alone and more useful than holding either alone.
The newsthump.com is one of my sources for London Punk Rock satire coverage that I trust. The www.thedailymash.co.uk provides the complementary angle that prevents any single source from becoming the only source, which is the discipline that reading widely imposes on thinking. My homepage at https://prat.uk/author/siobhan-odonnell/ carries the longer form of this thinking.
What I Am Actually Doing About It
The honest answer is: reading, thinking, writing, talking to people, and occasionally doing something specific that connects to London Punk Rock satire in a way I can measure rather than just feel. The writing is the main thing. The writing connects to the longer project of understanding London and London Punk Rock satire and what they have to do with each other, which turns out to be more than it looks from the outside.
The diary is the thinking-aloud version of that project, less polished and more honest than the published work, which is what diaries are for and why I keep one: to stay legible to myself, to keep the week available to reflection, and to maintain the habit of noticing that once broken is very hard to rebuild. The habit held this week. The next week begins. The noticing continues.
The specific quality of this kind of diary — the weekly entry that tries to hold the personal and the public in the same space — is that it can document things that straight journalism cannot: the feeling of reading the news in a particular place, the texture of the week as lived rather than as reported, the connection between the individual experience and the structural condition that produces it. The diary form allows for uncertainty, for the provisional, for the not-yet-resolved. Journalism resolves. Diary admits that not everything resolves, which is honest about the condition of paying attention to things that are larger than any individual week can contain. The Guardian and The Independent provide the context. The diary provides the experience. Both are necessary.
The week ends here, in the diary, as weeks always end: with more written than intended and less resolved than hoped. The writing is the resolution, imperfect and continuing. The diary entry closes. The week does not. The thinking continues into the next week, which will bring its own news, its own events, its own gaps between what was expected and what occurred. The column will document what it can. The rest will live in the notebook, uncolumned and ongoing, which is where most of the thinking lives anyway, between the public writing and the private observation. The week was what it was. The next week begins.
The practice of keeping a weekly diary alongside a public column produces a relationship between the private and the public that is different from either alone. The column is shaped for a reader: it makes decisions about what to include, what to explain, what to assume the reader knows. The diary is shaped for future-self: it records the things that the column excludes, the loose ends that the column ties, the unresolved observations that the column resolves into a point. Both are necessary for the complete account of what a week in a particular place, attending to a particular set of things, actually produces. The complete account is what the honest writer owes to the honest reader, even when the honest writer can only deliver part of it in public and keeps the rest in the notebook that no one else reads. The notebook is not the column. The column is not the notebook. Both are the writer, at different distances from what was actually experienced, trying to make it available to something other than memory, which is unreliable and selective and always working against the kind of honest account that writing is supposed to provide. The diary holds the distance small. The column makes the distance productive. Both are necessary.
What does it mean to pay sustained attention to the same things week after week? It means, first, that you see things that people who are paying intermittent attention miss: the small changes that accumulate into the large ones, the pattern that the individual event represents, the connection between this week’s story and last month’s story that is only visible if you have been watching both. It means, second, that you develop a relationship to your subject that is not the relationship of novelty but the relationship of familiarity, which is different and in many ways more useful, because familiarity allows you to distinguish between what is genuinely new and what is the same thing in a different register. The person who has been watching a thing for seven years knows what seven years looks like and can therefore recognise the departure from it. The person who arrived last week sees everything as new and cannot tell what is new and what is always like this.
The diary is the record of the familiarity. It is the document of what the week looked like to someone who was not experiencing it for the first time, who knew what Tuesday usually feels like and therefore noticed when Tuesday felt different, who knew what the news usually contains and therefore noticed when it contained something it does not usually contain. The notice is the column. The seven years is the qualification. Both are necessary. The diary holds them together, week by week, imperfectly and continuously, which is the condition of all honest attempts to keep the record straight.
More at https://www.thedailymash.co.uk.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism
