SPEAKING OF PRETENTIOUS CRAP

Fri. September 3, 2004
Categories: Abstract Dynamics

Is this sad case worth any more of our energy, readers?
‘ Even a cursory inspection of my blog…’ is all my eyes can take before the ‘glaze’ override kicks in.
I suggest three competitions. Lucky winners will receive a thesaurus signed by Dylan Trigg (he won a boxload when scientifically proved to be “writer” most unlikely to be able to complete a sentence without its use).
1. Worst DT sentence. Plenty of candidates clearly — but what do we mean by worst? Most pompous? Most portentous? Most unreadably convoluted? Most humourless?
2. Best DT parody. Now, this must include incorrect use of apostrophe obv, sentences so stodgily packed with verbiage that the concept of flow is entirely alien to them, and must convey that sinew-busting attempt to appear authoritatively detached and mature (I sometimes see this in teenagers’ writing at work).
3. Can anyone find a worse written blog than Poetics of Decay?
Dylan assures us that he’s never suffered from depression. Dylan, sweetie, I doubt you’ve suffered from anything… besides delusions of competence as a writer and theorist.
Enjoy your rioja and your Cioran though. Very stylish!

42 Responses to “SPEAKING OF PRETENTIOUS CRAP”

  1. glueboot Says:

    Is this really necessary? You may not like the guy but this post seems a pointless waste of energy. I don’t like to criticise people’s choice of subjects this ‘argument’ happened a month ago at it seems incredibly schoolboyish to bring it up again.
    I read his blog, he’s commented on mine and I don’t have a problem with him. What does bother me is seeing people I respect partaking in such puerile activities. But then that’s just my opinion.

  2. mark Says:

    He’s not dead, and he’s not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified. After all, you can only ridicule the ridiculous.
    I am not a liberal like you. I’m sure he’s very nice to his granny. So what? He should get a proper job.
    I’m supposed to just sit back and let him make his pompous pronouncements am I?
    If you want peurility, read ‘Poetics’ of Decay.

  3. CarterM's Wife Says:

    “Quivering in an anecdotal malaise, plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddles: without the benefit of a sickness towards impressions, you reduced yourself to an invalid of appearances.”
    Is he writing his own autobiography here?
    (I am sitting in a hotel waiting for Hurricane Frances–this is an amusing way to widdle the hours away–when I start to feel sorry for myself, at least I can say that I am not the author of this blog!!)

  4. mark Says:

    LOL — the hard question is: what is worse? The prog lyrics or Dylan’s drivel? It’s a tough one…

  5. Anonymous Says:

    Hate’s not your enemy, love’s your enemy

  6. Stoner passive cops Says:

    Hey man, you should change the name of this blog to k-hippie liberal let’s hold hands with those who insult us — PUNK is too agressive, man

  7. mms Says:

    underwater merkman

  8. andreas beyer Says:

    Hey, call off the hyenas!

  9. K-rage Says:

    These things are obv a good way of splitting… who is liberal and who is not?
    who recognize that life is a war and you have to be one side or another and who think you can cosy up to ppl because they’re nice…

  10. Stoner passive cops Says:

    Tony Blair’s nice though….

  11. mms Says:

    who recognize that life is a war and you have to be one side or another and who think you can cosy up to ppl because they’re nice
    that’s not entirely what war is all about is it?

  12. Anonymous Says:

    Tony Blair’s nice though….
    we were talking about his use of the word humanity today regards the stuff in russia,
    didn’t seem to accept that humanity
    ie those chechen’s have no humanity
    doesn’t equal christian moral ideals, big problem when dealing with warriors surely

  13. Roger Says:

    “He’s not dead, and he’s not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified.”
    You’re displaying your issues for all to see and coming off like a prick.

  14. mms Says:

    He’s not dead, and he’s not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified.”
    does sound like painful belly ache

  15. Anonymous Says:

    What issues Roger? You’re just demonstrating yourself to be a liberal. Fine. Run along now.

  16. Roger Says:

    You’re demonstrating yourself to be rattled by something you apparently think is drivel.

  17. Philip Says:

    What exactly do you mean by ‘issues’? Can we please cut the tedious therapy speak? When did it become a crime to call a twat a twat?

  18. mark Says:

    These things are really really worthwhile.
    Here we see what ppl’s agenda really is.
    Do they want to change things? Or do they just want an easy life where you tolerate mediocrity and stupidity?
    If being completely intolerant of either of those things means that I have issues, then bring them on. I’m glad I have them.
    What’s it like NOT to have issues Roger?

  19. mark Says:

    Yeh… thanks Philip … the rise of this kind of therapy speak is of course commensurate with two things over the last 25 years (1) a culture of quetism and mediocrity (2) the rise of depression amongst the population of western societies to almost endemic levels.
    ‘So, Mr k-punk, you are angry about being insulted by a pompous, continentalist fuzzonaut? Was your father a big man?’
    ‘What? You are angry about the stupidity of Kapital…. take a chill pill…’
    (Chorus from outside): Yeh, come down the pub! have a laff!

  20. Roger Says:

    Issues: resentment. I find it pathetic that you debase your blog by bringing up this bullshit.

  21. mark Says:

    It’s because it’s drivel that it rattles me… what’s worse though is people that I respect having time for it…
    bring back marcello, at least he isn’t a liberal, and at least he can fucking write…

  22. Philip Says:

    Resentment and anger are not the same thing.

  23. Anonymous Says:

    It;s NOT resentment.
    Is attacking Tony Blair resentment?
    Is attacking capitalism resentment?
    or let me put it this way: what can we attack without it counting as resentment?
    Let me say it again until I’m blue in the face: it is not wrong to call stupid things stupid.
    What is wrong is letting them go without subjecting them to ridicule.
    Jeezus, the emollient power of Blairism runs very very deep…
    The Nietzschean critique of resentment is based upon the idea that the slaves envy the masters but cannot admit it. If you seriously think I envy DT, well LOL. what I have I got to be jealous about from Trigg? His prose style? His command of theory?
    rotfl

  24. neville chamberlain Says:

    what’s also fascinating about liberals is that they will defend tooth and nail aggressors — and only attack those who defend themselves —

  25. Roger Says:

    It’s hardly a noble cause though, is it. I mean – who gives a shit if you’ve got some beef with another blogger? It makes for a boring read.

  26. Love isn't all you need Says:

    Anger is an energy — john lydon
    Anger is holy — mark stewart

  27. Anonymous Says:

    It IS a noble cause
    crushing bourgeois individualism without mercy is one of the most noble causes going
    It is NOT about a beef with another blogger…
    It is about combating miserabilist-subjectivist abstract machines

  28. mark Says:

    and btw, I find DT’s writing hilarious — in the same way that I find prog rock covers hilarious and roger dean hilarious — though of course they have an absurd nobility that bourgeois individualists lack…

  29. Roger Says:

    Bullshit – it’s about your ego and that gratification of readers becoming voyeurs to your ‘anger’. Here’s an idea: why don’t you write to him personally.

  30. Anonymous Says:

    NO!
    I have no interest in him ‘personally’ — i want readers to share anger not to be voyeurs to it —
    but if you are an egotist then all you can see is ego

  31. mark Says:

    this one is really the living end
    why write to him personally? Because we should keep our emotions out of public forums so that we behave like Kantian autonomous rational subjects?
    It is important to publicly ridicule damaging machines

  32. mark Says:

    Thank uttunul i can remember the 70s — when punk was around and there was anger — and best of all ANGRY WOMEN — and thank uttunul I remember Monty Python and Chris Morris — both of whom were about relentlessly exposing and ridiculing pomposity and stupidity…. in other words, thank uttunul that I remember a time when you didn’t get tarred and feathered for attacking complacency wherever you see it…

  33. Roger Says:

    I think they only thing they’re sharing is a sickness that you choose to concentrate on this fucking waste whilst actual wars occur in the background.

  34. Anonymous Says:

    Thank uttunul I’m not an old fucking man glazed over in nostalgia.
    Over.

  35. mark Says:

    He’s not dead, and he’s not stopped writing. Until either of those things happen ridicule is justified.”
    does sound like painful belly ache

    I wanna destroy passers by
    I think they only thing they’re sharing is a sickness that you choose to concentrate on this fucking waste whilst actual wars occur in the background.
    my guess, herr doktor, is that you are an American liberal.
    I can’t do much about what you call ‘actual’ wars. Can or are you btw?
    I can do something about the war that I am fighting.
    Thank uttunul I’m not an old fucking man glazed over in nostalgia.
    I plead guilty to the old, but thank uttunul I’m not locked into a Blairite gliberal Present and that I can deploy the resources of the past to make a different future.

  36. CarterM Says:

    MR. TRIPP EARNS A TUPPENCE PER EVERY USE OF THE WORD “WHILST”, OR, NOTES FROM THE WINEBAR UNDERGROUND
    Here’s a lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp. Guess which lines belong to whom. (Hint: I put all of Mr. Tripp’s lines it italics.) All Sinfield lines taken from his lyric website; all of Tripp’s from his blog. Enjoy!
    ‘Ringed By Ants And Musing Over Man, featuring “Poets of Decay”, and including “I Cannot Resist His Solemn Pomposity”‘
    Lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp
    Wagner blows his tuba whilst another fracture of the ceiling erodes
    Harlequins coin pointless games, sneer jokes in parrot’s robe
    Lizard bones become the clay –
    An evocation of Chauncey Gardiner gliding down the hallway
    CHORUS:
    Who’ll give me comfort when the moon rides in the pines
    An aesthetic commitment to fatigue, silence, and decline
    The wise men share a joke; I run to grasp divining signs
    It permits a sense of moral autonomy whilst Simultaneously affording the aesthetic pleasure of decline
    Worship!” cried the clown, “I am a TV”
    I do not suffer from depression so the formula is alien to me
    Burn slow to ash just as my days now seem to be
    It is like returning to Mahler and remembering how rich things can be
    REPEAT CHORUS
    A sublime sense of elevation amongst the pitiful waste of the asylum transpires
    They slide across your frying pan and fertilize your fire
    And thereafter the everyday recedes,
    Poets’ starving children bleed
    (MELLOTRON FLUTE SOLO)
    Here, the surface, rotten through dampness, upturns whilst its gaze lingers in suspended decay
    Burnt with dream and taut with fear, the yellow jester does not play
    Resonances of Schopenhauer’s disinterestedness simmer,
    All veiled in a quasi-prophetic tone whilst still maintaining an academic rigour

    REPEAT CHORUS
    Grass in your hair stretched like a lion in the sun
    I renounce Cairo whilst I furrow deep beneath the waste of the asylum
    Snuff brown walls where Spanish lizards run
    I am maintaining Baudelaire’s view that dandyism is incompatible with being a woman
    Damn iron minded, gold braid blinded, officers and gentlemen!
    REPEAT CHORUS
    Blown autumn leaves shed to the fire where you laid me
    We look to open expanses of glass and accordingly feel open and free
    For now Prince Rupert’s tears of glass make saffron sabbath eyelids bleed
    Ontological space clarified not through the appearance of stability but through the presence of the unhomely, the world depicted in debris
    REPEAT CHORUS (x 2)
    Quivering in an anecdotal malaise,
    Plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddle

    Now tales Prince Rupert’s peacock brings
    Waves sweep the sand from my island,
    From me

  37. undercurrent Says:

    >thank uttunul that I remember a time when you
    >didn’t get tarred and feathered for attacking
    >complacency wherever you see it…
    yeah, wish I did

  38. Anonymous Says:

    if blogs are going to offer anything more than an acceleration of the dominant, bankrupt genre (newspaper columnists, or diarists), then this incontinence should be renounced.
    calling something stupid, “stupid”, simply rests at the level of opinion. You’re performatively demonstrating your liberal attachment to your self.
    Get abstract. Generate knowledge not puff.

  39. munch Says:

    blast from the past – Hegel
    “The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itselfm and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.” PS para 377

  40. paul "bone thugz and armoury" meme Says:

    I can’t believe people are defending DT’s right to blog without ridicule when a) he’s, like, a PRO and therefore certain standards can be expected and b) his stuff is so obviously wannabe nonsense it’s embarassing. I believe in Love, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with laughing at a philosophy writer who can’t write.
    Anyway Roger, your comments are always mean spirited and poisonous in a way that Mark and the Kollective just aren’t… maybe Luke’s right and the comments boxes should be closed, leave Mark more time to stick up cool writing… what’s your blog again Roger? Oh, I see…

  41. clap-clap-clap Says:

    “leave Mark more time to stick up cool writing”
    Did you write that on the blackboard?

  42. mark Says:

    >thank uttunul that I remember a time when you
    >didn’t get tarred and feathered for attacking
    >complacency wherever you see it…
    >yeah, wish I did
    Perhaps you could start doing it then, instead of exemplifying it. If kneejerk anti-glam cult studs ‘feminism’ from 25 years ago isn’t complacent (AND oppressive), then I don’t know what is. Part of the almost charming quaintness of your and ruth’s completely out of touch position is imagining that it isn’t blandly hegemonic in universities and other high culture bourgeois hang-outs (n.b. please don’t reply here, we don’t want to hear it again, sound off on your own blog if you have to).
    >calling something stupid, “stupid”, simply >rests at the level of opinion.
    No it doesn’t. See forthcoming post on teenage ontology (first thing you have to try and destroy in teenagers when you teach them philosophy is the absurd idea that ‘it’s all just opinions’). Arguments are like machines, some work and some don’t.
    >You’re performatively demonstrating your >liberal attachment to your self.
    Perhaps you could demonstrate this would-be deconstruction of my position instead of blandly asserting it.
    I’m performatively demonstrating my anti-liberal attachment to Reason.
    The fact that you and Roger insist on personalising this is of course indicative of YOUR liberal attachment to self – both at the level of your own subjectivity and at the level of ontology.
    I don’t have a self. You might think that you do.