Our good friends at Berfrois have quite a lively Twitter feed, and it’s there we chanced to meet Will Self’s recent article in The New Statesman: ‘The awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over.’ Out of pure love for your interest in SPR (and our own critiques of hipster moves in poetry), I leave you to link the piece on your own—the joint at http://www.newstatesman.com so teems and blinks and bops with adverts it nearly ended my laptop. This aside is an brief sneer, then, at Will Self, Statesman, and every glossy that deigns to publish articles, stories, and verse alongside their capital click-and-gos.
In the case of ‘The awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over’—an article of some interest otherwise—how can one possibly take Self’s critique of ‘capitalism’s blitzkrieg,’ his lament over his generation being ‘the idiots who scrumped the golden apples from the Tree of Jobs until our bellies swelled’ with a modicum of seriousness, drowning, as it is, in a slurry one-sixteenth words, fifteen-sixteenths ‘capitalism’s blitzkrieg’? Bopping, blinking, teeming. Let’s get a pair of Levi’s, some uppers from Midwest Sports, W. Self, and talk together.
Considering where the article sits, your ignorance is not short of laughable. You deserve a throttling. To fancy yourself a cultural critic is to be mobilized in diagnosis—and therefore change. You do not have the luxury to soapbox from one side of the maw without proffering to your boys at Statesman with the other, ‘Hey, mate, let’s make sure I don’t look like a cabbage when this hits the www. Keep the bills you’d pay me to make that page exemplify the word-forward bit.’ It takes a rare sort, Mr. Self, to bemoan the ‘world-girldling mass of mindless attitudinising’ alongside the sure composition of gems like ‘we’re the twats’ and ‘dickhead arseholes.’ You’re rather too in on the joke; your article follows a light-fingered lash with the reassuring squeeze that all your ‘Oxycontin-popping’ still left you sober enough to turn a phrase. Who needs such puffy and combed half-soldiers? Line every birdcage with the charades of columnists like these. Stop submitting to the mags that put your words in primary service to coin.
SHARKPACK Poetry Review 
3 responses to “Money & Mouths”
I never thought of this before. Now I find it really annoying. Does this guy just not get it?
It’s common, N. Nearly every piece of thoughtful academic writing on a major website is stewing in adverts. If writers refused to publish against such backdrops (and, really, it’s the writing that becomes ‘backdrop’), important movement might follow.
Link’s all broke up there, Dr—ends in a %20 that shivers my screen with error.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/09/will-self-awful-cult-talentless-hipster-has-taken-over
Abundance of dickheadishness. Seems one end of the phallus speaking to the other—the Self piece; this silly video referenced therein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVmmYMwFj1I).
Find no growth in either. Find no charm, gives rise to an antagonist in me, antagonist that would curse the world and turn towards his mushrooms and sheet-grass.
A certain self-deprecation early slows my fireball, that he takes some responsibility (even if it’s as a we and not an I)—did wonder about his kid, the one who probably brought him to said trip-hopping cafe, who apologized briefly. That to me was a seam.
I guess my concern is mostly with the community or lack thereof, the one that waits in the sky above the whaling ships, that when a Levi is speared and bloated beside the ship, come down to pick and nip at one another while the greatness of the monster beneath them turns and turns in a swirl of meat, blood, and fowl-feather.
The skies, in this case, are the threads beneath Youtube videos. Particular sympathies with folks attempting to prick further scavengers away:
“Sanref (3 weeks ago)
No need to scroll down. All comments below are composed of are all and they need to .”
I am glad you inflate the whale elsewhere, Spece. Constructive, even with your torch.