Most of my own favourites are there, to be sure. Asking what it's about is sort of like asking what life is about, though, isn't it? Not that this keeps me from looking forward to your response...
Favourite Hydragenic Posts Of 2007
Most people reflect on the end of the year at a fairly appropriate time: the end of the year. It's a fine tradition and I used to indulge in it myself, but these days I tend to find that I can only put the past year's events into any sort of perspective once the festive period is over and the new year has well and truly begun.
I usually end up looking back through the Hydragenic archive for the previous year, to remind me of what I was doing as the months progressed. Here's a selection of my favourite 2007 Hydragenic posts, presented via the medium of quote. There are twelve in total: one for every month, if not one from every month.
Thursday 1 March
"... it's not exactly a bundle of laughs having Crow squatting in your head, having to endure the Chinese New Year water torture of "the drip of rain like blood from the one tree weather-tortured" for an entire month or more. So, it's a less than fond farewell to the rotting, cabbage-like stench of the mud-month of February and a warmer welcome to March, whose name is derived from the warrior and is synonymous with forward motion."
Tuesday 4 April
"Sometimes you're talking but the noise from your mouth is hollow and empty. You want to use words like pleh and skow and drav, but you're speaking a foreign language, un-subtitled and un-dubbed. They can hear you, but no one knows what you're saying. You're the last speaker of a dead tongue, with no heirs."
Tuesday 17 April
"... I return constantly to these erased tracks, caught off guard, discovering myself to be the driver but yet not driven enough. Again the engine rattles over the points, wheels sparking and grinding. Once more the steam whistle shrieks pitilessly. In the dark night, the passenger-less train hurtles forward, bound remorselessly for Black Dog Halt."
Friday 1 June
""Look at this," he said at one point, holding his palms downwards over the table. "I have the worst fingers in the world. Fuckin' 'orrible." They bleed when he hits the guitar strings too hard, apparently. We all sympathised, but I'm sure that the others were secretly as thrilled as me to be shown precisely where the magic comes out."
Thursday 21 June
"Maybe the biggest psychological shift of the noughties will come to be seen in future decades as the expansion of our community memberships from the traditional handful (family, workplace, residence, hobby, etc.) to tens or even hundreds of special interest groups... maybe this will become the decade during which we learn how to wander freely between these myriad expressions of self, whilst yet maintaining a sense of togetherness."
Electric Gardens Festival 2007
Tuesday 7 August
"The stuff I'll remember is what always attracts me to musicians and artists in general: the baring of souls and the expression of the truth of existence in a way unique to that person. Two days of that, in a field, in the blazing sunshine, with a seemingly infinite supply of draft Spitfire. What more could a man ask for?"
Sunday 16 September
"When I was your age, I think, I worried all the time. We were all going to die. We had endless discussions about it at school. Our drama teacher acted out the ferocity of a nuclear blast by sitting us under a big pile of tables and chairs and pushing the whole lot over. Farcical, but the bruises it left were more than physical."
In The Gutter, Looking At A Star
Tuesday 2 October
"What matters is that something special happened. Where minutes previously there had been a handful of cigarette smokers and the occasional man-at-C&A figure hurriedly entering or exiting the neighbouring sex shop, suddenly there was beauty, blossoming briefly in the moonlight."
Tuesday 6 November
"Such thoughts preoccupy me... him... the two of us. We think of Bono, of Adam Ant and of Billy Childish. We sometimes even thinks of Gollum, my preciouses: half-blind, ring-starved and wholly mad in the darkness. We think of those whose names are not all that defines them, yet who could not be defined by anything else."
Saturday 17 November
"... the part of the classic series I look back on most fondly was the period during the early 1980s, with the Cold War at its height and teenage angst dawning slowly and darkly in my mind, when that vulnerable, frowny, worried-looking Doctor grappled with good and evil in a way that suggested that it all might go wrong at any moment, but nevertheless rarely did."
Roots That No Storm Can Dislodge
Wednesday 21 November
"I am from the eastern madlands,
from the outskirts and the margins
where the tunnels now stand empty
and ghost stations are buried under
1970s shopping centres."
Four Decades Inside The Gold Mine
Wednesday 5 December
"Dragging heavily on an unfiltered cigarette, she fixed me with a no-nonsense stare and pronounced conclusively in husky Russian tones, "Your frriend, he is fox. But you... you arre dauck." "I don't want to be a duck," I protested. "Ducks are ridiculous. I want to be a cat, or a snake, or a scorpion." She waved her cigarette dismissively. "Want is nothink. You arre dauck.""
Writers should probably refrain from commenting on their own material, but nevertheless I'm going to make the rash observation that the quality of the writing on Hydragenic improved as 2007 advanced. As you can see, the final half of the selection above comes from the four concluding months of the year.
In late 2006 someone asked me what this website was "about". I thought that was a daft question at the time, yet I've found myself dwelling on its increasing relevance on several occasions over the past twelve months. Insofar as there's any plan for Hydragenic during 2008, it's to finally answer that question.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 09 January 2008 at 18:25.
Received 2 comments so far.
Comments
Taking the blog as a metaphor for my life, the question becomes more urgent. What IS it about? What do I want to do with it? "Write about things that interest me every so often" is just too weak and woolly.
What do I want to write about, exactly? What is is that only I could write, that no one else could do? Why don't I have an instinctive response to this question? It's about focus, I think. Not re-defining, but refining.
Variants of the following phrase have bounced around my head and out of my mouth at numerous points over the past few years: I want to do something more exciting/meaningful with my life/writing. Time to be clearer.
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