Friday 1 February 2008

Blah!

Blah!
A Writing Club

Sometimes it’s necessary to make decisions quickly, in the spur of the moment, so that the next stage, the doing, the activity can commence. As writing can be a solitary thing, needs only some kind of tool to create words pencil, pen, brush or fingers and a keyboard, the decision to base ourselves online seemed suddenly clear after abandoned attempts to meet on Thursday afternoons.
What to call our club? A club of false starts that needed immediate action; anti-precious of membership in the club spirit of our Graphics course; anti-precious of material, open, embracing of writing as a creative activity not confined to ‘writers’ but open to anyone who wants to take part, spew their words publicly, collaborate in some exquisite corpse of text together; to generate words to play with visually; and finally to enjoy, poke fun at and play with words in the world.
Our name? From a casual discussion blah blah blah came to mind, but obviously it’s obvious, been used and is already rife – bands, restaurants, galleries blah blah blah.
But one blah, a spurt of speech, a meaningless word but a primitive sound; with the exclamation mark it requires a decision and effort to ensure you project it accurately; almost a need to physically chuck out your chin, and feels disrespectful, un-English as it’s carried out. (And our competition – a DVD rental shop).
It also had a wry reference to the past as both a nod of the cap and a prod in the ribs – to Blast, the Vorticist magazine led by Wyndham Lewis in 1914 to 1915. A British movement, Blast was ‘Aggressive, belligerent, sarcastic’, its ‘typography confrontational’, anti-tradition, combinations of capitals and lower case, using bold letters and words and ‘bold Latinate serif typeface that aggressively grabbed the readers eye’ – all potential for Blah! to use, steal, borrow.
or Blast embraced the explosive, likened themselves to a whirlpool at which the ‘heart is a silent place where the energy is concentrated’ and rejected Futurist ‘Marinetti’s romanticised view of the machine, considering that the machine produced impersonal results that dehumanised the world’ (Heller, Stephen. Merz to Émigré and Beyond. Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. 2003. P45/46).
Well Blah! attempts to use the machine to engage in human activity and communication in a more purposeful way than Facebook! (Imagine with typographic drama)
But Blah! isn’t 20th Century but 21st Century, it also desires the quiet, the considered, the playfulness of Apollinaire’s calligrammes perhaps or some concrete poetry fun. Hah!
(Currently I am interested in the abuse of the semi-colon; and liberally and hopefully ungrammatical use of it here)
Blah!.

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