Mirrors are everywhere

Gravy in the gravy train.
Adam Ryan
The following text has been authorised as official Doomsbury Set propaganda

Well, I sat down to look at your blog while Radio Four were broadcasting a part-time comedy about life at a newspaper (Electric Ink). I heard a quick-fire rant on the un-fact-checked immorality of blogging, and that reporters are now answerable to all the morons out there who comment on everything they write. That’s the lofty perspective of the traditional purveyors of disciplined wisdom, with a little humour. I don’t want to tear down the traditional above. Let them hang onto their noble plaque-in-a-cornerstone that reads ‘Fourth Estate,’ so long as they give us ethical copy. The point about the morons is valid, after all; when everyone’s cerebral drip trays empty out onto the same subject we do a disservice to that subject.

So what is conjured up on The Doomsbury Set blog, from below, so to speak? I am lucky to be viewing when it is reacting to the BNP’s grotesque parody of a news conference, and subsequent egg-stained recriminations. Your blog calls up the Nazis, Spain, Cable Street and the Index Librorum Prohibition (sic - Prohibitorum), and in between contrasts and defeats the BNP’s current spectre in political life with rejoices for Friday and the free writers and copy in the city of books. Your manifesto was posted on the blog last year, it includes the words ‘this is writing “with” the art,’ which I think holds true for the blog. A picture appears on the blog with some text, this text may comment on the picture or it may be part of the experience of looking at the picture. Take a pinprick of Brighton and Hove and put it on the blog. Has the poster ‘done’ it? Have they spotted something, considered it, captured and presented it? Or does a post represent: ‘POP…What do we make of this?’ Well that covers the traditional anti-tradition of the blog world. But to get to Doomsbury itself, on its own terms, with bullet-pointed goals and ongoing facetious meddling with those goals, does it succeed?

You’re lapsing, you Doomsburys. Yes, there’s stuff being posted on the blog that maintains the fraught e-pace and clears out each poster’s tubes, but this does not always grab your readers, if that is the goal. The stuff bounces off and between you, and when Tiktoc hasn’t been mentioned for a while it is sometimes hard for us readers to see what is being done with the blog. There are usually enough self-aware (even self-conscious) commentaries with the posts, but posts are so diverse in purpose and style that I think they may be scaring off outside perspectives or comments. What should be witty, and reads as witty, is posted next to something at the high end of ideas and sincerity, and it can be hard to judge as to whether the moment has passed, if the moment ever existed, where a reader’s youthful humour and skills at punning could have let them engage with you fine Doomsburys.

What this does mean of course is that your minds and characters are coming across well and strong in your posts, whether they are posts about Tiktoc, the last pub pint enjoyed, or any other contribution. And when Tiktoc comes to the fore (as I check the blog now there it is) we can glimpse the making of the journal, and that the journal is in very capable hands. You Doomsburys impress on us your genuine love for Tiktoc, and the wider excitement surrounding it. I have forced my brain into new shapes trying to do The Doomsbury Set justice here, for your noble work on the blog deserves honest, accurate description. I may have failed, in which case all I shall say is thank you for the opportunity, you Doomsburys.