Is Blogging dying? Should it be saved?

I haven't been here this calendar year and feel bad about it.

Not least because Charles Arthur's recent article in the Gruaniad suggested my abandoned loops were part of a trend. Although the Other Charles stimulated plenty of disagreement.

It seems to me that an unkept blog is a form of internet litter. So I am going to put a drop of oil on this one and start driving it again.

It's my baby and shouldn't be neglected. (That's just a way of getting in the picture, a print of which adorns my study wall).

Even though I'm not entirely convinced many of the earlier posts stand the test of time, I did win a Twitter poetry competition the other day, so maybe it's time to shove a bit more of my writing out into the faces of an already overloaded world.

Blue train but not col trane

THIS IS FROM AN OLD TRAIN FILM

Strange that I haven't posted since May 9 - but explicable.

The daylight came back to the North Midlands , my garden began to call and many of my various serial addictions started coming to a close.

And when some started up again - Prison Break, Dexter, Heroes ...

Well, ya know what? I couldn't get back into them.

Dexter? One trick pony of a series - once you've chuckled darkly through one plotline it begins to feel laboured through the second.

PB? Too, too far away from the very prison walls for them to seem to reel and Michael has been foiled too many times for him to seem quite so cool or intuitive any longer.

Heroes? Well - I missed the beginning and the second series in toto.

This does , of course, leave many stories I can't leave alone - cricket, The Archers etc.

So more on them soon.

Lost Love

It's back in the UK but with a greater lag than before

So I fileshared (from the US) an episode ahead and then had to go back and watch the previous episode.

With all the flash-forwards going on in the series now, this left me badly mind-f***ed...

Serial Chic

So I'm hooked on Dexter - late to the party , I know , given I'm watching it on ITV terrestrial.

But I take back all my designer accusations from before.

Dexter is a kind of superhero. His power is his ability to kill anyone he wants, because he's a sociopath... but only if he can find emotional justification.

Does this make him a faux sociopath?

He's a hybrid between those emotion-free heroes we love exactly becasue they don't feel (R2D2, Mr Spock...) and a traditonal, wide-eyed juve lead.

And the narrative leaves you hungry for the next death. Last night there weren't any...

Obama Republic

We watch you here, from across the ocean, and we can't understand why the choice is so difficult for reasonable Americans.

The guy's got intelligence, style, grace and he is just so cool.

Hillary looks desperate and sounds dishonest.

That she could orchestrate that "Bitter" bandwagon , with all her pretences to church and gun glory...

And she even played to this gallery...

Dexter Porn

I sat down the other night and properly watched an ep of Dexter. It's really nasty .

Of course there's the overarching dilemma of idenifying with the serial-killer hero - and I don't have a problem with that in principle - it's a nice puzzle for us all (writers and audience) to struggle through. Ben Marshall puts the case for all of this very well.

No - it's the cold marketeering at the heart of it all that turned me off . There's a metrosexual, knowing, gratuitousness pervading everything from the sex to the language (neither of which I have problems with per se, either) to the glib dark shade carefully cast all over the script.

And then again, it can be very funny . Very funny. In the episode I watched, Dexter books himself in as a patient to a therapist he suspects of being a killer.

Dexter establishes he's right, takes another therapy session to sort out some of his own issues, and then a final session, where he unburdens himself . That's the Youtube link there.

Very funny.

I may watch the next ep anyway. The marketeers win for now.

Spaced in Lost

As it teeters to the edge of its latest series - shrunk by the writers' strike- LOST needs addressing.

Here in the Heart of England we are fewer and further between than in shiny America, but I actually met several Losties during lunch at a conference last week. In Alton Towers, of all places, the most famous English theme park.

I put forward my idea that LOST is really more like a reality show or a sport event than a drama . The viewer engages with it under the misapprehension that this is almost an interactive experience. Clues, mysteries, puzzles proliferate and seduce.

But the series wilfully keeps useful information from you, partly by selecting scenes to tantalise and surprise but never to inform, and ,more importantly , by presenting the least curious set of protagonists ever to grace the square screen. My new chums at Alton Towers and I knew more about each other in 5 minutes that the LOST folk know their fellow-castaways after 90-something days on a desert island.

I have ranged the web looking for answers, but what I really want is more LOST. That's the engagement, both apparently interactive and uselessly passive.

The worst storyline of all will be the conclusion. I'm not saying they won't make it brilliant - it's just that it will be over and the end cannot be as good as the expectation, the confusion, the Black Smoke, the whispers and the elusive moral status of just about everybody involved.