Anwen Crawford

‘Fruitful misunderstandings’ strikes me as a good way to think about the blogosphere — and, actually, as a good way of describing what interesting criticism does, in so far as you never really ‘understand’ a work you’re responding to in any transparent, straightforward sense.

For me, the easiest way to demonstrate the uniqueness of the blog medium is to think about why the k-punk book instantly and overwhelmingly prompts that question of its migration across media, a question which would not even arise for an anthology of newspaper or journal articles.

There’s been a lot written already about the work of the late English writer, blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017. Last year, a substantial anthology of Mark’s blog writing — together with interviews, reviews, and an unfinished manuscript fragment — was published as k-punk (Repeater Books), which was also the name of his highly influential blog.

‘Rimbaud walked out of his young life and disappeared from sight. Wojnarowicz came off the streets just as he went onto them: in stages.’

‘At the south-west extremity of Westfield Penrith, between the shopping precinct and the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, there is a narrow strip of outdoor space. It is a simulation of a public square.’