Blogs worth a look

[luka]

Does England really need another Owen Hatherley?

 

[craner]

Any good? I read this one the other day.

The Alexandra Road Estate, Camden: ‘a magical moment for English housing’

In the sixties, London was swinging and Harold Wilson had promised a new Britain forged in the ‘white heat’ of a technological revolution. That may have been hype but something of it resonates whe…

municipaldreams.wordpress.com

I didn't say I'd read it, I just searched for it.

 

[craner]

Does England really need another Owen Hatherley?

His greatest achievement is to create a cliche.

 

[RWY]

Does England really need another Owen Hatherley?

No! Absolutely not!

 

[luka]

No! Absolutely not!

I thought you liked him!

 

[RWY]

I thought you liked him!

I liked his two books on British architecture and urban planning (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak Journeys Through Urban Britain) when I read them at uni - they're probably the best collection of writing on those topics published in the past half-century. It's his politics and the intellectual circle he inhabits on twitter that I'm not a fan of.

 

[RWY]

The anti-intellectualness that I've been accused of on here this week stems from my disappointment and frustration with him.

 

[luka]

Craner hates him. Not on a personal level, just begrudges him his success. It's a thorn in his side.

 

[craner]

Craner hates him. Not on a personal level, just begrudges him his success. It's a thorn in his side.

This is not true.

 

[luka]

This is not true.

Ok my mistake, it is on a personal level!

 

[RWY]

He suffers from quite severe crohn's disease - he writes about the ordeal of attempting to visit a hospital near to the Bluewater shopping centre without the use of a car at the beginning of one of those books.

 

[luka]

What was striking about it was that this was someone of our generation, a little younger, who knew things it was impossible for someone of our generation to know.

 

[luka]

hed read things, lots of things that were -incredibly- boring. This is what really caused a sensation. The tower block reappraisal is what made him famous but it was all these boring books he'd read that really marked his blog out. It was completely unprecedented.

 

[RWY]

I've always wondered to what extent his suffering from a disease of that nature influenced his evangelical belief that only socialism can redeem the world of it's current ills.

 

[luka]

Knowing lots about music was par for the course. Maybe some partially digested fashionable French theory. But not all that stuff. Completely without any sex appeal. It wasn't cultural capital it was this job lot of mildewed lace he'd found in a skip. It made him seem like a creature from out of time.

 

[luka]

I've always wondered to what extent his suffering from a disease of that nature influenced his evangelical belief that only socialism can redeem the world from of current ills.

That's just something his family passed down to him. Same way most of us get our politics.

 

[luka]

Craner says his citta violenta was the model for Owens blogs, and it probably was, but the cultural, political and intellectual background was completely different. A lost tribe of Jewish communists marooned in Southampton, still loyal to the old ways and the old idols. We'd never seen anything like it. Hammer and sickle pin badge on a tweed blazer.

 

[version]

He suffers from quite severe crohn's disease - he writes about the ordeal of attempting to visit a hospital near to the Bluewater shopping centre without the use of a car at the beginning of one of those books.

Is this an attempt to make Craner feel better?

 

[RWY]

Is this an attempt to make Craner feel better?

Yes

 

[craner]

Craner says his citta violenta was the model for Owens blogs, and it probably was, but the cultural, political and intellectual background was completely different. A lost tribe of Jewish communists marooned in Southampton, still loyal to the old ways and the old idols. We'd never seen anything like it. Hammer and sickle pin badge on a tweed blazer.

I never said that.