Status Updates From New Model Island: How to Bu...

Was perhaps abit harsh on this. Section on Northumbria and Basil Bunting's poetry is genuinely fascinating and introduced me to his work (priority find now!). But still dont know where the fuck its going, its still hoplessly waffly, its argument is weak (its reliance of hearsay, unattributed sources, generalised cultural observations are hardly rigrious) and terribly self indulgent. So a perfect Zero Book then!

Another howler. Niven writes that the contradiction was that the "economic basis of NL was Thatcherite, and Thatcherism was of course a political movement firmly embedded in the south-east of England". In one sentence hes done a sleight of hand which conflates the economics of Thatcherism with its politics. Thatcherism was economically neoliberal, but politically Tory. NL was economically AND culturally neolib.

Almost half way am not fucking impressed. Tries to tart up Britpop as some absurd product of regional working class culture with an ear to 60s continental modernism, when plainly it was a macho postering, deeply consumerist establishment ploy recreating beach town mod thugginess. His argument that Blairism represented sublimated, warped New Left desires ignores a) new left desires were garbage and b) the late Marxist