“Uncle Zip”:http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/double-bind/ (aka M. John Harrison).

Reading Benjamin R Barber’s Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow ctizens whole, & invincibly reminded of some of the weird contortions Thomas de Zengotita (Mediated: How the media shape your life and the way you live in it) put himself through to avoid looking as if he was saying what he was so obviously saying, I determined to write a book of cultural criticism of my own, to be called Nuanced: How the contemporary left has been forced into hypocrisy, temporising & doublespeak by the fear that no one would otherwise publish, buy or read its books of cultural criticism. Damned if he does & damned if he doesn’t in a culture that simply won’t be criticised, Barber explains why this can’t actually be described as a form of soft censorship proceeding from what unstreamlined old lefties would have called f**** c************. Not a bad thing, because it forces him to find a new way of (not) saying it, & books like Consumed–unable to point the finger at their own potential readership for fear of losing it–survive the market only on their ability to confect neologisms & catchwords, presumably in imitation of the business bestsellers & aspirational texts which they don’t actually want to be seen to be contradicting.

When I’ve finished Nuanced I’ll move on to Fucked.