Punch and Pins

Riddley Walker is one of those books which you finish quickly but which continues to seep and creep through your life for months afterwards. It taps into something completely and utterly True. Reading it, you get a sense of something that's both ethereal and able to grab you somewhere roundabouts your gut and heart and wrench you around. Riddley Walker is about a post apocolyptic society, a twelve year old boy, nuclear holocaust, dogs, and much more - but what all of those things add up to create is a book about simply being human.

Anyway, before I explode in a fit of enthusiasm and uneloquent pretentiousness, let me back up what I say. This is Riddley going on about how he can't explain things. Just like me.

'I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs will talk to you.'

Basically, I signed up to Pinterest the other day, and I don't get it. I don't get Pinterest at all because I don't see the point. It just looks pretty. It doesn't explain or add to anything. Twitter is about linking stuff and sharing information quickly. Facebook is catching up with things. Flickr is about sharing stuff you've made. Pinterest just seems to be telling other people what nice things you like. Creating an image through the creations of other people.

Although basically that's what lots of artists, and ordinary people,  have been doing for centuries, stealing bits of things, magpie like, and stuffing them together to make a novel or a song or a painting or even some ridiculous outfit you wear when you're a teenager. But I still couldn't get it even in the context of that. Basically, it was only with Riddley Walker seeping around in my brain that I realised why I didn't like it.

Sometimes just images on their own can do what Riddley's stanning stoans can do and talk to us anyway. But Pinterest doesn't form any sort of coherence, even accidentally. Basically, in a very old-man style rant, I'm going to say that I feel very uneasy about Pinterest, especially as it's becoming massively popular all of a sudden. It's not even putting words down on paper. Or scrawling on it with crayon. It's just lazy, sloppy short hand for being creative. Images talk to you whether they're saying something interesting or not, but then your reaction to that should be to react, not to just go around showing them to everyone else. Otherwise your screen is just a load of pretty pictures but there's still more on the 'emty paper' around them. And that might be the case whatever write or draw or copy and paste - but you should at least try to fill it. Otherwise you're just like poor Riddley, who, for all his noble and beautiful emotion, is just a little boy with a brain poisoned by nuclear waste.

Yes, that's what I'm equating you to. Someone brain-damaged by nuclear holocaust. Please note that I am still using pinterest.