'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
Everyone Should Have One
As I close in on my sixtieth article for Netlistings, I can’t help reflect on what I have learnt from it, about me, and about you out there.
One thing is clear. You guys don’t comment much. A week or two after something I have written goes ‘live’, I maybe read another article on much the same subject as mine, the only difference being that they have ten or twenty comments. It is true that the comments are there to be read on those sites, whereas Netlistings just sends them through to me. It is also true that their articles have a higher readership than mine, but still my proportion of responses is much smaller. However, I know that you readers are out there, because of course, there are stats .The feedback I do get is from friends who occasionally read my stuff, and get told when a new article is posted. These comments tend to be on the more esoteric articles or something which possibly relates to our common background.
Anyone who reads what I write can see that my own reading is mostly fiction and historical biographies, plus some contemporary political thought. For current events and matters connected to the natural world, I mostly rely on the television, plus my own observations. I don’t read newspapers, except when I Google an article, so I am not your average correspondent by any stretch of the imagination, but one who hopes to stretch yours a bit.
The title of my column, ‘Loose Talk’ gives me a very large remit, which naturally follows my own inclinations. One thing that I am sure of is that these articles will continue to expand into new areas, and hopefully I will look back on the next sixty articles with as much satisfaction as the first.
Before starting this column, I had written some pieces entitled ‘Smoke in the Air’ back in 2003. They were not poems exactly, but in that general style, each fashioned around some discovery, or event that had recently taken place. They were a conscious attempt to find another way to write about contemporary events. Apart from that everything I had previously written dated from the late seventies and eighties and was based on my love of tall stories, or what can loosely be described as fiction.
The work I have done for Netlistings has been as near journalism as I am ever likely to get, and at the same time has been an fine way to get my writing chops back together, to find out if I have any more major stories in me. As I am presently about seventy pages into something new, it seems that I have. Although I had one or two ideas which would have relied on factual events, I find myself drawn back to outright fiction, but what changes have taken place in the writer and his writing over the last twenty five years!
This has in part been brought about by these Netlistings articles, but they have proved to be an end in themselves. They have mapped the progression of my thoughts, concerns and amusements as well as my familiarisation with basic journalism. To my mind writing this column is better than a diary, particularly because you are there to read it, and if it is not worth the bother, you won’t.
Looking back over these articles, I can see that ‘Loose Talk’ has defined and refined both my writing and my take on any number of things. In short, as long as you are there to read a page every two weeks or so, I am more than happy to write it. What can I really say about a column like this? Well, in truth everyone should have one.
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