Today I am cutting down a chapter that I've written for a book called One Track Minds. My contribution is on this track by X-ray Spex, and I have to 'lose' a thousand words by dusk.
For any cowgirl this is difficult, but I do know that what is being chopped out is probably extraneous stuff. It's just that I was so appalled to see how hostile and cruel the press had been to Poly when I went to Liverpool to look at Falcon Stuart's archive. They treated her as an object of ridicule.
The misogyny and racism disgusted me. Patronising, belittling: and some of these journalists are still writing today, having reinvented themselves as jolly middle-aged raconteurs.
It's hard to detach emotionally from it the reviews of the day but I'm mainly focusing on descriptive content, including the stings-in-the-tail of each article, in the hope that the build-up of insulting crap will tell its own story.
The record itself. How brave of a young dual heritage woman to come out with that in the 1970s!
I will always be really grateful to her for documenting the contemporary female experience of punk, which just like in academia, is still in the hands of white male historians.
They 'don't even know they're doing it'. Ahem.
I got good at editing when I had to read through the Wilkyettes essays. Most of them could be reduced to a handful of bullet points. It doesn't make for a good read tho'.
ReplyDeleteTrouble is, those 1000 words are there for a reason. I often wanted to add in a good few words to explain a point, but as seems to be usual the word count is all important.
Am I right in remembering that one of your students once handed in 35,000 words when only 5,000 were wanted? If not you then someone else told me the story. Trouble is, you never know just how dumb the person reading your words is...