Armed with quotes from Houellebecq and other wankellectuals, Friggieri stepped into the blogosfera in a desperate attempt at defining the Maltese psyche. The examiner became the studied as the inescapable traits of the fishpond mentality provided a whirlpool of unwelcome distractions. Lanzarote became a distant island – whether it was because the kitchen was too hot or because the table’s food was too appetizing we will only know when Friggieri decides to resume regular blogging.
Uno scontro di civilta’
“The internet has actually had the opposite effect of what one would have hoped for. Instead of becoming the means of opening the mind, it has become a tool for the release of anger and personal animosity…”*
“No mean feat” is the expression I chose to congratulate Jacques for seeing his j’accuse project through infancy, toddlerhood and into late childhood. I read in the French music magazine Les Inrocks that television programmes have something in common with cats – you must multiply their age by five to calculate their equivalent human age. I suggest applying a similar formula to establish the effort required to keep alive any vaguely intellectual Maltese project which doesn’t draw its lifeblood from the dominant discourse. Using this formula, Alternattiva Demokratika should be celebrating its centenary, Brikkuni are well into adulthood while Alex Vella Gera’s Li Tkisser Sewwi has already been with us for a decade. Mark-Anthony Falzon described the mechanics of why this might be so in this article. Every band, every publisher, every political party is obliged to ask itself the crucial existential questions: Why am I doing this? Does anyone give a damn? And in the case of those who operate outside the confines of the dominant discourse, a perhaps more insidious doubt inevitably plants itself into the minds of the willing few: Have my efforts brought about any change at all? We may wish to call this dilemma the Il Gattopardo moment. Looking around at the Maltese blogging scene (il-blogosfera was the word coined back then), seven years after j’accuse, xifer, books&beans, il-maqluba, toni sant, lanzarote and a few other pioneers tried their hand at shaking things up a bit, that Gattopardo moment turns into more than a passing thought or a fleeting doubt. What started out, naively perhaps, as a medium for an alternative way of describing this small world that we call Malta, has, with the exception of a few pockets of resistance, settled along the familiar, depressing but still relevant, battle lines. Huis Clos (No Exit), as Sartre would put it. For this reason alone, those pockets of resistance – and j’accuse remains an important one of them – should be saluted.
(*Malta does the absurd as well as any other place on Earth. The quote, above, is taken from an article by Daphne Caruana Galizia, The Malta Independent, 8 March 2012)
David Friggieri (whose lanzarote blog died a natural death sometime in 2008 or 2009)
