People blog about all kinds of things. Witness this loving chronicle of London's bollards, or the site devoted to folded pictures of Ross Kemp's face. So there's certainly space in the blogosphere for Bad Dalston Short Stories, a site celebrating woefully constructed prose and poetry about E8.
The blog is put together by Dan Hancox and housemates who live just south of Balls Pond Road. The idea came to them after reading a 'cringeworthy' William Boyd short story about a Dalston hipster, recently published in the Guardian. Thinking that they could outdo the recent media love-in with the area, they set up Bad Dalston Short Stories. And the results are...bad.
So far, submissions include the inner monologue of a Dalston trendie, a Church Street Haiku, and a piece called 'Trapped Inside Iain Sinclair's Memory Hole', which describes Dalston as a 'facsimile of a palimpsest'. But there's still work to do. No one's used the words 'fug', 'chthonic' or 'parsed' yet - three of the four pall-bearers to the coffin of bad writing. (The fourth, 'sigil', is present and correct.) So get your submissions in to [email protected]. They're offering a prize for 'The best evocation of the horror that is Dalston Superstore'.
Image from WowTheWorld in the Londonist Flickr pool
