SPURIOUS MANIFESTO, POINTLESS PROJECT

Self-Savagery 103: Write a manifesto to fit your achievement, or lack of it. Claim your failings are a deliberate act of protest. This is Self-Savagery in exelsis: justifying to yourself, not only your complete lack of success, but going so far as to claim that failure of the precise kind you know well was what you coveted all along. Once I tried, after the column Notes and Queries, to write a book called Quotes and Nearlies, which was to be composed entirely of straight lifts from everybody else’s good ideas, and some second rate ones of my own. Every time I felt the urge to touch myself I wrote instead. If you must, busy yourself with pointless projects, such as compendiums of half ideas stitched together untidily with spurious manifestos.