Those were the days

Over on Public Address, Russell Brown has imagined what A.R.D. Fairburn would have been like as a blogger:

Fairburn is generally taught now as a poet, and he wrote quite a bit of that. But he wasn't the best of our poets, and, for me, it's his argument that's the key to him. His cranky, rambling 1944 essay, 'We New Zealanders', certainly has its flaws: most notably a section in which he hails the theories of Social Credit as the answer to New Zealand's economic problems. But it's also possessed of a raging, huge, unmissable voice.

... Fairburn had another key attribute of a good blogger: he didn't need much editing. "One of the remarkable things" about Fairburn's letters, declared James and Helen McNeish in their biography, Walking on My Feet, "is how meticulous Fairburn's English was even in his careless moments."

Suddenly I was cast into an alternate reality, where Peter Tomory, Hamish Keith, Gordon Brown, Wystan Curnow, Nelson Kenny and Imi Porsolt were running the 1960s EyeContact. And I thought: wow. That would be one hell of a read.