Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

I listen to a lot of music. A lot. And while I think my taste is fairly wide-ranging, ultimately I have to recognise that I am particularly drawn to and moved by music that is odd or broken or primal or otherworldly. I want from music what I want from poetry and fiction — I want to be moved. I want to be taken to a place of sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to borrow Eduardo Galeano’s most beautiful word, because sentipensante is “language that speaks the truth”. And my god, that is a powerful notion.

The notion of a participatory makeocracy thrills me, well and truly, for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that I relish the blurring or even eradicating of borders and divisions — integration not segregation!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all, just like you: the Internet is a fœtid swamp of depravity and conjecture and rumour and fibbery and inaccuracy and pointlessness and Lindsay Lohan’s twat, and I can’t really come up with a compelling argument to dissuade anyone of such notions.

The backbone of the backbone.