The Rivendale Review is in its twenty-fifth year. It began as a Website, hosted by an outfit called IC24, which later became Madasafish. The Internet was still shiny-new back then. It was yet to be colonised by a handful of tech giants, and the phrase “surveillance capitalism” was the stuff of dystopian science fiction. No, the Internet in those days was more akin to the wild west. There was a pioneering spirit about it, and to establish your own presence in it was exciting, like setting up camp in the darkness of an unknown wilderness. My early campsite is still there, which is surprising, since neither IC24, nor Madasafish are with us any more, and I’m no longer troubled for the fees. I maintained it until around 2011, but began a transition to WordPress, where it has been ever since.
I can’t remember how I used to update that Website, other than it was something convoluted, involving a thing called FTP. I don’t suppose it would work anyway, now, though it’s interesting there is still a computer server out there containing forgotten bits of code I wrote, and which are yet to be overwritten by someone else, that if you stop paying, or the provider goes bust, one is not necessarily deleted. Anyway, it was all a bit clunky, but those were early days in the self-publishing world, so still something of a revelation. They were days when launching one’s own words into cyberspace, without the gatekeeper of a publisher, felt deliciously anarchic. We take it all for granted now, but it’s useful to be reminded of these things.
The Internet is a very different place now. We early travellers have become minnows swimming the shallows of a feudal ocean. We might feel we are still the heart and soul of cyberspace, doing our creative thing. But our existence is only tolerated for the potential ad revenue and intel that can be gleaned from scraping our words, studying our clicks, measuring the time we linger over certain images, and subjecting them to AI analysis. Surveillance Capitalism is very much a thing now. We take our freedoms to write on here for granted, but we have only to look at other parts of the world to understand how fragile, how vulnerable we are. The west is not yet in the grip of authoritarianism, but it is flirting with it. Though the Rivendale Review is far from being a place of controversial opinion, I feel I can write what I want here without fear of censure. Orwell’s dystopia, however, is just the flick of a switch away.
I was in my late thirties when I began the Rivendale Review and still of a mind to have my novels, in all their book scented glory, on the shelves at WH Smith. This was going to rescue me from the day-job, and set me up as the next John Braine, the next Alan Sillitoe. I had the Singing Loch and Langholm Avenue doing the rounds of the London publishers, but they lived mostly on a Floppy Disk, and it was only their opening chapters that made brief juddering forays into daylight, via a dot matrix printer. This was prior to accompanying an SAE to the next publisher’s slush pile, where they would languish for months before being returned unread. They never rescued me from the day-job, but thanks to self-publishing, they are read, and it’s through the Rivendale Review, I realised my mistake: I did not actually want to be a professional writer, just a writer. And the novels kept coming.
As an introverted personality, one who shuns the limelight, and ducks every social engagement he can, being a professional writer would have been hell. Now, in my early sixties and safely retired. I do not need to be a professional writer to actually live, but I do need to be a writer, so the Rivendale Review continues, at least in so far as my dialogue with the outside world is concerned.
The title “Rivendale Review” was born out of gormlessness, but I’ve stuck with it. There’s a scene in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where the fellowship is gathered secretly at rather a grand place called Rivendell, for a council of the wise, in order to determine the future of the “One Ring”. Lots of heroic and weighty words are spoken. Borrowing it for my own purposes smacked of pomposity, then, but the gods were quick to take me down a peg, when I realised I’d got the name wrong. Then again, “Rivendale” rolls together better with “Review”, so maybe the gods had a plan. Except the name doesn’t matter, since it’s the web address that’s crawled by the search engines.
The eclectic nature of the Rivendale Review suits my interests, which are varied, and it allows me to write about them. The subtitle is “writing to know what I think”. This comes from a Flannery O’Connor quote, which again I didn’t get right, but which makes sense, as I’m not good at thinking on my feet, and prefer to boil things down to their essence by writing essays about them. It is also a vehicle of existential enquiry, exploring meaning and purpose, at least from the perspective of a twenty-first century, Western European man.
Meaning is different for everyone. Its eclectic nature seems to either make a mockery of the idea altogether, or it is reflective of something more mysterious, and from which all our varied enthusiasms arise. I see it, I feel it, in the blogs I read, and through reading them I see the world through your eyes – all of which confirms the insight of the old mystics, that we are the same, just different versions of the one thing, different back-stories, but all of us the universe awakening and becoming aware of itself from our unique perspectives. So the important thing is that whatever your thing is, not to give up on it, and don’t live your life from the perspective of how you imagine others see you. Dance like no one’s watching, sing like no one’s listening. Write like no one’s reading. Be original. Be yourself. This is the only obligation placed upon us.
Of course, this is not to say that as the winds change we should not change with them, as I’ve no doubt the Rivendale Review will change in the years to come. But for now at least, eclectic, old-fashioned, and occasionally cranky, we sail on.
Cheers for 25 years.
The Rivendale Review 