"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?"

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

On another day, at another time, the news that glitterscars has moved would merely have flickered perfunctorily through my impassive brain, surged down my arms as a series of electric impulses, and seeped out through my fingertips in the form of a highly sarcastic, single-digit-scoring review of the redirect page. Oh, well! It is the first review of the New Year, and I little doubt that my reserves of bloody-minded perversity will be much taxed over the next 365 days- let us, therefore, have grounds more relative than this. Plz chnage ur booksmarkz to http://maralisa.diaryland.com! Click! ZOOM!

Ladies and gentlemen! I have often -for shame, for shame!- led you a merry dance in these reviews of mine, stepping briskly out on some entirely tangential story on completion of scarcely so much as a paragraph, grabbing your hand and hauling you behind me as we together circumnavigate the labyrinthine side-steets of my flippertigibbet subconscious only to finally emerge back where we begun. I have done it before and -yes!- I fain would do it again; but NOOOOOOOO, because that might be FUN. Who would run hand-in-hand and breathless with me in the cobbled alleys of my mental metropolis when they might instead promenade leisurely down its main street, hands behind backs, hunched over like old vultures, and parting with a polite handshake at the city gates? Not you, anyway- and let me therefore cut to the chase, dispensing with Aristolean unities in favour of non-linear temporality, setting out on the judgement I ought otherwise to have concluded on: and that, good friends, is that this diary is an online cliquist's diary.

Ah, do not start so! The road turns slightly here, I confess, but we are still of the main street- no lengthy diversion here! We merely proceed gently along Qualification Street, then cut daintily through Judgement Avenue to the fork between Jabroni Drive and People's Champ Boulevard... Ah, do not be alarmed, but the route thereon eludes me. Well, we shall see, we shall see, by and by.

To resume! This is, I have said, a cliquist's diary. The tell-tale textbook signs are there for all to see: the recurring evocation of a 'you' which clearly refers to some online conglomerate of which the happy reader is presumably no part, the ready assumption of the reader's familiarity with the aspects of the writer's life she has previously discussed in her diary, the sinister confederacy of faceless and entirely interchangeable capital letters who have silently usurped the roles of real people, the self-created webring devoted to herself, and so on, and so forth. None of this, of course, is criticism of any great consequence -one might as well criticise Dickens because Chapter XLIV of Bleak House doesn't make a great deal of sense if you isolate it from the rest of the novel- and I do not propose to make great consequence of it. This is merely exposition.

Glitterscars, as I say, makes certain fallacious assumptions about her readership which, whilst serving to alienate new readers and render her diary somewhat inaccessible, do not necessarily entail the worthlessness of her diary. So she expects us to know what happened to her last week, or last month, or last year- well! We shall either read back a few entries or go grumbling off to do something else instead. All very well and good. But the biggest bodyblow for this diary is by far NOT that it is assumed that we know these little or monumental things, but that it is assumed that we care.

Now YOU, my friend, you are the darling of high society, the very pink of courtesy, and it is therefore only to be expected that you should intrigue me- and when you ring me on your mobile phone from the taxi home to tell me a prosaic and predictable story about your day at work, I shall listen with polite interest because I am interested in you. You are interesting and funny -you are my friend- and so will I be uncomplaining audience to your occasional superficial sheens and bouts of non-rhythmical grumbling, though they would drop from any other lips like plastic bauble-banalities. There, there. Diddums.

That the people who read her diary will be interested in their narratives simply insofar as they happened to her is a prop which Glitterscars could well do with having swept out from under her. The entries themselves are competently written, with occasional glimmers of what could be worthwhile humour- but there is a comfort and a complacency which overarches the entire structure, nullifying any chance of expansion or development. There is no energy or apparent desire driving any of the writing exhibited here, simply a quiet exposition of an event with a couple of the onion-layers of superficiality peeled back, written with a "TE-Tum-TE-tum-TE-tum-TE-tum-TE-tum" monotony which challenges neither reader nor writer. The prose is flat and lifeless, with no third dimension leaping off the page and prodding the reader in the ribs or the eye. That which is written without effort is read without pleasure- and the tacit assumption of her reader's assent in everything she writes seems to have left Glitterscars with no impetus for effort at all.

Frankly put, Glitterscars flatters to deceive. The lack of glaring grammatical or stylistic errors and the general smoothness of the prose trick the eye into glancing mechanically on; but only because the mind has long since disengaged itself and is solely occupied in trying to convince the eye of its mistake. There are no guarantees, of course, that a shake-up in attitude would result in significantly better output for Glitterscars- and, really, there are no signs here of any great self-awareness in the writing craft, nor of any great interest in its further development. Conversely, there are no obvious indications that an elevation in writing style or effort would be doomed to failure- there is nothing in the diary to elicit groans of disbelief or knowing sneers. The humour, as I have said, shows occasional signs of being worthy of greater focus than relegation to the realm of throwaway remarks, and the entries manage to steer clear of the ridiculous reliance on the "Look at me, look at me, I'm Scottish!" schtick that characterises most of the talking tins of self-styled shortbread who pass for her countrymen on Diaryland. But, as things currently stand, there simply isn't much here of any worth or relevance to anyone who doesn't know her, and, ultimately, very little even to those who do.