a good blog primer

thoughts on feminist criticism and "feminist readings" - the discussion got quite critical of these theories, mainly led by me and Donna; the thing is, I understand perfectly the theory that marginalised groups may be excluded from a mainstream discourse, the whole thing about "the other", and I once even understood what phallocentric language was.
I just don't feel all that displaced or excluded, myself. and I'm wary of the idea that we have to work against the dominant paradigm. Wasn't Derrida on about how that simply reinforced the exising structure?

an angry blogger, who can't understand why people comment on her life. she says she'll shut her diary down if people don't SHUT UP about her.
funny, to publish and then wonder why readers respond. another difference between journals and fiction; people criticise your journals, they criticise

Rainer's chapter Finding Your Voice: the bit I found most useful was about dramatic tension, the different voices you can use.
Because so much of autobiography is not plot-driven; so why do we care about these people we'll never know? Even if I admire a writer, their biography can turn me off if it's too much of the "then I went here and did this" style. I guess some of it comes back to those experiental pleasures of reading, which is also about constructing the world of the book in one's head.

Tute two, 14/8
Hmmm. I may have to start a separate file about the writing exercises, because I don't think they're part of this journal, except where, perhaps, something in the readings informs what I do in the "writings."

On that topic, I was already thinking of a Ballarat memoir for my main writing piece; of course that itself is hugely broad for me, and I'm not sure whether I'd be writing about the town itself, or me, or if it matters. Doing the "place" exercise helped with that, if only to remind me of how much is in there. I won't be straining for details, I don't think; more trying to strain them out.

I liked something Candace said in the tute. I can't even remember exactly what she was talking about - something about working out what was good and useful in a journal - but she called it "the gold thread", which brought to mind an image of a skein of dirty twine with that one gleaming strand tangled through it.

Something to get hold of and read: The Jerilderie Letter. After reading Carey's Kelly book and a few extracts from the Letter, I really want more of that voice. It rolls.

actual reading notes (!)
Alfred Kazin's The Past Breaks Out is very meta-something. It's a biographical piece about how he came to write a biographical piece.
It doesn't seem such a revelation now that "One could be a writer without writing a novel," but I guess at the time literature was even more than now in the shadow of the Great Books.
I liked the way he drew out his tale slowly; parallelling himself with the things around him - "Pineapple Street ... was in a poor way just then, and so was I" - and gradually letting you discover details: he doesn't say "I'm Jewish" but talks about him memories of the Shema.
A journal as presenting one's story for judgement fits in with the idea of just telling one's own story as one says it is: a God or some other audience seems to me in some way almost secondary to the telling, the writing of the tale.
I liked his frankness about his descriptive efforts: the phrase "emotionally authentic", used about his few pages on Brownsville, is really about that voice, knowing our own way of seeing. Perhaps writer's journals help with this; once you have a good grip on that way of seeing that is yours, you can try it out on other subjects, using the journal as a kind of tuning fork to make sure it rings true.

I liked Alfred, I think. I liked his "amazement" at the world, his "heightened sense of existence," which seemed to me to be combined with a certain humility; he didn't think his writing was automatically great because he put it down on paper; he was self-critical and clearly struggled to get it right.

dmoz has a personal writing journal section. good for browsing in.

in the spirit of investigating blogs - which is part of the reason I'm doing this subject - I'll just note this teenage blog which is fairly much the usual stuff - shopping, school, complaints - but also notes how there's a lot she doesn't say on her blog, but can to her friends. re: publication/nonpublication

More tute thoughts:
The question was asked: what do we do when we write biography/journals that is different (presumably from non-fiction/traditional fiction?)
I think part of the answer is that we filter what we say through our own perceptions much more consciously; we try to put not only our voice but our view of the world, our way of seeing, into what we write.

well, whether or not I'm actually inthe subject officially, I seem to be doing it.
so, reading/thinking/tute journal:

Tute one, 7/8/01

The lines between autobiography, biographical novel and novel: Sari says they can be blurred deliberately to mask things that are unacceptable to say outright; metaphor and concealment.

Why else would be they be blurred? perhaps for a better effect, to make a point more effectively? Because a real event is so suitable for a fiction, or because a real story screams out for a fictional neatness to make it whole?

It reminded me of the story from Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character, where he talked about the laid-off software engineers who met up every week to go over what went wrong with their careers. They started off blaming the company, then blamed the global economic situation, and finally started to take responsibility, to talk about what they could have done better/differently. Sennett said it wasn't until they started talking about their own role in things that they really came to terms with being unemployed; the stories they told themselves and each other about what happened really affected how they dealt with it.

But in the tute we also talked about writing-as-therapy. I should find the course reading from Continental European Philosophy II that talked about how, even though writers felt they had written something out at the end of a book, they stayed just as mad as they started. And wasn't there a study of Holocaust survivors that found that the ones who basically went into denial and refused to talk about it were the ones not haunted by bad dreams? I suppose that's an extreme case. I just don't think that talk (writing) therapy can fix everything.

Things to look up: the reading from Continental Philosophy II

just posting something to make my sitemeter work...

woo-hoo!
thanks to the general disorganisation of uni students, or maybe no thanks to them, the initial cancellation of my Tuesday night class has been reversed.
kinda lucky, really, cause I'd already bought the course reader.
reading note for this weekend: Robert Dessaix's interview in the Saturday Extra has ideas in it worth looking at.