Salome Chasnoff: Performing Teen Motherhood (p109) ""it is a truism to say that performance, privileging process over product, is transformational"
which would imply that there is a product to be transformed? but anyway, how "performative" are blogs? they are clearly there to please and amuse in some cases. if they're public, the writer knows they'll be read. how important is that fact?

interesting autobiography in the Good Weekend; a woman whose father and grandfather were adulterers, then her own husband; her husband said her requests that he not travel without her "enslaved" him.

if we are dasein, that for which its own existence is an issue, then how very important it is how we present ourselves, how we define that existence.
while dasein is something of a mass state - and groups can have autobiographies - the urge to tell one's story, to define what one is by one's words or deeds - is a very personal thing.
which goes back to getting a life and its assertions that almost every action is a form of autobiography.

even the ratava issue is one that hovers around this essential question of what it is to say "I am", the control over the "I", the constitution of the subject.

and in an Internet world, a blog is just a way of saying "I am" to the world; with appropriate filters and embellishments of course - and the visuals, the links and the music are other facets of the self.

"my place on the Web" - my self on the Web - my self in the world.

it's not publishing in the sense of being for an audience; it's a way of being.

Sidonie Smith, Taking it to a limit one more time in Getting a Life p231: "In effect, the neurophysiological model consigns the autistic to an unautobiographical life".
because they don't recognise others' stories, they have no story?
an amazing idea. but is it so? and if one has no story, has one a self?

Aritha van Herk, from in visible ink . I suspect I will not finish this. it is all the things I want to avoid in my writing; self-conscious without revealing a self, passively written, tricked up - "this journey's conditions are no more luxurious than riding in a komatik is comfortable" - the editor in me crosses out "conditions," "no more" and writes "as", crosses out "than riding" and gets "this journey is as luxuriuos as riding in a komatik is comfortable" - still not good, but better, but I still don't know why I should care.
And why should a Nordic goddess have cake pans? and why would she scatter them across the frozen ice.
She assumes I've read her book. She assumes I'll persist. She addresses me as "Reader", but this is not a Just So story, and it is certainly not Helen Garner's awestruck account of the South Pole.
why, on page 4, does she say "I am anxious about reading" then say it again, three or four different ways?
page 5: what does adjutory mean? why should I have to look up a (checks) now rare 16th century word that means "helpful" or maybe "therapeutic"? it doesn't even make sense in context: "the wind against my stinging face adjuratory breath, cold suffusing time."
enough.

91: "Documenting my own experience was an act of critical intervention"
and clearly one that she then had to follow up with personal intervention to get it published/read.
the act of writing is not enough; one has to be read for a "critical intervention" to have impact

Writing bone black
89: "Any writer who strives to be true to artistic integrity surrentders to the shape the work takes of its own accord."
She would presumably apply this to all art?
it's one of those statements I think is true and false at the same time; sure, things have their own direction, the best way for them to be expressed; but the exact shape is probably not totally inherent in the subject matter; for one thing, writers/artists are influenced by their mileu (sp?) and the styles they have learned; for another, you need to have some control and make conscious as well as unconscious decisions.

the interesting question for me is: at what stage do you start bringing conscious decisions into it?

thinking about the girls in Sydney who were raped, and how angry they were that substantive facts were changed in a plea-deal.
no one knows who they are, but the court was their forum, and they didn't get to tell their stories. sometimes "sparing" someone from going over the facts again is not kind at all.

apparently the prosecutor will appeal. the sentence, though, not the story.

you have to fit your story into the stories that are appropriate for the setting. the better you follow the script, the more successful you'll be?

how do you then create change in yourself or the society? by being differently, or writing differently?

ah, this is where they're heading: "the everyday uses of autobiography can produce changes in the subject" (15)

can we really change ourselves by changing our story? I'm sure the post-whatsits would say "what's our self anyway".

the word neurolinguistic programming springs to mind.

Getting a Life, Smith and Watson.

13: "the complexities of postmodern life require individuals to negotiate multiple locations of identity on a daily basis."

we all play different roles at home, school and work, with family, friends, lovers.

so far (halfway through the introduction!) this seems to make sense, except for all the stuff about America. it's the same cultural studies stuff about the other, the Heideggerean sense of being with others, but from a biography - self-story-telling - pov.

I've always found it interesting what happens when you're with two conflicting "frames of reference" at once. when friends come into the restaurant where you work. when your Dad turns up at the nightclub. do you choose between roles, find a compromise or (I think often) freeze?

Patti Miller The murmuring of grandmothers seems to me more like it. she seems more able to talk out of the page, to make images.

I like "We can never be sure that others will see the tapestry we offer" - that question of self-image and interpretation of messages all rolled into one.

And Primo Levi - the grief people feel when no one will listen. but I haven't read Levi yet. I think I'm a bit afraid of his awful story, and death.

Vertigo, Louise de Salvo

: page 7 (47 of reader) She talks about her compulsive writing, but I can’t see how it actually helped, yet.

page 8: her use of the etymological link between vertigo and verse to find a way to “transmute my instability”. is this what they called phallocentric? to see the words as ways of holding, grasping the thing?

page 19: hmm. she has interesting issues, but I’m getting tired of her writing style, which includes lots of “I”, lots of descriptions of feelings and few visual images.

page 30: it has some moments, good moments, which frustrate me by her not taking them further: “the trusty vessel I have made of my home”. How? in what way? how do they overwhelm it?
when people feel something strongly, they often assume that it’s obvious and resort to this sort of shorthand – either that or she doesn’t want to or can’t spell it out. either way, it makes it harder as a reader to follow her, be with her.

p 34: “anything appropriate will reveal too much” why not give us examples now?