from the tute the other night: the destruction of the journals that constituted such a deep part of the women's identity; not just censorship, but an attack on the self, even posthumously. or is that what censorship is?
what we say is what we are/what we say we are is what we are, we say.

all this stuff about women needing diaries to express their true inner selves that were repressed by society, etc seems to fail to take into account that often men weren't able to express themselves either. and while some men did keep those more personal kinds of diaries, isn't it possible that women used diaries more simply because as women, they had more of an emotional life; they, rather than men, said things in diaries because they had more to say?

Smith-Rosenberg in Gannett, 134: "this closed and intimate female world"

funny how no one ever refers to an all-male enclave as "closed and intimate". the female is still the other. closed (off) from the male gaze.

blogs: performative, hypertextually connected construction of the self?

(have done way too much cultural studies)

Gannet again: 135: "journals and letters written by women ... function as long distance connections that help maintain these important networks and the self constructed in part through them."

we talked in the tute about imagined readers, and whether it made a difference to the nature of the writing-about-self if there was a person addressed, or an expectation that it would be read by a certain person.

is there a difference, really, between the maintenance of the networks/relationship and the construction of self? in one sense yes, because the self can exist just in relation to itself, so to speak, but in practice, not really, and not for the kinds of home-and-family oriented women being discussed here.

did they write the sort of self they wanted their audience to see? and by doing that, did they become that kind of self?

Gannet, Gender and Journal-keeping traditions 110: the use of a journal to guide a spiritual journey. it's funny how we do forget things; how writing things down can give them new weight, and make them more available to be built on. like the way writing allowed the transfer of knowledge between people/generations, but for a single person.
so if I need to write a letter to myself to remind myself how I feel right now: am I really just one person?

experiment: pick a journal from 1985 and open a page at random.

hmm. they start in april 86, just before I turned 20. OK, the April 1990-May 1991 journal, at random:

"Reading Bonfire of the Vanities, with its characters' obsessions with incomes, their rise and fall. The idea of earning $100,000 a year seems remote, but some people can reach it. Not everyone. Of all us young people starting out, only a few will get to whatever "success" is. That means the rest will fail? Be relegated to minor, has-been or never-was type jobs?
It appears in my mind like a pyramid."

Nothing startling there. that thought still occurs to me from time to time. and I was questioning that definition of success too. In 1990 I was in my first year of my first job as a journalist.

but this is fun. again: 1996:

"The difference perceptions and attitude can make to an event.
That when a man describes or experiences a thing, he can feel it as sublime or dismiss it coarsely. Sex, eg.
The physical sensations must surely be the same. The difference is in the willingness to experience all that is potentially there.
There is a potential for an exquisite agony in everything: an orgasm, a walk through the forest, physical effort like swimming or cycling.
It is too strong, it is too much.
Taken in fully, it will overwhelm. Such is love. Love can penetrate all defences,. transform."

across the page:

"People who spend years and great efforst developing strength of character - in war, the battles of youth - and then you only see a middle aged, boring citizen b/c they're never called upon to use those strengths. or they avoid the need."

All that is consistent with the person I am now. but "it is too much". a single mind is not enough to hold it all in. how much of journal writing is an urge to preserve? the person one is, the thoughts one has; the different personae, which cannot all exist at once?

Introduction to Granta 58 on biography.
I'm sure there's something in the suggestion that "the present fashion for meoir does suggest the presence of something like a cult of authenticity, a suspicion of purely imaginative endeavours."
because so many popular biographies still follow the True Story plot-driven line.
(not that there's anything wrong with that!)
how disappointed they (readers) must be when they come across biographies that jump around, that refuse to start at the start and go on.

Dean Kiley :Alone: Again: Naturally (and Queerly)
not having read Alone, some of this went over my head. but I liked the way he started talking about Alex almost as an aside, like a minor strand in a piece of music that grows and grows to take over the whole stage.

Kiley has the advantage of a rather acerbic wit – “primary domestication moves ... of queer writers” and “critics engage in Police Rescue expeditions”. but the subject matter is a hard one – suicide and alienation of queers – and he seems to need an attitude to put some distance between himself and the reader and the topic.

from what I could gather on Alone he has trouble with the conflation, real or perceived, of the author and the text. but if “there’s no such thing as autobiography,there’s only art and lies” (Winterson), why does it matter?

because of the way that conflation is used?

Nabokov: in Nabokov and his Fiction (connolly), Barabtarlo (Nabokov's Trinity chapter, p 115) quotes this: "were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely on memory."

apparently some critics say Speak Memory is not really autobiography - basically it's too good, too structured, too well-written.

could this make a late run as an essay topic? probably not. have gone too far down the blog/subjectivity road to turn back.

p 117: "people who might never have considered writing their lives are now making video autobiographies..."
in the way the video made this kind of representation possible, the Web and blogs are making online representation possible, with its special qualities of fluidity, currency and connectedness.

Performing Teen Motherhood p 115: breaking the structure of being "the investigated" or the other; how much of the blog thing is about taking back one's subjectivity? to stop being an object for the media/other people around one?

and what a shock it is for them sometimes when their readers bite back and deny the representation they are claiming.

Marc Andreesson's what's new from !1993!

don't know if this is the right space for blog-essay development notes, but it's a good place to keep links.
Jill Walker is Australian-born, has Norwegian citizenship and has been studying this stuff academically for a while. good source of links to other places.
very much into the hypertextuality aspects of blogging.