Gibson, Gaddis, G–del, Godot, Goebbels, George Gobel–who can keep them all straight?

Bring on the experiments and especially the novel.

So there’s never been, at least not since entering the decade I’m now a little over halfway through, much danger of my suddenly airing all the dirty laundry of my life all over the place—but even the slightest suggestion that I might be doing so has kept me from the personal here.  The other issue that Mariah and BT both raise is, I think, more of a danger, and one that I’m seriously pondering:  the “steals the fire” problem.  Gibson did point out (and you didn’t mean Gibson, did you, Mariah?  Gaddis really had a blog?  If so, how disappointed am I to have missed it) that blogging requires a kind of daily attention and a kind of writerly brain-space that can easily crowd out the other kinds of writing that one ought to be doing—easily because those other kinds of writing require slow, sustained attention over long periods of time, without the instantaneous gratification of blog-publishing.  No conversations with the audience.  No links from other writers.  Years of labor between the inception of an idea and its seeing the light of day.  It’s easier and more satisfying, on some level, just to blog—and yet there’s something about the permanence of the book that the blog can never approximate, and one likes to think that some ideas are too big for this format.

But yes.  So.  I worry that blogging will keep me from other writing.  I worry that blogging about the other writing will (as BT suggests) provide for potentially stultifying feedback.  On the other hand, I want very much to explore the kinds of possibilities that rhubarb (on her own blog) and Cindy and Francois suggest:  a multi-layered subjectivity that is always caught in the act of encountering its own incompleteness.  There will be experiments, soon.  You’ll probably recognize them when you see them.

Oh, and Francois:  thanks for being concerned about my sleep.  Alas, the lack thereof mostly had to do with travel—early flights, time zone changes—and the conference, but after a few days’ rest, I’m feeling a bit more myself.  Whoever that is…

But, as you point out, the “personal” also consists of a whole realm of stuff outside of casual thoughts about books, cracking wise about comment spam, and updating your readers on how close the flames have come (needless to interject I’ve been relieved to check in and discover you safe)—there’s that stuff that does make one feel quite vulnerable to commit to ‘net.  A lot of stuff.  I rarely blog in detail about my marriage or my family, if only because that involves other people so closely that I always think “I wonder what s/he will think if s/he reads this?” and chicken out. Sometimes I wish I was the kind of writer who could do that—but I don’t think I am. So, yeah, um…that’s hard.  And good luck.

The other issue, about the fiction: while I think M. may be overstating the case in the “steals the fire” argument, I believe there is certainly something to be cautious about.  As I’ve been working on fiction in the context of a writing group, I’m painfully aware that sharing the early-stage drafts—good in itself for spurring me on—I invite conversation about what I’m up to, and my own thoughts about it have been somewhat contaminated by the early responses by my readers.  I never thought this would feel like a bad thing: I solicited response and input along the way.  But there’s been something in me lately that believes that a certain amount of isolation is a part of the fiction enterprise (even though what I’m working on is trivial).  I can’t imagine blogging my ideas in progress, not because I fear other people’s negative responses, but because I’m aware that they…this may sound nuts…lose something, become quotidian, begin to lack lustre, once they float around in front of too many eyes.

Which isn’t to say that will feel this way at all for you.  Perhaps another way of thinking about it: I’ve discovered that my “fiction writer” voice is startlingly different than the voice I feel happy in writing on the blog.  Putting the two out there together would feel like trying to tell a ghost story in a crowded, bustling pizzeria.

Again, your milage may differ.  As always, I’ll be eager to read whatever you deign to share.

Gaddis’s short-lived blog makes a good example: blogging steals the fire. Unless you’re Choire Sicha or someone like that (i.e., using blogging to vault you into a career), you might be better off using the blog to stay in touch, get a bit of feedback, and test things out but generally being selfish with your creative energies.

There’s a reason the bulk of the most popular, most entertaining blogs are written by twenty-somethings: they don’t have kids and impending tenure reviews and mortgage applications and bunion surgery. AND they don’t mind spilling their guts about their personal lives, which, I must admit, can be riveting in a reality-series-like way. AND they’re not too worried about getting fired from their entry-level jobs.

Okay, K, the following doesn’t apply to you, since I’m not worried you’ll start telling us things we didn’t want to know. It’s just a reason to be wary of those people who “enjoy” exposing themselves to their colleagues and strangers just a little too much.

If you’re still displaying too much personal life in your blog when you’re in your thirties, you probably haven’t matured enough to be very interesting. Or you don’t have much going on in your life–which also contributes to uninteresting writing. Or you haven’t learned that, if you’re going to alienate friends and family and coworkers, for god’s sake don’t do it for free! At least get a book deal out of airing everybody’s embarrassing secrets!

I don’t mean to chase you off from putting personal stuff here. I guess I’m just saying I’d love to read the novel you describe, and I don’t want a blog to siphon the impetus away. Still like me?

“The risk, then, resides in sending ideas out into the world before they’re fully formed, in inviting disagreement with whatever half-baked nonsense I produce.”

And recently referenced it in the entry to which this comment is appended. I find it very interesting that what is left suspended there is the naming of the intelocutor from which the disgargreement will come. Indeed, as revealed in the comments to that entry, the is scenario of later disagreement with what the self had written previously is contemplated.

Now in reference to the sleep and time budgeting remarks above… can one shorten the intervals in the dialogue with the self? Can one play out the game of disagreement within one positing? The blog form could allow for the experimentation with a different type of voicing in the entry as opposed to the comments? Can the blog form help exteriorize a dialogic mode of writing?

The answer is patently yes. I think what I have read of KF’s entries so far is that KF is willing to send out the half-baked, the still-in-formation. I suspect that KF is able to respond to the nonsense—her nonsense and my nonsense, too. In my reading, the situation is not so much about boundary crossing but about risking response, risking observable response.

I have a wonderful tingling sensation that KF is on the verge of permitting a display of a split, multiple and layered subjectivity. A very postmodern Hallowe’en!

You don’t have to blog a respons to the next question but you might want to write it up somewhere handy for you to refer back to. When at Claremont in the current work/profession site of your living, how do you unwind before attending to getting a good night’s sleep? When you are located in that place where the personal sphere of activity is played out, do you have a similar or different routine for unwinding and balancing sleep with waking hours?

This asking about how do you begin to do a certain activity is a sense a temporalization of Weez’s framing the problematic in terms of knowing when to stop. I have a hunch that while you have been unable to write you have been “composing”. Is there an expectation when the parts of your life will become integrated that the time to be devoted to your personal relationship will cut into your “composition” time? Is this about budgeting? Anticipating a redistribution of travel time?

Again you don’t have to answer the question. It may not be the one most appropriate to your situation, your academic or personal situation. I have been very careful to observe a wholistic situation — you may indeed be faced with a set of situations. The plural construction would indeed complicate any resolution.

So much of what you’ve said resonates with me: the fear of “exposure,” the desire to write while fearing one’s absolute failure at it, the knowing when to stop. 

The greatest danger is in not doing what you want to do.  I really believe that.

Good luck.