Archives for May 2005

A reader writes:

Blogging has become the intellectual’s TV set.

I wish I’d said that. (I will, Oscar, I will!)

Last week I mused about diaries kept and unkept, kempt and unkempt, pretentious and pedestrian. I was feeling rather cynical about the whole endeavor. But one reader’s response made me think again:

I kept journals/diaries as a teenager, inspired by the diaries my great-grandfather kept since he was 19 until a few months before he died at 94. In it are recorded India’s independence, the birth of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, cases he won (he was a lawyer), progress on the books he wrote (in English–they were short stories), his first trip to England, the passing of his wife–he wrote them with every intention that they would be read by others. In fact, he kept them near his writing desk and would browse in them from time to time.

After a few “journal”-like attempts in the decade that followed, I wrote very little.

I started again a couple of years ago. They are from Moleskin and there is a page a day following the calendar year.I was motivated to start and keep them fairly updated because of the sense that days were slipping into months and into years without any “account” of them.

What did I do the summer of 2001? Was I happy? Did my back hurt? Did I take walks? What did I cook for dinner? What happened

Oh no! I missed my first weekend since switching to weekend blogging. Contrary to what you may expect I’m going to say about that, it’s not Terry’s fault. Mostly.

Terry did, of course, keep me very busy for most of the weekend, what with two plays, several meals, and six Gilmore Girls. But I deposited him at Midway Airport around two o’clock Sunday, and still had most of a day stretched out promisingly before me. Oh, the things I would accomplish. Or so it seemed.

I accomplished exactly one thing. What kept me away from the old blog-and-chain was a task that was something new for me: I was serving as a screener for a writing contest that drew many, many entries. My job was to winnow down a few hundred to, well, as few as possible. Despite several bouts of concentrated reading over the last few weeks, I still had a pile of entries to get through yesterday, as well as the task of converting the towering stacks I’d been generating–“probable,” “borderline,” and “NO”–into a final list of recommendations I could stand by.

I felt as though I was near the end yesterday but, as anybody out there knows who has done work like this, you never really cease refining and recalibrating your standards in response to the fluctuating quality of the field. You can’t know what an above-average piece of work looks like until you have read most of the entries. So the closer I got to the end of the pile, the more my anxiety grew that I had miscategorized the entries I’d read earlier. So when I reached the pile’s bottom, I went back to the beginning. Suffice it to say that blogging time, along with a fair chunk of sleeping time, fell by the wayside last night–but for the sterling cause of literary justice. Anyway, I appreciate your patience and will try to make up for my absence during the week.

Yikes, yikes, yikes! One of my deadlines was moved up a day, causing a catastrophic meltdown of my schedule. As a result, I spent all of Monday writing like a madman and most of the evening watching a movie about which I have to knock out an essay later in the week. (It was Look at Me, about which Our Girl was exactly right, thus leaving me with the unenviable task of trying to figure out how to say differently what she already said perfectly.)

Bottom line: I probably won’t be posting again until Wednesday, if then. Almanac entries will appear as usual, and I may plead for sympathy from time to time, but don’t expect much more than crumbs.

For now, do the usual: ooch on over to “Sites to See” and immerse yourself in the marvels of the blogosphere. And when you speak of me, speak well….

“Half the literature, highbrow and popular, produced in the West during the past four hundred years has been based on the false assumption that what is an exceptional experience is or ought to be a universal one. Under its influence so many millions of persons have persuaded themselves they were ‘in love’ when their experience could be fully and accurately described by the more brutal four-letter words, that one is sometimes tempted to doubt if the experience is ever genuine, even when, or especially when, it seems to have happened to oneself.”

W.H. Auden, “The Protestant Mystics” (in Forewords and Afterwords)

“Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in
their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to
interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw
before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching,
struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the
stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love
which the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he,
through the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a
burning gaze fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose
magnificent pearls had caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to
the information that Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the
players, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the
words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of no merit,
interested me also; for I could feel in it that there were budding and
opening for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the
agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease paint
and pasteboard, on his own human soul the words of a part.

“These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play
that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one
would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by
that time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer
in the position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer
shews one the comedian’s face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief
wipes off, who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing
of them, since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of
the show, make us–like the dissolution of a dear friend–begin to
doubt the reality of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death.”

Marcel Proust, Le C

To begin with, several readers caught me with my pants down when I claimed
the other day, apropos of W.H. Auden, that Forewords and Afterwords was “the only essay collection Auden published in his lifetime.” Not so, not so! It was preceded by The Dyer’s Hand, which is actually on my bookshelf, whereas Forewords and Afterwords was stuck in the back of my closet. This was double-barreled dumbness: I somehow had it lodged in my mind that The Dyer’s Hand was based on a series of lectures. (Wrong book–that’s The Enchaf

I don’t know anyone in New York who hasn’t claimed at one time or another that the value of taking a vacation is outweighed by the difficulty of cleaning up the mess that accumulates while you’re out of the office. Alas, I haven’t been on a vacation, but I did take the weekend off to see plays in Chicago with Our Girl, and on my return I found the usual intimidating pile of snail mail, e-mail, and packages waiting for me.