This is my last entry for #blogjune. I know it’s July 2nd but I’ve been busy and decided I’d just sneak this one in.
I had the thought the other week that this return to making our own spaces and putting our own stuff in them ( well, on this blog there’s quite a bit of other people’s stuff as well) is a kind of mark making that’s only been possible since the beginning of those remarkable exemplars of the nineties, the PHP crowd, the hand coding bloggers like Rebecca Blood.
There’s a moment or two still in most of my weeks, even after being on the earth for sixty-two years and trying to repress this, where I need to make something, ideally something I don’t have to share immediately (food, a garden)…something that involves process and choices. Like visual art, music, poetry, writing and assisted internet writing (I am hardly a hand coder. Not a hope in hell of achieving that and it is not needed anyhow.)
It’s nice to have your own spot, isn’t it. Whether someone else sees your thoughts or not. And the problem with all the walled spaces is just that. People will find you, fast. But do we want to be found by everyone? do we?
I subscribed to two nieces’ FB pages last week and now I feel like sending them an apology. They are up and coming trad folkies, they’re exploding onto the scene and using the usual tools (FB, Insta, TikTok).
After talking to their dad recently about this, my beloved younger brother, I realise it would be nicer simply to text them or ring them up, or go visit. They only live fifteen minutes drive away. Following them on FB feels like being one of Nonna’s Spies. (I do have a lot of nieces and these are the youngest.)
I have enjoyed reading the remarks of others (Andrew, hallo again! And Con, and Kathryn) on where blogging sits in their lives. Funny thing is, I didn’t even notice that I was back.
It is interesting to loosen up some of these thoughts. I have been through a bit of agonising about online diarising. I found a piece by Stephanie Radok in HEAT magazine when I was at my lowest on this matter that made me send one box of notebooks into storage:
“…When I leave the house and go to the market I see stories piled up in every face, every encounter, every piece of clothing, every smile. The idea of treasures, of gifts for the future, folded inside the archives, is for me, one large reason they exist. Yet getting them out needs more than a systematic mind or indeed a system because an organic archive leaks away in all directions.
I sit on my bedroom floor surrounded by notebooks of every conceivable size, colour and shape. There is no regimentation in this life, even though it includes making notes and writing – there is no tidy progress, no inventory, no order! Damn. Just a great volume of pages scrawled, written, scribbled. Lists for self-improvement, complaints, dreams (a lot of dreams), visions (quite a few), appointments, plans, events, joy, manifestos, copied out passages from books, anger, drawings, misery, shopping lists and accounts, delight, and here and there a flight of writing, and sometimes a poem or something like one lying on its side, half-dead, half-alive, wondering if it will be pulled out and resuscitated or left there.
It would be great to be able to link to the whole essay as there’s food for thought here.
Elise Valmorbida, who has published a concise, comprehensive and beautifully designed writing guide, The Happy Writing Book, gently and kindly mentions that she has “boxes full of notebooks, the kind that sort, travel and stack easily.”
Funny that the notebooks that match and stack are the thing I remembered. My son has a passion for keeping my shelved notebooks that are the same ALL TOGETHER. I could make that work while he’s still living here.
Elise does also mention that her other notes are kept less tidily, ending with, “It’s a messy habit. I urge you to try it.”
Radok’s article explores the value of messiness in depth, giving us a fine sense of its richness:
Every now and then a shelf of notebooks that I had forgotten turns up to frighten me. And then I appreciate the common sense of religious rituals that, as a side effect, include cleaning the entire house…Thus religion can improve hygiene, and maybe this is one key to its endurance, as well as a way to remove secrets and trails. But how likely is it, really, that all secrets will be removed? Don’t we all need them to give our lives depth?
I will have to contact the mag and ask if this can be put online, it is splendid stuff.
At the same time I found an article on Sharon Olds which mentions her writing methods (and I’ve talked about this before) and met with a friend who uses a singular and quite original method to put her work into a collage kind of space, which I won’t discuss here. Olds and my friend saved me from despair about the notebooks. I’m managing my feelings about messy note taking a little better now.
Elise also speaks of the value of blog writing, but I will have to dig back further into her wonderful handbook to find this – or buy an e-copy and search it.
Much like diary writing, I think internet writing for ourselves can often have an ephemeral flavour. It reflects our feelings at the time of writing. Our favourite inflections of language and jargon from our readings and work creep in and date it. I may have already spoken here about the shock of reading back your writing on an older blog. I’ve archived two of mine on WP (links at the end here) so you can see what I mean if you dip in.
On both those blogs I discovered a writing style that now feels foreign – breathless, hyperactive are words I would use about some of the things I used to post.
But as Carl Phillips and many others say of writing practice, keeping a journal – anywhere – is a way of practising writing.
Finally, though I may change this soon, a couple of times I have gone to publicise a new post on Mastodon and then found myself hanging back. There are habits from the walled gardens that die hard, including the need to publicise across those walls. In the last few posts I have found that I’m just going to do the free thinking here, free the words for now. And see what happens.
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