13 september 00

So yesterday a friend sent email saying he liked the site, but added that he's not so sure "about this modern trend of posting the musings on one's mind up on a daily web site as a public diary." Hmmm, yes. While I myself appreciate this "modern trend," I don't at present have an interest in participating in it. There are plenty of reasons why people keep e-journals and just as many ways in which those journals can be exciting. Enough has been said on the subject that I don't really need to expound here on ideas of voice and community. I am a huge advocate of diary-keeping, and have been keeping my own (in a series of varied notebooks and scraps of paper) for close to 16 years. Keeping a journal has had a great effect on how I think, on how I interact with my own life. For me it's a compulsion, and I could probably dicuss my feelings about it at nauseating length. It just so happens that at the present time I don't feel a need to keep a second, public, electronic journal, as necessarily different as it would be. So I thought perhaps I should mention now that I haven't been thinking of this as a journal space, in case anybody is assuming, expecting, or hoping for otherwise. But who knows what it will turn into? If I have something to say I'll say it. Let's just see what happens.

Coincidentally, I learned yesterday that there's a mention of graphomania in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I skimmed through my copy until I found it, on pp 91-92:

A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers).

then later:

If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himeslef with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

Not sure how I feel about that. I'll have to think about it. Right now, I'm running late.