I was pondering my blog on the weekend - not adding to it mind you - and not doing anything that exciting that it needs a record. It is either Gwendolen or Cecily in the Importance of Being Earnest who says she never travels without her diary because she might need something sensational to read on the tran. Come to think of it she also says that her diary is a very private document meant for publication after her death!
I wonder if all this new technology just makes it easier for people to expose themselves and mask opinion as fact? A lot of the diaries I have read for rsearch are boring really. You cscour them for the facts that might prop up your argument but rarely rad much that is exciting (Joe Orton excepted). Indeed one I had cause to use recently had been worked over by the author in his latter years and he hlepfuly gave a running index on the top of the page listing key people and events - clearly he wanted it to be read and probably would have been a blogger. Unlike me.
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2 comments:
C'mon Joe, c'mon! Your diary isn't really public because I don't know who you are, hey? Or are you really John Kingsley returned . . . whatever, expose yourself, mask your opinion as fact, just blog your way into the blogosphere. Look yourself up on Flickr or YouTube. Ya jus' never know . . .
Plenty of people - Virginia and Leonard Woolf, for example - wrote diaries with an eye to eventual publication.
Perhaps there's a secret public diarist within most of us, but we simply can't be bothered doing the boring writing bit, unless we're sure it really will be seen. Hence blogosphere.
And God knows plenty of blogs are just as tedious as our diaries would be.
Especially if a diarist leaves out the good bits ... not that we need too much more information about Hampstead Heath thanks (in fact, for that - in fabulously lurid detail, if memory serves - we can also read Derek Jarman's diaries).
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