And now with some pleasure...

And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven, and must cook dinner.  Haddock and sausage meat.  I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

And there you go -- Vegemite Woolf's haddock and sausage preserved for all time!

I'm pondering a class I'll teach in a couple of weeks' time on blogging/diary-writing/journalling. I've been reading Tristine Rainer's The New Diary, which is touted as being The or One of The Only books on above subject though I doubt this somehow.  The above extract from Woolf which Rainer quotes touches on one of the pleasures of blogging -- the capture of passing minutiae with the accompanying illusion of it being for all time.

I'm much more a personal blogger than a political one, as is evident... Which is kind of odd, really, given that I've worked in a political area until very recently and written various political or policy thangs but not kind of odd, on the other hand, given that I have a PhD in women's writing... Which is a dangerous thing to say, as it might suggest that women are naturally less politically oriented in their interests.  I also find that my response to political blogs is quite different to personal ones...I generally just scan political blogs and say to myself, 'oh yeah, well that's happening in the world (oops, Australia!) today' whereas my magpie mind tends to gravitate towards and take pleasure in obscure details generally (but not always) to be found in personal blogging, like the Dalai Lama saying it's wrong for anyone to 'use the other two holes', Jude's dragonfruit, the activities of other people's pets or Adelaide's husband's bon mots.  (Should I be worried about this pervy interest in other people's lives?  Perhaps it's something to do with my current location!)

I feel perhaps the teeniest pressure not to be such a girly blogger and to write political stuff, especially when it's right on my doorstep...like the almost 30 % increase in murders here over the last year...but I'm just not that interested (perhaps it's possible to reach your saturation point with this, esp when it's up close and personal). Whatever happened to the 'personal is political' anyway (now there's an excuse!) 

There is, I think, a sense of the blogging elite in the Australian blogosphere, with political bloggers being the upper strata, so to speak, and personal bloggers mushing around together in the substratum below, generally being better known if they're connected to the upper stratum in some ways.  I wonder if this is an extension of the current trend amongst the Australian culturati to privilege the political: this is a bit of a caricature but there seems to be a prevailing notion at present that something is good art (or it's the best kind of art around at the moment) if it's about refuges, reconciliation or some other left-liberal theme, and more or less obviously so that people will 'get the message' (i.e. mimetic), tho only the faithful are likely to read/see it anyway.  I would agree that all art ultimately has a political dimension but I'm bemused by the implication that politics=culture, and then only the left-liberal variety (sounds like something from the Eastern block).  I wonder if this trend is part of a fortress mentality, an offshoot of the pressure on the 'chattering classes' from the Howard government to dig their heels in and maintain their turf (of which I am of course in my own way a part and support.)

But this is way off track from my subject...and am I starting to sound like Paddy White and his eschewal of dun-coloured realism? I wouldn't want to be making a corresponding suggestion that personal blogging is an art-form or that a higher cultural value attaches to personal blogs.  (Difficult to write critically without it sounding like sour grapes of some sort, anyway.)  I was interested to see that Mark from LP is running a survey of bloggers and their motivations in blogging (he's asked other bloggers to promote it) but that he's made a cut already between political/social/cultural bloggers and personal and academic bloggers.  I can understand why he's made this cut, particularly in terms of a manageable research project and his own background and areas of interest, but I do wonder if it presupposes a kind of 'true' boyo political path to blogging. (And what will he do with blogs like 'personal political' that are a mixture of both?)  It's also put the thought in my mind that I could do a sister (ha ha!) research project into personal blogging (which would probably be far less sociological, because I find social science research methods boring).

But back to Tristine Rainer...she reckons that:

...the first diaries that were not essentially historical records were written by Japanese women in the tenth century.  These ladies of the royal court developed the diary into a form of personal expression that explored subjective fantasies and fiction, not just external realities.

In other words, not the battle diaries (er, histories) written by hangers-on of the Roman Emperors, etc.  So there's that idea of the personal, introspective, feminine diary-writing tradition again.  Rainer gives some delightful quotations from the courtesans' diaries, such as the following: acc to Lady Murasaki, one writes when some experience:

...has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.  Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion.

(Note use of third person masc pronoun, despite being writing in private woman's diary.)

Comments

[Mel]

Great post, echoing some of my own misgivings. My old boss is very enthusiastic about blogs, but for him the only blogs are the really hardcore political ones. And he thinks the most important thing about blogs is 'citizen journalism'. Whereas I think the most important thing about blogs is the creation of community and dialogue through comments, blogrolls, trackbacks, etc.

I know that Jean Burgess has written about personal blogs with a particular emphasis on the most derided and feminised sorts: LiveJournals and emoblogs. And recently I have been struggling to free myself from a kind of 'compartmentality' associated with blog genre. I write on nine blogs, all with their own genres and purposes: some public, some private; some whimsical, others analytical. I think it's the stigma of personal blogging that makes me chop up my writing and my subjectivity like this.

[Pavlov's Cat]

I think it's a boyo thing to construct it as a dichotomy at all, and am semi-conscious (so to speak) here at Pavlov's Cat of more or less deliberately mixing them up -- sometimes to what I think, when I look at it later, must be a disconcerting degree. It's very liberating to think of personal/political as -- no, not a spectrum, something more three-dimensional -- a hyperlinked rotating disco mirror ball with tiny writing on all the facets, perhaps.

It's also very liberating not to give a rat's about stats. I'm fully aware that if a certain kind of boy finds his way to my blog and sees a picture of a cat and a dolly little anime-inspired weatherpixie -- against a satured deep-musk-pink background, at that -- he will immediately go EEEEWWWW and leave. What he doesn't know is that that's exactly why I put them there.

[Pavlov's Cat]

PS -- why is Virginia Vegemite? Is this a spell-check joke?

[elsewhere]

Yes, Pavlov, but it hasn't scared that terrible R.H. away!

Ideally, one shouldn't have to think self-consciously about personal-political at all. I do find it interesting how people like Susoz and now Polemica have worked out their own categorisation of blogs along this spectrum, er, mirror ball.

Mel -- I was going to say something about Jason Mulgrew's fascination with boobies (incl his own) but I didn't think that qualified as an obscure preoccupation. I have enough trouble carving my thoughts up into separately themed posts, let along blogs.

Re: VW -- because she's both a well-known product and a complex one? I'm not sure, I think this is something that came out during a drunken moment at a cross-dressing Orlando party last year when I got tired of some people's notion of canonicity.

[laura]

Just a thought about Lady Murasaki...maybe translation contributed something to the effect you noted? I'm incredibly ignorant about anything to do with the structure of LoTE and so very likely to be guessing wrong.

I'm half thinking about getting up some sort of literary-inflected research on blogging for post-phd myself. So I'm interested in these conversations too. One thing that's pretty clear to me is that the network we here are all part of, is only one of many not-quite-touching interwebs which collectively calls itself THE blogosphere. Internal factions are perhaps not that significant.

There's at least one other factor (or faction) in the Australian blogosphere, that being the tribe of business and PR and tech bloggers: many of them view whatever they write about - "content" - as simply a lure to get punters in to click on the pay-per-click ads; the acknowledged leader of these blogs is themed about how to make money from blogging. Many of these people view noncommercial bloggers as naive amateurs.

[elsewhere]

Indeedy, well, I guess there's a question of what one puts value on, apropos commercial and non-commercial blogging.

I'd be interested to know what the proportional breakdown of personal/political blogging is on a national basis -- as much as one can make those distinctions, not to mention given the transitory nature of blogging. E.g. is America the bastion of the personal blog? Do Australians tend to emoblog?

[Jonathan Shaw]

What interesting questions. I'd hate to think I -- or you -- had to decide to write ONLY personal or ONLY political or ONLY cultural stuff. The closes I have to a model of the ideal blog is the Nielsen Haydens' Making Light, which does anything it bloody well wants, and mostly does it well.

[elsewhere]

What is the link for that blog?

[Matt]

I have to admit, overtly political blogs bore the arse off me. I can get my news from elsewhere and form my own opinions thank you very much - it's much more interesting to find out what's going on inside the head of a blogger before you find out their views on the issue of the day. Clicking 'next blog' on blogger.com is like flicking through the channels of peoples' subconcious, it gives you a much greater perspective on the mood of the blogosphere than reading a cut and paste job from Reuters with some person's opinion tagged on the end.

As for the commercial aspect, I would rather have people concentrate on the "content" - if what you're writing is of so little worth that the ads provide a better distraction, surely you're in the wrong business?

[laura]

Making Light -
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

[Pavlov's Cat]

Thanks for the link, Laura. How interesting, given the gender-based speculation on this thread, that Making Light is a (straight) couple/double act. Is this like Virginia/Vegemite's famous couple getting into the cab as a metaphor for a hypothetically androgynous artist? (Ahem: cop that for a segue.) Can the public/private thingy be fixed by a double-edged, or double-barrelled, subjectivity? (Sorry, tried and failed to get away from metaphors of knives and guns here, which is quite interesting in itself.)

Or is it more that if there are two of you with equal presence and investment, regardless of gender, then there's less ego investment, less at stake psychologically and therefore more fearlessness about how the coupled self/selves is/are represented?

And yes, E, if RH sees this I'll never hear the end of it. Sigh.

[elsewhere]

Very clever but I don't know...is two of you different to seven of you ("I am Legion")?

I'm off to tango now...

[suzoz]

Gosh, I've had a copy of The New Diary for over 25 years - never knew it was the only one of its type.
I wrote my MA thesis on blogs - actually, on one blog, but there's some general stuff in there. An American feminist academic called S C Herring (? her name is Susan) has written several academic articles about gender and blogging and reckons personal diaristic blogs far outnumber the others.
see http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere
http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Ejpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf

[elsewhere]

Thanks Susoz -- and everyone else. The links look very interesting. You'll have to tell me more about your MA some time.

[laura]

The double-act joint blog thing *is* interesting, isn't it? There's John & Belle in Elsewhere's sidebar. I wonder if they began it.

[elsewhere]

Do you think they'd be the first?

What happened to the Symposiasts? Are they still going?

[Kate]

Late to the conversation but it's something I struggle with. I try to mix up the personal and the political at my blog, and tho I'm supposed to be posting at LP more often I find myself struggling to be 'political' instead of 'anecdotal'. I also prefer to read personal blogs or blogs with a more personal slant; maybe I too am a voyeur, but I really enjoy getting to know a blogger's voice. So when they do talk about politics I feel like it's almost a conversation I'm having with a friend rather than a lecture from someone much smarter than I.

[elsewhere]

But why should anyone feel obliged to 'try', as people have said above and why is there a sense of fracture or self-consciousness between the personal and the political?

My feeling is that political blogging is done more effectively at the larger collective blogs, in any case.

[third cat]

I've been away and am just catching up on all my blog reading - a lot happens in a week. I really like what PC said way up there about the mirror ball. I guess my reading preferences fall for the blogs which mix it up. And I don't think it's any coincidence that most of the blogs I read are written by women.

[susoz]

I think I feel obligated to try for the political because of my background working in the media (I've got an inner journalist trying to get out) and also my background in the women's movement which put into practice 'the personal is political'. So I do feel a bit, hate to say it, guilty if I only focus on the personal. But lately I have been very much doing that, for, um, personal reasons.

[Laura]

What do people think about repositioning the divide (the one that the blogs we like try to bridge) as public / domestic, rather than personal / political?

[Laura]

Sorry, that should have said 'public space / domestic space.

[elsewhere]

I like that 'divide', Laura. I'll have to think about it some more, tho. 'Public' seems to me to encompass more than 'political', whereas 'domestic' suggests just one area of the 'personal'.

[Kate]

Sorry elsewhere, you might not get this comment for ages as I note you've gone away for a few days -- but I do feel that divide, even if it's silly. As a feminist I feel like I SHOULD be making feministy type statements on my blog rather than going on about my dog and my lack of a job and so forth. I try to meld the two and do what Susoz does and make the personal political and vice versa, but I often fail.

As for my posting issues with LP I think it's the old inferiority complex creeping up on me. I don't feel nearly as eloquent and knowledgable as the other people who write there. It's silly I know but it's hard to overcome.

[elsewhere]

I sympathise. I do think a lot of what you mention is a particularly female dilemma. Sometimes I think I'm too underconfident to do the sirrius blogging stuff; other times, I think I'm just too lazy.

Off on a slight tangent -- I wonder if the background that fires much female blogging is letter-writing, journalling, mass-emailing of friends -- that kind of thing, rather than the path Mark suggests for his research project of coming up through the political chatrooms, etc. It's certainly more my background and feeds the personal focus of this blog.

[Pavlov's Cat]

I dunno -- for me the blogosphere has reinforced, depressingly it must be said, all the worst gender sterotypes I had hoped were myths or at least exaggerations. I see a massive element of competitive dick-waving (to put it nicely) among male bloggers right across the political spectrum, competing for stats and in stoushes, flourishing their half-remembered Philosophy 1 cred, squabbling over rival economists, etc etc ad tedium. If women bloggers ever show any signs of behaving like this, they are either ignored or condemned as ugly feminist shrews who should shut up.

But I see very little competition among women bloggers: again, the classic stereotypes seem to pertain, with consensus and civility the order of the day. (There are exceptions, of course, but they seem few.) There are a number of aggressive male commenters at LP, Catallaxy and Troppo who seem to me to be alarmingly dim, but quite unaware of this fact and therefore very confident in the often very stupid things they say. They remind me of a conversation somewhere in Henry James: 'A pretty woman?' she said. 'Why, her features are very bad.' 'I don't know about her features,' he replied, 'but she carries her head like a pretty woman.'

Maybe that's one of the secrets of confident blogging -- to carry one's head like a pretty woman. So to speak.

[third cat]

Again: what PC said.
I'm such a copy-cat.

[genevieve]

Nice post and discussion here - thanks to lucy t for pointing me over here. I just posted on weblogs that have been 'sampled' by a literature journal, Famous Reporter. I don't think they're particularly interested in divides. You're welcome to have a look and tell me what you think.

[genevieve]

And because my son can't sleep, I also found this at the Guardian blog - it's pretty nice.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/melissa_mcewan/2006/04/the_political_is_personal.html

Hope the url comes up okay - the last part is, the political_is_personal.html

[elsewhere]

Thanks, that looks really interesting. I'll have a read of those links soon.