Writing vs. blogging vs. life
Posted on | March 4, 2008 | 8 Comments
I have been in Tasmania for the past week hanging out with friends and family and drinking lots of local Pinot! At the moment I’m on Bruny Island where I grew up, and this morning I drove over a mountain to go to yoga in a place called Adventure Bay. I could hear the waves crashing from the beach across the road from under my lavender relaxation pillow, in a hall where my mum and I once dressed up to go to the Easter bonnet parade.
Bruny is changing: it is no longer the modest, remote, embarrassing place of my childhood, where my city friends were too scared to come visit because it was so far away. Now it’s the place where rich people come to “get away from it all”, take wildlife cruises to be awe-struck by nature and generally fantasise about another, simpler life. Weird parts of my past and present life collide here. My friends are currently staying in the cabin my Dad built with two other blokes on the beach at Cloudy Bay and that Peter Beattie rented just before he left for the US. I’m trying to prepare for a seminar on “rural cultural studies” but the seminar papers that have been sent out in preparation are blowing out the broadband. My cousin who met me when I flew in last week is renovating her house to let Bob Brown use it as his city office (he is the partner of another cousin). Meanwhile I just found out my godfather has been working as a consultant to the Exclusive Brethren on its school curriculum.
I’ve been having a lot of nightmares since I got here. I wonder if it’s to do with the confusion my body feels in this acutely familiar place that is also so far from many other things and people I now love and call home. At night, the different lives it seems I’ve lived since leaving this place fight one another, vying for supremacy, trying to trick me into looking backwards at all the wrong moves I might still be able to correct. But in the daylight, I discover other things that reassure me I’ve been following the right path.
Like in the room where I’m sleeping, I’ve been remembering some of the first “books” I wrote in primary school:
Initially with the help of teachers, like this one:
these stories chart the years I spent trying to fit in at the private school I was sent to in the city. Their increasingly cloying dedications “to Jenna, Kate and Jacki who I like” and insular subject matter “Angela’s Rock and Roll Party” (which was, as far as I can recall, more fact than fiction) actually show how much my imagination and appetite for excitement narrowed in four years.
I went from blissful operatic Freudian fantasies (falling into a lake that I found in a cave!?!) to quite desperate attempts to make friends and fit in with the cool group.
That I thought I could do this through writing helps explain why so many of those friendships did not last in the process of my becoming a writer by profession; but the positive feedback I got from writing also explains why I persisted with it.
These comment sections sections at the back of the books are an early indication of why the post/response of blogging would be such a revelation to me, years later. The internet promises the ultimate (infinite) audience for feedback, even if the forms of reciprocity and encouragement also often fall into pre-established friendship groups – when they manage to rise above schoolyard antics. It was all a lot simpler though when someone I kind of knew just signed with the comment: 11/10.
It’s funny to find these little relics given what else I’ve been reading. Despite my brother’s warnings, I just finished Blind Faith, Ben Elton’s take on the micro-celebrity of reality television and – I guess – Web 2.0. It imagines a world where blogging and uploading video of all major life events and daily activities (including sex and childbirth) are compulsory acts of citizenship.
The quite credible depiction of office life in the near future certainly raises the stakes on my own reading of workplace affect that I finished before going away. It’s also an important book to read as Catherine and I try to strike a balance between advocacy, defensiveness and participant observation of online cultures. I don’t think we could ever be accused of the evangelism I’ve seen displayed by some of the bigger name bloggers and web enthusiasts, which might actually contribute to the book’s vision being realised, but even our position would be open to the thrust of Elton’s satire. What will save us from his dystopianism, as the exodus from Facebook is showing, is the persistence of certain bourgeois notions of privacy, as well as the consistently limited numbers of people who share the desire to write.
In Courage, another book I just finished, Maria Tumarkin claims she was thirty before she could ‘really, genuinely’ think of herself as a writer. Until then she had various strategies to avoid such a realisation, including convincing herself ‘that I had never wanted to be a writer in the first place’, and relegating writing ‘to the status of a verb, to turn it into one of the many actions I was given to performing from time to time’ (p. 150).
Tumarkin says it was fear that led her to dissociate herself from writing: ‘of being a talentless hack, a pen pusher, one of those people whose profound lack of talent is matched only by the blind conviction that they have something vitally important to say’ (p. 151). Overcoming that fear involved seeing writing as ‘a noun again, to recognise it as part of my inner-most identity… It was simply the need to write, which was akin to a compulsion, and which was not so much the sense of rightness [others] had described but rather a sense of must-ness’ (p. 151).
This is a deeply attractive description of writing, even though being a writer is something I still struggle to identify with. Maybe it’s because I haven’t quite turned 30! Or maybe it’s because of my own fears – RSI, blindness, Alzheimers, cancer – that are all Western and bourgeois too, and which I suspect Maria would hate. More rationally, I am quite determined not to follow a lineage of people who have used the label of ‘writer’ as a convenient alibi, to excuse me from all of the things I might otherwise be tempted to use it to avoid: reciprocal relationships, family obligations, community involvement, political activism, general politeness, cooking dinner for my partner or putting the garbage out. These are all things I want to be able to maintain as well as being a writer, and yet romantic visions of it as courageous or radical make me shy and pessimistic that might be possible.
In two days I will have to leave the views of the lagoon and the veggie patch which grows strawberries and raspberries every day to face smoggy Sydney again. But at least on Saturday I will be home to my beautiful boy, more post-rock at The Tivoli, some expanded wardrobe choices and the challenge of keeping many conflicting desires and histories in happy animation.
Comments
8 Responses to “Writing vs. blogging vs. life”
Leave a Reply
Currently consuming
Blogroll
- {im@ no jaz}
- A Wild Young Under Whimsy
- Adrian Miles
- ana australiana
- archive : s0metim3s
- Creativity/Machine
- Edu-Factory
- Event Mechanics
- Fifty Two Acts
- Geert Lovink
- How The University Works
- Life during wartime
- Making Wifi
- Marika Luders
- Mentalization-Positive
- Purse Lip Square Jaw
- SA Stories
- Silver in SF
- Snurblog
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- Supervalent Thought
- Tama Leaver
- Tammi Jonas
- The Memes of Production
- The Vapour Trail
- Unemployed at last
March 4th, 2008 @ 9:03 pm
Wow, beautiful post Mel.
Problematic identity or not, as we can all see here, you do writing as a practice really very well.
I also spent some time going through my early works recently, after rescuing a box (of the stuff I have lugged from house to house for decades) from the flood. I was stunned by how much clearer my writing was when I was 8 or 9, and how assured the narratives were, and how satisfying it is to arrive at a conclusion with such certainty. And hey, I love nostalgia, generally.
March 9th, 2008 @ 12:41 am
I loved this post too mel.
I hoard my children’s stuff and realize I map my own adult life through their childhood creativity–love letters, drawings that chart my size from gargantuan to human. Partly I suppose because my father burnt all our photos and memorabilia when my mother fled with us but also because my head is so full of what increasingly feels like useless theoretical knowledge that their presence feels like it is slipping through the cracks.
How I Met Kylie Minogue–I smell a New Idea editor in the making…
March 10th, 2008 @ 1:17 pm
Hi Jean, thanks! I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard an old interview with Ted Hughes when he was out for the Adelaide Festival in the 70s. He was saying that poets should imagine they are writing for children; once we get older things become too complicated – which I think means we try too hard to sound smart, and that we pick up a lot of bad habits along the way. Maybe all PhD courses should include some Hughes.
Kiley: my books are in a pile with my brother’s and my mum’s schoolbooks. I remember when I was little how much I loved anything that was my mum’s at school, and I was amazed that she didn’t keep things like her school uniform for me to dress up in. Oh dear, my sad geeky life! But it is important to me that all these things stay in one place for whoever else might come along…
March 10th, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
Good call by Ted Hughes. That’s just what Colin Thiele said when he came to my primary school and told us we could all be writers – evidently I forgot the “as long as you remember what it’s like to be a child” part. Although, while I’d like to keep the clarity of my Year 4 writing I’m not so sure about the moral certainty. And then again (see?) if somebody *did* actually present me with a magic saddle that would grant me all my wishes as long as I was grateful and polished it every day, and then I didn’t fulfil my part of the bargain, I reckon it would be fair enough if my pony was taken away.
March 11th, 2008 @ 8:50 pm
I think I see writing not as an alibi to get me out of things, but as an alibi to get me INTO things. For me, as a kid, it was amazing to think I might end up going anywhere, except in my head.
So, while you sat on your island imagining Kylie Minogue, I sat on a mountain and imagined celebrities, too. I even wrote a letter to one, once, when I was probably far too old for it. It was exciting just to send a letter to a different country. Imagine my joy when a reply came, and an 8×10 publicity shot! I knew that there was another world out there, but I was not at all sure that I could participate in it.
Don’t know what I’m trying to say here. This post made me sad and happy all at once, like dusk, and REM. I guess that’s it.
Oh, and bugger about the Exclusive Brethren thing.
March 12th, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
Tell me about it! So strange.
You aren’t the only one to say this post made them sad – I wonder why?
March 15th, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Of course it made me a bit sad, too. A few years ago I had to pack up all my things from childhood and teen years from my parents’ house. Most of it I threw away, which made me sad at the time. I am going through what was kept now, and throwing most of it away. I often think that my daughters will want my clothes, because I wanted my mum’s when I was growing up. But it’s just too hard for me to hang on to anything now! Passing it on to my friends is the next best thing I think.
x
March 19th, 2008 @ 11:22 am
11/10