10:31 a.m. - 2022-09-17
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I've met four Diaryland-ers in real life. That is to say I've met four people whose blogs I was familiar with before we were introduced. Two of these have professional writing careers and one teaches writing professionally. (Not sure what happened to Ramona, a dancer who I'd known for a year before she mentioned posting here under a nom de guerre that I'd already been reading, never realizing it was her.) I would end up courting one of these four authors, taking the train up to her neighborhood and talking for two-hour stretches on a bench by the historical society. Sitting in front of a wishing well or some other impossibly quaint civic landmark before taking the train back to the ratty apartment where we would eventually live together. I never wrote about it, nor did she. In fact, after she moved-in I quit writing here altogether.
I chalk this up in part to the traits and topics that haunted my journal; low self-esteem, lack of ambition, heavy drinking, skirt-chasing etc. and to an understanding that this was too dark a spirit to bring to a public writing exercise...specifically one my girlfriend had bookmarked on her browser. So yeah, we kept those struggles in-house. Conversely, the joy I'd gleaned from reading her journal entries was now available in-house as well. Those awkward two-hour bench chats would burgeon into years of heady, savvy jib-jab...a connection that still resonates during our all-too infrequent phone calls.
So given that we shared an aesthetic, a worldview, a conversational tone and metre...given that we were both chronicling the ups and downs of scrapping/scraping by in LA, wouldn't what we held in common reflect in our writing? Some mutual stylistic tell? None at all, actually.
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My only writing experience came in pursuit of my philosophy minor. Which, to be fair, did involve a shit-ton of writing. But is was of an esoteric cast, style-wise. Tasked with the burden of epistemic justification, language itself becomes belabored and knotted...straining to achieve beyond its intended function and leaving little room for self-expression. I would write these papers longhand and my grandmother, a career journalist, would type and edit them. (Which, given my lousy handwriting, spelling, and mechanics, was a dirty job, but she never complained.) So...might that background inform my “style”? I feel like there's a chicken vs. egg aspect to this question: I mean, I was obviously attracted to the dense and tortured verbosity of the curriculum and its required reading, right? And while I don't think of myself as obtuse or long-winded, I do know me well enough to top my drink off before launching into an anecdote...My ex, on the other hand, studied writing-proper and has built a career around it. The nuts and bolts of the craft are as second-nature to her as carpentry is to me. Also, in addition to the resources afforded her by two well-funded private universities, our age difference meant that her college years coincided w/the dawn of the internet. What a boon for a hungry, dew-spangled mind that must have been; what an accelerant for the fresh-kindled spark of inquiry. My "lateral" exposure was strictly analog; garnered via restless roams through the stacks of my backwater college library. Said stacks, though beautifully-housed and voluminous, were ad-hoc and antiquated—shipwrecked texts from long-forgotten syllabi rubbing sleeves with vanity collections donated by the aging scions of the cattle-barons who'd endowed the school... So at an age where she was already tucked into the “good stuff” like Pessoa, Calvino and Flann O'Brien, I was on a decidedly less-hip diet of John Cowper Powys, Robinson Jeffers and Ford Maddox Ford.
No regrets though, and our bookshelves would eventually commingle. But mapping our respective paths up to that point does serve as a springboard for speculation. As a possible factor for why, while both of our sensibilities are post-modern, her writing evinces as such on a structural level and mine is defined-by/mired-in a more trad approach. I realize this is a simplistic take, but I dunno... Try the pudding maybe. It's hundred-proof. She can isolate the pith of the subject, distill it and whip it into an edible foam...presented as an amuse-bouche on a bespoke porcelain platter. I prefer to core the mealiest apple in the crate, stuff it with a mashed fistful of luncheon meat and plate it on a chafing dish, under a heat lamp.
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I bring this up because I've been in steady contact with another writer from this site recently; someone who knows me only through the lens of this journal but who has somehow, based on 20-some years of infrequent posts, drawn a recklessly positive conclusion re: me and my character. This despite the lack of a heroic (or in any way redeeming, really) story-arc over the course of these accumulated entries...this despite evidentiary anecdotes earnestly presented in favor of the prosecution. So I don't know--is it structural, the appeal? Is she some kind of comma fetishist?Whether or not we ever have the pleasure of meeting in person, I'm sure I'll be talking-to and writing more about this sweet lady—this sister-in-arms flying the flag of our far-flung online redoubt. But for now I'm raising a question that occurred to me regarding the circumstance of our connection...a question about how, exactly, we “know” each other:
"Who are we here?"
