Fitzgerald saving carbons. His detailed life ledger. Documenting Zelda’s abortion. He preserved everything, his letters, notebooks of observations, character ideas,some published posthumously in The Crack-Up. (He preserves everything except his wife, who he helped destroy.) The notes at the end of The Last Tycoon. He died before he could finish it. Heart attack in Hollywood, tended to by his mistress. Plath’s notebooks in the end, all notes, ideas, works, sketches. Ted Hughes wrote that this was a sign of a spiritual death, she was dead before she killed herself, as her notebooks dissolved into notes. The idea being, I suppose, that those who catalogue their lives exhaustively stop existing when they stop documenting the self amidst the clutter of other voices and events.
What does it mean to be aware of one’s own preservation? To preserve the self. I save myself, my days. This archive of the self. These women who haunt me, I want to save them too, to carry them forward with me.
It is the wives and mistresses perhaps who would have blogged and tumbled their fragments, all of their delicious brilliant witty urges they instead scrawled into journals and notebooks like Zelda, Jane and Viv, into letters, into conversation later snatched up by the male author. I imagine Jane Bowles would especially have found this form rather freeing, she who suffered for thirty years from writer’s block, which I think about now as really being blocked because of this oppressive idea of the massive BOOK in our culture, totalizing and emblematic of our talents as writers. I’d like to think that the women of modernism would have forged a community of their own in this space.
I think back to those early posts, that seemingly flowed out of me, like channeling, Yeats with his Georgie-girl. It’s one of the only times I have never felt stopped or blocked from writing. I refused to be censored. It helped being so isolated in Akron, knowing no one, having no one aware of me. How freeing that all was. Sometimes I still feel that sense of jouissance blogging, but now I’m so much more aware of readership, who’s going to comment or not, if no one has commented in a while, whether I’m transgressing some boundary by writing about X, Y, or Z.
With my first published book, I had to exit the private bubble of my dinner party with the mad wives, and begin to negotiate becoming a public writer-self in the world. Because of this, the blog began to be overtaken by doubt, or rather become a performance of this doubt. The posts began to be about what it was like to be a minor writer in the world, these moments of humiliation, of abjection, of shame. Perhaps a refusal to swallow, a vomiting forth.
And thus began a public diary experiment, threading throughout a reflection on what I was reading, using literature as a way to make sense of my existence (some might call it Bovarizing). I wasn’t the only one doing it — there’s a whole league of us writers who are theatricalizing our lives. We make each other characters in our narratives, some of us constantly referencing, linking to, and reading each other. Our blogs reflect a performance of the self that is as much about our private lives as it is about navigating a public space. We are the relentless documentarians of our own quotidian, its gorgeous gasps and banalities. There are bloggers who are specifically diarists, like Rebecca Loudon, or Jennifer Lowe, or Angela Simione, who has taken lately to scanning her handwritten diary entires as blog posts. Today, Today, we title our posts. This reminds me of the beginning of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (“in fact, today is a word which only suicides ought to use; it has no meaning for other people”), a work that is a beautiful meditation on how to navigate being both the woman-writer and the woman-character. Online we negotiate and navigate what it means to be a writer, for some of us what it means to be a woman, except we aren’t celebrities like Bachmann was in her time in Austria.
Yet of course many of us don’t write every day. Sometimes there are long lapses of not writing or posting. That’s why I think of this form as a form of l’écriture féminine: a rhythm of silence and raw emotion, these fervent utterings.
Colette Peignot writing on her scrap of paper that she gave to Bataille as she lay dying, a communication felt as nakedness. These scraps that we pass back and forth to each other. A dialogue, a communication: the Internet. So intimate. These writings are the shudderings of the ego and lamenting the wound. We blubber and ooze. Texts that are raw and vulnerable, bodily and excessive. Sometimes freaking out in public. We are naked, like Karen Finley.
My blog at time feels like a toilet bowl, a confessional, a field hospital.
Our posts are often self-reflective, interrogating the form itself, threatening often to quit it, worrying that it deviates from our “real” writing. The girls who cry Woolf. All these fragmented, image-strewn, public records of self which are sometimes about the disintegration of self. We are nauseous, narcissists.
Sometimes there seems to be so much dialogue and activity and feverish writing in this public space, and sometimes it seems to retreat. Perhaps we are performing our own oblivion that we feel as writers in the outside world, many of us unpublished or published on small presses. Lately I feel no one’s been blogging anymore, no one’s commenting, everyone’s quitting, forming new blogs, new aliases, and then it all begins again. We cycle together. A fear and compulsion towards confessionalism, towards blurring boundaries. We write of this bleeding.
The pithy punchline bully of HTMLGIANT, Jimmy Chen, recently grafted a chart of Internet personas where he has named me, as well as a handful of others, as “menstrual” bloggers (on the opposite end of the spectrum, the “douches”). My response on my own blog was inflamed, indignant. Bringing up the Papin Sisters, pointing out modernism’s fascination with and horror of the feminine, her body, her emotions, embodied to me by the mad wives, Vivien(ne) and Zelda, who were disciplined and policed by both the literary theories their husbands espoused as well as psychiatry (not only how women should behave, but how literature should behave).
Yet my post on the matter was also woozy, hurt. I wrote about the serious health problems I had been experiencing, how this recent episode came at a particularly hilarious or cruel moment, depending on how you look at it, as I lay in bed, bleeding, like a reincarnation of Vivien(ne) Eliot. Soaking sheets with red. My clots of blood. My endometriosis worsening, the then-imminent exploratory surgery.
But oh, the mess. The excess.
How others rallied by me when Jimmy Chen made his chart. A string of comments, support, some medical advice. All very girly and gooshy.
But I think perhaps this idea of being a menstrual blogger is something to reclaim. Maybe my style is hormonal (what does this mean? too confessional? moody? emotionally charged? female? irrational?). In this community, if I can call it that, of writer-bloggers, many of us write of our bodies. Our periods. Yes, we write on our periods. The poet Ariana Reines posting her bloody panties on her Tumblr. We put everything out there, including the taboo, like Anaïs Nin. Our abject encounters pulled from the past, like Dodie Bellamy’s blog posts on an ex-lover she calls The Buddhist, that later became a book. Jackie Wang’s woozy, emotive, automatic writings on Ambien. (Although the beyond brilliant young critic also writes posts weaving in and out theory and the history of radical art, as well as deep philosophical essays on identity and political will.)
We are personal bloggers. We take things so, so personally. We are huge masses of emotion. Too much, as Jackie Wang calls it. Our blogs full of rage, tenderness, soreness.