it goes back to Starnes, and further
Jan. 1st, 2012 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffloin high school i had the same english teacher for 3 years on accounta the clerical error that put me in the "talented & gifted" class, and she had us keep journals and turn them into her. i loved this obligation and the conversation that resulted; she wrote replies or comments in the margins. sometimes i would query her directly about things, and she'd be frustratingly evasive about her personal life. i filled many volumes of the (sewn, not glued) (she insisted) composition books, and continued to do the assignment after the class ended. the conversation continued, though when her husband died she was many weeks getting the current one back to me.
they're in the basement. i intend never to re-open them.
in college i tried to start journaling for myself, but it was hard, that transition, to no audience. or rather to myself as sole audience. unless you count the potential myself of the future as a second audience, as i imagined future me could be. hard either way, just me, or just me and me, or me and me and me. and though i finally, a year or two ago, and over a course of years, came to fill a volume of journal before abandoning it, i've still not gotten to a fervor for writing just for me that comes anywhere near that for putting words from my head through my fingers in front of the eyes of others.
letters work that way some. but not the same. email too. chat/text, less. this writing here, to strangers as much as (some) people from my physical experiential humanity, has come closest. came closest.
but now, y'know, hardly anyone's here, particularly in the has-an-account and thus can-read-friends-only way. and letting it all hang out to the whole everybody of the probably still hardly anybody--- it's got a way of reminding me of the possibility of the hostile, contemptuous, superioristic, and otherwise unpleasant-to-imagine attitude that could be flavoring the gaze of one or more out there, some time on some day.
the meaning of audience is a theme i've thought about for just about as long as i can remember. it's up there with mortality. i watch how others seem to relate to it, and notice when it seems important to them, and ponder how, and why. i have lotsa hypotheses about how it matters to those it matters to much, in the various ways the desire presents itself, and engage not infrequently in little cogitational ruminational musings around what drives us in those ways.
for those of us who've stuck with this passé venue and the echoes of its formerly more robust cluster of audience, and with the form we use for public and semi-public writing/journaling here, i might think it's a case of an uncool hanging on to yesterday's technological/internet fad, were i not so interested in audience. there was always something a little uncool about livejournal, like about aol, so yeah, if the coolness detectors of the others (over, say, age 16) had similar readings, we must have cared about something else more than we cared about cool. and if we've stuck around here as the population (of non-Cyrillic characters) has shrunk so, we must care even more about that something that's not cool. it's gotta be something about audience, even when small. even when very small. even, sometimes, in the public case, when possibly containing less welcome eyes, less welcome imagined attitudes, ghosts from the past living on elsewhere, or lurking peripheral figures from the now, or just the projected nasty judgy whatever of whomever.
and then there's habit, and the retro-rss of the friends' feed, and i dunno what-all else. and then there's maude. and then there's maude. and then there's compromisin', energizin', anything but tranquilizin', right on, maude.
they're in the basement. i intend never to re-open them.
in college i tried to start journaling for myself, but it was hard, that transition, to no audience. or rather to myself as sole audience. unless you count the potential myself of the future as a second audience, as i imagined future me could be. hard either way, just me, or just me and me, or me and me and me. and though i finally, a year or two ago, and over a course of years, came to fill a volume of journal before abandoning it, i've still not gotten to a fervor for writing just for me that comes anywhere near that for putting words from my head through my fingers in front of the eyes of others.
letters work that way some. but not the same. email too. chat/text, less. this writing here, to strangers as much as (some) people from my physical experiential humanity, has come closest. came closest.
but now, y'know, hardly anyone's here, particularly in the has-an-account and thus can-read-friends-only way. and letting it all hang out to the whole everybody of the probably still hardly anybody--- it's got a way of reminding me of the possibility of the hostile, contemptuous, superioristic, and otherwise unpleasant-to-imagine attitude that could be flavoring the gaze of one or more out there, some time on some day.
the meaning of audience is a theme i've thought about for just about as long as i can remember. it's up there with mortality. i watch how others seem to relate to it, and notice when it seems important to them, and ponder how, and why. i have lotsa hypotheses about how it matters to those it matters to much, in the various ways the desire presents itself, and engage not infrequently in little cogitational ruminational musings around what drives us in those ways.
for those of us who've stuck with this passé venue and the echoes of its formerly more robust cluster of audience, and with the form we use for public and semi-public writing/journaling here, i might think it's a case of an uncool hanging on to yesterday's technological/internet fad, were i not so interested in audience. there was always something a little uncool about livejournal, like about aol, so yeah, if the coolness detectors of the others (over, say, age 16) had similar readings, we must have cared about something else more than we cared about cool. and if we've stuck around here as the population (of non-Cyrillic characters) has shrunk so, we must care even more about that something that's not cool. it's gotta be something about audience, even when small. even when very small. even, sometimes, in the public case, when possibly containing less welcome eyes, less welcome imagined attitudes, ghosts from the past living on elsewhere, or lurking peripheral figures from the now, or just the projected nasty judgy whatever of whomever.
and then there's habit, and the retro-rss of the friends' feed, and i dunno what-all else. and then there's maude. and then there's maude. and then there's compromisin', energizin', anything but tranquilizin', right on, maude.
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no subject
Date: Jan. 1st, 2012 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 1st, 2012 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 2nd, 2012 08:41 pm (UTC)And it's a hangout for filky folk, which is as an engaging musical community as I've stumbled across, what with smart, nerdy, and geeky people who write songs about stuff that commercial music doesn't touch.
So yeah, I always read your posts, often a little mystified but never contemptuous.
And, well I've never been cool--always a little suspicious of it. Except for one thing I think is cool. Instead of being the kind of person who listened to music before it was popular, I listen to, and personally know, great musicians and singer-songwriters who will never be popular.
Yeah, this cute litle community of LJ may be unravelling, but consarnit, I like it. So there. Neener.