See, I got bogged down in ideas and clippings and things…such fun. I’ll be back…

It took a while but I made it. I’m just going to tell you quickly what cogged me down and grabbed my attention yesterday, lovely things—to me, anyway.

Christie Blatchford, God rest her soul, wrote a column about blogs (in 2007—I keep things). She compared the compulsion to write a blog to that which leads people to keep diaries but “in the olden days,” she wrote, “people had the wit to keep their diaries secret and, indeed, went to some lengths to protect their privacy.” Not so today. She thought that blogdom served to fuel the notion that everyone believes they can write. (“At least not everyone can write without benefit of editor.”) She also didn’t like Facebook. Her conclusion:

“I want no Facebook friends. I have no online community. I do not blog. I have not blogged, I will not blog and furthermore, I do not care to read blogs.”

Good on her.

Now, here’s an excerpt from an article by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. that originally appeared in Writing Fiction Today, Winter, 2001. I like his advice to aspiring writers: “Don’t worry about getting into the profession. Write anyway to make your soul grow. That’s what the practice of any art is. It isn’t to make a living, it’s to make your soul growl.”

I’m saving three or four clippings about thank-you notes and the death of the personal letter,or even, of a hasti-note. I’ll send them to a like-minded friend. I have found that you just alienate people who don’t agree with you.

I found a 2011 piece from “First Person” a column in the NYT, by a writer named Dominique Browning, woman who reports burning 40 years’ worth of diaries. Not that she has given up writing. She writes memoirs, she writes about her life in a blog, but she says she’s had all the good out of a diary that she is going to get, including therapy. She had a lot of ashes to clean up.

I used to call my dairy my paper shrink and it has served me well over the years. I think it has served its purpose and I think I won’t keep it//them any more.I mean I’ll still write in one, because it’s a useful noodger, but I won’t keep them . I don’t have a fireplace any more, or a fire pit., so I can’t burn them. I’ll have to think about that.

Of course i have picked up and discarded other goodies. I have a couple of writers/books I must look up. I must re-read The Long Poem Anthology (1967), edited by MIchael Ondaatje. (I don’t own it! I’d like to find Hester Piozzi’s final work, Retrospection (1811) . AndI I must go to bed.

TheLong Poem Anthology: Introduction / Michael Ondaatje --Seed catalogue / Robert Kroetsch --The intervals / Stuart MacKinnon --Steveston / Daphne Marlatt --Long Sault / Don McKay --The moth poem / Robin Blaser --King of swords / Frank Davey --Allophanes / George Bowering --The fontainebleau Dream Machine / Roy Kiyooka --The Martyrology Book IV / bpNichol --Statements by the poets.