Spill Journal

It's too bad Blurty is not around. Once again, I feel the calling to go back to my first e-home away from home. As I try to settle in to my new post-LiveJournal life, I have been flirting with the idea of forgetting about trying to write anything more substantive than the occasional comment or snide aside to a news article or book quotation that I am posting. I was thinking, at 50, maybe I can finally put aside the vanity of writing down my passing thoughts, as if they were even worth the ink and paper. But, no, I still feel the compulsion, if not to write, at least to type a lot. Accordingly, I have come back to the familiar conclusion that I need the freedom of a 'scribble blog', or a 'spill journal' (what I used to call my pen & notebook journal in the 1990s), in which to write about my personal life (as solitary as it is), a place where I can write with utter abandon, without any thought of how I might shape it into a final draft that I will want to keep, and fairly free of much concern for grammar and spelling and punctuation, logic, all the polite conventions. Oh, to be sure, I intend to use these posts as a rough-draft for my main blog. I am just not going to worry about how I might get from this 'spillage' to that final draft. I imagine I will pick a few phrases and build something anew from there, but I will only start to worry about it when I get there, if I ever get there. Maybe I will let the spill journal be a thing unto itself, rather than serve as another halfway house to my great final draft (a draft that is three-parts myth and one-part aspiration), letting my main blog serve as more of a scrapbook. Though, I am sure that some of this will spill over - my greatest hits.

Kingsley Amis

“If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.”

-- Kingsley Amis

P. S. Poet

I hope you didn't just go to Facebook. that would be ultimate death. I hope you decided to write that masterpiece you dance around.

-- P. S. Poet

Old Pig Shit seems to be struggling in his own hell of e-loneliness, dropping me a couple of messages. I am almost flattered, but given the way that he likes to talk about the joy of taking other's writing for one's own, I suspect that he just wants to quarry my output to cart away a few phrases for himself.

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P.S. Poet

persona non grata

have you been able to do any writing yet?

i listened to an interview by a ghost writer who was coming out of the closet. having written numerous stories anonymously for others in order to say what may be sensitive to those it could imply by first person narrative, is able to talk about those people transparently in third party narrative under a nom de plume, with no notoriety. he has recently decided to write his own piece of fiction. stating he knows of a female ghost writer who died recently and will never be known for her unique contributions to literature.

then last night i went to see the movie 'holmes', which has a similar thread of anonymity vs mortatlity running through it. it makes one wonder what true ownership is about. are any ideas specifically ours? or are they out there in the collective accessible to those who are able to channel them?

another woody allan film came out recently called 'irrational man' which i haven't been able to locate in a theater near me.. but it is about a college professor with similar dilemma.

is this now an idea whose time has come?

it has been said to me, publish or perish. i have no idea why i hide behind this persona of pigshit poet, but i feel it allows me to say things i would not otherwise be able to relate.


Monk

It seems to me that both of our blogs were largely scrapbooks - consisting of favorite quotations or music or pictures. As for myself, I have never been able to write for real, that is, for publication, for money, and I don't have any real faith that I will be starting anytime soon, or at all. What writing I do is largely just to kill time (instead of myself). As for the idea of a collective ownership of writing and ideas, it can sound to me like a rationalization for someone to make money off of someone else's work. If nobody is getting rich and famous off the work, then I am all for it (though, even then, I think credit should be given - it's not hard to do), but if someone is cashing in, I am skeptical that there is any real idealism in such notions.

I know it is kind of lonely on LJ, but I expect that it is only going to get worse. I cannot imagine the place coming back to life. Maybe you should give in and go to Facebook, like the rest of the world. I have not done that, but I have had a lot of years to get comfortable with loneliness. Take care, guy, I know it's tough.

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