The boy is back in town

Yay for Geoffrey Chaucer! After a period of exile when his blog was taken over by the Lords Appellant, he has reclaimed his blog spot and tells us he was at Kalamazoo, dancing and all, in most jocound fashion.

Jeffrey is blogging about serious issues of anonymity and professionalism, and the future of the discipline. It's an interesting question on which he and I clearly have a mild disagreement: I think anonymity can sometimes be a good thing. Yes, it can be used improperly; but it can also be used provisionally, experimentally and playfully. The world of medievalist bloggers — sometimes anonymous, sometimes pseudonymous, sometimes named — shows us how hard it would be to be absolute about this question, since one of the points of blogging, for me, at least, is to blur the distinction between the formal/professional and the more informal and personal.

But I feel I'm rambling: time to try and harness the energies unleashed at Kalamazoo and get to work on my book.

Wanna read a blog about a trauma?

Hey, guess what? Someone has written an article (partly) about my blog.

A couple of years ago, in a post I don't think I could easily find now, Pavlov's Cat suggested that blogs about illness and trauma were under-recognised as ways of processing the experience of diseases like cancer. Critical commentary seems to be catching up with her, though.

Yesterday I came across (ok, by checking the referral pages to my blog on sitemeter) an article in M/C Journal (a journal of media and culture) 11.6 (2008), special issue:'recover', by Anthony McCosker, called "Blogging Illness: Recovering in Public", in which he discusses a number of blogs: Brainhell; Prostate Cancer Journal; Leroy Sievers' My Cancer; Tom's Road to Recovery; and Humanities Researcher.

I came upon Brainhell's blog just as he was dying, and had heard of Leroy Sievers', but it was all the same quite odd to read about my blog in this context and in this company. Anthony (I knew him a while back) uses these blogs to make an argument for the particular kind of writerly practice blogging represents:  

an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death

He concludes, in part:

Whatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery.

But one doesn't have to blog about one's own illness to accomplish the work of re-thinking privacy: see Liz Conor's In One Stroke, which recounts her partner's stroke, while on a camping holiday. It includes these memorable lines:

At the moment it dawned on us that something was not right he half turned to me, rolled his eyes back and sat hard on the floor. He tried to get up, half fell out the door and rested there, assuring me he was fine through the right side of his face, drooling from the left.

I also liked this bit:

It is a big part of Jeremy’s job to give the assembled public the assurance of his own calm competency. This he offered to the riveted campers, smiling half-faced through his oxygen mask.

I love this: that remarkable capacity we have to keep going, to reassure others (especially our children) that we are "fine". Just keeping on going on.

Three Excruciatingly Personal Blog Entries, No. 1A

Two days ago, I posted an entry that began like this:

The new academic year is about to descend upon us, and all kinds of cycles are drawing to a close. I'm now into my second year of breast cancer treatment, and settled into a routine of monthly injections and daily tablets. The blog has also seen me through an entire cycle of applying for a research grant (this was one of its initial aims), through first-time rejection to second-time success. I've finally made the breakthrough of making the Garter book my highest priority, the first thing I do on a good day, while I'm also just about managing to juggle the several other projects I have in hand, as well as fulfilling my teaching and administrative obligations.

It seems to me that the Humanities Researcher blog may also be winding up this phase in its life. Before I make any big decisions, though, I have in mind to write three long posts. Each will be full of embarrassing personal revelations, and each will test to the limit the territory I think of this blog as inhabiting, as space in which I attempt to reason my way through some of the personal and emotional vicissitudes of intellectual work in academic and familial communities. This first entry takes its spark from a recent event, and will become a second-order meditation on privacy and the personal in the poetic text: the relationship between poetry and life, if you will. The second will be the long-promised Menopause Post. Third will be the most embarrassing of all, when we move from emotions and the body to the world of spirit.

The entry then launched into a long post that did indeed test to the limit my sense of how personal a blog entry could be. It was about a poem written by a former partner that seemed to refer to me by a mole on my shoulder. I might not even have seen the poem, except that my beloved spoke to me about it. The blog entry then tried to untangle the knot of emotions about poems (and blogs) that seem to refer so closely to people's intimate lives, and the way poems (and blogs) can be read as personalised messages, while seeming to be impersonal or intellectual or artistic exercises. I wrote about how uncomfortable, even angry, I had felt previously (sixteen or seventeen years ago) when people would ask me about the poems the poet had written about me after our break-up, even though they could be read perfectly well without knowing anything about me (or him, for that matter). Despite our best formalist reading practices, we still love a good autobiographical reading. And how much more so with blogging.

I wrote, as I say, to test the limits of what I felt my blog could do; and I still plan to write the next two entries in the series. But if the test of this is "how do you sleep at night?", the answer is, "very badly indeed". That's two nights, now, I have been awake between three and five, anxious about the potential for damage and hurt and the infringement of others' privacy. So I've deleted the bulk of that post. (Of course, I've kept a copy for myself. You never know!) I'm keeping the comments box alive there, because part of this process is rehearsed there, in the remarks of some of the bloggers I admire most; and as usual, Pavlov's Cat has helped me articulate how I feel. And of course I'm glad they got to read the post. But now I'm glad its potential for emotional damage has been restricted. I must also thank the blogger who wrote to me off-line (I had you in mind as I was writing, I hope you realise!).

If you missed that post, you haven't missed any great or scandalous revelations; heavens, the poem in question is far more revelatory of whoever that woman is than my blog entry was about the poem's readers!

I wonder, though, am I cheating the blog genre, by putting out my post and winning such lovely engaged comments from my readers, and then withdrawing it?

I remember being very struck by reading Ross Chambers' Story and Situation, in which he distinguished between narrative and narratorial authority. Narrative authority belongs to the story-teller at the beginning of the narration, and is gradually passed on to the reader as the story is told, as they take possession, as it were, of the story. But by giving their attention, and hopefully, their admiration for the way the story is told, the reader or listener gives back narratorial authority. It seems to me that this episode is in large part about narratorial authority. Who gets to write about whose body, and publishes it where? And who reads that text, and who gives that text to someone else? And in the case of a blog, who gets to post, and who gets to delete?

But in terms of my three Excruciatingly Personal Blog Entries that test the limits of the blog, this has got to be a definite strike. Two more to go.

Three Excruciatingly Personal Blog Entries, No.1

The new academic year is about to descend upon us, and all kinds of cycles are drawing to a close. I'm now into my second year of breast cancer treatment, and settled into a routine of monthly injections and daily tablets. The blog has also seen me through an entire cycle of applying for a research grant (this was one of its initial aims), through first-time rejection to second-time success. I've finally made the breakthrough of making the Garter book my highest priority, the first thing I do on a good day, while I'm also just about managing to juggle the several other projects I have in hand, as well as fulfilling my teaching and administrative obligations.

It seems to me that the Humanities Researcher blog may also be winding up this phase in its life. Before I make any big decisions, though, I have in mind to write three long posts. Each will be full of embarrassing personal revelations, and each will test to the limit the territory I think of this blog as inhabiting, as space in which I attempt to reason my way through some of the personal and emotional vicissitudes of intellectual work in academic and familial communities. This first entry takes its spark from a recent event, and will become a second-order meditation on privacy and the personal in the poetic text: the relationship between poetry and life, if you will. The second will be the long-promised Menopause Post. Third will be the most embarrassing of all, when we move from emotions and the body to the world of spirit.


[Update: the remainder of this entry has been deleted by the blogger. See the discussion in the next entry]

Personalised blogging

This question of blogging voices is obviously a pesky one. I'm going to try and untangle a few more threads.

Blogs clearly intersect with a whole bunch of other genres: logs, diaries, journals, confessions, chronicles, advice columns, gossip, home pages, my spaces, second lives, journalism, rants, letters, listserves, and so forth. I like the idea that people are writing so much, and playing with language and voices. Blogging as an expressive medium is clearly conditioned, though, by the discursive constraints of the form and the dominant and most influential voices: if you took away the graphics, colours and photos, it would be a whole lot harder to distinguish many of the voices that crowd the internet. I read somewhere recently that about a thousand new blogs are started up every day. It's easy to feel a bit overwhelmed by this; but luckily, you can just read the ones you like!

It's hard to tell in my case how it happened exactly, since news of my cancer spread just as my blog was starting to develop its own modest readership, but around the end of last year my email and mail correspondence underwent a dramatic flowering. People I hadn't seen for years (domestic partners, housemates, students, colleagues, friends of my parents, parents of my friends) wrote or emailed me to send their good wishes. Another lovely thing to happen was that friends read the blog and emailed me: sometimes heartfelt stories about their own struggles with illness, work or family; sometimes long cheery missives about family fishing trips and sports days; sometimes their own accounts of balancing writing and living; sometimes long and thoughtful responses to issues I'd raised on the blog about teaching, Piers Plowman or other issues. Strangers have also read the blog, directed thither by the wonders of the web, and tracked down my email and written to me. And then there is the joy of finding comments on the blog, from people I know, or used to know, or am coming to know via their own blogs.

There has been a blossoming of words, then, around the blog and perhaps around illness, too. The instant readership of a blog is strangely gratifying. Perhaps this is especially so for academics, given the very long lead time between writing and publishing in many areas in the humanities.

A couple of folk have commented recently (on line or in person) that my blog is brave. I'm guessing this is either because it talks about personal things like illness, body parts, menopause and anxiety; or because it exposes the vulnerable soft and squishy interior behind the professional facade. But one of the things about having cancer is a changed understanding of what there is to be afraid of. (Personally I think it was braver to make the early drafts of my grant application available last year!) From what I have read, people who've faced serious illness (customary acknowledgement here: my own situation was nowhere near as scary or difficult as many cancers, ongoing disability, sick children, etc.) do come through with an adjusted sense of priorities. In my own case, I'm fired with the mission of showing that breast cancer isn't always as terrifying or as difficult as you might think.

A couple of correspondents, recently, have expressed doubts about the advisability of blogging under their own names, especially as graduate students. I guess it depends on what you're going to say, how personal you're going to be in the blog, and how critical you might find yourself being of your department, in which case you might indeed think twice. And there is comfort in a mask or avatar, I guess. But I don't think there is ever complete anonymity. Even Chaucer, who manages this better than most, has declared him/herself to Jeffrey Cohen!

The final question I'll raise here is whether it's different for men and women, the question of academic blogging, that is, and the relative dangers of the personal voice in this context? Is it related to the changing vogue for the confessional voice? Once the preserve of feminism, then male new historicism, and now...?