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...?

Voicing, blogging, working and recovering

One of those weird mornings, today, given the recent non-disclosures of the Chaucer blogger, in that I found myself lecturing on Chaucerian voice and constructions of authorship. How could I not close the lecture with a viewing of the Chaucer blog and his guest spot on In the Middle? I was talking about questions of genre, of course, and medieval contexts for authorship, and the odd temporality of Chaucer's relationship with the so-called renaissance 'authorship' of Petrarch and Boccaccio. There is such pleasure in thinking about the mystery of Chaucer as a medieval writer and his fascination with his own modernity. This is another reason for the Chaucer blogger's spectacular success: not only does he seem a kindly presence (even the vitriol against Gower seems to have subsided, much as Gower's own blog has [Update: Gower is Back!]), but he offers a perfect suspension between the medieval and the modern.

But lecturing about voice and authorship (still in a very part-time guest appearance kind of way myself) made me think again about the distinctive blogging voice we all adopt, and the extent to which it's conditioned by the genre, or influenced by the blogs we read; and the nature of the differences, if any, between an 'authored' blog like mine, and a scrupulously pseudonymous one like Chaucer's. There are lots of in between possibilities, too: the group blog of In the Middle, the third-person voice of Whitebait, the semi-pseudonymity of Pavlov's Cat, who names herself on her profile, but comments on other blogs in her feline voice (so to miaow). I also read a fair few academic blogs by graduate students and early career scholars who are very careful about revealing their identities.

At first blush, a blog looks like a very personal piece of writing, yet the fact that the majority of bloggers use a persona of some kind underlines the affinities of blogging with the kind of alternate universe of Second Life. Pavlov's Cat and I discussed this in Adelaide in February, and she reminded me that most bloggers were much younger than we are. There are a handful of blogs I read regularly (note to self: must update blogroll soon), but sometimes in moments of inability to work — and no, I'm not going to say how often they recur — I'll trawl around the blogs and follow a link from each blog to another. This takes about five minutes before even my own blank screen looks more interesting. I'm just not of the right demographic for most bloggers, I think. Occasionally I come across a gem of a new blog, but mostly I'm happy just following the threads of a few lives and discussions.

Oh, but I did feel for one of the commentators on In the Middle who said how much he/she was loving the discussion about Chaucer's blog, but felt too intimidated by the senior scholars debating it back and forward to offer any more in the way of a comment. What a lovely thing a pseudonym is for such an occasion. And what a good reminder of the capacity for academic hierarchies to cut across the democracy of the blog.

In my own case, I never thought of making my blog pseudonymous. Partly as a result of my great age, and longevity around the university, I don't feel that blogging puts me at any risk. This means there are lots of things I don't write about, though. I was struck by Jeffrey Cohen's picture and description of his first-born reaching double digits today; and was momentarily tempted to write about my own son, who is as gorgeous and clever and lovely as anything. But this is one of the constraints I put around my own blog, to limit mention of him and my partner. And I'm completely superstitious about posting his photo, though I really wanted to post a picture of my nephew, in London, in his surplice. I'm not saying I'm consistent; I'm saying it's complicated.

Anyway, in the spirit of the mixture of the personal and professional this blog is trying to celebrate, I'm proud to report that today I gave a lecture without paroxysms of nerves beforehand; and even hung around the department a while without feeling anxious or teary. I saw the psychologist linked with the breast clinic for the second time and was happy to agree with her assessment that while there was still a fair way to go (at least a year, she said, no matter how difficult or short the treatment), I seemed to have most of the bricks in place for a gradual restoration of equilibrium and the finding of a new path in the utterly changed university (of which, more another time). I then saw Mitchell for my monthly injection and the six-monthly questionnaire related to the drug trial I'm on. He examined my breasts and reassured me, by poking and pushing till it hurt or didn't hurt in various places on both sides, that the tenderness and aches I was feeling are all within the area affected by radiotherapy (Meredith, you were right!). He also said the magic words, "no focal points". So, seven months since diagnosis, and ten months since starting the blog, things are looking .... just very good, today.