Well, not quite. But I’m re-reading her diaries and am coming towards the end of Volume 1 (1915-19) and in the entry for April 27, 1919 came on this meditation on diary-writing which in some ways might also be written about blogging.

Woolf had just finished writing a long article for some publication or other (one forgets what an assiduous literary hack she was), and then continues thus:

“In the idleness which succeeds any long article… I got out this diary, & read as one always does one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whatever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; & take no time over this; & forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise [sic]. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, & thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, & shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during he past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of ourr life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.”

As a thought-experiment, I’ve tried to imagine Woolf as a blogger. My conclusion is that she would have made a terrific one. But of course she couldn’t have done it because her diaries are so suffused with critical (and often harsh) assessments of the people she knew, and so filled with gossip, that she would have had to retain a full-time libel lawyer.

Lovely blog post by Dave Winer.

I’d like to propose a new acronym. TIJABP.

This. Is. Just. A. Blog. Post.

In other words, this is not the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

Or the Treaty of Versailles or even legally binding.

It’s not Hey Jude or Beethoven’s 9th.

Not Catcher In The Rye or Annie Hall.

And it’s definitely not the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. (Yo Mookie!)

It’s just a blog post, so read it that way.

Twas written quickly, by one (busy) person, who then moved on to something else.

Nice blog post by Terry Teachout about throwing stuff away.

 So it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself confronted the other day with three grocery sacks full of miscellaneous papers retrieved from an old desk I’d left behind in my previous apartment. I’d completely forgotten the contents of that desk, and though I didn’t expect them to include anything important, I thought I ought to give them a quick sifting just to be sure.

I threw out most of what I found. I saw no reason, for instance, to hang onto a two-inch-thick stack of photocopied pieces I’d written for the New York Daily News during my tenure as its classical music and dance critic, though I did shake my head at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve published in the twenty-seven years since my very first concert review appeared in the Kansas City Star. Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you’re not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation.

Only one of those pieces held my attention for more than the time it took me to pitch it in the nearest wastebasket: a copy of the first piece I wrote forCommentary, a review of James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket published in December of 1985, six months after I moved to New York. I remember how hard I worked on it, and how proud I was to have “cracked” Commentary. Today it sounds hopelessly stiff and earnest, which is why I left it out of the Teachout Reader. What on earth could have possessed Norman Podhoretz to find a place for that immature effort in his book-review section? He told me the first draft was too “knowing,” the best piece of advice any editor has ever given me, and I revised it nervously, hoping to pass muster, never imagining that I would write hundreds more pieces for Commentary, eventually becoming its music critic. Would it have pleased me to know these things back in 1985? Or might it have dulled the tang of my first sale?

I didn’t expect to find a Metropolitan Opera program among my forgotten papers, though no sooner did I look at it than I knew why I’d saved it. I went to the Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of January 5, 1996, fully expecting to review the company premiere of Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case for the Daily News. Instead, I ended up writing a front-page story about how one of the singers in the production died on stage, a minute and a half into the first act. The opening scene of The Makropulos Case is set in a law office where Vitek, a clerk, is looking up the files for a suit that has been dragging on for close to a century. To symbolize the tortuous snarl of Gregor v. Prus, designer Anthony Ward turned the entire back wall of the set into a forty-foot-high filing cabinet containing hundreds of drawers. Enter Vitek, played by a character tenor named Richard Versalle. As the curtain rose, he made his entrance, climbed up a tall ladder and pulled a file out of one of the drawers. “Too bad you can only live so long,” he sang in Czech. Then he let go of the ladder and fell mutely to the stage, landing on his back with a terrible crash.

Three thousand people gasped. David Robertson, the conductor, waved the orchestra to a halt and shouted, “Are you all right, Richard?” Versalle didn’t speak or move, and the curtain was quickly lowered. I sat frozen in my aisle seat, stunned by what I had seen. Then I pulled myself together and ran to the press room to find out what had happened. A company spokesman told the rapidly growing band of critics and hangers-on what little he knew: Versalle had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. We started firing questions at him. How old was Versalle? When did he make his Met debut? Did he have a wife and children? I scribbled the answers (63, 1978, yes) on my program and pushed through the crowd to the nearest pay phone, where I dropped a quarter in the slot, dialed the number of the Daily News city desk, and spoke three words that had never before crossed my lips other than in jest: “Get me rewrite.” Eight years later, I leafed through the program of that unfinished performance, looking at my barely decipherable notes. As souvenirs go, it was a good one, and I decided to keep it.

 

I’ve long been struck by the way in which technological terms get corrupted (i.e. abbreviated) in common parlance. Thus “transistor radio” became “transistor”, and “videotape” (or “videocassette”) became “video”. The same thing is now happening to “blog post”. On Sunday I called on a friend who mentioned that he was “writing a blog” about something we were discussing when he clearly mean a blog post. And this morning I find that two eminent bloggers have slipped into the same usage — here and here.

Dearly beloved, I say unto you: The tipping point is near.

Last month I wrote about a discussion which showed what a useful part of the public sphere the blogosphere has become. Now comes another example — in this case a calm explication by my colleague Doug Clow of the background to Britain’s Bloomsbury-based New College of the Humanities. The initiative has attracted an extraordinary amount of hostility and ridicule in the newspapers, which leads Doug to observe, mildly, that he is “shocked, shocked to discover that the accounts presented in the mainstream media are not perfectly in accord with the situation as I understand it.”

That’s putting it mildly. Doug then goes on usefully to clarify a number of important points: that NCH is in reality just another organisation preparing students for degrees awarded by the University of London International Programmes; that it isn’t a ‘university’ or even a ‘university college’ because in the UK university status can only be bestowed by the Privy Council (though I guess that that would be forthcoming if the government decided to award it); and that it’s a for-profit company with a charitable arm.

The OpEd firestorm that A.C. Grayling and his fellow-adventurers have generated is interesting because, among other things, it shows how resistant some establishments are to change. The truth is that NCH is not the end of civilisation as we know it, but the first appearance on British shores of a phenomenon that’s an established feature of the US scene, namely an expensive Liberal Arts school mainly aimed at the offspring of the wealthy. I wouldn’t want my own kids to go to it (and not just because of the fees), but there are plenty of parents in London who spend more than £18k a year on lunch, and to whom Grayling College will look like an excellent finishing school for their offspring.