The M-Word Manifesto

I propose that writing one's life story in a thousand words is something that each of us might consider doing. I have just done so, and I want to say why I did it.

One reason was as an antidote to having to write one thousand words or a bit more about someone else, as part of the university course I am doing. This piece of writing has to follow the formal structure of entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, starting with details of when and where the subject was born and who his parents were, proceeding through his achievements and ending with a brief mention of his family, where he was buried and how much money he had left his heirs.

The formula varies little from that established for the first edition of the Dictionary, published over a number of years in the late nineteenth century. It reflects the outlook and attitudes of that time, one aspect of which had been memorably summed up by Byron earlier in that century when he wrote "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence".

This formula may seem, from one perspective, a reflection of Victorian male chauvinism, but from another it is eminently practical. It is (relatively) easy to dig up facts about a man's work: it is (exceedingly) hard to do the same about his relationships. Besides, it is easier to write about what someone did rather than how someone felt.

So it was that when I started writing an outline of my life story I found it very hard to write about my relationship with my two wives, particularly the first. I found it slightly easier to do so by writing about this by dropping the word 'I': omitting the personal pronoun enabled me to write much more dispassionately. Writing in staccato, disjointed phrases also helped. So it was that I ended up with something similar to that which used to appear at the start of chapters in many eighteenth and nineteenth century books, a series of phrases succinctly describing a topic or incident, separated by em dashes.

By the time I had finished I found that I had written just over a thousand words and had what might be called a Eureka moment. If I could edit it to make exactly one thousand words it could be the pattern for other people to write their own stories and we could be witnessing the genesis of a whole new genre. I have had many eureka moments in my life and most have turned out to be flashes in the pan than bull's eyes but, as I believe Cicero once wrote, "Dum spiro, spero": while I breathe, I hope.

In an earlier post to this blog I said why I wanted to do this: I felt that, because of the lack of opportunity for students on our course to get to know each other, I would write briefly about myself, let my fellow-students know I had done so and encourage them to do likewise. After writing it I found that the exercise was of far greater personal value. I found that I had written something that my grandchildren could read when they are older which would tell them about the life and times of their grandfather: I would that my grandfathers had done the same for me. I felt also that I had put, however faintly and however briefly, my footprint upon the sands of time.

This is why I am writing this manifesto with its alliterative title containing the Latin way of writing a thousand to reflect the length of my micro-autobiography and, perhaps, of other people, not just in the evening of their lives but also at their high noon.

It would be great fun for me to start another blog – say, M-autobiographies.blogspot.com – on which I could publish this and other life stories – like yours? C'mon, tell the world what you've done and how you've dealt with those two imposters, triumph and disaster: a thousand words is worth far more than a picture!

A Biographer’s Quest for Biographers

The titles of two books on the reading list, given me three months before the start of the MA in Biography course which I started in October 2009, immediately caught my eye.

One of them was Martin Gilbert's In Search of Churchill. I remember as a small boy being taken by my mother down to Woking Station to give comforts to troops returning from Dunkirk and recall the dejected face of the defeated poilus who were entrained for western ports for a futile attempt to return to France to continue the battle: I remember seeing from the top floor of my home the flames of blazing London reflected in the clouds over the eastern horizon during the Blitz; I remember the house with half the windows boarded up because a near miss had shattered them and there was not glass immediately available to repair them. I have then good cause to revere the man who led us from defeat to victory and to read with fascination the story of the man who wrote the magisterial Life.

The other was Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History, since I knew him as the biographer of Montgomery, Churchill's most successful general, and since as a history graduate I liked the idea of getting a feel for my new subject within a chronological framework. It also helped that, when I obtained a copy from the university library, I found it beautifully designed and printed, aspects which to me, a sometime typesetter and typographer, are particularly important.

After reading these books and before the academic year started I set out to talk to each of these men as I was considering doing as my final thesis something about the impact of technology on how biography gets written. In doing this I felt the first faint stirrings of the passion that drives biographers, that urge to find out, the thrill of the hunt, the tally-ho! when you first spy your quarry. No matter that the kill may come something of an anti-climax; no matter that, from the ninety enthralling minutes I spent with Sir Martin the only insight into his use of technology was his use of the fountain pen for writing and of the treasury tag for data storage; the quest is the thing, not the kill.

Over the first two of the four terms of the course I gradually developed the framework for my thesis. I believed that I could illustrate the impact of technology upon the creation of biographies in the manner described by Lytton Strachey in his Introduction to Eminent Victorians, in which he explained how he proposed to deal with the vast mass of material available about Victorians and their era; he would illuminate the whole by flashlighting a few isolated items. The wise biographer, he suggested, "will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity."

From the beginnings of life writing I tentatively chose The Epic of Gilgamesh from the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent and Sinuhe from the western end. From classical times I chose something from Plutarch's Parallel Lives but then, because of my ignorance of Greek and because of something that I recalled from my interview with Nigel Hamilton, I took Suetonius' Twelve Caesars instead. From the era of the manuscript book I selected Robert of Shrewsbury's Vita Sanctae Winefredae (Life of St Winefred) and Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), the latter translated by William Caxton and with the addition of a version of the former, making it the first piece of life writing about a Briton printed in English. There was no significant technical change in the book production process till the nineteenth century and the application of mechanical power to the printing process, and so a biography of William Caxton by another printer, William Blades, seemed a more relevant choice than any of the much better-known Victorian biographies. For the period when mechanical typesetting was being replaced by photosetting and letterpress printing by offset litho, nothing more appropriate than Martin Gilbert's Winston S Churchill could possibly be found, since the first of his volumes was produced by the older technology and the last by the newer. The ninth in this series again chose itself when I recalled that Nigel Hamilton had told me that he was having trouble having his latest work, American Caesars, accepted by his publishers because of its length and after I had googled that title and found that it is to be published in a couple of months' time, in July 2010. The tenth and final one may not have been published yet, since I am seeking something that will appear electronically only, thus rounding off my long-term goal of writing Life Writing from Clay Tablet to iTablet.

The enormity of this project did not really occur to me, but it certainly did to the course supervisor who suggested a much more restricted topic. I considered therefore narrowing my focus to the last quarter century, during which time the advent of the personal computer and of the internet, or rather the World Wide Web, has changed and is changing everything. My difficulty in accepting this stemmed from my inability how to construct a hundred-item bibliography about a topic about which so surprisingly little appears to have been written, if my experience in writing my first term's essay on blogging one's autobiography is a reliable guide.

This finally led to the radical decision to switch topics and to write on St Winifred for my thesis and on technology and its impact upon biography as my 6,000-word third-term essay. The decision was made with little over a month before the essay was due to be submitted. With just a fortnight to go, and with the disappointing results of my efforts to carry out sufficient meaningful interviews to write a satisfactory essay, I sat down and re-examined my options.

I started by writing the skeleton of the essay I would have liked to complete and which I had in fact already started. The title was Writers, Biographers and Technology: the USA and the UK Compared. This was followed by the section headings that follow naturally from such a title: Purpose, Method, Sources (printed), Sources (interviews), Writers and biographers compared, USA and UK compared, Conclusions and Appendices. The problem about the paucity of sources was compounded by the much greater problem about how to present my research data, all of which is stored on a database which cannot, I understand, be submitted with the essay as a vital and integral part of it.

I then thought about Martin Gilbert's In Search of Churchill and of A.J.A. Symons' The Quest for Corvo, about which I had given a presentation to my fellow students a month previously. In each of these books much if not most of the interest lies in the story of how the writers found or dug up the pieces of their respective jigsaw puzzles, rather than in the final picture when all the pieces had been assembled. This was a eureka! moment. A new title almost immediately presented itself: A Biographer's Quest for Biography Writers. This would detail what I have done in chronological order, describing the difficulties I encountered in seeking information and the manner in which I recorded what information I did find. This narrative, which would be relatively short, would be accompanied by a number of appendices which would principally be in tabular form.

The appendices that I then listed were these:

• Responses: in alphabetical order, answers given to key questions, both in direct and indirect speech
  
• Writers' Rooms: pics: 5 pages with the photos of the first 25 writers in the alphabetical list in the table created from The Guardian's series that appeared weekly 207-2009, plus what those writers say in their text about use of technology
  
• Writers' Rooms: data 1: table with first 25 writers by name, with genre (and fiction/non-fiction), gender, age, first draft how done, type of computer, DOM/WHOT scale &c
  
• Writers' Rooms: data 2: table with 100+ writers by name, with URLs of Guardian articles
  
• Standard soliciting: the text of e-mails used in soliciting help, with comments about their relative success
  
• Non-standard soliciting: outline of how this was done
  
• UK e-mails: listed in chronological order of dispatch, with answer (if any, and short/long) with date
  
• US e-mails: -do-
  
• Structure of database tables
  
• Tabular results: summaries by genre, gender, age and residence (UK/US)
  

This has been written so that it could form the first part of my essay, to be submitted in a fortnight. It is being posted to my blog today to give my supervisor an indication of what I propose in advance of our meeting on Tuesday. The essay would not contain the last paragraph with its list in precisely that form or position.

Finals nightmares

Every three months or so over the last half century or so I've had my Finals nightmare. They vary slightly in detail and duration, but the fundamentals are the same. I dream that I'm about to go into a fortnight of exams and I'm more (usually) or less (occasionally) unprepared. On one extreme occasion I was taking exams in a different subject altogether. You wake from such tormented sleep and say "Thank goodness! That was only a dream".

Now however it is not a dream. On 4 June I have to submit the following:

1. A bibliography about the thesis I will write in my final term containing one hundred items, twenty five of which should have a critical summary of the book or article attached
   
2. A piece of between 1,000 and 1,500 words in the style of an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, using the precise format used by actual contributors to the work, or an essay on a group of people with similar identifiers, the majority having entries in the dictionary
   
3. An essay of between 6,000 and 8,000 words with a biographical slant
   

Additionally, next Tuesday I need to give my fellow-students a twenty minute discourse on How Symons Quested Corvo: this particular soufflé is still half-baked.

For reasons which would take far too much time to explain here, the subjects of my thesis, my ODNB entry and my essay are in the process of changing. I am therefore having to go through our diary and cancel or postpone as many social occasions as practical and to realise that any further posts to this blog until 4 June will only be written if they are, like the previous two, recording something relevant to my undertaking these tasks.

Less than four weeks to go! Sweet dreams?

Getting to grips with the DNB project: 2

I did not in fact add a new field Sources to the table because of the difficulty of reading the text it would contain, either when displayed in Table mode or in Form mode, and because at this stage I had found that only 14 of my monks were listed as hagiographers. Therefore I created a wordprocessed file for each of these and stored them in a subfolder, Hagiographers, in the folder DNB Project.

The great thing about database programs like Access is that they are relational. This means that, when you want to add each title with date and notes to the table, you can create another one which, with the use of a query, you can extract just the data you want from two tables to create a third one.

I then created a new table, Vitae, in which to store details of hagiographies, with these fields:

1. ID
   
2. Writer: as indexed, e.g. Osbern
   
3. Title: e.g. Passio Aelphegi
   
4. Full title: e.g. Vita et passio S. Aelphegi archiep. Cantuar. et martyris; per Osbernum monachum Cantuariensem
   
5. Written: date, normally followed by c (about) or > (after)
   
6. Saint: e.g. Ælfheah
   
7. Latin form
   
8. Death
   
9. Notes
   

This yielded a disappointingly small tally of titles, which showed no clear pattern. At this moment I began to think of doing a rewrite of the entry for Robert of Shrewsbury, mentioned in my post of 20 April as Prior Robert Pennant. Before abandoning the present database-underpinned approach, however, I did another search replacing Benedictine by hagiographer and extending the search to a couple of hundred years either side of Hastings. This did of course add a number of claustral hagiographers from other orders: Augustinian (2), Cistercian (3) and Dominican (1), compared to a final total of 17 Benedictines.

The titles of their works did not, however, shine much light upon the second question I posed yesterday, ""How if at all did the subject matter of Benedictine biographies change after the Conquest?" or give much support to my hypothesis that there would be a swing away from vitae on Anglo-Saxon saints towards more universal ones. The only indicator of this is in the entry for Dominic of Evesham, which says "[His] most widely read collection … was of fourteen miracles of the Virgin Mary, Evesham's patron. … In that form [with additions by Anselm of Bury and William of Malmesbury] they laid the foundations of a new genre, devoted to the Virgin herself rather than to places or saints that she had honoured, which was to permeate the culture of western Europe." Even this support was weakened by the statement that Dominic "was perhaps born of English parents, as some slight linguistic evidence suggests": nothing here to support my guess about the Norman juggernaut crushing Anglo-Saxon sensibilities!

As to the first question I posed on Monday, “How rapidly and completely did Normans replace English in the senior ranks of the Benedictine order?”, I would have wasted my time trying to answer it in the way I did. The answer can be found on pages 111-113 of David Knowles’ The Monastic Order in England which I only read this morning. Moreover, there is some doubt whether Benedictines living up to two hundred years apart could actually be deemed to belong to the same Group as the editor of the ODNB would understand it.

As to the time I have wasted on this wild goose chase, I hope that the way I have detailed what I did may help other people to research the ODNB more effectively and to use the power of the electronic database to tease interesting insights out of their research material.

So, I now need to look closely at the entry for Robert of Shrewsbury to see whether his present entry of 297 words can be boosted without padding to something over the minimum of one thousand.

The first resting place of St Winefride

The cross to the right of PH (the Lion Inn) in Gwytherin is the site of the nineteenth century church originally dedicated to St Winefride but now deconsecrated. Alison, who has recently bought the building and the land, assures me that the saint was buried in the glebe land to the south of the churchyard. She is sending me her evidence for this assertion.

It was to the monastery at Gwytherin that she came in about 640 AD after the events that had taken place at Treffynnon (in English, Holywell), some 25 miles north east and a mile inland from the Dee estuary. Of these events, more later.

Early Welsh monasteries were quite different from the later ones like Tintern or Llanthony. The very word monastery conjures up in one's mind's eye those "bare ruined choirs" of David Knowles' evocative phrase. They were more likely to have been collections of separate dwellings in each of which lived a monk or nun, much like the Desert Fathers had in Egypt and the Sinai. In this form of monasticism, the eremitical form, individuals would live as hermits but would come together on occasion, particularly for common worship.

At least one church has stood on the spot where the present one stands. No trace of an earlier church remains, but as towering evidence of this having long been a holy place three enormous yew trees loom over the existing one. These have apparently been shown to be over two thousand years old. It would seem highly likely that here was the spot to which Gwenffrewi, as she would have been known then, would have come together for worship.

As to where Gwenffrewi actually lived, the tradition in the village is that it was at the back of Brin and Rhiannon Owen's farm at Tai Pella, the spot marked by the arrow on the map, at the quiet and peaceful place where two mountain streams come together. There are no traces of any past habitation. I need to ask my archaeologist god-daughter about what things like post-holes might be looked for underground to give evidence of earlier habitation. I will show photos of it when I have found out how to transfer pictures from my Better Half's camera when she finally manages to get back from South Africa.

There is evidence in place names to support the hypothesis that Gwenffrewi's nunnery, of which she was abbess, was of the eremitical kind rather than the cenobitic, in which monks or nuns live together under some kind of formal Rule. From Peter, who has lived in the village for all his 57 years, I learnt that Tai Pella means Furthest House(s), that Llwyn Saint means Field of the Saints and that Bryn Clochydd means Hill of the Bells.

It is possible to imagine that the Abbess would live in the remotest spot and that her sisters would live in huts mostly between her and the church. When it was time for communal worship, Gwenffrewi would call at each of the nun's huts as she walked the two and a half kilometres to church, then they would all pause at Llwyn Saint before going to Bryn Clochydd to summon anybody not already called upon to come to church.

At this point you will probably look back at the map and ask the question, "But what about the two other houses which are further away than Tai Pella?" At least, that would be your question if you don't speak Welsh, If you do, you wouldn't ask it, because Ty Draw means Further House, indicating it was built later, and Tw Hunt means [hic est magna lacuna: I must contact the amiable landlord of the Lion and ask him to ask Peter what it means].

This knowledge of place names has however raised another question. Gwenffrewi's bones were translated from Gwytherin to Shrewsbury, where she was known as Winefride or Winifred, in 1138. The name of the Benedictine prior of the Abbey of St Peter in that town who organised the translation is normally given as Robert of Shrewsbury or Robertus Salopiensis. In the medieval detective stories by Ellis Peters about the sleuth Brother Cadfael, Robert is named Robert Pennant. This surname combines the two Welsh words for Head and Stream. Is it a coincidence that the area around Tai Pella is named Pennant? Or did Prior Robert get a nickname which celebrated the most significant action of his life and which gradually transmuted into a surname? If he was Welsh or even half Welsh, how did he get such a senior position within an ecclesiastical hierarchy now dominated by Normans? Perhaps my researches for my DNB Project will throw some light upon this fascinating (but not really important) question.

Watch this space!

Term paper submitted!

In my post Term paper on 8 November I said that I was thinking of writing the required 3,000–5,000 word autobiographical essay on How the protagonists of the dismantling of apartheid regarded each other, based on the autobiographies of F W de Klerk and Nelson Mandela.

In my post Seventh tutorial on 20 November I outlined the brief presentation I gave at our Tuesday meeting that week, as a result of which I concluded that the topic was either too big or too small for a term paper.

In my post Outline of term paper on 22 November I described the steps I proposed taking in order to write on another topic, Can a blog be used for writing your autobiography? This was the easy bit. Even though I got an extension of the deadline for submission from 29 November till 11 December, I found the going hard.

The problem was simple. Of all forms of writing about yourself, the blog is most like a diary and least like an autobiography. I finally started the paper like this:

In the play and film Educating Rita, the eponymous heroine is a bright Liverpudlian hairdresser who, on enrolling in an Open University Eng. Lit. course, is asked to 'Suggest ways in which one might deal with some of the staging difficulties in a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt' and she succinctly writes 'Do it on the radio.'

In the cult TV series Star Trek , when new life is encountered on a strange planet, the onboard scientist turns to Captain Kirk and says in an ominous tone: 'It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.'

Were Rita to be asked 'Can a blog be used for writing your autobiography?', she would be torn between giving two equally succinct answers: 'No' and 'Yes, but not autobiography as we know it'.

The rest of this paper represents an attempt to help Rita make up her mind.

If only I'd been like Rita! Instead there followed four thousand words of regrettably rather superficial description of the relatively sparse academic writing on the topic and of the small number of blogs which I had come across and which could remotely be called autobiographical. I ended the paper not with a bang but a whimper, a confession that the attempt had failed.

This paper started with the intention of helping Rita to decide between 'No' and 'Yes, but not autobiography as we know it' as answers to the question 'Can a blog be used for writing your autobiography?' The paper has not done so. Both answers, surely, are valid.

I am, frankly, disappointed with what I handed in today, but at least it's done and at least it's caused me to think about avenues I should explore in the near future. More about this anon...

 

It’s a Don’s Life: Mary Beard’s blog

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge and has been blogging since April 2006 as one of two dozen blogs on a wide range of topics hosted by the Times Literary Supplement. A book based on her blog was published in the first week of this month, proof of the wide interest it has generated. For example, her post on 12 May this year, about whether her women-only and chapel-less college, Newnham, needed a new grace (or indeed one at all) generated 74 comments and features in both the local and national press.

Her blog, I thought, would surely have material on it relating to her life before 2006 as well as after it. I was wildly wrong. From a full scan of her posts this year and a cursory of the previous three I learned that her parents had divorced (in a post on 29 June about encouraging parents to come to degree ceremonies); that she used to suffer from nightmares about exams (in a post on 12 June about forgetting that she should be invigilating an exam); and that she had once been raped (in a post on 29 January 2007 entitled No sex please, we're drunk: rape ancient and modern

What is even more interesting is that she created links from her blog to articles she had written in The Guardian about the painful death of each of her parents and about the story of the rape incident.

Why write about such things in a newspaper and not on a blog? She suggests the answer to this in her post A blogger's life on 7 July 2006 when she discussed the pros and cons of blogging, saying of the latter "friends warned darkly about the perils of the public confessional. … And besides there was a sniff of dumbing down. What was worth saying in a mere 600 words or so?" The two newspaper articles were, indeed, respectively two and over three times as long.

Later in the same post she says "much of my life is either unbloggable or unblogworthy." The unbloggable includes all her interactions with her students who "would rightly not take it kindly if I discussed with you their exam performance, their essays or their individual career aspirations (and that forms a very big part of my day job)." The unblogworthy includes on the one hand all the minutiae of academic administration – dull to blog – and on the other all the excitement of scholarly writing – virtually impossible to blog.

On the pro side she is particularly excited by the ability to create links from her text to enable the reader immediately to see fuller text elsewhere online, making as it were dynamic footnotes. Thus I can enable my reader to go from here to her interesting remarks about the prurient nature of biographical research and from here to what she says about writing biographies of the ancients .

As a fellow blogger, but one with vastly less experience, I was interested to see how she referred to individuals. People, it seems, are only named if she has something favourable to say about them: if not, they remain anonymous. I was intrigued, though, that she occasionally does provide the reader with the means to strip the mask away. When writing Reviewing: the nastiness test she enables you to identify the bounder who vilified her and also to get the publication details of the offending review, without being in the slightest bit offensive. Her example comes for me at a fortunate time, since I am planning a post about being thwarted which I will now write without the asperity which I had considered.

So, although spending time reading A don's life today has not helped me with my term paper by getting positive evidence about making a blog into an autobiography, I have gained greatly in other ways. Thank you, Mary!

Outline of term paper

I have written in Seventh tutorial that I have given up my plan to write my term paper of 3,000–5,000 words on the de Clerk–Mandela relationship because it is too big a topic. When I told Jane this after our latest tutorial she suggested that I do something which is related to the blog I started in September at the start of this course. This ties in with the dissertation I want to do at the end of the course and so I happily accepted the suggestion.

Since this term is devoted to Autobiography, the title of my paper naturally suggests itself: Can a blog be used for an autobiography?

This too is a big topic, or rather the blogosphere is so big, that at first I did not know where to begin. But, as the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles is begun with just a single step, so I have quickly drafted the following outline for the paper. This will almost certainly change significantly when I start writing but, as another of my favourite saying goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, which is of course not a reason to have no plan.

So, here's the plan.

What is a blog?
Like an online diary – unlike physical diary (i) read backwards (ii) designed for immediate reading by others
How to start a blog – i. choose a host (e.g. Blogger, WordPress) – ii. write something on WP (e.g. Word) – iii. select Publish, choose Draft – iv. add topic (e.g. Life Story) – v. add pic, add hyperlinks, tweak coding (optional) – publish checked and modified Draft
How reader can select what to read – i. by date – ii. by topic

What are blogs about?
Anything – general v single issue – outline of categories shown on Technorati – absence of any biog-related category

What does the literature say?
Not (seemingly) a lot – refer to Winter 2003 Journal of Biography – no (apparent) plans for anything fresh from Hawaii – Mediated Memories in the Digital Age

How to find biog-type blog needles in blogosphere haystack:
Size of blogosphere – ease of starting blog
Blog Search Engine (http://www.blogsearchengine.com/) yields no results for [autobiography] – in Personal category subcategories nothing likewise
Technorati search engine (http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/ ) – Bio/Autobiography not listed as category – Living 12533 blogs – subcategories nothing likewise
Google [blogspot autobiography] – 1st 5 blogs with "Autobiography" in title not recognisable as such – explain
Google [blogs into books="blooks"(!): note defunct Blooker Prize] – e.g. Mary Beard (Cambridge don), Belle de Jour (London hooker), Julie Powell (cooking all Julia Child's recipes in a year) – also look at others

Example of process of formal publishing
Designer of VisiCalc (ur-spreadsheet) Dan Bricklin's Bricklin on Technology, from his long-running blog:
i. how to deal with changes since text first written – ii. how to deal with hyperlinks – iii. typographical process
Editing essential: how done (hard copy, files)

Process of informal publishing
Review of methods available via software for on-demand printing

(Currently-)perceived main problems
i Blogs deal with the now: how to deal with the then
ii Voice, i.e. how to refer to e.g. spouse or explain e.g. Jack
iii more

My suggested solutions to these problems
i Multitudinous Madeleine moments (but on my blog these are not involuntary but contrived)
ii Bloggis Personae (but wait for response, if any, from maryb [comment on 08/11/09])
iii more

Conclusion (answer to opening question)
Yes, but … Blog is a hunk of Carrara marble, from which you must carve your self-sculpture

Term paper

Each of us on this course is required to submit, by November 27 (check this!), a 3,000–5,000 word essay on an approved autobiographical subject. We are also required to deliver, during one of our weekly sessions, a twenty minute discourse on an autobiographical subject.

My original intention was to write on how people use blogs to write their autobiographies but, as I indicated in my post on Thursday, it became clear that the blog format is not suitable for this purpose and my initial researches in the blogosphere did not reveal anything that could reasonably be termed an autobiography, as opposed to a diary or a journal. I intend to continue my research, widening its scope to include anything autobiographical in any format on the internet, but I do not believe that I will have anything worthwhile to report before the deadline for submission.

It has emerged that the discourse can be related to the essay, so I had the idea of taking two historically-significant figures whose autobiographies had titles which clearly indicated that their life was a quest, then looking for similarities and differences in the way their writing described how and why they set off on their quest and the results of it. Two titles which sprang to my mind were Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The juxtaposition of two such towering figures, with such radically different quests, would I felt make a most interesting study.

This seemed like a good idea until I actually looked into Mein Kampf. Of course I had been aware that a large part of it was about his views which became the doctrine of his Nazi party, but I had thought that there would be sufficient about himself and how and why these views developed to make a vivid contrast to those of Mandela. I was wrong. The first chapter, In the House of My Parents, is astonishingly unrevealing. Thus he sums up his relationship with his parents by saying "I honoured my father: I loved my mother". Even what he does say about some things such as his performance at school turns out, it appears, to be false. So this idea rapidly shows itself to be a non-starter.

So, what about somebody else in South African history? Cecil Rhodes, perhaps? Alas, nothing: no diaries, few personal papers. What about Jan Smuts? A brief memoir about part of the Boer War, and nothing else. So, what about Mandela's white contemporaries? Google rapidly reveals that F W de Clerk, the country's last white president, wrote an autobiography, The Last Trek – a New Beginning. That's it! Another title clearly indicating a quest; an author who was Mandela's adversary-cum-partner during those five crucial years in South African history; each obviously says a great deal about the other in their books.

I finished Mandela's book last week and I now need to complete de Clerk's, which is much less gripping. This should give me enough to write an essay which I provisionally entitle How the protagonists of the dismantling of apartheid regarded each other. The main question I am beginning to wrestle with is, how much of the background to apartheid (and indeed to the story of South Africa before its imposition) do I need to give? Allied to this is, what should be its structure and tone? I think I will start by trying the Wall Street Journal approach, and change it if it doesn't seem to work.

Biography, Winter 2003: 2

I've already written about the issue in the Biography journal devoted to Online Lives. I read the second article, Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet by Laurie McNeill this morning and I am now writing up the notes that I pencilled at the time.

As with my posts about tutorials, I am doing this for my sole benefit, to find out whether this particular use of a blog is an efficient way of storing notes. My comments on the summary are in square brackets.

Abstract
This article examines the diary's transformation from print culture practice to online phenomenon, considering the implications of this change for the diary as a literary genre and as life writing. This discussion explores the challenges the online diary represents to traditional concepts of the genre as private and monologic, investigating the ways in which online diarists attract readers, build communities, and create identities in cyberspace.

Her personal reaction to ODs (online diaries): "supersize narcissism", much badly written/unedited

PDs (physical diaries) "associated with the spiritual, the therapeutic, and the strictly private" – delays before publication (if ever)

ODs now easily launched thru' templates from Diaryland, Blogger and LiveJournal [all still active: need to study further] – not private (but some exceptions) – all published – facility for retro-writing – should this be allowed/encouraged?

03/02 800K blogs registered [with whom and how? how many now?]

"Readers expect self-exposure and the telling of secrets"

"The confessor stays behind the 'grille' of the Internet, allowing the diarist – and the – reader – the illusion of anonymity necessary for 'full' self-exposure

V Woolf on PD: "capacious hold-all"

With PDs, diary and journal (usually) regarded as synonymous. Distinction made by some ODists (e.g. Jane Pinckard, with former=immediate, latter=reflective) [JP still active: see http://www.gamegirladvance.com/about.html]

With pics and sound, OD carries on diary-as-scrapbook tradition

Links can anchor narrative in "actual" places, or to external posts

"ODists have made community-building a major component of their texts", e.g. via Webrings which legitimate/endorse ODs

Newbies can use [About me], [FAQs], [Cast], [First time?] links on Home Page to join community fast

ODists crave feedback, hence hit counters, guestbooks, forums and e-mail address. Resentment of readers who don't contact (=lurkers/blurkers)

"Absence of an active, responsive audience would be a significant blow"

Password protection can limit access to certain parts of site to privileged readers

OD is "new artform", Steve Schachlin, OD pioneer (1996) and AIDS campaigner. Confusion of textual and lived life, with "S now both producer and product of his autobiographical narrative" (paralleled by his offline career as speaker): see "Living in the Bonus Round"

[Note all the above refers to personal websites or templates more sophisticated than Blogger]
[These notes say insufficient about how ODists attract readers: go back and add more]

Biography, Winter 2003: 1

I've already written [click here to see] about the issue in the journal Biography devoted to Online Lives. I read the first article, Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web by Madeleine Sorapure this morning and I am now writing up the notes that I pencilled at the time.

As with my posts about tutorials, I am doing this for my sole benefit, to find out whether this particular use of a blog is an efficient way of storing notes: it is certainly an incentive to writing them. My comments on the main points in the article are in square brackets.

Abstract
An analysis of online diaries suggests some of the ways in which autobiographical stories and subjects are shaped on the Web. The computer as a writing tool, and the Web as a publishing medium, influence the practices of diary writing, affecting how diaries are written, what is written and to whom, and how they are read and interpreted.

Research initially focussed on
(i) http://www.diarist.net/, with its quarterly prizes for best this, that &c. [Written in 2002: this site now gone]
(ii) "Cher écran" Journal personnel, ordinateur, Philippe Lejeune. [Available from Amazon.fr for EUR21.09, where it has this 1* review: Un livre bâclé (thrown together). Beaucoup de témoignages de gens tenant un journal intime sur leur ordinateur, assez peu d'analyses. L'auteur se contente de compiler les propos de ses correspondants. Au final c'est un peu vide. On l'a connu plus inspiré. Un peu cher pour ce que c'est...]

A diary is both text and artefact. What is the artefact of an OD (online diary)? [Does it matter?] OD ephemeral, c.f. paper, but permanent [?] with e.g. Wayback Machine. ["As of 2009 [update] the Wayback Machine contained about 3 petabytes (1000 to the power of 5) of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes (1000 to the power of 4) per month, as compared with the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003."]

Typical ODs, such as Diarist Best Design 2002 http://www.randomrain.net/ [this site now gone], has segmented home page. Bits of diary text are items of data which can be sorted by the reader according to the segments specified by the diarist.

PD (physical diary) characteristics: (i) chronological (ii) publication (if ever intended) not immediate (iii) designed to be read A-Z, earliest first

OD characteristics: (i) chronological only if not segmented (ii) publication immediate and universal (but some attempts to restrict access to parts or all) (iii) designed to be read Z-A, latest first

Diary entries show parataxis [Each bit is potentially standalone and of equal importance, with none subordinate, linkable by and: c.f. hypotaxis, where causal linkages shown], c.f. autobiography, where narrative requires conjunction/transition between bits or events.

Parataxis shares logic of database, which is basically list of fundamentally unordered items [until ordered by running e.g. a query]

Autobiography is retrospective and linear: diary isn't.

Links [<a href=…>] can provide some order within OD: they provide multiple ways of organising data/text, hence enabling reader to browse along path of choice: see complexity of ftrain.com. [Still going, and excellent, with: 1. Hierarchical Table of Contents 2. Table of Contents in Reverse Chronological Order 3. Table of Contents in Forward Chronological Order]

Contrast between weblog and web journal ["with its connotations of greater distance and detachment"]

With ODs being linked in Webrings, reader can read latest entries in multiple ODs [cui bono?]. Reference to 'blurbs, e.g. Artists, with list of 79 online journals, and Autumn Leaves, with 31 golden oldies' ODs. [No trace of either today]

Number Two Daughter

Helena Clare Marsh, known to all and forever as Henny, was the ugliest baby at birth you ever did see but, it's true, Ugly Ducklings do grow up to be Swans. She developed belatedly her innate artistic talent and enrolled as a mature student at St Martin's, the Oxford of art teaching. She interrupted her course twice to nurture each of her sons but was each time allowed to resume because of her consistently high grades.

She makes her appearance on this blog now partially because of her appearance in the preamble to the post about yesterday's tutorial but primarily because of her involvement with blogs in her final year project.

She has not yet given this project a title, and it is easy to see why not. She wants (if I understand her correctly) to compare the idealised view of motherhood, traditionally associated with caring, nurturing and selflessness, with what she believes is the unspoken reality, which is that conscious manifestations of these qualities are balanced by subconscious feelings of rage (or worse) at the loss of personal autonomy as the result of giving birth.

She thinks that the conflict between these two viewpoints in artists who have recently become mothers is the primary reason for the dearth of art works by such people. To seek evidence for this thesis she has started examining blogs, particularly the category known as 'Mom [or Momma] Blogs'. Googling these brings up 314,000 and 15,800 references respectively: finding evidence to support her thesis in this way is clearly going to be an arduous process.

Her professional interest in blogs meant that, when she came to deliver her sons to us for a brief visit this past weekend, she showed more than filial interest in my term project about autobiography on blogs. She reacted positively to my tentative suggestion that you might be able to graft your life story onto your blog, which often is a sequential diary of current events, with a series of flashbacks linked to past events.

I'll be discussing this idea of flashbacks more fully later this week.

Term paper: researching journals

Yesterday I spent some time in the Hunter Street library scanning the contents pages of the University of Hawaii's Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the current issue backwards in time. I was beginning to despair of finding anything relevant when I hit pay dirt with the 2003 winter issue, which had the overarching title OnlineLives. Here are the titles of the main articles it contains:

• Screening Moments, Scrolling Lives: Diary Writing on the Web
  
• Teaching an Old Genre New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet
  
• That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments
  
• The Gnome in the Front Yard and Other Public Figurations: Genres of Self-Presentation on Personal Home Pages
  
• At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes
  
• Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off
  

Even though these were written over six years ago, they clearly all need to be read carefully over the next month. Although the university has a subscription to the printed journal it does not have access to the online version. The Subscription page on the University of Hawaii's website did not permit ordering of single copies so I sent off an e-mail.

From: A G Randall [mailto:agrandall@btinternet.com]
Sent: 01 October 2009 14:49
To: 'uhpjourn@hawaii.edu'
Subject: Biography: Winter 2003 

How can I get hold of a copy of Online Lives, preferably in digital form? I couldn't find a way to do this on your website, I'm afraid.  

Best wishes

This morning I receive this response:

From: UHP Journals [mailto:uhpjourn@hawaii.edu]
Sent: 01 October 2009 23:35
To: A G Randall
Subject: Re: Biography: Winter 2003

Dear Mr. Randall,

If you are affiliated or have access to an institutional facility with access to Project Muse, you may access all electronic versions of each issue from 2001. I noticed, however, that University of Buckingham is not listed as a Project Muse subscribers. You may, however, browse the following listing for other institutions that do have Project Muse access:  

http://muse.jhu.edu/about/subscriptions/subscriber_list_country.html  

If you do not have Project Muse access, we can send you a PDF version of the issue via email for US$20. A hardcopy of the issue is also available for the same price, including shipping via airmail. Should you wish to order, please secure payment with a Visa or Mastercard via our web order page. I am sorry, but our online order form is not yet set up to accept single-issue orders; however, if you fill in all of your information and indicate in the "additonal comments" section, the material you wish to order, your order will be duly filled and charged the appropriate amount. If you have any futher questions, please let me know. Thank you.  

Sincerely,  

Norman Kaneshiro
Subscriptions & Advertising Mgr.
Journals Department
University of Hawaii Press
2840 Kolowalu Street
Honolulu HI 96822
VOICE: (808)956-8833 FAX: (808)988-6052
EMAIL: uhpjourn@hawaii.edu
 

I reproduce this in its entirety to bring to the attention of the world the singular courtesy of Norman Kaneshiro. I have of course thanked him personally, telling him that I hope to get an electronic copy of the journal through my Oxford connection this afternoon, but his reply was so prompt, so clear and so helpful that I felt his action should be more generally acknowledged.

 
 

Preliminary work on term paper

The Autumn Term is devoted to Autobiography. We are required to write a term paper of 3,000-5,000 words by 27 November. The subject is to be one of the topics discussed at weekly classes or a subject of one's choice, subject to approval.

The film Julie and Julia showed me how a blog could be a medium for publishing autobiography, or rather a slice of autobiography. In the film Julie Powell embarks upon the Julie/Julia Project, in which she sets out to cook in a tiny flat all 524 of the recipes in Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking while holding down a full-time job. The story she tells of this quest is amplified as she tells how it impinges upon the people around her: her friends, her work colleagues and above all her husband, who accuses her at one stage of having embarked upon one massive ego trip.

This film inspired me to propose writing a term paper on Autobiography on blogs and our professor agreed to this at our meeting yesterday. I intend to use this blog to be the place where I can store, under the label Term paper, my plans and summaries of what happened in trying to execute them. It might perhaps be better, if I were solely interested in writing a paper to use a conventional wordprocessor in the preliminary stages as well as the final one, but I want to explore how to undertake a task like this using what is to me a new tool, since this will also help me to understand better its limitations while I am researching how, if at all, one can write an autobiography on it.

Here, then, are the things that I intend to do as the preliminary steps towards writing the paper.

• Google [autobiography blog] and [biography blog], then see how these terms need refining to reduce the massive number of responses they will generate, then start a Word file with the URLs of sites that might merit fuller examination, along with a note of what was first seen
  
• Use Wikipedia, and perhaps other sources, to get a better idea about the development of blogs and in particular what search engines there are for blogs, then start a Word file summarising results
  
• Study the Julie Powell blog, then start an Access table to store potentially-useful quotes and their URLs: as a preliminary to this I need to look at the MHRA Style Book which we were told about yesterday, to see how bibliographical details of material published on the web should be recorded.
  
• Check at the library how to access the University of Hawaii's Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and check what other journals if any I should look to see what has been written on my topic
  
• Contact biographical societies in the USA (e.g. via The Biographer's Craft website) and UK (e.g. the Johnson Society of London) to see whether any of their members has written anything useful about blogging and biography: this item is a posteriority
  

Writing this to-do list gives me the comfortable feeling that the paper has actually been begun: you don't eat a salami by swallowing great mouthfuls of it, but by cutting it into thin slices and carefully chewing them one at a time.

I am also happy that embarking on the study of this topic will also help me towards my dissertation at the end of the course, provisionally entitled How technology is changing how biographies are made. When I announced this at our meeting yesterday, the question "What do you mean by technology?" was immediately raised by colleagues. After all, the development of a method to produce solid graphite out of powdered graphite and clay made pencils vastly cheaper, just as the development of the biro made pens vastly cheaper. This question must for the moment be put on the back burner.