Reading: Douglas Cooper, Delirium, and Jean Merrill, The Pushcart War

Moving: 10' on a new kind of elliptical machine that I'll have to get to know

Viewing: Rain, beautiful rain; and the Koelbel library

Listening: Colorado Symphony on KCFR

7 March 2000: Initially,

A former (I hope really only "hiatused") journaler wrote in Beth's forum that one thing she doesn't like in an online journal is initials instead of names. Whether she was referring specifically to me or not, what she said applies to me, and what she said matters to me because Kim Rollins is one of the best, most compelling, readable, researched, eminent, beloved, and missed journalers. If anyone else but Beth had said it, I wouldn't've considered the (constructive) criticism. That's not true. Kim's criticism means more to me than almost anyone else's, but I notice everyone's. I envy the ability to disregard criticism delivered by the unworthy. The good thing about Kim's comment is that while I respect her opinion, I don't hate myself for receiving it.

Really, the great thing is that I'm not crushed. I'm disappointed that if she has visited or ever does visit Speaking Confidentially (more than the Glamour Shots entry, which I know she's read), she'll find it unreadable immediately instead of only after discovering all the copious textual, semantic, and personal reasons to find me unreadable. Disappointed, but not so desirous of her, even her, as a reader that I would consider changing.

I wrote Kim, telling her that reading that comment had cracked me up ("That's me! That's me! That's meeeeeeeee!") and why I use them. I signed it thus:

SWAK
ljh

which I thought was mildly amusing (as did Shelley, a woman of excellent taste).

And Kim wrote me that she loves C-3PO even though he's got initials for a name.

The reasons (again) for initials:

• When I started writing a journal, I used them. "DCL" was a lot more specific than "David" and "RSC" more specific than "Scott." (Neither of those two mainstays of my tenth-grade life has come up in my life for years, but those initials occurred to me as readily as their memories.) RWR was president when I started, and his identity was no secret; and I had by that point stopped reading V.C. Andrews and now regretted wasting my life with VCA: initials were but a convenient shorthand.
• Initials protect privacy no more than than first names and probably less; confidentiality isn't why I use them. First names aren't how I naturally refer to people and made-up names seem like lying. When someone dresses up as Spousal Abuse Barbie for Hallowe'en, then referring to her as Barbie doesn't seem as much of a lie as Heidi or Maude or some other famous blonde woman, but I got to know Barbie only after starting the OLJ and after Shelley complained. I cannot change DEDBG's name. I've tried, writing stories, to assign different names to real people, but it seems like lying. Hence my problem (one among many) with fiction.
  (Actually, I can--or she can. She has been Nisou for about ten years now. It seems too personal a name to bandy about for everyday, though.)
• I am so accustomed to referring to people by their initials in writing that I have to proof my letters to my closest peeps--those to whom I write most naturally, most as myself--to ensure I use names instead of initials.
• I do not wish to change what or how I write to attract readers if that change detracts from my purpose in journaling. I write for me, appreciative of but not catering to any (possible) audience.

When Shelley began to read me, she told me she hated the initials. Anita Rowland said the same (more tactfully). Now Kim too. Much as I love Shelley, Kim's anonymous and possibly notevenaboutme comment resonated more. Maybe because it was impersonal, maybe because it was public, maybe because it was public in Beth's forum, maybe because I crave her readership and regret blowing my chance. I thought, "Damn! Kim won't read me and everyone knows it!" (Everyone=Beth, whom I also admire, has been the only contributor to that topic who I know reads me.)

Nonetheless I didn't consider changing. Stubborn. Wrong. Inconsiderate. I'm writing in public and therefore should make myself publicly accessible.

Nah. Just determined. I maintain that I write this for me, not for readers. Addressing this issue here might belie that, to some, but I would disagree: this is still all about me. Whether I write for a readership has nothing to do with whether readers' opinions matter to me. "Your website is painful" struck me, but it didn't crush me. "Initials make a journal unreadable" matters to me because of who said it more than because of what was said.

It is highly unusual for me to sail on confidently when someone I admire and whose opinion I am accustomed to valuing more than my own tells me I'm wrong. (Kim didn't do that, not in so many words, but I'm running with this.) So in a weird and twisted and probably inflatedly conceited way, her comment makes me more confident in myself. Because I haven't changed to please her, and because I didn't consider changing to please her (and others), that must mean I'm certain of myself. That's rare for me, and I'm proud of me.

Couldn't I write for me but be considerate of (hypothetical) readers? Well, no, I guess here I can't. I spell out the "imme'ly" that I write with a pen because I type faster than I write; same for Christmas instead of xmas (see below). However, I don't write out "probably" but usually use "pro'ly"; that's because of the history professor I remember every time I use his idiom. I scrawled all the above in snatches at work throughout the day yesterday and referred to both Beth and Shelley by their initials, but transcribing it here I spelled out their names. Oooo, what an effort. If I can spell out Christmas, why not PLT, since it's the same number of letters?

Hillory and Pat, the only two of my friends who I know read this, have never complained about the initials. Of course, they know who everyone is, Pat up to my moving to Denver and Hillory up to (by story) Denver and in person since.

HAO and PLT, the only two of my friends who I know read this, have never complained about the initials. Of course, they know who everyone is, PLT up to my moving to Denver and HAO up to (by story) Denver and in person since.

Nope. I prefer the second. Besides, first names recur a lot more often than sets of initials. And I don't like dashes, in journals or in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or anywhere else.

---

I began to read Delirium yesterday morning on the bus. I gave it to RDC for Christmas; he wanted it because Douglas Cooper wrote it entirely electronically. Allegedly, it never saw paper (the poor copyeditor) until it was bound. Almost as soon as he began to read it, he told me I'd like it. So I began it, and about halfway to work I began it again, because one character seems to be in both Paris and the Sinai. I'm ready for it to be convoluted and surreal, but I figure I missed something in there.

In Delirium, while an author sits reading an ms a manuscript (okay, I do revise for broader readability), printing presses drop from the sky, pockmarking the sidewalk around him and falling through his window. Cooper doesn't like paper.

Is the ancient Greek hero Theseus pronounced "Teseus"? The Greek alphabet has both a tau and a theta, so I'd think they'd have both sounds. A character in Delirium is named Theseus and his cronies call him "Teazy" so I wonder.

That reminds me. Last Thursday RDC and I went out to dinner at Paggliaci's in NW northwest Denver. (It was somewhere along the way that I lost my new iolite ring--eleven bucks down the drain, as I feared.) RDC is rereading A Farewell to Arms and liking it more this time. I unreservedly love For Whom the Bell Tolls but found Farewell nearly unreadable. The Sun Also Rises is one of RDC's favorite novels overall; I wasn't profoundly stirred. (I had read no Hemingway novel before knowing RDC, just a few short stories, The Old Man and the Sea and of course The Best of Bad Hemingway.) So anyway we talked about his prose style, and how Farewell is so much more stark and icebergy than Tolls, and how, as anyone could have guessed, I liked For Whom the Bell Tolls because it is least like Hemingway's usual icebergy self.

So anyway RDC told me that one of Hemingway's wives (the first or second) lost one of his novels (his first or second) on a train. (RDC knew which wife and which novel; I'm forgetting now.) I said, "That'd be a great novel." Not the lost one (well, yes, I'm sure it would have been great too), but as a premise for a novel, to find that ms--the discovery, the publication, the discoverer's temptation to pass it off as their own. The world of paper: a whole novel, ages of mental work and physical labor, lost on a train. That's why Cooper likes an electronic medium, and why western civilization would be so different if the great library in Alexandria hadn't burned. Which would be a great "what if" book, except we cannot guess at the wealth of knowledge lost there.

Beowulf exists in one, exactly one, physical text. It's staggering, what's been lost. I want everything documented, nothing in human experience or knowledge to be lost.

My other novel idea is also a what if: what happened to Heloise and Abélard's child? It was a son and it died in infancy; that's fairly certain. But what if it hadn't? RDC didn't remember which pair of lovers they were and asked if they were the lovers with the chink in the wall. I told him no, but then it drove me crazy there in the restaurant that I couldn't remember the divided lovers' names. It's the Greek myth upon which Romeo and Juliet is based. I remembered the story, the wall, the chink, the running away, the lion, the white-berried mulberry tree, the blood on the cloak leading the man to think the lion had killed the maiden, his suicide, the mulberries turning red as blood in sympathy, her suicide, ya ya ya, but I couldn't remember their names. RDC asked, "A lion in Greece?" But of course Greece had a lot of contact with Egypt--which wasn't exactly awash with lions itself, but African anyway.

Nearly a week later, the pronunciation of Theseus reminds me of the wondering, and now I'm at home and Edith Hamilton is on the shelf behind me. No internet access at Pagliacci's. Pyramus and Thisbe. Of course. And it was a lioness, and it happened in Babylon. And hey, as Edith Hamilton recounts it, it's more like "Romeo + Juliet" than Romeo and Juliet: I I liked the pathe touch in the movie of Juliet waking before Romeo had quite died, and thus Romeo knowing his mistake before he expired, but I didn't remember that that's a detail Shakespeare changed. I wonder if the movie-makers knew their Ovid.