the recurrent CONFESSION:

I am a Brevity-addict. 

Because I lack it (brevity lowercase) so drastically and because it (Brevity uppercase) so often makes me laugh.  And think.  At the same time.  Without the whole milk/nose thing going on.

Because during January, this last month of breathing rather than blogging, of neither writing (as planned) nor actually much Writing (contra-plan), a month of deeper, more personal revising than I had originally charted out, I couldn't refrain from reading Brevity.  In particular its series of brief (of course) pieces on blogging vs. something . . . more  . . . worthwhile?

This from January 17th, "The Made-Up Self,"  will stand for all the rest:

In this interview [culled from The Millions, another website worth your time] he [Carl Klaus, author of a new collection of essays] takes aim at the confessional “me-moir” genre and dismisses the oft-repeated notion that bloggers are somehow modern-day Montaignes.

Kudos to Klaus for holding us to a higher standard.

Full Interview Here and a brief excerpt below:

"Well listen, the differences between Montaigne and bloggers are so manifold that I find it surprising that anyone would even think of comparing them – because they have different agendas and completely different ways of going about writing. For example, Montaigne’s freewheeling style is grounded in an overriding concern with echoing the flow of his thought. Now the bloggers aren’t concerned with that kind of interiority. Their writing is largely concerned with topical subjects of the moment, and they have no consciousness of consciousness."

I lied. And besides, I myself am not necessarily constrained to practice brevity and so ~

This also from January 28th, from a description of sessions of the AWP conference going on this week in the wrong Washington (D.C. not PNW):

R217. Status Update: The Personal Essay in the Age of Facebook. (Jen McClanaghan, Phillip Lopate, Bob Shacochis, Debra Monroe, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Susan McCallum-Smith) Between the ever-popular tell-all memoir and ubiquitous status updates on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the confession has never been so popular or so utterly mundane. We know more about each other than ever before and yet little that’s truly intimate or insightful. This panel will discuss the tradition of the personal essay and what it might offer the contemporary reader and writer, namely the opportunity for real insight and reflection.

Of course, there is commentary to each of these posts both on Brevity and The Millions - bloggers who protest they for one (or more) are interested in interiority, in real insight and reflection, they themselves are conscious of consciousness, that they at least are doing more than just reciting the cake recipe of their daily doing, that they are offering uniquely intimate glimpses, valuable reflective views worth the attention of others in the thinking public.

Oh, but aren't we?  All?

my own CONFESSION: This Brevity series tugs at my own dissatisfactions with what I'm doing here.  I am wearied (again, always) of the form my blog has taken, does take, always threatens to be taking.  My private focus (a word that means "hearth" - that most homey heart of the home) that keeps refusing to escape its own smallness.

What began as a way to say something unmuddied by the grasping fingers of time and change, a private writing room where those who would could read, a kind of oratory in the woods, a chamber like Dickinson's where the soul selects her own society, begins to seem to me a lobby. With glossy magazines laid out.  Plants that look plastic.  The always open invitation to indulge in what - when I write it - becomes the written equivalent of Muzak.

Caught by the pleasure of hearing responses from faraway friends and friendly strangers, I want that response more and more, that eye contact, that small applause.

But that wanting distracts, distorts. Everything I write becomes a self-justification, a bid for sympathy.  Time is limited: what I need more is a chambered space  - contained, restrained in the way the private journal cannot be - for what is being called variously consciousness - insight - reflection - but which is something more.  Which one hopes is something more than those tired, and let's admit it, overused and empty words.

Something.  Less solipsistic, more wide. More intimate, less confessional.  A way out by way of going in. A way of moving into the clearing.  A way of singing in the woods.

All of these terms are unsatisfactory.

I realize I have said all this many times before.  Have revised myself.  Or meant to.  Have been always dissatisfied with what is written here.  I realize freshly that I will be dissatisfied, without a doubt, until the day I get it right, the day I no longer need to write?

(Here?  Anywhere?)

You don't have to keep reading if the prospect of recurrent dissatisfaction dismays you.