I write for myself and strangers

In the last day or two I’ve gotten into a scrap in a “random questions” community that began with the question “How do you choose which blogs in the community you’ll read?  Do you pick interesting user pictures, or strange names; do you read randomly, or just what?”  I replied that I looked for users who wrote interesting or literate comments, then read back into their journals and if I was pleased or amused by the content, I’d add them to my friends list to read for a while.

This caused a fuss.  I was accused of being “way too critical,” and of being unwilling to indulge everyone having completely free self-expression, unencumbered by logic, intellect, or even coherence (at least, it seemed that was what I stood accused of).  Part of my responses to those accusations follow.

I’m a short-tempered, middle-aged sumbitch who hasn’t any time to waste upon the half-baked or the half-witted.  This is why my blogroll is relatively short, and why those who are on that list are generally older than is common, and much, much more literate than is common.

I commend to you this quotation from Gertrude Stein, in The Making of Americans: “I write for myself and strangers.”  Strangers will read one’s blog, and will form opinions and judgements about the writer based on what he chose to put there.  The only way to avoid that of which I’m aware is to make one’s blog completely private.  A private journal is the sole time when one can be sure of writing only for oneself; else, one writes (certainly, I write) with the expectation of an audience, and with the knowledge that one has an obligation to that audience, to write the best one may.  To disappoint that expectation is to break faith, to violate the implied contract between writer and reader. (And I would mention in passing that a private journal imposes an even stronger burden on its writer: the burden of requiring utter honesty from oneself.)

Hence, when I find an ill-spelt, ill-conceived, ill-thought out journal, full of jargon, preciosity, self-indulgence, and wilfully-assumed despair, I believe the writer has broken the contract, a contract incumbent upon any writer—even hermetics such as Emily Dickinson, who wrote in the full expectation her work would never be read by any save herself—the contract to tell one’s tale in the best way possible.  “Give me a copper coin and I will tell you a golden tale!” has ever been the storyteller’s cry, and to discover I am repaid in base metal revolts me.