Sunday, April 07, 2002
Blah, blah, blah - I wrote today. 1,265 words on Chapter Four. It's actually coming along quite well. My characters are beginning to talk more like people and less like characters. Now, if only I could unlock the secret of writing prose that unfolded more like reality and less like plot-constrained campfire tales, I'd feel certain I was, at last, on the right track.
But I didn't get to see In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers today, because our local UPS delivery people are lazy and/or incompetent and can't be trusted to figure out how to operate a keypad. Perhaps this is why downtown Birmingham is such a wasteland. Businessmen never get their packages, because UPS drivers can't fathom the mysteries of doorknobs.
Horrornet is about to experience the bbs equivalent of a Mass Extinction Event. Any moment now. It'll be interesting to see the new world that rises from the ashes. I thought about building an ark, but it seemed like too much trouble.
And, speaking of things that people post to the web in general, and speaking also of online journals in particular, I admit that I'm a little bit disturbed by the current fad of keeping personal diaries in public. An entirely new manifestation of exhibitionism, leading, I'm certain, to new manifestations of voyeurism. Seriously, people putting what seem to be intensely personal thoughts out there where everyone can see them, all their secret hopes and desires, fears and regrets, splashed about this or that website. What the hell ever happened to dignity? Or propriety? Or privacy? Isn't the whole point if a true personal diary or journal that it exists between the author and him or herself? That's why the damn things often come with locks and keys. I'm saying all this because I inadvertantly stumbled across such a thing today, and apparently much of Blogger is devoted to providing this service and, well, I'm simply mystified. Does this phenomenon spring from the loneliness of modern life, or from the craving for even the meanest scrap of celebrity which our mass-media culture fosters? Finally, the great emotional outlet for everyone who can't get on The Jerry Springer Show, the ultimate egalitarian catharsis. All you need is access to a computer and a minimal knowledge of the language of your choice.
For the record, this journal I'm writing here will never descend into the nether regions of my private life. That's why I keep a real journal, the ink-and-paper kind. I strongly believe that our personal demons and angels are things to be wrestled with behind the closed doors of our own psyches, with occassional, carefully-considered divulgences to close friends and family members and various other confidants. People we can hopefully trust not to ever use this knowledge against us. I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so naive as to view the entire population of the web, at least in theory six billion strong, as friendly. In short, this whole thing seems like a profoundly bad idea. If you were to ask my advice I'd say you'd be better off with a good fountain pen and one of the blank books from Barnes and Noble. But you didn't ask my opinion and, as I have expressed it anyway, and at length, I will now let the matter rest.
Changing the subject.
It seems months ago now that I last mentioned my reevaluation of my Right Bank/Left Bank taxonomy of "horror" fiction, and the relevance of the writings and ideas of Gothicist Ann Radcliffe to that reevaluation. Discussion on the Horrornet boards has recently dredged all this up again and reminded me that I never got where I was going, so to speak. So, though I don't have time to say much on the subject tonight, I will reopen this can of worms with a quote from Radcliffe's "On the Supernatural in Poetry" (posthumous publication 1826):
"That may be," said Mr. S------, "and I perceive you're not one of those who contend that obscurity does not make any part of the sublime." "They must be men of very cold imaginations," said W------, "with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the latter, respecting the dreaded evil?"
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