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Confused Blog to Biog

Looking over my last Blurried Musing article, it’s difficult to figure out the point. Having written the damn thing, I know what my objective was for the softly tiradical document, even if my writing turned out disjointed and came nowhere close to a complete thought. What I’m after here is to say that I can’t say why I went on about the topic for any length, since there’s little there to speak of. Nor do I think I meant what I meant, and by that I mean, I’m not sure I can claim to hold whatever conviction it may actually have buried within it.

With a good night’s sleep under my belt I could go back and clean it up a bit, make it sound like it came from a smarter and more logical writer… but where’s the fun in that? Nevertheless, I’m glad I wrote it because of what it isn’t. It’s not clear why that is, so let me go in from a completely different angle.

I look at the whole span of literature. OK, maybe not all of it, but whatever the amount I’m able to get my brain around adds up to. Then I separate off and compare this to what stands in for it today. I won’t go over the derivative calculations the work entails, due to it’s lack of value here, and my disinterest in evaluating it. And the fact I didn’t really do it — but let’s say I did, primarily to make my point work better here. Here is the conclusion I would have come to: the memoir or personal narrative is overrated and over published. No, not for all time. I mean within the here and now. Let me elaborate:

Journals were once something kept under your mattress, or swaddled in your underwear in a drawer. Are diaries still sold with locks on them? If so, now it has to be for keeping others from swiping your material as fodder for their next biographical manuscript. Everyone and their dot.com selling cousin has a narrative of deep and abiding interest (or can generate three good quotes, which fulfills the requirements for piggybacking a book tour). Once respected goals of intelligibility and style tend to be shoved aside in the new editorial demand to get details to order. Yes, we all embody a weirdly plotted story line leading from conception to termination in a format of near chronological organization. But why must everyone write it down and slap a sale sticker on it? Some blame the modern fascination with pop psychotherapy, or the ongoing, sickening fad to gain fame through ones personal problems. (How else can you explain success stories like Jerry Springer and Oprah’s Dr. Phil?)

In my opinion, new-age publicized online journals or blogs are either partly responsible or demonstrate a failure for this behavior to properly subside. In HTML table cells we discuss our lives, its successes and slips and sublimations, the journal software automatically assuring it’s listed properly under day and month and year. Why a philosophical rumination needs to be attached to July 14 I’ll never fully understand, but it must be if it wishes to provide a concrete meaning to us. Within these we trundle on, note how we observe our daily operandi, then gear up for publication — for free when published to our Web site, for diminutive royalties when book sales are involved.

Brendan Halpin, the author of It Takes a Worried Man, a memoir about how he had to deal with his wife’s breast cancer (hope no one thought narcissism was on the way out), and a work which falls into a category I call the Self-Help Memoir, was quoted as saying “I had to write it to stop myself from going insane.” Sorry Brendan (can I call you Brendan?), but sanity is, as far as I’m concerned, as overrated as the personal narrative is. It leads way too often to purposeful items like Diet Pepsi, Wal-Mart, and most especially self-indulgent autobiography.

Just to protect my rear, I don’t go so far as to claim memoirs have no value at all. But you know, too much of a mediocre thing…