Mining the trivial

I've just gotten back to my room from David Sedaris's reading in Big Bridges. During the program, it struck me how bizarre and trivial the situations he chooses to write about are. He writes about 45 minutes in the trailer of a small-time pot dealer, or about the difficulties of making coffee without running water, and The New Yorker prints it. I realize that he's mainly a humorist, but there's nothing light about the best comedy. His writing does what a lot of great writing does: it takes something small, something that would otherwise drift off in time, and unpacks it, lending it unexpected significance.

Because, like many of us, I'm quite behind on the blog count for the semester, when these thoughts crossed my mind in Big Bridges, they eventually directed me to the question (that I really must ask myself ever more often if I want to make it out of Writing Machines): can I blog this?

And the answer was Yes! He writes about the trivial, the fleeting moment! Picks it apart and shares it with the world! That's just like a blog, right?!

Satisfied with the imminent increase of my blog count, I lost myself in listening to the rest of the program. Then Sedaris took questions. And the very first question was about a piece he had introduced as coming from his diary, and the gist of it was this: how much do you keep and how much do you throw away? How much do you write, and how much do you actually share?

Well, he throws most of it away. He said he's written in his diary for 30 years, and that he uses it as a kind of guide to his experiences. In response to a later question with respect to publishing, he mentioned the process of going through his diary and finding a replacement for an apparently unpublishable situation that had made it into one of his pieces.

And then came the crushing realization: mining the trivial for meaning takes time, and it is private time. Sedaris said it himself: you can't take risks with your writing if you're too afraid of producing something bad. It now seems absolutely crucial to me that he keeps his diary -- presumably full of isolated incidents and half-formed thoughts -- private. These are a substantial portion of the resources he has as a writer. If each entry were to be read individually, the lot of them certainly wouldn't accrete in the same wonderful way that the elements of his essays do. They would have meaning, sure... but it would not be nearly so rich. And I doubt we'd find the same sort of synthesis, the sort of compatibility between experiences, that he manufactures long after the events themselves have taken place. So, sure, he writes about 45 minutes in a dealer's trailer, and about making coffee with the water from a vase of flowers, but he links the two moments together with a description of his partner, and the result is funny and beautiful. And The New Yorker prints it.

I always tried to keep a journal as a little kid. I had to call it a "journal" because "diary" sounded too much like "diarrhea" to me. (Now I hear "logorrhea" and "blogorrhea" and wonder if I wasn't on to something in my prudishness.) Try as I might, though, I could never fill up more than the first 10 or 12 pages of those beautifully empty, sturdily bound journals that every book store keeps near the counter. Then I would become disgusted with my confessions and with the style in which they had been written, and I would abandon the journal. There must be a dozen of those things scattered in the attic among my childhood possessions, all mostly empty. I knew that a journal was something just for me, and that no one else would be likely ever to read it, but somehow the very act of putting the words down was too much for me. It felt like I was broadcasting things I hadn't yet had the time to contemplate. We all know this, but when it's personal, you can just feel it: words are scarily powerful.

Don't worry... I'm not trying to insult the blogosphere. All I can say is this: is it any wonder that I find blogging unnatural?