What I’m saying is this: people know better than to ask me to update the blog more, but when I see that people are using the blog as intended–actually reading it–I’m filled with a serious sense of inadequacy.

So it’s another Sunday evening, many Sundays away from the last chapter that I’ve read of any novel, especially a Certain Novel That I am Supposed to be Reading to Prove Some Point Maybe. The formula for writing is all here: a half-emptied glass of wine, my normal Sunday restlessness/insomnia, John Vanderslice singing about whaling ships. I thought I was in the mood, too; yesterday I was possessed by the ridiculous urge to buy a prompt-based daily journal, and so far, I’ve managed to keep it completely up to date. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately, and thinking about the mix CDs we used to swap whenever we knew we’d be apart for awhile, and having positive enough thoughts about spring, and letting my hair get really long, and eating apple sandwiches.

But I’m not. Call it the weather, or a change of heart, or a shift in language–I have a scientist’s strange comfort with the use of the word “canonical”–but it’s just not there right now, and I don’t want to go looking for it.

Today I did go looking for some street art with a friend. It was so good to feel some sunshine on my face. It made me miss the ocean. I think I’ll buy a new swimsuit soon.

This is why, even though the album-a-day project was less than successful on the blog front, I have a tidy record of all of the albums I enjoyed in this capacity for the duration of the M-Dick hiatus (available upon request, of course, but not to be shared here otherwise; what purpose would that serve?).

This is why, after months of false starts and broken promises (they’re just like pie crusts!), I fell back in love with Herman Melville.

This is why I know that Jay Hepner will be missed.

At least when I deliberately abandoned Ishmael to pursue science, I left him at a logical place: the departure of the Pequod from Nantucket. At first, this chapter seems have been invented purely for the purpose of belaboring the elusiveness of Captain Ahab, who has still not appeared on deck. Taking that intellectual stance early on in the chapter greatly reduced my desire to actually read it, given that, you know, nothing was going to happen. Peleg and Bildad are running around the deck, barking instructions in their characteristic (caricatured) ways. It’s irritating for two reasons: it’s full of ship-type terms that I don’t care about, and I know that they’re not enduring characters to the narrative because they are not actually going to sail away with the Pequod so who really cares what they have to say, anyway?

Then, the chapter ends:

Ship and boast diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

It’s a list. Melville didn’t have to make it a list. He definitely didn’t have to use that many semicolons, and the linear passage of time assures us that he wasn’t just trying to piss off Kurt Vonnegut. (I mean, I don’t think that Melville even went to college, so. You know. Whatever, KV.) Melville’s lists are powerful because they form the internal rhythm of novel, one that I never even noticed before now. It’s an attractive anatomy. The rhythm of a writer can draw you in the same way that the rhythm of a musician can. I learned that from Jay Hepner.

Mr. Hepner was an English instructor at my high school, the guy who would grade your essays when your actual teacher couldn’t, leaving complicated notes about the precision of language and the pain it brought him to see you overwrite your introductory paragraphs. He told me, among other things, to read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. In this “classic guide to writing nonfiction”, Zinsser dedicates a chapter to something that I’ve spent a long time thinking about: voice. “Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage,” Zinsser writes. “Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.”

Since Hep passed away this fall, I have been struggling to find some phrase, some heritage, that could lead me to that sort of eloquence. I listened to Neil Young. I looked at some of the papers I’d written, ones with his handwriting on them, ones where he’d urged me to reconsider my syntax or my adjective choice. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him with some heavy-handed tribute, but, as is so often the case with great teachers, it’s hard to say what you mean without being sentimental. So let’s leave it at this: Jay Hepner, I have been trying to take your advice, and I think that it’s served me well so far. I have to say that, knowing that you’re gone, even though I haven’t seen you in years, I’ve had my own case of the hypos.

I wish it were so easy as hopping on a whaling ship to get rid of them.

Although, to be fair, I was also, ehem, preparing for the season premiere of blatant sexism, racism, and misogyny for a lot of the day, so gin could have a lot to do with my success.

What can I say about “The Grey Album” that hasn’t already been said? Absolutely nothing, I’m sure (not that it’s stopped me in the past). For those of you unfamiliar with the mash-up, the internet works. Also, watch this video:

While Greg Gillis seems to be a way more popular media subject re: copyright laws, Burton created quite the stir with this album, which is sort of a mashup bridge. Although Burton maintains that he made “The Grey Album” for artistic reasons, not to challenge the way we think about intellectual property, it’s hard to imagine a better springboard for a discussion of the issue, a discussion that we might actually even be able to have at a time when I haven’t been screaming at my television about what a terrible mother/all around human being Betty Draper (or whatever her name is now that she’s been to Reno) for fifteen minutes straight.

Beach House is from Baltimore and, in a word, “dreamy”. The members are both heavy-lidded and unkempt, possibly leading you to question whether they have just woken up. The music, to me, is the sort of comforting white noise that you would encounter if you lived with someone else: hearts beating, pets breathing, air circulating. While I’ve always found it pleasant, I’ve never really felt strongly about it.

(You love how totally awkward that first still is. Who makes that kind of decision?)

I like the way this song feels once I get there, but it’s hard for me to decide that that’s really where I want to go. Even more so than Pela, the lyrics are rapidly approaching inconsequential. Upon investigation, they seem trite; in the context of their accompaniment, they’re incredibly moving. The interplay of Victoria Legrand’s understated vocals and the pulse of whatever textures are beneath it brings an understated moodiness to every song, rendering even the most prosaic statements…evocative.

Evocative in a sullen way. In a way that guarantees that I’m not only not mad when she croons “there’s something wrong with our hearts”, but actually kind of weirdly in agreement. Like…”oh, yeah, I totally get this, there’s something not medically defective, but defective nonetheless, about my heart, too! How insightful! I’m going to listen to this album again!”

I am going to be seeing Beach House when they open for Vampire Weekend this fall, so we’ll see if that strangely hypnotic power can take hold in a live setting.

When I listened to this record, I felt very connected to its reluctant insistence on its own strength. It’s like, “Oh, hey, I’m uh…don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I promise.” In this song in particular, “The Trouble with River Cities”, the vocalist seems to be trying to convince himself that he is going to be able to survive whatever he’s going through, but his voice is just…faltering. “Yeah, there’s an undertow,” he says, “but it ain’t got me”. You don’t even need to listen to the words–good, because they’re often incomprehensible–to get what’s going on here. The delivery itself is so evocative as to upstage the lyrics. I dig it.

Weirdly enough, Pela broke up a little under a year ago, just a few years after “Anytown Graffiti” came out and before any of their newer material was officially released.

I listened to the album about four times straight through, then ended up listening to “The Trouble with River Cities” about thirty times on repeat. A solid choice from a defunct rock ‘n roll band to which I will definitely return.

Regular readers will not notice a difference in posting frequency, so I’m not really going to apologize.

Until after my defense (mid-August), I’m going to try to approach the blog a little differently.

I listen to a lot of music. Part of this is because I work in a very social environment. Since I’m unable to physically sequester myself, I isolate myself from my beloved labmates with music when I really need to get something done. Lately, because of the looming proposal defense, this has been all of the time.

The major issue with this approach is, as you might suspect, the amount of time that I can waste trying to figure out what music is mood and activity appropriate. Additionally, I am an egregious music repeater; that is, listening to a song over and over usually only causes my affection for a piece to swell, and it’s rare that I will declare something “played out”. Given both of these things, I have basically been listening to the setlist from a concert I saw in early June for the past month and a half. Occasionally, I decide that it’s time to re-evaluate my listening habits, but I inevitably stall during the decision-making process and end up falling back on “Terrible Love”.

I cannot afford to waste time while I’m writing. (This may lead you to ask why, exactly, I am updating my blog while writing at all. Well, my friends, this blog entry is the first in a series of what I am going to call, in honor of my advisor, the “throwing my scarf over the fence” posts, in which I force myself to write so that I may continue to write, if that makes any sense, without any revision or restructuring. This post is a permanent first draft.) As such, I’ve resolved to listen to one completely different album a day and only that album. I suspect that all of the energy that I usually devote to agonizing over my musical selection can thus be reallocated to the “agonizing over technical writing/my imminent failure as a graduate student” category of my brain, increasing my productivity.

My experience listening to the Baths album, Cerulean, last week gave me confidence in the soundness of this hypothesis. Yesterday, I expanded the pilot study to include the classic Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and today, I have not shifted from Kill the Moonlight. My friend has already suggested an album for me for tomorrow, and I welcome further suggestions from the peanut gallery. I strongly suspect that music that I’m less familiar with permits a higher level of productivity–apologies to my first and second husbands–so don’t be shy about reaching out.

I’m not really sure what I’ll end up saying about album-a-day (yes, I am approximately that creative), if anything. Still, it’s comforting to have a semi-creative distraction when your daily mission is decidedly dry, right?

Yeah, that’s right.

Life would be kind of different if I were pursuing employment on a whaling ship.

If it were up to me (and weren’t for Christopher Hitchens already articulating this observation), I would group these five chapters in Moby-Dick together and call them “How Believing in Things You Cannot See Makes Everyone Around You Sort of Crazy”. Between the hullabaloo surrounding Queequeg’s ramadan (Chapter 17), Bildad’s inability to accept any non-Christian shipping on The Pequod (Chapter 18), and all of this anxiety about the still invisible Captain Ahab (Chapters 19-21), I am finding it virtually impossible to believe that Melville had any religion at all, although a cursory Google search has not really illuminated the subject for me. Since this is, you know, a blog, and not a my full-time occupation (although, if you would like to pay me to write this nonsense, I would really appreciate the cash flow right now), I’m going to leave the historical Melville and religion question for another time. Meanwhile, I will present the literary evidence:

1. Knowing that Queequeg is locked up in their room performing some fasting and/or humiliation, Ishamael excuses himself from the inn for a day. While he, as a good Presbyterian, finds the ramadan useless/potentially a mark of Queequeg’s inferiority, he does note the futility of arguing with a religious man, saying “Heaven have mercy on us all–Presbyterians and pagans alike–for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head , and sadly need mending”.

2. When Ishmael returns to the inn and cannot enter his room because the fasting, humiliation, etc.-fest is still on, rather than accepting that this might be the case (and given that Queequeg’s harpoon has somehow gotten into the room, where it was forbidden), Ishmael launches into a screaming panic attack about a possible apoplectic spell that has killed his friend. This, in turn, launches the landlady into a rant about procuring a sign forbidding suicides on the premises of her inn. Queequeg is fine. Since he’s a cannibal, you shouldn’t doubt his fineness at all.

3. When Bildad and Peleg don’t want to let Queequeg ship because he looks like a pagan, Ishmael speaks up on his friend’s behalf, saying that he is a member of the the “same ancient Catholic Church,” to which “every mother’s son and soul of us belong”. Our race, to couch it in terms more familiar to the times, is the human race. Good for you, Ishmael, although your narration sometimes makes me doubt the sincerity of that claim.

4. Peleg, the less devout Quaker of the Pequod’s owners, makes a particular rousing speech at the end of Chapter 18: when faced with death on some previously doomed trip–with Ahab, of course–Peleg did not, as Bildad has suggested the pious would do, think of Judgement. Rather, in the throes of death, the sailor though of life, and “how to save all hands–how to rig jury-masts–how to get into the nearest port; that was what [he] was thinking of”. The occupation of whaling, according to Peleg, does not lend itself to the mentality of the pious; death and judgement should never be welcomed in such a context. I love the simultaneous practicality and sacrilege of Peleg’s rant, especially given its intended audience. At the least, we are left with the impression that there is something more to the whaling voyage than can be dealt with by scholarly adherence to faith. At most (and I’m tempted to stretch here, so please, stay with me), we could see a lashing out at the complacency that goes hand-in-hand with Bildad’s devotion, a complacency that interferes with the very mission at hand: to whale.

5. A smallpox-scarred prophet named, duh, Elijah tells Ishmael and Queequeg that they’ve made a huge mistake in shipping the Pequod, but obviously won’t tell them why, because that would destroy the tension that Melville is creating here. This is in direct contrast to the advice given to the pair by Queequeg’s little carved god, who wanted the men to ship whatever vessel was chosen in an uneducated fashion by Ishmael while Queequeg was, you know, ramadan-ing. Additionally, this serves as a continuation of the suspense generated by the invisible, yet obviously central, character of Ahab. (What’s fabulous to me about all of this is that, at the time of M-Dick’s inception, Melville couldn’t have fathomed that his captain’s name would someday come to stand for something even more culturally identifiable than the Biblical Ahab’s: total obsession. The passages here play nicely upon our cultural literacy, and, I think, underscore Melville’s mastery.) When Elijah isn’t sowing more seeds of doubt and, literarily, foreshadowing bad shit on the horizon, Ishmael is generally taking on those responsibilities, obsessively reassuring himself that he doesn’t need to see Ahab beforehand or anything to have a good three year voyage under his command. In Chapter 21, when Queequeg and Ishmael finally board the ship, they learn from someone else that Ahab has boarded, but we still don’t get to meet the captain: he’s too busy being “invisibly enshrined in his cabin”. Enshrined, eh? Like a god, perhaps? Is merely convenient that someone with such power over our narrator remains as such?

The trappings of religion, and of the invisible heads of them, are on Melville’s mind as Ishmael commits himself to a voyage that we already know (because, as readers who know how this is going to end, we are god-like) is doomed.

I am officially one hundred pages into the tome, now (actually, nearly eighteen percent through). If I continue my current pacing–which has been replete with diversions and outside reading–that means I should be through with this project on April 8, 2012. Considering my tendencies for outside reading, side projects, and serious blog neglect, I would say that would be skating in just in time.

1. I have had a huge glass of a bold malbec (the boldest in the store, according to the clerk, and I always believe clerks, having once been one that no one particularly seemed to believe).

2. The air-conditioning in my apartment has been running since four o’clock this afternoon, and yet the temperature on my futon (read: right next to the window unit) is still eighty seven effing degrees Fahrenheit.

3. When attempting to steam some vegetable dumplings for my evening meal, I managed to give myself some impressive second-degree burns on my right hand, which is currently drenched in spray analgesic and swathed in gauze.

4. I am listening to my newly arrived Destroyer vinyl reissues and the NPR recap of the Kagan confirmation hearings at the same time, which would be challenging under normal circumstances, but, given reasons 1 and 2, has deteriorated into a tragic mash-up of misguided patriotism, civil libertarianism, and impossibly convoluted metaphor. (I propose that all future Supreme Court nominees be subjected to a round of the Destroyer Drinking Game, since our current confirmation proceedings make approximately as much sense and are far less entertaining.)

However, my lovely and patient readers, nothing, not even the melodious riffing of Nina Totenberg, could distract me from what I’ve read today. And that, as you may have already ascertained, was another chapter of Moby-by-
god-Dick.

The last time I met Ishmael, I was harping on about how Melville (and, by virtue of the Big Geoff/little Geoff narrative style invoked by Chaucer, our narrator, too) really, well, gets me. When Ishmael isn’t operating on some sort of ridiculous phrenological pretense, he expresses sentiments that a fourteen-year-old-me would have been ecstatic to see penned in such a prestigious tome. I believe that liking your narrator, even if you aren’t supposed to trust him, is ninety percent of the battle–think about how you felt the last time you read The Catcher in the Rye and you’ll probably be able to directly pinpoint when I mean. And while I’ve often been unkind to Ishmael’s wailings about cannibals and country bumpkins, there is one thing that I really appreciate about little Melville: his hypos.

In chapter 16, Ishmael finds himself in the unique position of being directed by Queequeg’s little black idol (whose name is Yojo, in case you felt that Ish was being culturally insensitive every time he referred to it as an inanimate object instead of, you know, a deity) to go on and pick a ship without his cannibal roomie. In the meantime, Queequeg would hang back to perform his usual trifecta of responsibilities: more idol-worshipping, eating raw beefsteaks, and spooning with his harpoon. Ishmael makes the point that Queequeg really trusts Yojo, considering him a benevolent god whose heart is always in the right place, even if his end game is a little off. Still, Ishmael’s uneasy acceptance of Yojo’s proposal to pick the boat himself, thus disregarding any expertise that Queequeg may bring to the table, doesn’t bode well.

There are three ships in the harbor from which Ishmael must make his selection. The one that he’s going to end up on for the next three years (!) is called the Pequod, and its appearance provides ample opportunity for our narrator to exercise his obscure-biblical-references muscles. The ship is so venerable as to appear bearded, and her masts are as stiffly rendered as the vertebrae of Christ’s three wise men. That the Pequod is named after an extinct tribe of Native Americans is just one more lovely morbid touch on its already gloomy brow: Ishmael compares her to a “barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory”. My favorite line, a mere breath later, describes the Pequod as “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies”. The owners of this ship are not kidding: she is dripping with whale remnants; even steered by a tiller made of whalebone. “A noble craft,” Ishmael notes, “but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

I kind of hate to say it at this point, but I agree. The delicate tinge of melancholy that appends every grand story of nobility (Camelot, the Romanovs, Camelot II) is part of what draws us in; what lets us tell the story again. Ishmael is not really pulling his foreshadowing punches at this point: he is preparing us, line by line, for the great, transcendental sorrow of his story. He wants us to know that the sorrow isn’t common; it’s noble. Well, I think we need to be the judge of that.

We don’t, unfortunately, meet Captain Ahab in this chapter. Apparently, it’s fairly common for men to sign three-year-long contracts with captains that they’ve never met, and Ahab has recently suffered the loss of his leg, so he’s probably not taking visitors. Ishmael does, however, meet the characatures that serve as dominant owners of the Pequod: Bildad and Peleg. While both are Quakers, the former is discernibly more intense than the other about his faith–enough to move Ishmael to thee and dost in the Quaker fashion. Thinking back on Bildad’s biblical namesake, who famously asked the unjustly suffering Job “Does God pervert justice?”, Melville’s scheme becomes obvious: we don’t need to like this man. While the Bildad of Job appeared to follow the teachings of the Bible to the exact letter, he was mistaken in presuming to understand the intentions of God. Peleg, meanwhile, warns Ishmael not to think too much on the Biblical meaning of Ahab’s name (with a name like Ishmael, how could you?), although he doesn’t do much to dissuade the rumors that the captain of the Pequod is “desperate moody–and savage sometimes.” As far as I’m concerned, this is a fairly normal course of behavior following the removal of your leg by a whale. I’m not mad.

A tangible mood of melancholy has settled on Ishmael during this chapter, one which, to be honest, I have missed since the appearance of Queequeg. While we, as readers, are well aware (and possibly even admirable) of our narrator’s desire to satiate his wanderlust while in the employ of a whaling ship, his desire to “see the world” falls flat with the Pequod’s owners. When forced to look toward the horizon from the harbor, Ishmael must admit that, when looking to the sea, “the prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding”. Peleg reproaches him, asking if it isn’t possible to see the world from where he stands.

If Ishmael had taken this advice, he would not be the narrator he is to us: someone so wizened by events that we have yet to read about as to be mildly irritating but still beloved. “All men tragically great,” the man remarks, “are made so through a certain morbidness.” While he may be referring to Ahab on one level–a man he hasn’t yet met, but whom inspires in him a confusing sense of awe–he is just as easily referring to himself, the man he will become as the novel presses on, the man who we will, I hope, encounter with the same sense of confusion and compassion as we press forward through Moby-Dick.

Obviously, lately, I have not been in the mood to listen to Ishmael whine.

I left Moby-Dick in a very logical place: the arrival of Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket. It’s a good thing, too, because I haven’t read any Melville in over a month and I’m still not entirely sure that I even want to right now. Chapters 14 and 15 (“Nantucket” and “Chowder”), though, are softballs even by normal, non-Melvillian standards.

Before Queequeg and our intrepid narrator can set foot on the island, it is necessary to thoroughly introduce it to the reader. Nantucket–or Nantucket!, as Ishmael would have it–is not populated by super-rich relatives of the Kennedys yet. The natives are prone to exaggeration re: its barrenness and isolation, but seriously, quips Ish, “these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois”. Since I’m refractory to the idea that American “civilization” has extended itself west of the Appalachian Mountains, the joke is lost on me. If it even is one.

Mythology first: the first settlers of Nantucket were Native Americans trying to recover a baby that had been stolen by a eagle. Obviously, the infant did not survive the passage, but the welcoming desolation of Nantucket somehow spellbound the men, and they never left. Since the island offered no obvious way to support the new commune, its residents took to the sea, then proceeded to conquer its watery ass. Once the stage of mythos has been fully constructed, Melville dresses it fully with images of Nantucketers as a race of Alexanders. When he goes Biblical, he does it in a way that I appreciate: Noah’s flood couldn’t've taken these mothers out, you see, even though it took out, er, everyone, pretty much. When Nantucketers “go down to the sea in ships”, they are doing it very much in the sense of Psalms; that is, they’re seeing the work of the Lord.

It’s kind of true, isn’t it? I’m not a sailor, nor do I have the desire to be one. (Please, hide your disappointment.) As cranky as I am about my return to M-Dick–I’m reading Carson McCullers right now, and I would much rather be in rural Georgia than New England–I read the Nantucket chapter four times this evening. It’s three pages, but the third is mostly just white space. Without cramming too much trite nonsense about the unexplored frontier that the ocean remains down your throat, how can I tell you how strongly, passionately, intensely I have felt its force in my life? How it is, in the most Rilkean sense, a beauty and a terror to me? How, when I lived on an island, I felt cradled, not isolated, by it?

“We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.” I can’t tell you because I am not Melville. Melville knows. Melville can take all of the archetypes, all of the icons, all of the thousands of years of human dependence on water and make it feel like it was a sentiment that he invented and you just incidentally happened to experience.

Chapter 15 is called “Chowder”. In it, Ishamael and Queequeg consume a lot of the New England varietal at their Nantucket inn and Mr. Queequeg is not permitted to sleep next to his harpoon. No beefsteaks for breakfast and no harpoon in the bedroom? Sounds like an active effort on the part of the management to discourage a certain type of clientele…

Okay, the cannibalistic type. Come on. What would you do?

Now that my faith in Melville has been reaffirmed and my classes have ended, I would like to make promises that my progress through Moby-Dick will be faster. A better policy, though, would be to continuously underachieve so as to dazzle you with my actual updates. Loyal followers, I’m sorry to disappoint: the two of you will just have to call me up if you want any of my sparkling insight into life, the universe, and everything.

I started keeping a journal because I knew that I would grow up to be a writer and, as such, find every thought that had ever occurred to me to be invaluable, especially when writing my memoirs. I haven’t held on to many of my journals, possibly because I have completely become the Tilda Swinton character in Burn After Reading (“Why in God’s name would anyone think that’s worth anything?”) and possibly because I’m incredibly attracted to the idea of a dramatic physical act delineating one period of time from another in my life. This is beautifully accomplished by the feverish disposal of a diary, whether through a cathartic tearing session or a good bathtub drowning.

Still, I have quite the collection from high school onwards, some of them running concurrently, some of them online, most of them missing pages, many of them abandoned before they had been filled. I still have some that I’ve never written in at all, including one with a really nice note from my high school creative writing teacher about my power to change the world and all. As an undergraduate, I switched to Moleskines: they still stand at attention in a locked drawer in a desk whose top is now (almost inexplicably) covered with papers from Cell and Nature and hundreds of dollars worth of slick-looking textbooks. And online journals never die: even though I can no longer access many of them, I tend to believe that they still exist, each immortalizing a distinct period of exhibitionism in my life until they were abandoned.

I’m still writing in a Moleskine, sort of: I’ve had it since the fall of 2007 and the last item in it is a list of paintings that I liked at the Phillips Art Gallery in Washington. I don’t carry it around with me, usually: the last entry before that is one on vertical farming, which is actually more of a series of lecture notes than any original thoughts. I feel like I’ve lost focus with writing; almost like I don’t see the value in documentation anymore. Looking back over my intense, uneven collections of my thoughts, I don’t feel that I gain much insight.

So, here’s the question: is journal-keeping a form of narcissism, a stage upon which we can play out the most overwrought tableaux so that we don’t have to subject other to our insufferable inner monologue? Was my obsession with journal-keeping a form of teenaged narcissism that lasted too long, or is there some way to find value in that sort of record-keeping, possibly even to revive it, to make it a constructive force in my life?

I don’t know the answer to that.

As far as I know, my grandfather never looked back over those writings. Why keep such a record at all? When I die, will those surrounding me search for meaning in my late-night sloppy script, my crushes and antagonists? Is that my secret desire: that someone recognize the internal commentary of a woman leading a completely ordinary life?

I don’t know the answer to that, either.