I do so hate it when my friends catch me in a contradiction.

In her comment to what is, until I post this one, my only post on LJ, my no longer autopseudonymous friend Ellen points out that I regularly send e-mails to one friend, but cc the e-mail to three or four others.  If I just blogged these comments, she argues, I would leave a permanent trace of my thoughts and opinions, rather like the diary of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest, whose entries are the simple thoughts of a young girl, and as such are destined for publication.

So true, or at any rate, quite true enough.  It is one of my favorite rhetorical tricks, and therefore I am sure it is bad for my character, to talk to a person about a second person, in that second person's presence, and of course the only way to do that in cyberspace is to cc that person.  Naturally under those circumstances you're not really trash talking that person --usually you are trying to praise them in faux mockery-- but then again, that suits me:  I really like my friends, and if I do want to vent about them I don't really want it to get back to them.  (Like Kathy Griffin, I was brought up properly, I only talk trash about people behind their backs.)

But as a result I think I have been honing a style of address that is sort of like the Wordsworthian ideal of feigning to ignore the audience, while one is caught up with lyric spiritus or imagination or what have you; only in a social mode, in which I feign to ignore one part of an audience while carrying on a conversation with another part.  This is still not the truly anonymous addressee of conventional fiction; however, all the time in real life real people end up reading mixed messages although they themselves were not conceived of as part of the mix. (As a gringo Latin Americanist, I do this almost rigorously:  by most criteria, almost no Latin American writers write for People Like Me.)  

Enough.  Now I have to go read the article in today's New York times about why well over 90% of the internet's bloggers have given up on the project.

 A certain friend of mine --let's call her "Ellen"-- has just reminded me that I have an LJ account, but have posted nothing on it.  She also reminds me that I write eloquent, fulsome postcards to her and to friends, and she seems to think that LJ and postcards are equivalent.  

Alas, I beg to differ.  I have been known to talk a lot --the prerogative of a college professor-- and to forget the specifics of the audience I am talking to.  Why, just a few hours ago I was at a birthday party of a friend --a birthday party that prevented me from attending the party of another friend, let's call her "Delia"-- and held court for far too long about things I did not know, as well as the plot, thematics, and mood of Toni Morrison's most recent novel, which I did.  

Perhaps "Ellen" does not realize this, but I actually am quite conscious of my audience when i write postcards; and there is something soothing but also energizing about the finality of the white pasteboard lower-right-hand corner.  

But I feel as though I at least owe "Ellen" an explanation, and I thank her for reminding me what my Live Journal name is --since I had, indeed forgotten it.  

Not believing in open-ended communication makes it hard to write either fiction or non-fiction.