DigiWriMo Update, and not much else.

Life has a way of getting in the way of goals. I'm swamped. I'm not giving up on DigiWriMo yet, but I'm giving myself a break for not having posted anything since Saturday. I lost track of some of my digital writing since then, but of what I can track, I was at 4305 words from my last post until I started writing this one. And just for fun, here's a frequency count of the 10 most common words I typed or texted:

1. me 29 (8%)
2. just 19 (5%)
3. think 19 (5%)
4. data 19 (5%)
5. good 18 (5%)
6. how 18 (5%)
7. Joe 18 (5%)
8. too 17 (5%)
9. don't 17 (5%)
10. will 15 (4%)

It's a little disappointing to see that my number 1 word was "me."



Word Count

Running total: 8,246
Day 8 target: 13,336
 

Writing on writing

This is going to be longish, folks--I've got some catching up to do on my word count. And since I'm having trouble thinking of what to write about, I'm going to do what any self-respecting scholar would do: I'm going to go meta, and write about writing.

The first human writing was primarily numbers, for record keeping. Wikipedia tells me that the first writing of language occurred in at least two times and places, independently: in ancient Sumer around 3200 BCE, and Mesoamerica around 600 BCE. The Sumerians, humanity's earliest known writers, wrote using a stylus on clay tablets, and their writing was initially used for bookkeeping.

The Egyptians, who may or may not have developed their hieroglyphic writing system due to the influence of the Sumerians, used writing not only for economic but also for religious and military purposes. Semitic workers developed an alphabet in Ancient Egypt around 1800 BCE. These "Proto-Semites" wrote graffiti and "votive texts" on Mount Sinai.

The Ancient Chinese wrote divinatory texts on bones and turtle shells. And the earliest known writers in the Americas, the Maya, likewise initially tended to employ writing for sacred purposes.

Eventually people started using writing not only for economic or devotional purposes, but also to record ideas and poetry. I sometimes wonder whether those early writers ever struggled to think of what to write.

Plato's Socrates (really the only Socrates we know, since he never wrote anything himself) was suspicious of writing. He argued (quite correctly, as it turned out) that writing would destroy memory and cause people to profess knowledge they did not actually possess. Memory and knowledge meant something rather different in oral cultures than they do now, of course. It is true that, if you can write something down, you don't have to commit it to memory--and that a memory recorded externally is qualitatively different from a memory etched in the mind. Our memories are not what they were.

The problem with writing, Socrates said, was that you can't ask it questions--or at least you can, but it can't explain itself; it can only repeat the same words again and again. And that is why it doesn't count as knowledge--to know something means to be able to explain and re-explain how you know it. Writing doesn't "know", it just "is," but it enables people who can read it to pretend to knowledge they haven't "earned"--they haven't worked it out for themselves, but just gotten it from a book. So, with writing, something was lost, but something was also gained.

I wonder how often Plato struggled to find words for his ideas. I wonder how often he struggled to find ideas for his words.

The problem of what to say (or write) and how is one of the two primary concerns of rhetoric (the other is analyzing what's been said and how). Classical rhetoric broke the problem down into five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Scholars continue to argue about which of the canons deserve the most attention, but since I've started this blog, invention has been on my mind.

For ancient rhetoricians, invention was all about the topoi--the topics, or places to find things. But they weren't really talking about things to write about or places where ideas could be found--such a catalogue, being potentially infinite, could never be completed, and Aristotle, the great systematizer of ancient rhetoric, did something much more clever. His topoi represent "basic categories of relationships among ideas". And the ways we can construct relationships among ideas turn out to be rather more manageable.

Anyway. Those who know me, know that I am rarely at a loss for something to say. But having something to write seems to be quite another matter. And having something to write about every day seems positively daunting. Aristotle reminds me that it isn't so much having something to write about, but about making connections.

Audience is another problem. Not only do I have to think about who might be reading this blog, but also who might read it in the future. Like everyone, I have multiple identities: sister, daughter, friend, colleague, scholar, teacher, student, Latter-day Saint, woman, Latter-day Saint woman (yes, those are three distinct, though never separate identities), Doctor Who fan, roommate, among others. Many of those identities overlap, but they are sometimes in tension with one another (scholar and Latter-day Saint, for instance, are often perceived by others as being in tension, if not generally by me--but that perception itself generates a tension). And new identities arise over time.

When I write this blog, which "me" am I? And which of "you" am I writing to? Perhaps, in writing this, I am calling forth new identities for myself and my audience. All of these identities and the tensions between them are, of course, sites of rhetorical invention--they represent potential relationships among ideas, as well as actual relationships between people.

The stakes are not trivial. It may be that I will never have more than a handful of readers. Perhaps only family and friends, but potentially also future employers, colleagues, federal agents, and the odd web-crawling AI. I hope, at any rate, that my readers will be friendly, or at the very least, kindly disposed toward the "me" that is embodied in the words that I write.

The full title of this blog, generously supplied by my good friend Nancy, is "Rebeccaland: where everything is just like it is in my head." That title was a bit too long for Blogger to display properly, so I shortened it, but in shortening it, something was lost. Indeed, I've been meditating on this very interesting title for the last few days. Nancy loves layers of meaning--I mean, loves them even more than I do, and that's saying a lot. She's a Joyce scholar.

The title is both the product of invention, and a new site of invention. It is the product of the particular relationship among the ideas that I have of Nancy and she has of me and each of us have of what blogging is or can be--among other things. It also represents the potential range of topics this blog might contain, and suggests a certain attitude toward them (an attitude which is tied to that complex of interpersonal perceptions I just talked about).

Basically, I think that this blog isn't so much going to be like the inside of my head (which is really full of a great many things that ought best to stay inside my head; they won't stand for being shoved onto the front stage of a blog), as it is like what Nancy thinks the inside of my head is like--a bit like Disneyland, only without the commercialism, and with more books. So, like a cross between Disneyland and a library. Or, to put it another way, it will be full of random happy geeky things with a generous side of pondersomeness (and the odd neologism sprinkled in here and there).



Word Count

Friday: 221
Saturday: 1893
Running total: 3815
Day 3 target: 5001

It's a blog. I'm a blogger now. Blogging is cool.

My friend Nancy does NaNoWriMo every year. She's awesome, and someday she'll publish a bestseller and I'll get to mooch off her millions. Anyway, this year I found out about DigiWriMo, and I thought, what the heck? 50,000 digital words in a month! Well, now that the challenge is upon me, I realize that that's 1,667 words per day. For any of my students reading this, that basically means I have to write the equivalent of a 7-page paper Every. Single. Day. 12,500 words per week: that's basically the equivalent of a frigging THESIS, every week. So yeah.

I don't know how many of the official DigiWriMo challenges I'll take part in, but I definitely need to set some ground rules for myself. Anything that is written and published digitally counts, so long as it is intended for an audience beyond myself. That means seminar notes, which I record on my tablet, don't count unless somebody asks me to share them. But text messages, emails, tweets, Facebook status updates, homework submitted electronically, the fairy story I've been meaning to finish writing and email to my niece, and messages I post to my students on Schoology, all count. Plus, of course, this blog, which is where I plan to be getting most of my word count. Which is why this blog, like the TARDIS, can go anywhere in all of time and space. Anywhere I like. 50,000 words is a lot, guys.

Now, not all of that digital writing will be publicly available, of course, but I'll keep a running count on my daily blog posts. So far, I'm at 875 words. That's just over halfway to my daily goal.

Update: total word count of the day=1701