Showing posts with label diary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diary. Show all posts

dear diary


As a long-time diary aficionado, I couldn't resist the chance to take a peep at Ctrl.Alt.Shift's Dear Diary, which ran for two weeks in May at Super Superficial's Gallery 7.

In a little room in the basement of a Covent Garden shop, this tiny exhibition offered up a selection of written and audio diaries from young people from all over the world, ranging from the visual journals of Dan Eldon, a young photojournalist who was killed on the front line by an angry mob in Mogadishu at the age of 22, to musings from Kurt Cobain, Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath. Extracts written by teenage Kenyans living in a context of extreme poverty, violence and political instability were side-by-side with the unpublished diaries of ordinary British people, collected by the British Library's Irving Finkel. A comfy chair in the corner provided a space to browse a bookshelf of famous diaries and journals, and to jot down your own diary entry to add to the selection on offer.

The exhibition was complemented by an aptly-named event, Cringe at Hoxton Hall, which saw the theatre transformed into an 80s-style teenage bedroom complete with pin-up posters and The Breakfast Club playing on a TV screen. Readers from Henry Holland to Brett Anderson read extracts from their own or others' diaries seated on a bed strewn with copies of Just Seventeen, Smash Hits and Jackie, accompanied by music from Jodie Harsh and Matt Horne. As a part of the project, Ctrl.Alt.Shift have also launched a limited-edition diary, with a cover illustrated by Alexa Chung and featuring extracts from Courtney Love, Daniel Johnson and Anais Nin, with all proceeds going towards work with young people from the slums of Nairobi.

Blending the entertainingly kitsch and toe-curlingly self-indulgent with some serious questions about how diaries of all kinds help young people to deal with even the most traumatic experiences, and resonating with Ctrl.Alt.Shift's wider purpose as a movement fighting social and global injustice, Dear Diary was an enjoyable and sometimes thought-provoking little show. However I was left feeling that this was really just the tip of the iceberg - for me at least, this fascinating and rich literary form has lots of interesting depths still to be explored.

not doing well: blog vs diary


I have not upheld my pledge to write here more in May. It’s already the 23rd (how did that happen, exactly?) and I have but two measly posts.

I've been wondering why it is that I don't seem to be writing this blog quite as much as I once was. Perhaps it's partly because, in the last couple of months, I've got back into writing a diary much more regularly. I have long been an avid writer of diaries: I started writing when I was twelve, and have continued ever since. But I do have 'on' and 'off' phases with it - and at the moment I'm definitely in an 'on' phase. I've got back into the habit of writing every day, and perhaps that has absorbed some of my need to write here.

But that in itself is interesting. I have always felt that a private, paper diary and a blog, however personal, were inherently different, separate spaces - one very much for yourself alone, and the other, whether you acknowledge it or not, by its very nature designed for an audience, for a very public readership. But maybe they aren't really so very different: perhaps secretly our 'public' blogs are for ourselves before they are for anyone else, after all...

I'd be interested to know what others think. Do you keep a diary, or write a blog, or both? Which do you prefer and why? What do you think the real differences are between them as formats - and what is it that motivates you to keep going?


Meanwhile here's a few other things:

Emily started a very interesting discussion about blogging and anonymity, writing and autobiography on her blog which Jenn and Max joined in here and here and here.

Ben unmasked himself as the author behind not only the Although I am not as delicious as I once was... blog by the mysterious 'Rosetta Hampshire,' but of a whole Patchwork Labyrinth of slowly-unravelling blog-based metafiction! I am looking forward to reading more...

Booooooom! and Design for Mankind’s Free Encouragement project (which I blogged about back here) has now launched its much-anticipated second stage. Take a look at their beautiful Free Encouragement postcards here.

I have another book review at Bookmunch – this time for Anne Michael’s second novel, The Winter Vault. You can read it here.

Manchester Writing is a new and most useful blog bringing together news and reviews of writing and readings around Manchester. Check it out here.

Main things I am doing at the moment: eating, sleeping, reading obscure 1920s prose poems for my dissertation, playing the piano (item number seven on this list), rock pool dabbling, baking cakes, watching the kittiwakes, contemplating whether or not to buy myself a bicycle with a basket, admiring bluebells and paddling in the sea.

[Pictures are via We Heart It here and here]