A good assistant to your future self

From austinkleon.com

By Austin Kleon

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today's date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work,  all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

https://austinkleon.com/2023/03/20/a-good-assistant-to-your-future-self/ 

Cook's diary shares details from American Civil War front lines

From eu.newarkadvocate.com

By Doug Stout

Charles A. Cook was born in Licking County on March 15, 1844. He was 17-years-old when he enlisted to fight in the Civil War on Jan. 20, 1862.

He served with Company C of the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry until his enlistment was over on Jan. 24, 1864. At that time having already been with his unit through the battles of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Arkansas Post, Vicksburg, Canton, Jackson, Lookout Mountain, Mission Ridge, and Ringgold Gap, he chose not to reenlist in the 76th. On June 25, 1864, Cook continued his service and enlisted with Company G of the 1st Veteran Volunteer Engineers. These men were tasked with repairing railroads, building block houses and bridges, and other general engineering duties for the army.

A page from the diary of Charles A. Cook, a Licking County soldier in the Civil War.  

COURTESY OF DOUG STOUT

The descendants of Cook have a diary that he kept. The small black cover was stamped 1865 and was marked inside with each date. In the back, there was a ledger that one could keep track of their finances by day as well as a calendar of the year. Cook remarked on Feb. 1, 1865 that he “bought this diary.” At the time he was stationed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. However, the diary has detailed entries from January 1, which leads us to believe he was keeping another diary and then just entered the details from that one to this one. His entries are mostly 3-4 sentences and center on the weather, his job for the day, what letters he received or wrote, and his health. Some might think this has no historical value, but they would be mistaken. There is very little online when researching his unit, so any information in his diary is helpful as to their movements and what they were doing. The other part, as you will see, is reading what the common soldier was thinking as the end of the Civil War approached in the coming months.

The diary began that January with Cook arriving opposite Decatur, Alabama, it is here that they are tasked with maintaining a bridge over the Tennessee, River. He stayed here until Jan. 30 when they were sent to Chattanooga, where he purchased the diary. For the next few days, he sat and did nothing. According to his entry on Feb. 3; “Weather cool with some rain. I cleaned my gun in the A.M. nothing in the P.M. worth mentioning. Health tolerable good.” On Feb. 7, it snowed heavily and they began work on a blockhouse, but according to Cook the ground was warm so it ended up just “very muddy”. Throughout the rest of February, he hauled lumber for the blockhouse through cloudy and rainy conditions. By Feb. 27, it had rained so much that the camp was flooding. The rain stopped however, and the creek “commenced falling” the next day. On March 4, he reported, “Weather cloudy, I was on guard last night. Between 8 and 11 it rained very hard while I was on duty. The president of the United States retaken his seat today.”

Abraham Lincoln had begun his second term in office. By March 5th, they had to “evacuate their quarters’ because of the rising floodwaters. Fortunately, for Carter on March 11, they left Chattanooga for a new job on the Duck River in Tennessee. They arrived there on March 18 and he noted: “Weather windy we left Carter Creek this morning and marched about 8 miles and camped near Duck River. Was on guard last night and today. This is a much pleasanter place than Chattanooga”. On March 15 he mentioned, “I am twenty-one years old today.”

He had been a soldier now for four years but his army days weren’t over yet and an occurrence after the war would bring Charles Cook national and international fame.

Doug Stout is the Veterans Project Coordinator for the Licking County Library. You may contact him at 740-349-5571 or dstout@lickingcountylibrary.org. His book "Never Forgotten: The Stories of Licking County Veterans" is available for purchase at the library or online at bookbaby.com & Amazon.com

https://eu.newarkadvocate.com/story/opinion/columnists/2023/03/18/veterans-column-cooks-diary-shares-details-from-civil-war-front/70015899007/ 

I was a former journaling sceptic but here’s what I learnt after a month of keeping one

From fashionjournal.com.au

By Tom Disalvo

“Expressive writing is scientifically proven to be beneficial, sometimes even as beneficial as seeing a therapist.” 

As little as three months ago, the practice of journaling was to me akin to a 2005 Panic! At The Disco album – perhaps cathartic in theory, but probably better suited to an angsty teen who wears Tumblr quote T-shirts. The concept of trauma dumping on an inanimate page seemed like a messy and needless exercise, especially for someone so emotionally talkative they worry their friends’ ears might bleed.

It’s this scepticism that I brought to the first day of January 2023, when I relented to an Oprah-level self-help epiphany and resolved to keep a journal every day for the remainder of the month. Vowing to write both my sins and my tragedies à la Brendon Urie, much of my early journal entries reflect my reluctance around the entire enterprise. 

“Don’t know what I’m hoping to achieve from this, LOL,” an excerpt dated January 1 reads. In that entry, I question the mechanics of journaling itself. I struggle with technicalities like handwriting (I should have my pen licence revoked), then worry that I sound like Elmo because I switch to third person on a whim.

“How does this work?” I write in the opening lines on day one, mustering the energy of Greg Heffley from Diary of a Wimpy Kid. By the end of the excerpt, I selfishly vow that at the very least, the journal will provide material for my biography – which at that point would constitute all of three paragraphs. Forthcoming entries remain equally uninspired. On January 8, I tell myself to go for a run and then lament not completing the task the following day. 

“Shower thought,” an excerpt from January 10 reads. “Why do I only break out when there’s a social event approaching?” While extracts like these pose uber-important questions for posterity, they nonetheless feel inconsequential as the first fortnight of my journaling experiment concludes. 

Then, on January 16, I was made redundant at work. Overnight, entries barely stretching a page now extended until the pen ink ran dry, and a former journaling sceptic had become a bonafide convert (excuse the third-person reference). 

Mary Potter Kenyon, a grief counsellor and author of the book Expressive Writing for Healing: Journal Your Way From Grief to Hope, also arrived at journaling from a place of loss. In March 2012, she lost her former spouse and wrote her first entry two days after his death. Now, Mary runs expressive writing workshops and has filled out some 20 journals since first adopting the practice over a decade ago. 

“Expressive writing helped me process emotions I didn’t know what else to do with,” Mary tells me. “Keeping a journal is an inexpensive form of therapy.” I see glimmers of Mary’s journaling experience in my own. Post-redundancy, I write with more intention and consciously attempt to make sense of day-to-day anxieties.

While anecdotes like this go some way in explaining the mental health benefits of journaling, Mary explains how the practice has also been viewed by research as a “flexible tool in our mental health toolbelt”.

“Expressive writing is scientifically proven to be beneficial, sometimes even as beneficial as seeing a therapist,” Mary says. “Research shows that short-term, focused writing can have a beneficial effect for anyone dealing with stress and trauma. Writing about emotionally charged topics [can] reduce symptoms of depression or anxiety, [oftentimes] with veterans experiencing PTSD, cancer patients and those who have experienced a loss of some sort.”

But even beyond the writing of emotions – which in retrospect allowed me to process and organise thoughts that might’ve otherwise proved dizzying – the physical act of penmanship has likewise proven invaluable for mental wellbeing. “Writing is a form of meditative practice,” Mary explains. “We have to consciously slow down to write.” 

With this understanding, I began re-reading my entries with a more attentive eye, a process equally as enlightening as the writing itself. I now find nestled even within the pages of my early scepticism some glimmers of manifestation and foresight. “I guess a big chunk of my day is now free to focus on new opportunities,” an entry four days after my redundancy reads. I pitched this very article the following day and here we are. 

Mary also speaks of journaling as a tool for the law of attraction. Long before she met him, Mary jotted down “a checklist of attributes [my future husband] would have,” she recalls. Upon their first date, Mary “checked off all the attributes” and years later, would read from that very entry as part of their wedding vows. That re-reading process in itself contains a healing and almost predictive benefit unavailable to those who don’t keep daily records.  

All of this is not to say that a journal can only be borne from a life-altering event. Mary recounts filling out an entire diary in the “period of extreme happiness” when she met her now-husband, offering a feel-good vessel to reminisce on their relationship. “I also journal through the good times,” Mary tells me. “[I can] relive the excitement of feeling like I was 19 again as we fell in love.” 

Now further removed from being laid off and with a more dimensional view of journaling, my entries have likewise become records of better times. Two months on, the pages mirror the ebbs and flows of life, albeit messily and in script seemingly more suited to a year five student. It’s all that chaos, Mary explains, that might’ve informed my initial scepticism.   

“Emotions are messy, so journal writing can also be messy,” Mary says. What was once a fear of dumping excess clutter has now become the very function of my journal – a record of the fact that my day-to-day, just like Greg Heffley’s, is beautiful because of all the mess.   

While there are no hard-and-fast rules to journaling, Mary has a few pointers. She recommends a notebook that suits one’s personality, four days of consistent entries for those just starting out, and a disregard for semantics, spelling and punctuation. Mary’s research has found that “cultivating gratitude increases our wellbeing,” so she also suggests ending each entry with a note of thanks.    

“By ending your journal entry on a positive note, you are training yourself to consciously choose joy and gratitude,” she says. It’s the same sentiment I now apply when reflecting on my own experience having put pen to paper for all these months. So in that spirit, I leave you with Mary’s final message in regards to keeping a journal; one that might’ve also been scrawled on my angsty pre-teen shirts: “Just give it a chance.”

For more on the benefits of journaling, try this.

https://fashionjournal.com.au/life/journalling-sceptic/

The power of Forbidden Notebook's hidden diary entries

From bbc.com

By Clare Thorp

The 1952 novel Forbidden Notebook reveals one woman's interior life with radical honesty. On International Women's Day, Clare Thorp explores how the book – which has just been republished in English – still resonates today, finding new audiences in repressive societies across the globe. 

There is always an illicit thrill in reading someone else's diary – even when it's fictionalised. But rarely has uncovering someone's innermost thoughts and desires felt as powerful as in Alba de Céspedes' 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook. From its opening line – "I was wrong to buy this notebook, very wrong" – the reader knows that what the book's protagonist is sharing with us is somehow dangerous. In this case, a 43-year-old married mother of two living in post-war Italy is, for the first time, daring to express her honest thoughts, feelings and desires – if only to herself, on the pages of a notebook.

If reading her diary entries feels like uncovering a secret, that feeling is only heightened by the fact that the novel itself has been out of print for decades. It has recently been reissued, first in Italy, and now in a new English language translation by Ann Goldstein. Goldstein is best known for translating Elena Ferrante's works, and it was Ferrante who first alerted her to Alba de Céspedes, with the author referencing her in her non-fiction 2003 book Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey. "She mentions her twice in Frantumaglia actually," says Goldstein. "She has this list of writers who are encouraging, and De Céspedes is one of them." Goldstein then tried to track De Cespedes' work down but struggled to find it. "I was interested in her, but I couldn't find any of her books. It was crazy."

In her day, Alba de Céspedes was one of the most popular authors in Italy, widely read not just in her own country, but many others too. "She was very well known in her day and then just kind of faded to almost obscurity with many other women writers too," says Goldstein.

When Goldstein finally got hold of a copy of Forbidden Notebook – published in Italian as Quaderno Proibito – she was enthralled. "It was just stunning in how modern it seems to me," she says. "The things that she discovers, she sees, it's what we all struggle with still, and that was a little alarming. Immediately you're just so pulled into it and engaged, it's just amazing. I just feel like everybody should read this book."

She's not the only person to be dazzled by De Céspedes' writing. Last year's Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux said: "Reading Alba de Céspedes was, for me, like breaking into an unknown universe." The author Jhumpa Lahari is also a fan, contributing a foreword to the new edition of Forbidden Notebook, in which she writes that it still "blazes with significance. Women's words are still laughed at, still silenced, still considered dangerous. De Céspedes vindicates, artfully and ardently, a woman's right to write – a right that must never be taken for granted."

Reading between the lines

The book takes the form of a series of diary entries made by 43-year-old Valeria Cossati in Rome in 1950. She is a wife to Michele and a mother of two grown-up children, Mirella and Riccardo. Somewhat unusually for her generation, she also has an office job.

One Sunday morning she goes to the tobacconist to buy cigarettes for her husband when she notices a pile of notebooks in the window – "black, shiny, thick, the type used in school". When she asks to buy one, the tobacconist tells her it is forbidden, as by law he is only allowed to sell tobacco on Sundays. She pleads and he gives in, insisting she "hide it under her coat" so the guard doesn't spot it.

She has no room of one's own, not even a drawer of one's own. The notebook becomes her only private space

Once home, it becomes no less clandestine, as she keeps it a secret from her family. She writes her name on it – a name that feels lost to her, as her husband calls her "mamma" like the children, and her parents call her "bebe". When, at dinner one night, she casually floats the idea of keeping a diary, her family laugh at her, incredulous at the idea she might have thoughts worth recording. "What would you write, mamma?" says her husband.

At first, she too feels she has nothing to write about aside from the "daily struggle" to hide the notebook – moving it from sewing basket to linen cupboard to suitcase. She has no room of one's own, not even a drawer of one's own. The notebook becomes her only private space.

Forbidden Notebook, once a bestseller in Italy, has been rediscovered in recent years (Credit: Pushkin Press)

But soon she is sharing more details – her inability to connect to and understand her daughter, her disappointment at her son's choices, her stale marriage. She stays up into the early hours, feigning insomnia, to find the time and privacy to write.

In recording her thoughts and feelings, she starts to rediscover who she is outside of her family, uncovering needs and desires that had been overtaken by her domestic duties. "I'd always thought I was transparent, simple, a person who had no surprises either for myself or for others," she writes.

There is a growing chasm between the person she presents to her family and friends, and the self she reveals in the notebook. "I find time to look at myself, to write in my diary." As she starts to rediscover herself as something more than a wife and mother, so do others too – including her boss, who she starts to spend more and more time with.

But in examining her life so closely, she becomes increasingly restless. "The better I know myself, the more lost I become," she writes. By the end of the book, the freedom her writing brings turns to fear. "Facing these pages, I'm afraid. All my feelings, thus dissected, rot, become poison and I'm aware of becoming the criminal the more I try to be the judge."

The novel was originally published as a serial in a magazine, La Settimana Incom Illustrata, over the same six-month span as the diary entries in the book. Like her protagonist, De Céspedes also kept a diary – though her own life was far removed from that of Valeria's. Born in Rome in 1911 to a Cuban father and Italian mother, De Céspedes' grandfather was Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who led Cuba's fight for independence from Spain and served as the country's first president. Her father also briefly served as president. Alba was married at 15, had a child at 16, and divorced by 20. She then began a writing career, initially as a journalist and later as a novelist and screenwriter. She was jailed twice for anti-fascist behaviour in 1935 and 1943, and in 1948 founded a literary magazine, Mercurio, that published writers including Ernest Hemingway and her contemporary Natalia Ginzburg. In the 1950s, she wrote a popular advice column. "Her life was quite different [from Valeria's]," says Goldstein. "But what is the same is the issues that she faced, like struggling between marriage and her career and what it meant to be a woman and whether women could or couldn't do certain things, and if not, why couldn't they?"

The personal is political

De Céspedes was writing at a time when women were pushing for change in Italy – only finally getting full voting rights in 1945. "Her first novel, Nessuno torna indietro [There's No Turning Back], is about a group of women all struggling with what their life is going to be, struggling against men and against all the restrictions that are put on them," says Goldstein. "The fascists tried to keep it from being published because this was not the idea of women that they wanted to be out there." The book was eventually published in 1938, to great success. "It sold incredibly. It was a bestseller, and the one after that was also a bestseller. So people really responded, women responded to her."

De Céspedes' writing may have described lives more mundane than her own, but in tackling domestic life – and the interior lives of women – with such radical honesty, she would go on to inspire other female writers to do the same, including Elena Ferrante.

Goldstein – who knows Ferrante's work better than anyone – instantly saw similarities between the two when she first read De Céspedes. "With Ferrante's characters, there's a huge difference in class and other details, but I think that they're still facing very similar issues of becoming yourself, of figuring out what is it that being a woman does for you and doesn't do for you, what particular struggles you have in society, in the family, and all those different ways."

De Céspedes' success might not quite have matched that of Ferrante – whose quartet of Neapolitan novels alone have sold more than 15 million copies, been published in 45 different languages and spawned a critically acclaimed TV adaptation – but in the 1940s and 50s she was one of Italy's most popular and well-known writers. So what happened?

Adam Freudenheim, publisher and managing director of Pushkin Press, the UK publisher of De Céspedes, thinks her popularity – especially as a woman – may have worked against her with the literary establishment of the time. "There could be a sort of snootiness about things that are successful and popular," he says. "These were books that were printed and published and well enough received at the time and they often sold well, but they were often not valued as highly by the establishment, which was, of course, largely male. Often they were sort of seen as women's writing for women."

The concept of a hidden diary, a space for recording thoughts that you weren't allowed to share publicly, resonated for those living in a repressive society

Yet while she faded from view in Italy, there was one place where her popularity soared. Following the election of Mohammad Khatami as President in 1997, Iran was going through something of a literary revolution with the government relaxing censorship, resulting in many books that had not been allowed before being published or republished. Writer and historian Arash Azizi was a teenager in Iran in the early 2000s. "If you went into a coffee shop in Iran in those days everyone was talking about books. Literature was really seen as this powerful thing that can really change the world."

Bahman Farzaneh, a highly regarded Iranian translator who has translated books from Spanish and Italian – including Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude – translated many of De Céspedes' works. "When you have someone like Bahman Farzaneh translating a book, you buy it just for the translator. They have the role of a cultural mediator," says Azizi. Several of De Céspedes' books were published in Persian, but Azizi says the one that stood out was Forbidden Notebook. "It was one of the most identifiable books of that era. Without fail, friends from Iran that are my age, they all remember the book."

He recalls it being especially popular among women – not only his peers, but women in their 30s, 40s and older. "I remember many of my female friends related to how the main character's husband calls her 'mamma', which she found very frustrating. They too wanted to be known as more than mothers."

The concept of a hidden diary, a space for recording thoughts that you weren't allowed to share publicly, resonated for those living in a repressive society. "What I really loved personally was this confessional tone," says Azizi. "This idea that you can reach a kind of emancipation by the power of words alone. For someone growing up in the repressive Islamic Republic, it was really powerful, because of all the things we couldn't do. We did live this double life."

Azizi is delighted more people will now discover the book. "I'm very excited that something that I grew up with can now be shared by my friends in the United States and around the world. The book is really a testament to that period of my youth, as well as a testament to the power of literature."

So, why is De Céspedes being rediscovered now? "I think Ferrante has a lot to do with it," says Goldstein, "Her popularity really led people to look for other Italian women writers." Freudenheim says there's been a resurgence of interest in women's writing from the late 1940s to 60s in general – and De Céspedes is part of that. Pushkin is planning to publish two more books by De Céspedes over the next two years – Her Side of The Story (1949) and her debut novel Nessuno Torna Indietro (There's No Turning Back).

"Literary rediscoveries are really exciting, full stop, but sometimes you can't actually imagine very many people reading them, because they're quite difficult or abstruse or dated in a way that doesn't resonate," says Freudenheim. "What's so exciting to me about this novel is that it is just an incredibly readable book, which is heartbreaking at the same time and very moving. It's a page-turner that has a lot to say. Everyone I know who has read it is struck by that."

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (translated by Ann Goldstein) has just been reissued by Pushkin Press.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230307-the-power-of-forbidden-notebooks-hidden-diary-entries

From donation to ownership, John Salmon's diary has a remarkable journey

From eu.news-leader.com

By Kathleen O'Dell

This is the story of a book that has a more fantastic tale that the book itself.

In 2014, a Friends of the Library volunteer sorting donations for the book sale discovered a rare find: the 1828 diary of John Salmon, a passenger aboard the American ship “Chelsea,” sailing from England to New York City. The donor remains unknown.

Genealogists researching the passenger manifest learned, among other things, that Salmon had been a bank clerk, led devotions with steerage passengers, and administered medicines to the sick.

The Friends used the journal as the basis for two readers’ theaters they performed in 2016. The Friends later digitized it for safe keeping. Local researchers found and added Salmon’s last will and testament.

This is an excerpt from John Salmon’s 1828 journal which chronicled his journey from England to America.  

COURTESY OF KATHLEEN O'DELL

Fast forward to 2023.

 Karen Crouch of North Oaks, Minnesota, emailed the Friends: Her research revealed that her husband Steve’s great-great grandparents Levi and Sarah Crouch and seven children had sailed to New York on the “Chelsea” in 1828. Her research about the ship led her to a 2016 Springfield news story about the journal discovery. Where was the journal, and could she read it?

The Friends sent Karen a PDF-transcribed file of Salmon’s journal and last will and testament. She was thrilled after reading the diary’s revelations: Early in the voyage, Salmon mentions giving medicine to Mrs. Crouch for indigestion. Only four days before arriving in New York, Salmon also noted the death of three children, including one of Mrs. Crouch’s daughters. He described the terrible agony and grief of the mothers as their children’s bodies were committed to the sea.

Karen’s email reached a Friends member who had purchased the diary years before. “Since it came into the hands of (the Friends), the Journal has been a lonely orphan waiting for a good home,” he wrote. Send your mailing address, and I will send Salmon to its new home; an orphan no more.”

The Salmon Journal may have made its final journey after 200 years. “My husband, Steve, and I felt amazed and in awe when we actually held it in our hands,” Karen wrote. She’s sending a donation to the Friends. “… Thank you for trusting me with this rare journal. It will be treasured and protected. With thanks and warmest wishes, Karen Crouch.”

Kathleen O’Dell is community relations director of the Springfield-Greene County Library District. She can be reached at kathleeno@thelibrary.org. 

https://eu.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2023/03/06/john-salmon-diary-gifted-to-springfield-library-district-has-new-owner/69967728007/

An Oxford Diary: How, Who, What, When, Why?!

By Tim Holman

Slow as ever, I've just realised that this blog contains no mention of my own book, An Oxford Diary, which was published in 2019. It's unlikely that many people will ever read this, so I'll jot down a few words now.

My book contains an edited sample of the handwritten diaries that I scribbled as an undergraduate at Oxford between 1977 and 1980. There is much to be said for writing something down and then waiting 40 years to publish it. For one thing, after 4 decades there's a lot less work to do - writing, for a starter. More importantly, after that amount of time one's jottings can reasonably be classified as a minor piece of social history since they reflect the values and use the language of the time in question.

I always describe my 3 student years as a "white-knuckle ride", since the ridiculous number of extra-curricular activities that I took part in always threatened to leave insufficient time for studying and getting a degree, which after all was meant to be the whole point of the exercise. The diary is a seemingly endless succession of essay crises, worries about finding accommodation for the following year, money crises in the business world of student journalism, revision crises for imminent exams, and much else. It was all 'go' in those days, or to put it another way I spent the time "doing" rather than "being." I hadn't expected my time at Oxford to be like this, but it was certainly an education in the broadest sense.

                                                      Trinity College "Freshers"         October 1977

Why publish at all? After 1980 the diaries joined those from previous years and sat on top of various bits of furniture in various lodgings in various locations and did no harm to anybody during the next 25 years or so. And yet, and yet, my time as a student had had a beginning, middle and end, unlike the regrettable shambles that has comprised so much of my life. There was something THERE, a story, even though my diary was more Adrian Mole than Samuel Pepys. 

At the beginning of 2006 I had just moved to a new city (yet again), was out of work, and had time on my hands. Meanwhile my Oxford college, Trinity, had established a successful archive and was grateful to receive historical artefacts concerning any events from its distinguished history (it was founded in 1555). I had already contributed a few items (photos, college magazines), since the archive hadn't yet received much from the late 1970s. Would my diary be a worthwhile addition? No! Surely not! My own student lifestyle might horrify the eager, innocent and earnest youngsters who would now be at Oxford. Even worse than that, the original manuscripts would have to be typed out, and that would require application and hard work. Ugh! 

On the other hand...

I picked up the 4 original diaries from the bit of furniture they were sitting on, opened the 1977 one and pondered. I decided that it would be possible to start typing and if the content was rubbish I could call the whole thing off and go back to the pub. Having reached this brilliantly logical conclusion, I went back to the pub but remembered to start typing into my laptop computer the following morning. 

The project hung in the balance, but as I typed former colleagues and various long-forgotten incidents bubbled up from the dark depths of my sub-conscious mind. "It really was like that!" I exclaimed to my bemused cat, Tigger, who responded calmly. After some sections I added footnotes when I felt that explanations were needed to clarify certain points. To cut a long story short, roughly 2 months later the typing was finished and when printed it covered 200 A4 pages. This was easily enough for a full-length book. 

Mind you, I didn't include everything. The original diaries contained long sections about my vacations, snippets of national and international news and weekly Top 10 Singles and Albums charts. I also had a fat file of letters received from relatives, fellow students and tutors. Adding all that stuff would have doubled or tripled the length of the book and made it unreadable (if it wasn't already). There were also - how can I put this? - a few choice epithets scribbled in haste at stressful moments that I decided were a bit too rich for the pudding and were therefore omitted. (If I hadn't done this, the eventual proof reader of the manuscript would have spiked them without hesitation.)

I saved the finished product in 4 separate files on my computer and also had the presence of mind to email them to myself, so that they could retrieved from cyberspace if the hard drive crashed, or something. Job done. But to publish now? It was only - only! - 26 years since I had graduated, and some of the events, essay crises etc were still too embarrassing and fresh in my memory to bring to other people's attention just yet. I went back to the pub and had a think.

I then returned to the world of work, and had 5 hugely unsatisfactory years followed by 8 quite good ones. By 2019 I was redundant again but at least had a small ££ payoff to splurge on something worthwhile, or possibly deranged. The 4 files of my Oxford diary were still waiting patiently on my computer, and since 40 years had now passed my embarrassment about their contents had abated slightly. Browsing the back pages of the 'Oldie' magazine, I saw an advert by Janus Publishing, based in Cambridge. "Your book is written to be read," it announced. Well, that sounded like quite a good wheeze after all my years of prevarication, so I made a tentative enquiry, we agreed terms, and the publishing process finally began. Hurrah!

I chose the title An Oxford Diary because it was accurate and suitably modest. But thank goodness I decided to employ a professional publisher, rather than upload the diary's files by myself to a blog or whatever. The proof reader did a superb job raising queries about the text, and emails went back and forth between us. She spotted things that I never would have done. For example, a particular problem was my inconsistent use of apostrophes when applied to proper nouns: was it Browns restaurant, Brown's or Browns'? I had used all 3 spellings at different times and now had to choose one for consistency's sake. She also - how can I put this? - discovered one or two choice epithets that my initial editing had failed to spot, and earnestly requested their removal (which I approved).

This took about 3 months. Then the first draft of the finished book came to me to check. It looked great and very professional, but the page numbers had gone haywire after page 13. So I manually noted down the correct ones, checked these against the page numbers shown in the list of Contents to ensure there weren't any discrepancies, and submitted the changes. (You really have to do this kind of work to experience and appreciate all the fiddly bits involved with publishing something.)

Job done. Nearly there! But now there was the ticklish decision about what to put on the front and back covers of the book. The publisher had drafted a rough design, and gave me the choice of brown or dark blue for the background. I immediately, and decisively, opted for Trinity Blue, and also provided a brief autobiographical note and a suitably tiny mug shot for the back cover. 

But what photo should go on the front? My first suggestion was to use a royalty-free pic uploaded from the internet. Maybe a view up the High, or Carfax, or something suitably Oxford-y. But the publisher feared that somebody might claim copyright infringement. No problem, I replied. I'll tootle up to Oxford at the weekend and take a few pics with my trusty digital camera.

So on a beautifully sunny Saturday, 31st August 2019, off I tootled and was in Oxford by 9.30am. My first photo was the obvious and appropriate one of Trinity chapel, as seen from Broad Street. Then I clicked my camera at the Sheldonian and the Radcliffe Camera, strolled up the High, clicked again in the direction of Carfax and Cornmarket Street, had (another) breakfast and then caught the train home to examine the results...

Oh. Hang on a sec. Come to think of it, I caught the train into London and visited a few pubs in Hampstead. Never mind. The NEXT MORNING, at home, I examined the results and decided there was a problem. Namely, even small and cheap digital cameras like mine take photos that are razor sharp with lashings of brightness and contrast. But my diary covered events that had occurred 40 years previously, and a spectacularly colourful photo taken in 2019 might give a misleading impression of the book's contents. Hmmm. Perhaps I had a black & white photo from the late 1970s that could be used instead? A quick flick through old albums produced two possible candidates: Trinity chapel; or a view of Trinity's garden taken in the Spring of 1978 with various people loafing about on the grass. Since my diary was Trinity-based but not about the college per se, I opted for the garden photo as being more Oxford-y, other-worldly, Brideshead Revisited and all that. I sent it to the publisher and that's the one they used. (My sister described the photo as "intriguing" and said I'd made the right choice. Phew!)

                                                                            Front Cover

A month later, on 1st October, the book was published and (for what it's worth) I was very satisfied with the result. Was it/is it any good? Frankly, I've no idea. It is simply what it claims to be, and despite some obvious flaws it is at the very least an authentic diary. People are entitled to their opinions and can say what they like as far as I'm concerned. I was grateful when the 'Oldie' magazine described it as a 'minor masterpiece', and Chris Gray in the Oxford Times was very complimentary.

That was good enough for me.

Will I publish another diary? No fear! I've written plenty of others, but none of them tell a story like my 3 years at Oxford. In the words of Martin Amis, "Perhaps once is enough - but not more than enough." *

* Amis, M. (1977). Martin Amis. In: Ann Thwaite. (Ed). My Oxford. 2nd ed. London: Robson Books. p.213.

Review: 'War Diary,' by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from German by Greg Nissan

From startribune.com

NONFICTION: Juxtaposing the ordinary and extraordinary, a Ukrainian woman documents the unimaginable effects of war in words and photos 

Thirty-three days after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian writer Yevgenia Belorusets types the following words into a public diary she'd been keeping for the German newspaper Der Spiegel since the start of the war: "My previous entry was an eternity ago. At least that is how I perceive it."

From her apartment in the centre of Kyiv, not far from where the 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Russian leader, Belorusets observes the surreal distortions of war, echoing the words of other Ukrainians. Time, the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko also writes, "is an unpredictable sequence of plains and abysses."

This sequence of unpredictability — both oppressively real and imagined — dominates the pages of "War Diary," a compilation of Belorusets' photographs and roughly 41 entries, which were translated from German by Greg Nissan. It must be said that by including a photograph of ordinary city scenes with each entry, Belorusets achieves a profound kind of juxtaposition, one that overlays the ordinary with the extraordinary realities of war.

It all started that Thursday morning with a barrage of missed calls on Belorusets' cellphone. Fearing for her safety, family and friends tried to reach her because of shocking news — Kyiv had been shelled and the war had begun. But in her entry that day, Belorusets is quick to clarify: "I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war."

Her reasoning is simple, her insight damning. Since 2014, the Russians had been waging war in that "foggy opaque zone of violence," the Donbas region of Ukraine.

                                                       Yevgenia Belorusets                    OLGA TSYBULSKA

As a photographer, Belorusets spent time in the Donbas coal-mining region and wrote "Lucky Breaks," a collection of absurdist short stories, mostly featuring women whose lives are interrupted by war. This familiarity with war, along with Belorusets' immersive documentational skills, make for a uniquely powerful read in "War Diary."

We read how, despite the terror-inducing probability of air raids and blaring sirens, Belorusets ventures out into the streets to run errands, almost always food-related, to take pictures and to interact with people. At one point, she inquires about train tickets for her eventual return to Berlin. Her entries, written in the cloaked darkness of her apartment, convey not only the mood of a besieged city but also the spirit of its undeterred inhabitants.

In one entry, she notes that Kyiv, with its streets eerily emptied, resembled a city that is "yet to be inhabited, a city without a present, with only a past." Of the people, she observes that "time and again I watched [them] hug each other." In war, there is destruction and death, and suffering and despair, yet we are reminded that it does not, as Ukrainian poet Kateryna Kalytko asserts, "abolish the power of tenderness and love."

And if, at the end of many entries, personal moments slide briskly into directives for the "genocidal" war to end, who can blame Belorusets? "Every day at war is like a deadly disease that needs to be cured with urgency," she writes on the 34th day, already one more unpredictable, harrowing day too many.

War Diary

By: Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from German by Greg Nissan.

Publisher: New Directions, 128 pages, $16.95.

Angela Ajayi is a Nigerian-Ukrainian critic and writer living in Minneapolis

https://www.startribune.com/review-war-diary-by-yevgenia-belorusets-translated-from-german-by-greg-nissan/600255936/