on enthusiasm
Jun. 14th, 2003 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gurdonark"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about"--Charles Kingsley
Friday night winds its way into Saturday morning, yet my waking moments, fueled by Diet Coke caffeine from dinner, interrupt my sleep. I've dined at a hibachi grill, watched an interesting television program, and re-posted my eBay sale of the silly CD, after its third auction proved not to be the charm its prior two sales had been(I learned from this failure to mark down my auction minimum from its steady ascent; we'll see if it sells this time). Maybe in a moment I'll put on the headphones for my Radio Shack shortwave radio, and see if I can lose myself in the sounding roar of Radio New Zealand, the Taiwanese national radio or Radio Netherlands. Although each of these stations is probably more or less available via internet, I've become fond of the whirr and buzz of a shortwave station. These instantaneous streamed connections seem less "real" to me than transmittals through the airwaves. In high school, I used to listen to my father's tube-type Halliburton short wave. He had bought it used when he was not long after high school. The tubes still work (thought the tuning dial is largely useless), but sometimes they make those little tube pops and hisses.
This weekend I've set myself the task to move mountains and cudgel Grendel's wayward relatives in their lair. I also seem to have agreed, somewhere in the marital fine print, to drive 40 miles to watch a spousal co-worker tap dance to show tunes. I have a long to-do list, as well as a burning desire to have fun, relaxation and good exercise. I will work like a madman, write poems on line and off, interact on LJ, hike, enjoy time with my wife, and generally find myself entirely alive. I hope I even make it to the ninety percent off book sale.
I notice that my capability for work increases with age, largely because my productivity improves. I no longer feel any pride, though, when I am called upon to work all night on a project, as I might have when I was younger. Now I am inclined to see such late night hours as a failure of planning rather than a virtue of determination.
I notice that I'm enthusiastic about a number of projects, both work-related and hobby-related. I'm a huge believer in enthusiasm. I think that sometimes talent is over-rated, and enthusiasm under-rated. If one's individual aptitudes were credit scored, in the way that the mortgage lender assesses a home buyer, I'm convinced that my score might deny me any but the most prosaic life. In some ways, I feel that I wasted whatever potential that I had, and did not develop new skills to compensate for that potential. I don't mean that in some "woe is me" kind of way. I have a life with which I'm quite happy. But I recognize that the things I do in life are things I get excited about doing, not necessarily the things I am remarkably talented at doing.
That fellow Amos Bronson Alcott always said such aphoristic things.
One thing he said impresses me: "We mount to heaven on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes". Mr. Alcott had a good idea about failure. An educational reformer whose schools often failed, his family moved 20 times in the first 30 years of his marriage. What was his radical notion that caused so many schools to fail? His subversive idea that schools should feature the arts and music, physical education and nature, and eschew corporal punishment. Later in his life, Mr. Alcott got the recognition his ideas deserved, as his connection with the transcendentalist movement became known. His, and his wife's, own emphasis on their daughters' intellectual and aesthetic needs perhaps played a hand in the fact that his daughter Louisa May wrote many fine novels (most prominent of which is arguably "Little Women") and his daughter May found her way as an artist. Mr. Alcott was a very untalented man in very many ways. By many accounts, he was an impractical theorist, a poor bread-winner, an indifferent writer, an inveterate talker and utopian, and an imperfect family man, given to flights of fancy more than practical schemes. But in some ways, his failures came for the right reasons. One of his schools failed, for example, because he admitted an African-American child to the classroom, and the anglo parents withdrew their children from school. Arguably, only at the end of his life did he reach his perfect niche, when his daughter's earnings from writing supported the family, and he launched a "summer school of philosophy" to expound on his many and varied ideas. But among many flaws and errors in his life, his many virtues included that he painstakingly advocated equal rights for women, the abolition of slavery, freedom of thought and faith, and the importance of education. One cannot forget, either, that during most of his life, most people thought his work unimportant. In those days, there was no telephone, no telegraph, no radio, no television, and imperfect educational systems and literacy. The society was deeply stratified and extremely flawed. That was not some golden age for meeting kindred spirits, and reaching new revelations.
I think sometimes it's tempting to feel about historical people the way that I feel when I read a Jane Austen novel. Sometimes even the middle class people, with whose "poverty" I am to commiserate (and hope for a saving marriage) have so much more leisure than I have ever had in my adult life that it reminds me of one of my mother's favorite sayings--"they were so poor, that even the live-in maid was poor". Those folks in the novels who had an income without working intrigue me, and perhaps even incite my envy. I find it easy to imagine that those who did interesting things began with more advantages or lived in a more fertile soil than I did.
But Amos Bronson Alcott actually had no education beyond age 13. His father farmed flax, so Alcott started with no funds for his schemes. He educated himself while working as a peddler and a handyman. He read a lot of German, English, and Greek philosophy, while he worked in jobs one might charitably describe as drudgery. I find his story very appealing, because his life drew tremendous fuel from sheer enthusiasm, though he lacked many advantages and talents given to others. Alcott himself said that "enthusiasm is essential to the successful attainment of any human endeavor; without which incentive, one is unsure of his equality to the humblest undertakings even".
I perceive sometimes that people value themselves (or, more accurately, devalue themselves) according to various extremely material measures of success. My own theory, subjected to only the research of my own mind, is that in our culture, economic success and a sort of celebrity-ization infects the way things appear.
This is true even here in LJ. I read brilliant journals by people whose words I cherish, but those self-same people denigrate themselves because the great wide world has not seen fit to publish them in corporate mass-run books, exhibit them in galleries designed solely to provide commodities and interior design for the rich, or pay them sums of money to generate corporate profits for record companies. Please do not believe thatgurdonark, a commercial litigation attorney who pays firm attention to the bottom line, eschews the desire to make a living, and by many (though remotely far from all) measures a quite workable living. Nothing is wrong with people in the arts or in any moral pursuit wanting to be recognized or paid handsomely for their efforts.
I posit instead that the lesson history teaches me is that so many people who came to do work I find meaningful did not achieve during their lives any of the respect or renumeration that their hard work arguably deserved. Moreover, of those who did get recognition, so many examples exist of people who changed the world, but considered themselves utter failures. I think of Mohandas Gandhi, who helped illustrate alternatives to violence in resisting oppression, but who came to view himself as a failure because he was unable to prevent the violent partition of India and Pakistan. On a less positive note, I think of one of my favorite musical pioneers, Harry Partch, who, despite a solid string of grants and perquisites from people who wished to assist him stretching over decades, continually believed that his genius went un-noticed. I come to conclude that recognition--or one's sense that one is being recognized, is not a true measure of the value of one's work.
I think that it's easy to mistrust one's own enthusiasm, and trust the messages that the world tolls out like bells. Can you hear those words ringing out, like the "nine tailors" bell peal that killed the man in the murder mystery? The first toll--it can't be important if it does not pay; the second toll--if you could write, a New York agent would have found you a publisher; the third toll--it's not important unless it's in the newspaper; the fourth toll--if you do it yourself, without some critical imprimatur, it can't matter; the fifth toll--it's not what you do, it's only who you know; the sixth toll--your importance derives solely from what others think of you; the seventh toll--unless you get a formal grant or award, your work does not matter; the eighth toll--you lack the degrees from the institutions we respect; and the ninth toll--who told you that you could achieve x? No wonder the landscape is littered with people shell-shocked by carillon. I see the desperation and the false bravado of being one's own best reader and promoter take its toll. But enthusiasm requires no false bravado, but just the courage to recognize that one with integrity does what one must do, in order to fulfill one's goals. Money or recognition or accolades are nice, but they do not suffice, nor are they necessary.
This week I've felt an experience which I call a "communion of saints", though I mean this in the most non-religious sense. A woman interested in my chess poetry approached me by IM to compliment some I put on the web years ago (she promptly agred to sumit to my Mail Poetry Call, which gratified me). An eBay auction ran the price of my chess poem book up in a competitive bid, as comic ad copy sold it again. I sold two of my CDs, and the first buyer just put appreciative feedback on eBay about the electric football fields music contained thereon. None of these will make me more than "break even" money, nor grant me any great fame, but I am gratified for my enthusiasm in some small way being rewarded.
I read on LJ people truly gifted at writing, some of whom are "published" writers, but most of whom run on the fuel of enthusiasm alone. I wish that I could give one gift to those here and elsewhere in my life who ply their gifts with enthusiasm. To the hypnos.com ambient music artists, who re-invent a genre while selling only hundreds or a few thousands of CDs a release; to the LJ'ers who write small miracles to audiences of dozens; to the artists who fight unsuccessfully for grants from people ill-equipped to understand their work; to the kid whose family has humble material means, who strings together choir scholarships and Pell grants and work/study to get that education from the local Hometown U; to the people who put on plays without budgets; help the deaf without funding; attend Democratic Party meetings in the most conservative county in north Texas. To each of them I'd give the gift of peace with their enthusiasm. I'd give them the assurance that what they do matters. I'd give them just one drop of cool water on a fevered brow (that being the limit of my meager canteen), that in their enthusiasm, I find all my hope. I find myself enthusiastic, though it makes me launch long comments on LJ, and post wordy posts, and write poems, too many poems, in ecstatic succession. I'll continue down this course, hopefully until I die.
Friday night winds its way into Saturday morning, yet my waking moments, fueled by Diet Coke caffeine from dinner, interrupt my sleep. I've dined at a hibachi grill, watched an interesting television program, and re-posted my eBay sale of the silly CD, after its third auction proved not to be the charm its prior two sales had been(I learned from this failure to mark down my auction minimum from its steady ascent; we'll see if it sells this time). Maybe in a moment I'll put on the headphones for my Radio Shack shortwave radio, and see if I can lose myself in the sounding roar of Radio New Zealand, the Taiwanese national radio or Radio Netherlands. Although each of these stations is probably more or less available via internet, I've become fond of the whirr and buzz of a shortwave station. These instantaneous streamed connections seem less "real" to me than transmittals through the airwaves. In high school, I used to listen to my father's tube-type Halliburton short wave. He had bought it used when he was not long after high school. The tubes still work (thought the tuning dial is largely useless), but sometimes they make those little tube pops and hisses.
This weekend I've set myself the task to move mountains and cudgel Grendel's wayward relatives in their lair. I also seem to have agreed, somewhere in the marital fine print, to drive 40 miles to watch a spousal co-worker tap dance to show tunes. I have a long to-do list, as well as a burning desire to have fun, relaxation and good exercise. I will work like a madman, write poems on line and off, interact on LJ, hike, enjoy time with my wife, and generally find myself entirely alive. I hope I even make it to the ninety percent off book sale.
I notice that my capability for work increases with age, largely because my productivity improves. I no longer feel any pride, though, when I am called upon to work all night on a project, as I might have when I was younger. Now I am inclined to see such late night hours as a failure of planning rather than a virtue of determination.
I notice that I'm enthusiastic about a number of projects, both work-related and hobby-related. I'm a huge believer in enthusiasm. I think that sometimes talent is over-rated, and enthusiasm under-rated. If one's individual aptitudes were credit scored, in the way that the mortgage lender assesses a home buyer, I'm convinced that my score might deny me any but the most prosaic life. In some ways, I feel that I wasted whatever potential that I had, and did not develop new skills to compensate for that potential. I don't mean that in some "woe is me" kind of way. I have a life with which I'm quite happy. But I recognize that the things I do in life are things I get excited about doing, not necessarily the things I am remarkably talented at doing.
That fellow Amos Bronson Alcott always said such aphoristic things.
One thing he said impresses me: "We mount to heaven on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes". Mr. Alcott had a good idea about failure. An educational reformer whose schools often failed, his family moved 20 times in the first 30 years of his marriage. What was his radical notion that caused so many schools to fail? His subversive idea that schools should feature the arts and music, physical education and nature, and eschew corporal punishment. Later in his life, Mr. Alcott got the recognition his ideas deserved, as his connection with the transcendentalist movement became known. His, and his wife's, own emphasis on their daughters' intellectual and aesthetic needs perhaps played a hand in the fact that his daughter Louisa May wrote many fine novels (most prominent of which is arguably "Little Women") and his daughter May found her way as an artist. Mr. Alcott was a very untalented man in very many ways. By many accounts, he was an impractical theorist, a poor bread-winner, an indifferent writer, an inveterate talker and utopian, and an imperfect family man, given to flights of fancy more than practical schemes. But in some ways, his failures came for the right reasons. One of his schools failed, for example, because he admitted an African-American child to the classroom, and the anglo parents withdrew their children from school. Arguably, only at the end of his life did he reach his perfect niche, when his daughter's earnings from writing supported the family, and he launched a "summer school of philosophy" to expound on his many and varied ideas. But among many flaws and errors in his life, his many virtues included that he painstakingly advocated equal rights for women, the abolition of slavery, freedom of thought and faith, and the importance of education. One cannot forget, either, that during most of his life, most people thought his work unimportant. In those days, there was no telephone, no telegraph, no radio, no television, and imperfect educational systems and literacy. The society was deeply stratified and extremely flawed. That was not some golden age for meeting kindred spirits, and reaching new revelations.
I think sometimes it's tempting to feel about historical people the way that I feel when I read a Jane Austen novel. Sometimes even the middle class people, with whose "poverty" I am to commiserate (and hope for a saving marriage) have so much more leisure than I have ever had in my adult life that it reminds me of one of my mother's favorite sayings--"they were so poor, that even the live-in maid was poor". Those folks in the novels who had an income without working intrigue me, and perhaps even incite my envy. I find it easy to imagine that those who did interesting things began with more advantages or lived in a more fertile soil than I did.
But Amos Bronson Alcott actually had no education beyond age 13. His father farmed flax, so Alcott started with no funds for his schemes. He educated himself while working as a peddler and a handyman. He read a lot of German, English, and Greek philosophy, while he worked in jobs one might charitably describe as drudgery. I find his story very appealing, because his life drew tremendous fuel from sheer enthusiasm, though he lacked many advantages and talents given to others. Alcott himself said that "enthusiasm is essential to the successful attainment of any human endeavor; without which incentive, one is unsure of his equality to the humblest undertakings even".
I perceive sometimes that people value themselves (or, more accurately, devalue themselves) according to various extremely material measures of success. My own theory, subjected to only the research of my own mind, is that in our culture, economic success and a sort of celebrity-ization infects the way things appear.
This is true even here in LJ. I read brilliant journals by people whose words I cherish, but those self-same people denigrate themselves because the great wide world has not seen fit to publish them in corporate mass-run books, exhibit them in galleries designed solely to provide commodities and interior design for the rich, or pay them sums of money to generate corporate profits for record companies. Please do not believe that
gurdonark, a commercial litigation attorney who pays firm attention to the bottom line, eschews the desire to make a living, and by many (though remotely far from all) measures a quite workable living. Nothing is wrong with people in the arts or in any moral pursuit wanting to be recognized or paid handsomely for their efforts.I posit instead that the lesson history teaches me is that so many people who came to do work I find meaningful did not achieve during their lives any of the respect or renumeration that their hard work arguably deserved. Moreover, of those who did get recognition, so many examples exist of people who changed the world, but considered themselves utter failures. I think of Mohandas Gandhi, who helped illustrate alternatives to violence in resisting oppression, but who came to view himself as a failure because he was unable to prevent the violent partition of India and Pakistan. On a less positive note, I think of one of my favorite musical pioneers, Harry Partch, who, despite a solid string of grants and perquisites from people who wished to assist him stretching over decades, continually believed that his genius went un-noticed. I come to conclude that recognition--or one's sense that one is being recognized, is not a true measure of the value of one's work.
I think that it's easy to mistrust one's own enthusiasm, and trust the messages that the world tolls out like bells. Can you hear those words ringing out, like the "nine tailors" bell peal that killed the man in the murder mystery? The first toll--it can't be important if it does not pay; the second toll--if you could write, a New York agent would have found you a publisher; the third toll--it's not important unless it's in the newspaper; the fourth toll--if you do it yourself, without some critical imprimatur, it can't matter; the fifth toll--it's not what you do, it's only who you know; the sixth toll--your importance derives solely from what others think of you; the seventh toll--unless you get a formal grant or award, your work does not matter; the eighth toll--you lack the degrees from the institutions we respect; and the ninth toll--who told you that you could achieve x? No wonder the landscape is littered with people shell-shocked by carillon. I see the desperation and the false bravado of being one's own best reader and promoter take its toll. But enthusiasm requires no false bravado, but just the courage to recognize that one with integrity does what one must do, in order to fulfill one's goals. Money or recognition or accolades are nice, but they do not suffice, nor are they necessary.
This week I've felt an experience which I call a "communion of saints", though I mean this in the most non-religious sense. A woman interested in my chess poetry approached me by IM to compliment some I put on the web years ago (she promptly agred to sumit to my Mail Poetry Call, which gratified me). An eBay auction ran the price of my chess poem book up in a competitive bid, as comic ad copy sold it again. I sold two of my CDs, and the first buyer just put appreciative feedback on eBay about the electric football fields music contained thereon. None of these will make me more than "break even" money, nor grant me any great fame, but I am gratified for my enthusiasm in some small way being rewarded.
I read on LJ people truly gifted at writing, some of whom are "published" writers, but most of whom run on the fuel of enthusiasm alone. I wish that I could give one gift to those here and elsewhere in my life who ply their gifts with enthusiasm. To the hypnos.com ambient music artists, who re-invent a genre while selling only hundreds or a few thousands of CDs a release; to the LJ'ers who write small miracles to audiences of dozens; to the artists who fight unsuccessfully for grants from people ill-equipped to understand their work; to the kid whose family has humble material means, who strings together choir scholarships and Pell grants and work/study to get that education from the local Hometown U; to the people who put on plays without budgets; help the deaf without funding; attend Democratic Party meetings in the most conservative county in north Texas. To each of them I'd give the gift of peace with their enthusiasm. I'd give them the assurance that what they do matters. I'd give them just one drop of cool water on a fevered brow (that being the limit of my meager canteen), that in their enthusiasm, I find all my hope. I find myself enthusiastic, though it makes me launch long comments on LJ, and post wordy posts, and write poems, too many poems, in ecstatic succession. I'll continue down this course, hopefully until I die.
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 01:26 am (UTC)Most of the songs, like "uklectic", "mind the gap", and "what o harp", Scott sent me a list of proposed names. A few of those I altered, to create modified or different names. Most are his.
Most are conscious parodies of "serious" albums. Lots of ambient artists seem to name songs ponderous things like "Rapture of the Deep". I wish we had used "lord of the starfield", which is the name of dozens of ambient songs. Electric Stadium Land is an Hendrix parody/homage, while Gladiator Song was chosen because I envisioned it (or perhaps Scott envisioned it) as the soundtrack to an overbudgeted sixties sword and sandal flick. "Alien Marketplace" is a Lucas homage title, while High Plains Lullaby under the Power Lines tries to make sense of harmonicas, off kilter glock and a field discordantly playing together. "Saturday Afternoon" is intended as a respite after the 3 key songs of the album that precede it, rather like a nice mint before they bring the check. It perhaps also has a homage to 60s easy listening, which always featured improvised instrumentals with improvised titles.
If we'd spent another hour in the studio, we might could have named the songs for a concept album instead, about Marie, Queen of Roumania.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 03:31 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-06-14 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 01:09 am (UTC)thanks for sharing
Date: 2003-06-14 02:50 am (UTC)Re: thanks for sharing
Date: 2003-06-14 05:21 am (UTC)Amos Bronson Alcott
Date: 2003-06-14 03:01 am (UTC)Re: Amos Bronson Alcott
Date: 2003-06-14 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 03:08 am (UTC)I like that quote. I look around me and I see so many people working so hard to get the "better" things about. But as per the quote, perhaps all we need is something to be enthusiastic. Something simple, something that we love.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 05:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 06:18 am (UTC)stimulates my thinking. Many of us live lives
of "quiet desperation". What is the measure
of success in a life? Are respect, recognition
and reward necessary? As you point out so
beautifully, it's about doing what we love,
with passion and integrity.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 08:23 am (UTC)enthusiasm
Date: 2003-06-14 07:19 am (UTC)My bursts of enthusiasm are getting shorter and shorter when I wish they'd get longer and longer. I'm getting old. Running out of time.
I do so appreciate posts like this, though. Really gives me something to think about...It is helpful. (But also a wee bit exasperating for a failed optimist like myself!)
beehive enthusiasm
Date: 2003-06-14 07:26 am (UTC)crafts night, new friends, oh, just a world of things! You really do a lot, and you'll do so much more as you pick up momentum. That's why I always hope you'll see your enthusiasm as a great gift, and not merely a passing fever. I don't want to draw too much inspiration from one person, but what Bronson Alcott teaches me is that cleaving to one's ideals may not make for material success or lasting literary fame, but it may be the only way to survive. A hundred outsider artists impress me more than any critical favorite for roughly the same idea.
Re: beehive enthusiasm
Date: 2003-06-14 07:42 am (UTC)But I hope you know that I very much appreciate your enthusiasm for my potential enthusiasm. I just think we have fundamentally differing world views! I hope all roads lead to happiness. Even though I know they don't.
Oh, dear. I'm a ramblin'!
Re: beehive enthusiasm
Date: 2003-06-14 08:15 am (UTC)I don't think all roads lead to happiness--but I certainly want yours to do so!
Re: enthusiasm
Date: 2003-06-14 07:29 am (UTC)this moment, this time, this is all you currently know of eternal life--whether your ghost travels to other realms after death really doesn't affect what you can do here, do now--to me, the now is the eternal.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 07:32 am (UTC)i don't have the financial capabilities to become publisher and distributor of myself, so i should rely on someone else. it's a disheartening process. the ideal would be finding someone who really likes and appreciates my work and is really willing to help me. unfortunately the process (and society) is truly centered on the nine tolls you enumerate. at least here in italy i've learnt about those tolls the hard way. as a consequence i feel angry and disillusioned.
this won't stop me from writing. but i find myself too often thinking "for who/what i'm doing this?".
Rick
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 08:21 am (UTC)But the point you're making is a good one. I believe that your journal is itself a work of art, by which you reach your readers.
I think that sometimes you denigrate it, because you get so few comments. But I think that in the face of a heavily textured journal people don't have much to say. They just read. I think reading matters--it's a form of connection, even if passive.
But I can certainly see the other point(s) of view.
You'll turn out fine, that's my prediction. I don't know why, because all I know is that I read your journal. Your journal has a lot of frustration and angst in it. You suffer from some material privations, and certainly a dearth of real life connections. But I have this curious faith that your life-to-be will be better than your life now. You can prevent that, of course, by sliding into negative situations you do not now face, but with enthusiasm, I think you'll be a in a better place.
You write from a perspective that no all will understand, or appreciate. Even if you publish, you, like most writers, will work a 'day job' all your life. I don't see you as resistant to that, or anything. It's just part of the package.
I want to write to you reams of advice on self-marketing, on careers, on emigration, on a scad of things. But I know how bright you are, and how in the long run, you'll make your own way. Most of my advice is not detailed or precise, anyway, but only launching pads for dreams.
Don't ask me why, but I have this sense that your life at 50 will exceed your life at 30something.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 08:42 am (UTC)Don't ask me why, but I have this sense that your life at 50 will exceed your life at 30something.
curiously, you're not the first to tell me so. more curiously, it's a thought i myself grazed time ago. due to my nature, it is of no consolation at all. i have this serious fear: what if nothing really changes in the following years? what if this loneliness escorts me again for years and years? i am afraid to reach 50 eaten up and more, far more bitter than i am now. and i'm also truly afraid to start seeing things bettering when i am 50, because i'm truly afraid i won't be able to fully enjoy them like i could now, when i'm still in my 30s. love, for example. and everything related to it. yes, it might sound silly and immature, but the thought of finally enjoying something after having waited for it for 50 years terrifies me, and makes me envisage my life as a true failure.
i tell you this not to throw poison at your sincere kindness and nice wishes. just out of sincerity. true feelings triggered by your inputs.
thank you, as always,
Rick
p.s. - i don't mind passive reading of my journal. but i never can tell how many are reading and if someone's reading, if all i receive is silence. if my journal were a published paper book, at least i could judge by the copies sold...
no subject
Date: 2003-06-14 09:25 am (UTC)