८ जुलै, २०२३

Before blogging, there were proto-bloggers, and I have encountered another example: Rose Kennedy.

I have commemorated proto-bloggers before. For example, something John Keats did in 1816. And, in the first year of my own blogging, I told you about my grandfather, Pop. And though I can’t find where I've blogged about it, there's something I myself used to do in the 1990s. I'd read the paper NYT at the dining table in the morning and if I found something distinctly interesting, I'd tear it out and put it on the other side of the table, where my sons would see it when they eventually came into the room.

Anyway, the proto-blogger I discovered today was Rose Kennedy. As a consequence of reading that Rebecca Traister article about RFK Jr. — blogged here — I started reading his book "American Values/Lessons I Learned from My Family." 

Here's what I consider to be like blogging:
An incessant walker, [my grandmother Rose] urged us to never go to bed without a twenty-minute after-dinner stroll. Her own evening rambles covered a good two miles, even in her late eighties, and she didn’t reserve them just for that time of day. She walked regardless of pouring rain or blazing sun. My cousin-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger once wrote that he “was quite shocked at how much walking she did and how the family always rotated who would go on walks with her.” To preserve ourselves from exhaustion, we each took hourlong shifts as she meandered around Hyannisport’s seaside golf course, or on the towpath along Lake Worth in Palm Beach, or on the sandy shores of Nantucket Sound. In preparation for these promenades she pinned to her sweater snatches of poetry, clippings from the morning papers, and noteworthy quotations or passages from books she was reading. As we walked she might depart from this syllabus to ask about our own reading, or to talk about our family and its history. 

Pinned to her sweater! She was a walking blog!

Let me give you one more thing about Rose from that book:

Grandma... wanted to know all about our opinions and ambitions, our clothes and our hobbies. What were we reading? What were we studying at school? What subjects did we discuss with our friends? She listened to Bob Dylan and read the poems of Rod McKuen....  One night we told Grandma we were headed for a Rolling Stones concert at the Cape Cod Coliseum. She must have mulled it over before deciding to witness the spectacle herself. She came alone, but word of her presence rippled through the Coliseum as she searched for her seat, and the young audience rose spontaneously to greet her with a long ovation. That gesture touched her deeply. There were, however, limits to her embrace of the cultural revolution. She drew that line at the musical Hair, telling an interviewer, “I can see plenty of naked bodies in my own basement when people are changing into their swimsuits.” 

Personal dignity was high on Grandma’s list of priorities. She once scolded Tom Brokaw for drinking in her theater, and I still recall her ferocious scowl when my sister Courtney’s boyfriend, Dan Dibble, stripped off his shirt to expose a giant rose tattoo while performing a rendition of Dion’s “The Wanderer” for Grandma’s ninety-fifth birthday party. I suspected that, had she been able to leave her wheelchair, there wouldn’t have been a coat hanger left in the closet, nor an unviolated strip of flesh on Dan’s body.

१८ टिप्पण्या:

Chuck म्हणाले...

One of the many things that I like about the Althouse blog is the thoughtful use of subject tags. Althouse is faithful about employing them, and appropriately cautious about overuse (that is, too many) tags. Avoid tag proliferation.

There is, appropriately, a tag for "RFK jr." And thanks to that tag, I was able to quickly and easily see that Althouse has featured "RFK jr" in posts on:
July 8 (2)
July 5
July 4
July 3
June 29
June 26 (2)
June 23 (2)
June 21
June 20
June 19
June 18
June 16
June 15
June 11
June 8

18 RFK jr posts in 31 days. Fewer, actually, than I had imagined. I had guessed closer to one/day. (We did get a mid-month slowdown in RFK jr posts when the Supreme Court term ended with several major decisions; I expect RFK jr posting will pick up. And we did get one Jack Schlossberg post.)

Sebastian म्हणाले...

"American Values/Lessons I Learned from My Family."

Riiight. Lots of lessons to be learned from the Kennedys, just not about "values" or "personal dignity."

Blastfax Kudos म्हणाले...

I relate the phenomenon to a term that doesn't exist, 'graphophilia'. It captures the concept of a "love of writing" that graphomania, a psychological pathology, doesn't capture.

"Proto-blogging" immediately conjures an image for me of the famous Samuel Pepys and his more famous diary. Many people know about his famous diary, but what they don't know is he wrote his diary in shorthand, and coded. There is a great debate within literary circles as to whether or not he ever intended it to be decoded, by his nephew I believe, and understood to the public at large as it is today.

In it's own way, the diary reads like a proto-blog, but a blog intended for one person, Pepys himself. Much like Althouse.blogspot.com, there are all kinds of notations (tags) and organizational tricks (date references) throughout the diary that are clearly meant to allow Pepys to find bits of information, not for others, but for himself. Why? Because it's quite clear he reread his own writing constantly, as most great writers and editors will tell you they do constantly.

Although keeping a diary is considered passe now, the concept itself just transformed and got itself a hip name. For myself as I'm sure for many others who post or lurk on blog forums, this is one of the best ways if not the best way to remember a day's events. It's what Pepys was doing and so many others before him, more often realizing that their thoughts and observations would never see the light of day because the distribution channels didn't exist yet. Herodotus, Aquinas, Pepys, all proto-bloggers. And they did it all without Amazon advertising.

gadfly म्हणाले...

Seasons in the Sun
(an English-language adaptation of the song "Le Moribund" ["The Dying Man"] by Jacques Brel) [Lyrics rewritten by singer-poet Rod McKuen in 1963]


Goodbye, Emile, my trusted friend, we've known each
other since we were nine or ten.
Together we climbed hills and trees, learned of love
and A B Cs skinned our hearts and skinned our knees.

Adieu, Emile, it's hard to die when all the birds are
singing in the sky. Now that the Spring is in the air
Pretty girls are ev'rywhere. wish for me and I'll be
there.

Chorus:
We had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun, but
the wine and the song like the seasons are all gone

Adieu, Papa, please pray for me. I was the black sheep
of the family.
You tried to teach me right from wrong. Too much wine
and too much song, wonder how I got along.

Adieu, Papa, it's hard to die when all the birds are
singing in the sky. Now that the Spring is in the air
Little children ev'rywhere. Think of me, I'll be there.

(Chorus)
We had joy. We had fun. We had seasons in the sun, but
the the song and the rime were just seasons out of
time.

Adieu, Francoise, my faithful wife, without you I'd
have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then, I forgave you in
the end though your lover was my friend.

Adieu, Francoise, it's hard to die when all the birds
are singing in the sky. Now that the spring is in the
air
With your lovers ev'rywhere; just be careful, I'll be
there.

We had joy we had fun. We had seasons in the sun, but
the stars we could reach were just starfish on the
beach.

Adieu, Emile. Adieu, Papa. Goodbye, Francoise.

All our lives, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun,
the wine and the song like the seasons are all gone
All our lives, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun,
but the stars we could reach were just starfish on the
beach.

Quaestor म्हणाले...

Hemi-interesting proto-blogging from the meta-matriarch. (Relax, it's just hyperbole.)

This spate of Kennedy nostalgia is troubling. The next thing to expect is an NYT page one item about the Republican-neglected missile gap -- not the old fake one, a new fake one.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

Netnews was running in the 80s, both company-wide and inter-company. Arguments instantly developed. The chief recurring one was the battle for and against company Christmas decorations, every year the same thing and every year the same people. Accusations of not being a real person developed. In short, it was the blogoverse without websites. Trolls were the chief amusement.

Valentine Smith म्हणाले...

Old Rose Kennedy was a saint. At least by the standards of the 30s 40s and 50s. Catholic women married to scoundrels like Joe were seen as martyrs to the cause and with good reason. She was the consummate matriarch, who doubled down on the idea of integrity having lived so long with so little from her husband. I suppose in a way her actual morality and I believe it to be real, completed the circle and made whole the family’s psyche. The paradigm for Irish American families in the old days was one son, a cop, one son, a criminal, and one son a priest. There’s a lot of truth in that.

Ambrose म्हणाले...

So Al Gore invented the internet and Rose Kennedy was the first blogger - call me skeptical.

charis म्हणाले...

Now I will think of this blog as a table where clippings are left for people to read and discuss.

I do the log part of blogging in a daily diary where I process my day and include photos I took. The difference is there is no public sharing. I am far too private to do that. I seldom even post on social media.

The Keats post included a link to a photo of the original manuscript, also left on a table.

H म्हणाले...

Long ago I read the essays of E,B, White. They describe his daily life (mostly in rural Maine). I wonder if those are proto-blogs.

H म्हणाले...

Actually (reflecting on my earlier comment about EB White essays). I wonder if all earlier diarists (Pepys?) aren't protobloggers.

("Proto bloggers" autocorrects to "photobloggers".)

Narr म्हणाले...

Our scrapbooks and chapbooks are virtual nowadays.

Althouseblog is in part a record of my days and thoughts, and I'm glad to have it.

Left Bank of the Charles म्हणाले...

I think Althouse is talking about a particular type of blogging that is focused on current events in the news, so not every diarist would be a proto-blogger in that sense. But by that more limited definition, Reader’s Digest is perhaps the most commercially successful proto-blogger. It wasn’t just that they picked up articles from other publications, they ran condensed versions.

Tina Trent म्हणाले...

Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Anais Nin pretty much cover 20th Century America and Europe up to the 1970s. MFK Fisher does the rest.

Lyle Sanford, RMT म्हणाले...

Lord Byron kept a diary during what I think was a hike through the Alps. I remember when reading through it how amazingly modern the "voice" was - and how he used brevity so well. This was back in the 60's, so "proto-blogging" didn't come to mind, but now it does.

Lyle Sanford, RMT म्हणाले...
ही टिप्पणी लेखकाना हलविली आहे.
Tina Trent म्हणाले...

Curious how she covers her sons and nephews' rapes and murders of women. Also how RFK Jr. Justifies and covers for them. How about her husband's Nazism, mobster ties, and affairs? Get to that part yet?

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"Although keeping a diary is considered passe now...."

Tell that to David Sedaris.