Julian Gough

Actually, Julian, I have to say that what makes your blog refreshing is your natural style, your personality coming through, your sense of humour and really amusing writing style. And the way your sense of excitement, joy, or any kind of feeling really comes through as you write. Personally I wouldn't change it. I do understand you sometimes wanting to say things that are not so..ahem..nice from time to time... a pseudonom for these occasions perhaps? It would be in character and amusing to get your take on things you find less than appealing - the pseudonom would of course be wasted because we know it's you - an alter-ego section? Mr. Nasty Gough? Don't know, but don't think you should lose the current format either..But an alter-ego section, yes... could see that...

Ah, you are sweet Siobhan.


The thing is, some of my personality may well come through on the blog, but not all of it. I chucked myself into the internet headfirst this year just to have a splash around and to explore this interesting new world. But a blog is odd.

I speak as though I'm talking to my friends, because I AM talking to my friends. But I'm also talking to a lot of strangers and to anyone who googles anything I talk about. And people look up their own names all the time. So it's like having a pub conversation that is being overheard by everybody you talk about…

I HEARD that, Gough!

For heaven's sake, don't take my blog as any kind of model. It's a form of sickness. I'm stuck in the labyrinth of opinion when I should be plunging into the pungent core of an onion.

Well, a blog IS a form of sickness. And yours, being sicker than most, is much better than most...

It's like that guy on I'm a Celebrity who got so used to the cameras he forgot they weren't just part of the inside of his own skull and went and cheated on his girlfriend without thinking. Or that's the way most people blog, I think. Me, I've got two blogs and two personae, I'm a two-headed monster and am going berserk and am wondering too if killing it/them off is the only way...

Yeah, a blog is never the person direct and undiluted, it develops its own personality (it warps its owner's).

Elizabeth, didn't you get outed accidentally, by the technology, a couple of years back? And what was that like, having your personal personality and your lightly fictionalised blog personality brought crashing together in other people's minds? How did you feel? How did they react? Quite a shocking event, psychologically, for a lot of people, I'd imagine. But especially for you.

This all ties in with my interest in the death of privacy, and the new ways of living which it allows / demands... Sigh... I really must blog on this some day...

What it really needs is a novel. I'll write one and you can too if you want.
Yeah, it was very shocking. I had these two completely separate personae and in the one in which I was identified I was doing the good writer thing and making sure I alienated no one, and then in the Fictionbitch I had the knives out....

So now it's simply schizophrenia...

People keep asking me why I don't just have the one blog (now I'm outed) but they have two separate (indeed opposing) functions and styles(promotion and personal diary versus hard-thinking critique), and (as I say) as a result two damn separate personae!!

This is it, pre-internet you could compartmentalise like a fecker, and paper publishing kept your personae safely apart. You could be accessible and personal in the Guardian, for example, and impersonal and dense with references in the Times Literary Supplement. David Lodge could write open-access novels for a huge general readership, and also write very technical Russian-formalist-influenced criticism for specialist journals. The limited distribution of paper objects, their cost, subscription-based magazines with specialist niche audiences; it all meant you could have several voices and personae without confusing anyone.

Now, if people google you, it all comes up in one big pile of stuff, with no context. Google me, and videos of popsongs I recorded when I was nineteen come up alongside essays on tragedy and comedy that I wrote a couple of decades later.

And well-thought-out, much-revised pieces that I'd thought about for years before writing and rewriting them jostle up alongside unthought-out first drafts of vague ideas like this...

And nothing VANISHES anymore.

It's not a bad thing, but it's a new thing, and it's different, and it's interesting. I rather like it, but I don't think we've got the hang of it yet...

We'll have to go a lot easier on our future politicians, for example, or nobody will be clean enough to elect, with their teenage follies scattered in a twenty-year trail all over blogs and myspace and facebook and youtube, every drunken party, snog and joint videoed in wobblevison by their friends and enemies, and saleable years later to the Sun at the right moment...