Stephanie’s Pillowbook

1) I once received an email about the Pillowbook damning it with the faint praise: it’s better than expected even if not “Guardian’s features level”. Grrrrr. Well, I’m sure my critic meant to be kind. It’s not pleasant, though, to be criticised for failing at something you’re not even attempting.

Now, if I were writing a feature article for The Guardian or something of that kind, I would be mindful that I was addressing the public, I would choose my subject with care (or have it chosen for me), undertake any necessary research, generalise from my experience, draw conclusions, and revise and polish what I wrote until it was fit for publication. I could expect, too, to be judged as a writer on a single, self-contained piece of work which, at the same time, is related to the other articles and serves a (transitory) purpose in a particular medium. My writing, too, would have to conform to a certain house-style and promote a world-view not entirely of my own making. And, ultimately, it would have to contribute to the selling of the newspaper.

However, I’m writing a blog. It’s not published work for the world at large - it’s a cross between an intimate diary, a personal scrapbook and a volume of essays that I choose to share with (potential) friends. It’s a dump for passing thoughts, links, quotations, musings on transgenderism, current obsessions, interests and annoyances, all the bits and pieces of my life that can be quickly put into words along with pictures and music. I please myself - and hope to please others in the same way. Blogging is more improvisatory and conversational, tentative and speculative, opinionated and provocative than other forms of writing. Also, it should be remembered, a single post is not representative or definitive - it’s the whole blog which is the work (although, of course, the Pillowbook is unfinished and unending!).

2) There are two common criticisms of blogs in general that get trotted out at every opportunity and neither of them, I believe, is worth a damn. The first identifies blogging as some kind of inferior short-cut journalism; as though every blogger spends their time responding immediately to current affairs. It sometimes appears that the only time blogs get mentioned in the press is when an amateur blogger circulates on the internet a photograph or bit of gossip hours before the professional print journalists are able to publish. It’s as though the latter see blogging merely as a kind of limited, speeded-up version of what they do. Even the most highly-praised blogs seem to be those that follow the established journalistic pattern: every post is derived from a news story or media snippet taken from another website or feed and dished up with a suitably quirky, smart comment. Also journalistic is the annoying 3-column layout favoured by many in imitation, I suppose, of a newspaper. It’s all very mainstream and unexciting and in a lot of cases deserving of condescension.

It might be going too far to suggest that those who persist in the delusion that blogging is simply traditional journalism brought online should be flogged until they see the error of their ways. Still, they ought to be forced to write lines. So, 100 times, if you please: “Blogging is not a form of journalism.” It’s an entirely different genre.

3) This site is more likely to fall foul of the second criticism which is that blogging is merely self-indulgence, an exercise in vanity and frivolity. Rubbish! I really do not understand the charge that writing a blog is the last refuge of the self-absorbed, a parade of self-advertisement and narcissism that displays an excessive concern with the petty and trivial details of everyday life. Well, real life, for most of us most of the time, is not the grand events that take place on the world stage but the endless conversation around the kitchen table. Why shouldn’t we be concerned with that? For a start, it is only by paying attention to the succession of small things, the things close to hand, that happiness is gained.

Why do we enjoy gossip so much? Why do we read biographies? Why do we pore over diaries? Why do we subscribe to blogs? Surely it is because we are all fascinated by the minutiae of other people’s lives, because we are desperate to know how everyone else gets through life? We want to identify the similarities and ponder the differences. But then comes the cry: “What makes you think anyone is interested in you?” The obvious rejoinder is that we are interested in each other. We are social beings, we seek to connect with our fellows. And in order to really connect it is necessary to share some intimacy. Indeed, generally speaking, when anyone makes a too hasty accusation of egotism one can often be assured that the true problem is that people are in fact not egotistic enough. So with blogs - the great fault with many of them is not that their authors are self-obsessed. On the contrary, what makes them frequently tedious is that they don’t in fact say enough. Nothing gets revealed. There is no sense of a live person with all their peculiarities behind the writing. Given the freedom to say anything people too often revert to clichés, to set forms and stock phrases. As usual it is the way things are done which is important. Don’t worry that you talk about yourself - just be entertaining about it. Tell the truth in a colourful or stylish or interesting way and I’m convinced someone will listen.

After all, when we are dead and buried what will bring us back to remembrance are the thousand quirks and habits which go to make up our individuality. If we are loved, these are the things which make us lovable. And writing a blog is, in a large sense, an appeal for love.

Hello, my name is Stephanie Delacey and this is my blog.

Again.

I began Stephanie’s Pillowbook back in December 2005 after a summer of crossdressing and internet browsing. By autumn I had become rather excited by the idea of blogging and joining what appeared to me then as a flourishing tranniesphere. A most significant visit to The Boudoir sealed my intent: I wrote my very first post the next day.

The title of my blog refers, of course, to the famous Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Shonagon was a Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress in tenth-century Japan who recorded her tastes and thoughts and impressions of life in a series of beautifully-written notebooks. As she writes: “I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.” She was also quick to point out what she disliked and found hateful, and the book contains much witty and malicious gossip.

Naturally I never had a chance of emulating that aristocratic and aesthetic lady but I borrowed the term ‘pillow book’ (which in any case was common enough in her day for a set of occasional writings) for my own use. My intention, as I wrote later, had been to mix up the trivial and the serious in my life and interests; to move between the past and the present; to have lots of lists of likes and dislikes. I wanted to make something rich and miscellaneous and uncategorisable out of it all. Not surprisingly I was too lazy to achieve much of that and I’ve not done half of what I could have done.

Still, after two years I did manage to work out what I should be doing. Since Christmas, though, my mind has been too unsettled to devote any energy to this pillowbook. Just before the new year my sister persuaded my parents that it was time to retire from work and come live near her and her family up north. It is rather shocking how long I was paralysed by indecision as to what I should do. In the end I have moved to London where my friends Luis and Pauline so kindly offered me a room in their flat. It seemed appropriate - to me at any rate - that I should mark the beginning of a new phase of life by restarting the blog.

I have changed hosts. I have made use of a new theme. I have deleted all the old posts. However, I shall be republishing the best of the old pillowbook over the next few weeks. I anticipate a certain irritation from regular readers. Especially when I reveal that some of these old posts will be revised, updated and combined with other posts. Some, I’m sure, will want to cry, “that is not the done thing“. It is what I am going to do, nevertheless. And in the future I intend to write fewer but longer posts.

The pillowbook is sleeping…. we’ll wake her up again soon.