last things

In his journal for the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (7 March 1961), Merton wrote, "Determined to write less, to gradually vanish." He added, at the end of that entry, "The last thing I will give up writing will be this journal and notebooks and poems. No more books of piety."

Quoted by Frederick Smock in his essay “Merton and Silence,” The Merton Journal, 2008, volume 15 number 1

discouraging the biographer

Documents relating to Cavafy’s life are scarce. He seldom kept a journal, and very few of his own letters have survived. His life was rather uneventful, and his remarks on his poems are generally unhelpful, while the observations recorded in his sporadic journal entries are seldom of great interest. His poem ‘Hidden’, which he wrote in 1908 but never published, is particularly discouraging for the biographer:

   From what I did and what I said
   let them not seek to find who I was.

—Peter Mackridge, introduction to Robert Liddell’s Cavafy: A Critical Biography (Duckbacks, 1974).

my life in realtime

The journal is the narcissist’s preferred genre.

artist impoverished

[Paul Léautaud] was mean, slanderous, and cruel; he could also display generosity and great delicacy in his judgments. Even at his most caustic there was a simplicity, an absence of vanity, rare in a writer. He talked about death and love, authors and actors, Paris and poetry, without rambling, without moralizing, without a trace of bitterness for having fallen on hard times. He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist. Léautaud, at rock bottom, still had his credentials. His monumental diary "Journal Littéraire", which he kept for over 50 years, can without exaggeration be described as the greatest study of character ever written.

—Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks (Stoddart, 1988), 143.

too good for us

The honest editor sent a nice note rejecting my poem, stating that I must place it in a more prestigious journal, for the pages of his magazine would only drag the piece down.

intermittent narrator

The journal is only the form of memoir I can abide, being piecemeal, fragmentary, sequential only in fits & starts, like life.

big thing in a small place

A big exuberant review in a small obscure journal.

first marks

No line is harder to write than the first line in a new notebook.

night entries

Was it a good or bad thing that writing in his journal helped him fall asleep?

and not &

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry: Sounds somewhat warmed-over. It's not Blast or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, that's for sure. Academic style manuals perhaps ruled against use of the ampersand in the title.