Ego, Superego and Id-eas

Take heart - the title has little to do with the post. I just wanted to see if I'm still capable of the learned stupidity of conference paper titles. And the verdict: Ay-up - I suspect that even having brain ganglions overgrown by Alzheimer kudzu wouldn't choke off that tendrilled vine.

Although I have been thinking about ego and public writing. Hmm, and it's a peculiarity of my mind that typing that qualifier makes me want to talk about private writing, partly because until this moment I hadn't yet been watching that idea chase its own tail. >SLAP< Okay, public writing - there's something peculiar in engaging in a largely solitary activity, with the intention of showing it to the world. Aside from thed humble folks who think they're just conduits for messages some higher power (humble?), people think they themselves have something worth saying, worth reading. And while I envy people who enjoy the act itself, as I admire people who really do want to feel their lungs and muscles burning from harsh and extended exercise, I imagine that most novelists can continue for day after day driven by ambition or self-display or messianic mission or some other aspect of blind rasping ego, as animal as appetite.

Funny, haunting the fringes of writing sites - the you-go-girlism of it all, makes me wonder - do people really think the "talent' they're praising is really there, or that well-wishing will make it so, or whether that's not the point anyway. But, really, it's beneath argument in most cases, like worrying about whether someone is destroying the elegant asceticism of a pig by slopping it. I think there's bad writing that does harm, but by content and dishonesty, not by the coarsening of ineptitude. Anyway, no one so lame that they cannot find affirmation of their swiftness somewhere.

But this is still not what's been rattling through my head - and, fact, that rumination above taken the wrong way would be a deadly insult. I want to talk about writing and response and ego and perfection and all that. Later this afternoon, I guess.