Papoulis on "the personal"

My generous and talented colleague Prof. Irene Papoulis offers these observations on the personal nature of blog-writing. (I think they're very apt, especially as we consider, again, that blog-writing seems to involve a sensation of "performance" not present in other kinds of writing.)

I suppose your post today is tongue in cheek. But it makes me think about what personal means. People sometimes think that the only way to be "personal" is to tell stories aboutwhat happened to them or what they're feeling. (Not that I have anything against that--I teach personal-essay writing classes all the time and have thought a lot about the nature of the personal, and about why people, especially academics, denigrate what they scornfully call "confessional," etc.) But one thing that's great about your public self is the apparent honesty and even brazenness you bring to whatever it is you're looking at, including so much that isn't personal in the conventional sense. (I guess some people need to be more like that, some less. You seem to know what it means not to be like that, which gives your brazenness a kind of personal awareness that makes it seem less brazen, and maybe that's part of why it works.) So I'm just writing to say you already are quite personal. Not that your being more autobiographical or confessional on your blog wouldn't be interesting. I'm sure it would.