Casual
Carlson, Tucker
Casual WASHINGTON DIARIST People in my Virginia neighborhood don't gather in bookstores on Sunday nights to talk about ideas. People in certain parts of Northwest Washington do, as I discovered...
...The people who came to discuss the book were just what you would imagine, too...
...I gave her a lame answer (a brain is like an attic, and mine is full), which seemed to suffice for the moment...
...Which means it isn't really lost...
...Generally they were friendly but awkward, the sort of people who have read about manners, but aren't quite sure how to use them...
...But at this point in the digital-cable-wireless-infotainment revolution, even literary pretense is a welcome improvement...
...People in certain parts of Northwest Washington do, as I discovered last weekend when I attended a discussion of The Slate Diaries at Politics & Prose, a lefty bookseller on upper Connecticut Avenue...
...On the way home from the bookstore I faced the unflattering truth: I keep a journal for the same reason people undertake any long, repetitious project: fear...
...In college, I would have mocked these sandal-wearers as phony and pretentious...
...I didn't tell her about all the other things I don't know anymore: how I spent the summer of 1987, who I ate lunch with two months ago, what she and her siblings talked about on the way to the park last weekend...
...I liked the idea of them, anyway...
...I'm pretty sure no one will ever read any of it...
...Actually, I had thought about it, but not in a way that pertained to me...
...The women had long earrings and complicated sweaters...
...I, meanwhile, had come up with a number of less embarrassing explanations for my journal-keeping...
...Then somebody raised a particularly good, and difficult, question: Why do people keep diaries...
...It's a writing exercise, I said at times...
...Either way, I figured, diarists are narcissists...
...I am one of the contributors...
...The answers to these and countless other questions have been lost in the jumble of my mental attic...
...And it's what I record in my journal...
...It's minutia, most of it, but it's what makes up my life...
...And, as it turned out, the liberals got a pretty good conversation going...
...I know I won't...
...It's a novel taking shape, I decided at others...
...she asked...
...The Slate Diaries is just what it sounds like: a collection of diary entries compiled by Slate magazine and published in book form...
...It's hard to knock people who are interested in books, or even people who only pretend to be interested in books...
...I liked them...
...Or, worse, their journal-keeping is a way of making a grandiose statement about themselves: "I consider my life so incredibly interesting that for history's sake its details must be recorded...
...I've kept a journal on and off since the sixth grade, and I couldn't say why, even to myself...
...But it's there...
...They write because they need a place to weep— and paper never talks back...
...The meaner part of me still does, silently...
...They talked earnestly about what sorts of people make the most interesting diarists, about who journalkeepers believe they are writing for, and so on...
...TUCKER CARLSON...
...The men were thin...
...In the car the other day, my 5-year-old daughter was trying out some of her latest knock-knock jokes on me...
...I used to know a lot of those...
...Pretty good, I said...
...In other words, they were living stereotypes: Volvo-driving, sandal-wearing, NPR-listening, arms-are-for-hugging liberals...
...Some had children in tow...
...I've always suspected that other people who keep journals must have emotional problems...
...Why don't you know them anymore...
...In fact—and I hate to admit this for what it says about me—until I stopped into Politics & Prose, I'd never really thought about it...
...Others, clearly, did not...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 11
