Dissatisfied with yesterday's post. It's a jumbled narrative. Ben's description of the foot incident, by way of contrast, is much more coherent. Then again I like my writing voice in that section (droll? detached?) more than Ben's brisk sensory account.

Second-guessing myself. I started reading The Norton Book of Personal Essays earlier tonight.

The alternative was writing an essay for German on an incredibly boring topic: the insufferable "Romantic period." It's all feelings and nature, as far as I can tell. Wedged between the Enlightenment and Modernism, it just looks pathetic.

Back to the anthology. It's a collection of exemplary essays assembled by my favorite essayist, Joseph Epstein. Here's a good example of an Epstein essay.

As I've said before, all the praise lauded on news-oriented weblogs ignores the medium's huge potential as a place to revitalize the personal essay. Even Epstein, who has half-heartedly compared blogging to journaling, seems to miss that point. Perhaps, like many writers in his generation, he thinks the word "blog" is, if not dirty, then certainly ugly.

We may have lost poetry, we may be in danger of losing the short story, but the personal essay is coming back.

Somewhere, there's bound to be a few bloggers who write about themselves but are not teenage girls with no knowledge of basic grammar and spelling. Certainly some of my longer posts, if they had a bit more focus, might qualify as decent essays. And vanity aside, I'm not the best blogger in the blogosphere. Which means that the sort of blog I'm envisioning might already be out there, full of posts worth perusing.

Here's where I would waste an hour looking for such a blog. I'll take this one on faith rather than risk disappointment. I've got enough to read, at the moment.

The idea is to get better. Bloggers — or at least this class of bloggers I'm talking about, the diarist-essayists — are the heirs to the personal essay tradition. Maybe, if I learn a bit more about this form, I can make a worthwhile contribution.

Probably sounds like a funny goal. Have I ever told you that I want to be a writer?

Between this reading and yesterday's unending post-party blogging, I've reawakened my inner English geek. (How many Google hits do you think I'll get for the all-too-obvious pun "mental floss"? Shoot high.)

After a prolonged game of sardines at dinner tonight, Jinx and Our Bold Hero digressed into the proper spelling of names.

I had made some point about how, in English, we tend to preserve the native pronunciation of Italian cities. That's complete bunk, of course; perhaps my mom has been doing that and I unwittingly made a sweeping generalization.

Jinx thought that we should always preserve the native name. Everyone should call Germany "Deutschland" and our neighbor to the south "Mehico." Not sure where I stand on this.

I'd like to think of myself as a "descriptivist," a member of the linguistic camp opposed to Dryden (who, after confusing English with Latin, decided that we shouldn't split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions), Elements of Style author E.B. White (who, basically on a whim, created a distinction between "which" and "that" that MS Word insists upon to this day), and their fellow "prescriptivists." The descriptivist in me notes that we probably have an easier time pronouncing the names we give to foreign places, and that, at least, is a good thing.

On the other hand, I can't get over Prof. Dreher's use of the word "Cologne" as the name of the German city he used to live in, otherwise known as Köln. He knew it was wrong, and there was no need to dumb it down.

And I think it was Prof. Goldgar (or was it Fritzell?) who once suggested that, while in England, Immanuel Kant went by the English mispronunciation of his name rather than the vaguely scandalous but nonetheless correct German pronunciation.

So I think I sided with Jinx, in the end. I suspect that speakers who know more phonemes (like ñ or ö or the ellusive "z" in words like "azure") are happier.

Other good news: the one thing I knew about E.E. Cummings isn't really true. You've guessed it already, haven't you? He capitalized when signing letters, explicitly told a translator that his name should be capitalized for a book, and never legally changed his name to be lowercase. Can you even do that, by the way?

That lowercase nonsense always annoyed me. (Though, obviously, I've got nothing against "e.e. cummings" within a poem.) Now the only threat left to our standard orthography is that girl from Wayside School who wants to spell her name with an exclamation point. Jenny!, was it?

Ah, and the essay still isn't done. I don't have class until Wednesday, I really don't see the rush.