Stephanie's Pillowbook

I originally started a blog called Stephanie’s Pillowbook back in December 2005. The title refers, of course, to the famous Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Shonagon was a Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress in tenth-century Japan who recorded her tastes and thoughts and impressions of life in a series of beautifully-written notebooks. As she writes: “I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.” She was also quick to point out what she disliked and found hateful, and the book contains much witty and malicious gossip.

Naturally I never had a chance of emulating that aristocratic and aesthetic lady but I borrowed the term ‘pillow book’ (which in any case was common enough in her day for a set of occasional writings) for my own use. My intention had been to mix up the trivial and the serious in my life and interests; to move between the past and the present; to have lots of lists of likes and dislikes. I wanted to make something rich and miscellaneous and uncategorisable out of it all. Not surprisingly I was too lazy to achieve much of that and I never did half of what I could have done.

Unfortunately as 2007 wore on I became more and more involved in frustrating arguments with trolls – in the end I could take no more. By early last year (2008) I felt the Pillowbook had become stale and bogged down with trivialities. At the same time my life changed dramatically when I moved to London. So far as the Pillowbook was concerned I had little energy for it. Also I became somewhat uneasy about revealing so much about my past life. Anyway, I shut down the blog in April – restarted almost immediately – and shut it down again at the end of September. At the beginning of this year (2009) I restored a few old posts at this new address and then forgot about it.

Well, now is the time to bring back the Pillowbook, I feel. My enthusiasm has been restored and I have a whole bunch of stuff waiting to be written up. The focus of the new posts will be on music but I am going to deal with other topics as well. In the meantime I shall bring back a substantial part of the old Pillowbook – some posts unchanged, some with minor corrections, some extensively revised, some (on the same theme) concatenated to form longer posts. The approximate date of first posting will be marked at the end of each revived post.

This is a personal blog and not a public forum and as such I reserve the right not to admit comments that are offensive, abusive, idiotic or irrelevant. So I have, as before, enabled Comment Moderation. I don’t reveal my email address here – so one good point about comment moderation is that if anyone wishes to send me a private message they need only use a comment and mark it “not for publication”.

Finally, a brief introduction. I am a woman of a certain age living in London. I have a PhD in Philosophy with a strong interest in the history of ideas. And music is my love and passion in life.