Ivy Compton-Burnett and anonymous commenting

Ivy C-B is the very first blogger. She had no internet but her whole mode of communication is by the spoken word alone. Every persona, every place, every emotion, every crisis, dilemma, horridness, kindness, disaster is told by speech, no description of gesture and scarcely any landscape at all.

Take Parents and Children,

"I suppose my thoughts are nothing to be proud of"
"Then they are different from the rest of you my dear".

We know at once we have a woman and her husband, a dissatisfied woman, and a husband fending off (with skill from experience) her dissatisfaction. Within a half dozen lines she has nine children, a very large house which belongs to her husband's parents, a mother -in -law not yielding position.....

Much of the art of blogging is the creation of persona, and position without any of the tools used in real social exchange.

That's part of why to comment as anonymous is to empty a comment of interest, a random shout from the darkness, an interjection from a non- person.

All of Ivy's commentors are bursting with life and reality.