I've been reading Heroines by Kate Zambreno, and she keeps mentioning the community of women she created on her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister. I've also been listening to Dylan Marron's podcast, The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks, where they dig up websites from the late 90s using the Wayback Machine. So I tried to find Zambreno's site, but was unsuccessful because the permissions seem set to private. And yet in attempting to access her blog I was forced to login to my old blogspot account. Oh the embarrassing earnestness of my college blog. And yet, it's also so endearing.
Prompted by the podcast episodes, I've been thinking a lot about how my relationship to the internet has changed. I think part of Marron's point is that the vitriol and group think that exists now was always there, but I can't stop thinking about the monetization of the landscape. Nobody read that blog. I just liked posting the random things that interested me. The potential for an audience mattered more than the audience itself. There was something exciting about posting to the web--it's basically a journal, but it's also a little more than a journal. Someone could read it. There might even be someone out there that can relate, that likes the same weird things, that wants to hear my random thoughts. Now though, the landscape feels so different. Engaging with the internet is a business not a hobby. Even if you start with no audience, the hidden expectation is that you will find your people and it will become something (money, trend, opportunity, fame). I can seem to escape this side hustle mindset. Instead of gaudy free blogs and over-emotive tumblr and email threads full of random links, we have Patreon and Substack and Wix. I am a little bit torn. I do think that we should be compensating people fairly for the creative work they do. I like the idea of subscriber supported content and see its radical potential (Defector Media comes to mind). And yet, in my own mind, for my own creativity, I hate that my approach to writing and creativity so easily and consistently falls prey to this kind of capitalization.
Reading that old blog, I also started thinking about how much I've changed. In college, I was so unabashed. So much of what I was posting, we would call cringe now. I was cheesy and unsophisticated and uncritical. Now sometimes I feel plagued by nuance, subsumed by academic expectations, and over aware of intervention. Another way to put it: I've read and experienced so much more since then. The old adage about getting a PhD: you realize how much you don't know. I'm surrounded by that which is so much smarter, more cogent, more thought-provoking than I am and suddenly the thought that my errant scribbles deserve to be out there in the ether seems shocking. (This is not entirely unrelated to the way the internet has changed either--surely the pure proliferation of media has its effect. Is there really a stumbling upon the weird corners of the internet anymore? The very concept of an algorithm works against that, no?) I am beyond grateful for the sheer amount of knowledge and my own lack of knowledge that I've gained from my graduate studies. It has radicalized me in ways I never could have imagined.
And yet, I can't help but feel like it's conditioned out of me a kind of wonder, a weirdness, a zeal. Walking through an art museum yesterday, I found myself wondering how to re-cultivate the weird. In the history of weird art, how much of it was drug-induced? Maybe it's as simple as observation? It also seems related to time and space: production and schedule and timeliness require repressing what doesn't fit. I've gotten so good at what I'm supposed to be doing that I've left no room for the musing, the noticing, the enjoying. Looking at my old posts, as insufferable as they seem now, that's what I felt the most nostalgic for--a kind of active and joyful processing of the world around me and unashamedly sharing it.
And so here I am, when I should be grading papers and planning classes, just writing a little something. Feeling inspired to document, to inscribe, to cultivate the weird. I'm writing and trying not to think of writing as potential publication. Already, I feel that enterprising part of my brain thinking about who or how I should share this space with, what it could become. But, while I think the connection that writing offers between reader and writer is something I would still like to realize in my life, in this moment I think the real challenge is to let this exist just for me.
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