Where to Put my Little Yops?

I was trying to sort through my feelings about social media feeds, blogging, and the like just now. A very nice thing about a blog is that your stuff is yours. I wrote a lot of stuff that was posted to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr over the years that I didn't need to save, surely, but that felt a bit bad to leave behind when I abandoned those platforms. For a while, for example, a Facebook note was how I held onto the piece of writing I gave the most thorough edit (so far) in my life—my college admissions essay.

A downside to a blog, though, is that the content is not ephemeral. Or at least, a blog has more claims to permanence than a social media post. For a while I had a blog that was basically entirely nose-to-the-page mathematics. Which I wrote, so obviously meant something to me, but recently I started to feel like I have done and will do plenty of that outside of a blog context.

Actually, blogs are kind of fundamentally sort of lonely creatures. Some of the happiest blogs I've read are sort of bursting with links to other blog posts, as if to keep themselves company. This makes them more interesting to read, of course, but makes the writing of them a different sort of proposition than I'm often going for.

Something that a tweet or a post on Tumblr could take for granted, for instance, was that it was arriving in the presence of friends (which is to say, other posts). You have a whole feed of such objects, so each one doesn't need the sort of scaffolding that a more standalone piece of writing does.

Actually, many pieces of writing function in this way as well: comics in magazines or comic books, articles in magazines or newspapers, and so on. Even emails and e-newsletters have the companionship of other emails.

Writing to Realize

In college, my favorite kinds of essays to write had the following form: I'd sit down with the thing the essay was about and attempt to wrestle my way towards a thought about it over the course of the assigned page length.

In my first year writing course, for instance, I wrote an essay about the somewhat recent (and to this day still mildly famous) suicide of a student of the university I now teach at. I was curious about an idea of ... something along the lines of "encoding compassion"? that had come up in a Martha Nussbaum essay that I'd love to link you to but realistically will not find. In the end I worried about how the court case against the dead student's former roommate might essentially reduce him to a cartoon villain in a (sort of literally) larger-than-life drama that had captured a moment in the national conversation.

What I liked about that essay is that I came to the clearest expression of that worry in the writing of it. Which isn't to say that the essay was handed in exactly as it came to me (although who knows, in those days I worked quite close to a deadline), but that writing is thinking.

These days, I'm hearing "writing is thinking" all kinds of ways in all kinds of venues. Framing it that way is really helpful for motivating stuck new faculty, for instance. It also helps them produce the volume of work required to get tenure, since so much of the figuring out stage is already on the page, even if it doesn't make it to the final cut. It's also helpful for blocked artists: write three pages every morning and suddenly making art is just a different kind of making, not divorced from other activities you're doing daily already.

Anyway, I started writing some things about what I want from blogging or from activity on forums or on social media sites and I realized: I want to write things that (so far as I can tell) are really shaped more like newspaper columns than blog posts.

My favorite post on Tumblr (way back in the day) was a breathless mock-unserious analysis of Kesha's "Blow" both in a music-theoretical light (ostinatos, production techniques), and a tongue-in-cheek expounding of what I called "the Will to Party", a joke I'm certain Nietzsche would have chuckled at for at least half a second. In those days, you could read a Buzzfeed-esque article by Sufjan Stevens doing approximately the same kind of riff on Miley Cyrus's latest. I don't know how one gets there, but I suspect that this is a step towards that.

Cultural Commentary as Adventure Log

Some of this, too, is I want to tell you about what I saw in hopes that at least some of the time you'll see what's cool about it. I've been really getting serious about achieving fluency in Japanese recently, and was totally bowled over by this reply on the WaniKani forums.

I think one of the biggest things of having a daily study log is that you can’t just make excuses in your head of like “ehhh i havent been feeling like it today, maybe ill do it a different daaaayyy???”, it’s like, you need to have adventures every day, you need to study every day, and ever since I’ve started the study log, there has not been a single day when I would go to bed without feeling like I at least did something today that would push down on any potential existential dread [...] so it’s been very therapeutic/gratitude training for me

I've certainly been attempting to have adventures every day recently, but haven't had a great place to put them. When I did a "batch" at The Recurse Center, I faithfully did one checkin every weekday for 12 weeks. I guess some amount of this will be some of that too. I was hoping to put one here for you at the end of this post, about Japanese, locations that appear in anime because they exist in real life, bubbling in standardized test answers and writing with a wooden pencil. I think for the moment it's flown away. Trying to get to there just now I wound up trying to tell you about writing systems. Maybe we'll get there or somewhere else in the next one.