First post

It's funny, starting a blog in July of 2025. Another one. Sorry!

This is not my first attempt – in the past five or so years there have been just about as many stabs at it – but as I've had more time to write in recent weeks I've wanted to find a way to branch out from the fiction I'm so comfortable with, push past the personal-essay grind I too easily fall into as someone with, as one friend put it, "a lot of lore". I am approaching my second year of a Master's degree, during which I've had to learn how to write like an academic at a freakish pace (my undergrad program, a design degree at an art school, had no formal classes or writing assignments at all), and think that keeping a blog that consists of more than just stories, whether true or made up, might let me explore and loosen the mental ligaments a bit.

I've decided to use Blogger as a platform rather than Substack because the latter gave me terrible performance anxiety and made me feel as if I had to hone in on one specific area of expertise which, beyond the experience of being myself, I lack. (I no longer have any remote desire to "tell my story", which has historically invited unpleasant voyeurs and forms of parasociality into my life.) The writing I did share on my old Substack blog was, to me, treacly and hastily-written, content for content's sake and little more, and I'm not very proud of it. The relative isolation of Blogspot appeals to me for now; rather than feel a push to self-promote that I myself don't like, I hope to have my own little corner of the internet where I can be a little less polished and a little less anxious while still pushing myself to write things that I'm willing to share publicly.

This Georges Perec quote, from The Gnocchi of Autumn or An Answer to a Few Questions Concerning Myself, sums up my thoughts, I think:

"How to set about avoiding, yet again, those games with mirrors within which a 'self-portrait' will be nothing more than the umpteenth reflection of a consciousness that has been well pruned, a knowledge that has been well polished, a prose made docile by the pains I have taken? A portrait of the artist of a clever monkey; can I say 'sincerely' that I'm a clown?"

I love Georges Perec. Maybe I will write about him soon. Lately, though, I have been thinking about existing as meat, and the idea of a "hedonistic reader". Whatever ends up on here, I hope you like it.