I’m an extremely, inherently nosy person.
I am an eavesdropper extraordinaire; I will look in your medicine cabinet if you invite me over to your home. And that’s part of the reason why I’ve always loved blogs.
I remember, in college in the late ’90s, when I first discovered that people I only vaguely knew from classes and other activities were spilling their guts online on webpages that absolutely anyone with an internet connection could wander over to and read through to their heart’s content. I was sort of aghast yet fascinated—I couldn’t fathom why a person would voluntarily make their innermost thoughts so readily available for anyone to judge, yet I couldn’t turn away from reading them myself.
Not only that, but I think I secretly wanted to be bopped on the head with a magic wand that would somehow give me the permission I thought I needed to be granted in order to share in the same way. I guess I was looking for self-esteem at the root of it, for enough confidence to take up space, to claim the inherent validity of my own inner experience.
After learning some HTML in a course on computer basics, I messed around with some rudimentary public-facing sites that mostly collected my film reviews and other academic writing I was proud of. But I totally missed out on the whole LiveJournal phenomenon. Even the blog I started in mid-2004 wasn’t overly invested with sharing personal details—I was sort of self-defensively invested in presenting myself as A Writer. I’d convinced myself that no one would possibly be interested in the minutiae of my daily life (yet I somehow fancied that anyone would give a shit about my jejune musings on film and books and art?).
But now in the Twitter era of everyone being a critic/pundit ready to pen voluminous commentary on any given political event or pop cultural radar blip, my knee-jerk contrarian impulse is to head in the opposite direction—to delve more readily into private memory and personal reflection.
I find myself actually craving the languorous rhythms of lists, of people detailing the stuff that they’re currently obsessing over or writing about the places or things or experiences that have made their lives more pleasant, or at least more interesting. It’s no wonder I fell in love with reading perfume blogs—though they can certainly be intellectually rigorous, they necessarily have to linger over personal, sensual experience at some level.
And, contrary to a lot of professional blogging advice that insists that writing must be helpful if you want to monetize your content and build your brand, I’m way more interested in anti-helpful writing at this point, to be frank. I don’t want to be sold anything; I don’t want to swallow heaping spoonfuls of self-aggrandizement disguised as useful advice. I want personality above all else, a window into genuine lived experience. I’ll never get tired of quoting this line from Carl Wilson’s book on Let’s Talk About Love:
But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors—to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare.
So, all that being said—it’s late July. I’m too hot and too exhausted and moving at much too slow a pace to try to think thoughts any deeper than this, and wonder if the same might be true of you as well. Rather than contribute any further to the pileup of self-serious ruminations that I was just busy castigating, I’ll give you a tour of some of the things that have been making my world go ’round lately.
(Please note that, yes, this whole thinky prelude was also a way of tricking myself into writing exactly the kind of gorgeously, poetically mundane and intimate “this is what I had for breakfast” blog post that I always weirdly felt like I didn’t have permission to indulge in.)
Frankie Knuckles House Masters ♥ Lyle Lovett’s Anthology: Volume One (+ concert anticipation for seeing him live for the first time at the Chicago Theatre on August 1) ♥ all things tulsi ♥ Benefit’s Brow Zings ♥ Eugenia Bone’s Mycophilia ♥ Arctic Monkeys’ “A Certain Romance” ♥ Jeff Buckley’s “What Will You Say” live at Glastonbury ♥ moving into a new apartment! ♥ my zine Satan Is My Father officially being available to buy at Quimby’s ♥ this exchange between Bjork and philosopher Timothy Morton ♥ this quote from Brian Eno ♥ Armani Si ♥ Spinning Wheel Apothecary’s powerful Crystal Vision salve ♥ Moon Mapping ♥ Sherman Alexie’s Twitter feed, always ♥ giving a psychic reading via Skype to a woman living in Dubai (hello, time difference!) ♥ our cats marching down the hallway behind us like they’re in a Fellini movie ♥ starting to learn how to use Evernote ♥ anticipation of playing a couple awesome gigs with my band later this year ♥ Keiler Roberts’s Miseryland (and Brian’s insightful blog post about it) ♥ anything Fassbender (fucking Macbeth! ZOMG, Steve Jobs!) ♥ Joshua Clover’s #HowIQuitSpin Twitter epic
APPENDIX
Of course the queen of these kinds of posts is Gala Darling with her running Things I Love Thursday feature. Ashley Ford’s 5 Things goes deep into emotions and experiences in a beautifully raw way. I’ve also recently been enchanted by Mlle. Ghoul’s writings—the posts Current Loves and Still Life with Adornments on her own blog and her guest post on the Bloodmilk Jewelry blog, Summer Scents for Those Who Shun the Sun.
Queen of Peaches 