Notes on Form
I always feel like Susan Sontag when I use that title construction. If I were in a more Joan Didion mood I'd go for "On Form." But that feels a little too declarative right now. "Notes," as long as yo
u are not Susan Sontag, keeps expectations nice and loose and low. Like, hey, just some notes coming through! Doodles in the margin, that kinda thing! Please don’t expect too much!
Anyway.
This is supposed to be a weekly newsletter. I didn’t write last week because I had a bunch of job interviews and my thesis was due, and now I’m only kind of writing this week because it’s finals. (I finished a 14-page paper on Ulysses today and it almost killed me. In the Before Times, it was supposed to be 20-25! The very thought is inconceivable.)
What do I mean by “only kind of writing”? I have no idea. I’m still figuring out what I want this whole Grackle thing to be. I don’t even know what to call these pieces of writing — newsletters? Blogs? Posts? Essays? Each is stupid in its own way. But I do find myself jutting up against the question of style, and polish, and form.
I’m thinking about these things because I kind of hated my last piece (besides the title and the images, which totally whipped. “go piss girl” is already an iconic text of this era.) But the essay was stiff and humorless and didn’t actually say anything all that interesting. I think I came up with that snappy little connection to a piece of Smart Theory by a writer I admire immensely — “We’re All Poor Images Now!” Fuck yeah, culture criticized! — and then, while writing the piece, realized I didn’t have much to say beyond that. So it was kind of hard and boring to write, and probably kind of hard and boring to read. But I powered through because I wanted to write something serious and smart. Because I want people to take me seriously, and to think that I’m smart. I’m obsessed with the idea that people consider me intelligent and good at writing. I might literally die if someone described my prose as “undistinguished.” Which makes “chill” a very difficult literary aesthetic for me to nail. My writing is often funny, self-deprecating, and informal — but it is always, always a performance. Another descriptor that might literally kill me: “artless”! I know it’s technically a compliment! I don’t care! I have guile, dammit!
Part of why I started this newsletter was to have a space for writing that didn’t have to be too polished. I didn’t want to have to agonize over ledes or structure or timeliness or anything, really. I always really loved the free-form, chatty kind of writing you used to get in personal blogs and sites like The Awl and The Toast. I sound like such an old person reminiscing about the Good Old Days of, um, the internet in the mid-2010s, but there was a genre of writing then that had its own formal characteristics. Some of these were, or quickly became, unbearably annoying. (Direct address. Highly complex, insulting epithets. Performative tea-drinking. Performative Jane Austen fandom. Capitalizing Words For Emphasis. Melodramatic uses of “literally.” Annoyingly smug, excessively correct usages of “literally.” Keysmashes. “Because reasons.” Yes, I still do some of these.)
This style is also very female, or at least it was coded as such. I read it on Jezebel and Tumblr and a million other places that are now deeply embarrassing, but that once meant more to me — a weird, lonely teenager — than I feel comfortable reckoning with. I don’t want to fully dismiss that chapter in my life as a reader. Of course I’d rather write like Joan Didion or James Baldwin than, I don’t know, Nicole Cliffe. I guess what I’m trying to carve out, though, is a space where I can cultivate the intimacy and joyfulness of the bygone blog era while still tricking all of my friends into thinking I am a very impressive young lady.
I don’t really have a conclusion in mind. (Woo, formlessness!) I guess I just want to cultivate a kind of transparency. I like transparency in writing. I like when I can feel a writer working out their thoughts on the page. I like the open-handed, bare-faced vulnerability of explaining what you’re trying to do because you’re not quite sure how else to do it. And I think I’m trying to give myself permission to experiment. At the risk of being corny, or unsuccessful, or ridiculous.
I don’t usually have a problem with vulnerability in my writing. Joyce Maynard herself once complimented me on my “impressive openness,” which feels a bit like Dennis Rodman complimenting someone on rebounding, or on rocking a mesh crop top with facial piercings. But the piece that drew that comment — an essay about my boobs — had been meticulously written and edited. It was a work of artifice, carefully and rigorously constructed. I had no problem being open and vulnerable about my imperfect tits. Being open and vulnerable about my imperfect writing? Much harder.
We’ll see what The Grackle ends up looking like. But for now, I’m counting it as progress that I wrote this entirely in the Substack text editor and hit publish without looking it over even once.
Some actual news in my newsletter:
I’ll be interning at the Los Angeles Times this summer, in the Op-Ed/Editorial department! I’m super excited, even though it’ll be entirely remote.
I finished my creative writing thesis, which is the beginning of a novel. I might post an excerpt here… or I might not.
And a classic work of the classic internet era (i.e. 2010):