Notes 08
About Ideas Now A list of personal websites by creators, thinkers, and doers of all sorts.
lol
Liana Finch
‘Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines’ memorializes a forgotten archive
Very Online A digital anthology of art and writing about bad times on the internet.
Started reading: Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu. Braiding prose poetry with bachata lyrics and the gritty humour of Canary dialect, Dogs of Summer is a story of exquisite yearning, a brutal picture of girlhood and a love song written for the vital community it portrays.
I read Manu's post about identifying as a "writer" the other day:
Meta posting is fun. I love to blog about blogging. My brain enjoys a good recursion. One thing I don’t do is write about writing. That’s because I don’t think I’m a good writer. As I wrote before, I don’t even think I am a writer. Sure, I write, but that doesn’t make me a writer.
This made me think about my own writing style. Am I a "writer"? I call myself a writer in my intro bio...but am I really? I've attempted to write short stories and long-form personal essays, but none of those channels felt like me.
Expression via language, no matter the format, requires a continual series of small choices: word usage, tone, cadence, flow, sentence structure, topic, and approach.
So even though blogging is inherently unpolished by nature, it's still writing. But perhaps blogging is less about writing and more about sharing of the self?
Blogging >>> expression and discovery of the self, showcasing your weirdness, documenting and sharing experiences, naming feelings, thinking out loud, broadcasting your super niche hobbies, writing the mundane, pointing to things you love, and fostering community through shared desires.
- How cute is this cat paper mache magnet made by the lovely Bity Booker? <3
Big events bend time. When someone dies, they stay frozen within a particular day, month, or year. I bookmark time in chunks of before and after. All this life I'm living without them. My mother has never read my blog, met my dog, and will never hug the person I've chosen to spend my life with. My dad will never hear me play that song I learned on the guitar. My ex-boyfriend will never see the art I've been making or see the next Scorsese movie. As their deaths get farther away, I try harder to fold them into my everyday life.
