what is a writer anyway

when i was a kid and teachers asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i used to say i wanted to be an author. i mean, i also said a cop and an astronaut and a farmer and a fireman and all sorts of other things, but i usually said i wanted to be an author.

when i was a teenager, my guidance counselor asked me what i wanted to get a degree in. not really knowing how to politely say “i don’t want a degree, i want a house and fulfilling hobbies”, or else “i would prefer if my wife was the breadwinner”, i briefly reflected on which classes i had found enjoyment in, if any, and recalled that i felt the best about my work when i was getting an essay grade back. those classes had been history classes where we talked about changing political systems and about philosophy more broadly. my parents had not so subtlely pushed me towards thinking about law school a few weeks prior, so i figured political science would be a good way to combine those things. at the very least i should learn something marketable.

next came the issue of actually picking out a university to attend. my parents spent a lot of money and energy on putting me in the schools where i had the best opportunities available, and i had always done well enough to make them not regret it. now, at the ripe old age of 16, it was dawning on me in real terms that i actually had to do some legwork to advance my life. so i filled out a not-quite form-fillable application and sent it to a few schools i had briefly googled, and they seemed alright enough anyway. they were names i had heard before at least. i was told it was also important to think about what schools would be a “good fit”, somewhere i actually wanted to be, not just the name at the top of my eventual degree. frankly, i couldn’t be bothered. i was 16. all my energy was devoted to keeping my gpa afloat, playing league of legends, and stewing about being a virgin - all things i could accomplish anywhere.

one college i was looking at offered me the option to take a year off and start with them the following fall. i was intrigued, but couldn’t be bothered with doing the research on what a gap year would really entail in my case. fortunately the choice was taken away from me when an end-of-year speech from one of my teachers somehow moved me enough to make me sure that i wanted to be in a classroom and do great things. so i decided to take the straight and narrow instead.

the path of least resistance took its course and i landed in my 100 level classes. i was shocked to discover that political science is a university code word for bureaucrat training. this is perhaps my fault - i had done as little research as was physically possible before committing to this path - but it still felt like a betrayal. or false advertising. whichever. what writing was available to me was mostly in the form of short responses to questions for which we had already been given the answers in lecture. what specific kind of game theory model is this? how come this amendment is written this way? what is the tragedy of the commons? in a shakespeare class i took for a gened requirement, i was able to write essays, such that they were. for the third or fourth time in my academic life, i was confronted with such thought provoking questions as “isn’t hamlet’s life fucked up?” and “do you think it’s racist for iago to be mean to othello?” once again, following the trend from high school, the absolute best any of us could even theoretically do was present a mechanically sound and generally comprehensible rehashing of the same essays the professor read every semester. nothing new was created, even if we were good at writing essays. most of us were not.

the problem was that this work was ostensibly what i should have wanted to be doing, even though it obviously wasn’t. i wanted to write something new. i wanted to learn something new. the university is supposed to be the place where you specialize, learn, and above all, create. what i had in mind was maybe learning a thing or two, reading a book i hadn’t read before for example, and then using the content to go on and do my thing. instead i found myself in “high school 2: now it’s expensive”.

over time, the gap between what i was doing and what i wanted to be doing grew more and more impossible to span psychologically, even with the assistance of psychoactive drugs and a constant stream of social functions. the problem of course was that i didn’t really know what i wanted to do instead. my major choice, and really university as a whole, was already a compromise from my adolescence. the only thing i could think of was how offensive my coursework felt. here were courses i was taking because they constituted a writing requirement, but the only writing i did was the humanities equivalent of taking the derivative of a function x. it was a set of benchmarks installed to ensure i wasn’t too much of a slack-jawed dunce to make the business i attended too embarrassed to continue taking my money. there was no creation, no expression, no revelation or discussion in it. just rote memorization of the bare minimum necessary skills to show the person reading my writing that i was an adult with an accordingly appropriate command of the english language.

the options for escaping this were meager. i could pivot to creative writing, put up with even more laughable standards of quality, and run the risk of not immediately being recognized as the next great novelist of our age. the other option was full-on english, which is in many ways doomed to be more of the same memorization and regurgitation. this was no clearer than when considering career paths, where getting enough inconsequential accolades to eventually replace my teachers seemed like the most likely endpoint.

i did, of course, wind up taking the second option anyway, and it has actually improved my relationship with school, but i think it’s mostly because in the interim, i’ve discovered what i actually want to do, and how little it rubs shoulders with anything resembling a legitimate institution.

when i was a kid i wanted to be an author. that’s still true, except i’m not brave or confident enough to commit to a whole book. i’d much rather write something here or there when i can. the trick is to convince someone with lots of money to give me some in return for the writing that i do. obviously everybody would like that job; i’m sure even people who don’t have an interest in writing would love to make a decent living for putting out a couple thousand words one or two times a month. so it’s not so simple as realizing you’d like to be a columnist or a commentator or whatever it is. most people who have those kinds of gigs don’t really call themselves anything but writers anyway. the important thing for them is that they write in some generative capacity, and that they’re good enough at it to get by.

this is what being a writer is, i think. it’s basically a hobby, only unlike being into model trains or skiing, calling yourself a writer puts you in the same category as people like hemingway and newton and dostoevsky and plato. it also doesn’t really mean anything in particular. if you tell someone you’re a salesman, it means you sell things. it could be any product, and you could have any clientele, but the function and format are largely the same. if you say that you’re a writer, it could mean almost anything. nyt editors are writers, but so are philosophers. you could do intensive research and peer review, but you could just as easily write copy for the sides of boxes of cheerios. it doesn’t really matter. i think that’s why people use this term ‘writer’ instead of something more specific. you see it all over people’s social media bios. this guy’s a contributor to the atlantic. that guy’s a writer, and you can buy a book they co-wrote on amazon with this link. the only people who call themselves authors are people who do books full time. most people in this circle of the world, though, they’re just writers. whatever that means.

quarantine livin’

it’s not all that bad

granted, my parents have a nice house with a yard and a pool and i get to see my dogs again, so it’s easy for me to say.

my schedule every day has been something like this:

• 2pm: wake up for class meetings on slack and zoom
• 4pm: get out of bed, alternate between playing viola and reading
• 6pm: dinner, watch the sopranos
• 9pm: dad starts complaining that he’s tired, goes to bed
• 10:30pm: mom falls asleep on the couch while we watch the british baking show
• 11pm: catch up on homework
• 12:30am: shower
• 1:00am: watch anime, youtube, twitch streams
• 6am: fall asleep

some days we walk the dogs around the neighborhood for a while in the afternoon. surprisingly, i don’t listen to much music. i shuffle a playlist for a bit while i’m showering or when i’m doing housework, or occasionally a particular song will pop into my head and i’ll listen to it a few times. the past few days i’ve had “oh darlin’” by the beatles and “kokomo” by the beach boys stuck in my head, so i’ve been humming along to that.

music

the main thing missing from my routine is travel. not in the sense of going significant distances, but literally in the sense of traversing from one place to another. my locomotion is a constant loop between my bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the street. this really ought to be the case for everyone given the pandemic, but it’s no coincidence that, in the absence of walks to and from class or appointments or coffee shops, active music listening has also largely departed from my routine. i do most of my listening while i’m on the go; last year it was almost all in my car because i spent so much time driving to and from work, and this semester it was between classes or while i waited for the bus. my intuition is that this is relatively uncommon, and it’s surprising to me that this is the case. i think of myself as someone who loves music (and pizza! and the office!!! and dogs!!!!!!!), and yet, i apparently use music as a space filler. my former 90+ minute commute to and from work in atlanta traffic was a psychic black hole that needed to be filled, so i obliged with the only stimulation allowed by the DMV, namely music and (hands free!) phone calls. all that said, i’m still trying to keep consistent with getting my viola chops back in action, so maybe i’m not so phony.

what i have been listening to is a mix of lofi, some korean groups, bedroom pop type stuff, and a few other scattered things. i really enjoy old school, balls-out love songs. stuff like put your head on my shoulder.

tv

i’ve been working through the man in the high castle and the sopranos a good bit, because my parents will watch them. high castle is alright. we started season 3 and i don’t really care for it too much anymore but i like to give things a fair shot.

the sopranos is pretty good. we’ve only gotten through season 2 so far so i don’t know if it’s still not at the ‘good’ part yet or if i’m just a philistine, but i don’t quite see reason for it to be as hyped as it is. i’ve heard it called one of the best shows of all time. still, it’s interesting and i like talking to my therapist about dr. melfi because it prompts him to talk about the theory and ideas behind psychotherapy and why show biz always gets it wrong.

anime

i finished full metal alchemist: brotherhood last week after having started it before the quarantine. VERY good show, and relatively short at roughly 60 episodes. it has a somewhat simplistic view of human struggle and failure, but it’s charming and the characters are compelling enough to carry it. it has a little bit of everything; humor, flashy magic, top-notch openings, political subterfuge, and wholesome romances. it’s on netflix.

i started watching jojo’s bizarre adventure this week, on recommendation of its ubiquity in memes. it’s not very good in the sense of writing and characterization, technical stuff like that, but it’s hilarious and insane. i pulled an all-nighter because i kept saying “one more episode” and then cracking up too hard to sleep. it’s about the joestar family fighting against ancient vampires through time, and every protagonist has a name like Jonathon or Joseph, so they all go by JoJo, hence the title. every single character is a hyper-muscley adonis dude with 16 abs and shoulders broader than a car. the villains in the second arc have these mediterranean/egyptian/persian looks with turbans and tattoos and lip rings, but their only clothes are basically loincloths and they’re all named after 80s rock bands. it’s so dumb, i love it. the openings have kind of weird 3d animation going on but the music is tight, and of course there’s the famous use of ‘to be continued’ as the riff from roundabout kicks in to end every episode. highly recommend this one if you’re in the mood for shits and giggles. it’s also on netflix.

i’ve been watching my hero academia off and on for the past several months. there are four seasons out right now and i’m currently an episode or two into that one. i will be catching up next week. i think of it as a shonen with the tone of a slice of life anime; the art style is softer and you’re more likely to say “he’s so cute!” about deku (protagonist) than you are to say he looks cool (not that he isn’t cool). this is one of those shows that’s fun enough to watch and has a broad enough concept that it could conceivably run for a really long time. it’s about society if almost everyone had a superpower, and how people step up to become heroes to keep the peace, because the cops are just useless (as usual). the fights are pretty fun to watch, with the one small drawback that because everything is so power oriented, there isn’t a ton of cool choreography like you see in naruto or in full metal. there’s a wide cast of characters and the show does a good job of making them all at least someone that you want to root for, if not particularly deep in every case. you should check it out on hulu.

books

i’ve mostly read things for class recently. i’ve enjoyed the marxism stuff from my critical theory class (lol) and readings from my film class about certain directors and the state of hollywood in the 90s. there will probably be dedicated posts to these topics when i get around to it.

i’ve been slowly working through ‘our death’ by sean bonney. it’s a collection of poetry, letters, and essays, mostly poetry. the whole thing has a very strong anarchist bent, but it’s not really political, not exactly. it deals more with the feeling of beeing utterly alienated from spirituality and the feelings of disillusionment in the current moment. the tone and delivery of my previous post is pretty overtly inspired by bonney, so that will give you a sense.

i plan to pick up walden again this week if i can stomach it. we’ll see how that pans out. i’m interested in it because it was referenced a lot in a book of essays by mark greif i sifted through a few months ago. i don’t really buy into the mythical “return to nature” aspect, at least not in the literal sense. people love to ‘gotcha!’ thoreau by pointing out that walden pond is like 10 minutes from his parents’ house. i don’t really put any stock in that criticism because he did, in the end, spend a few years living self-sufficiently and bartering fairly for what he couldn’t produce himself. the important part, from what i can tell, is more about the spirit of returning to tangibility and being responsible for the activities and projects we undertake. it’s extremely dense and meandering, though, which is why i have a hard time picking it up.

movies

courtesy of the film class i’m taking, i’ve been watching many more movies this semester than i usually did before. it’s nice to discover that i do in fact have the attention span for it. i haven’t attempted anything monolithic like apocalypse now or the irishman, 3 hour odysseys of film, but you know what i’m talking about. it’s the effect that makes people comfortable watching an entire season of television but turn their nose up at watching a single entity that takes 2 hours. my favorites from the class, which is entirely about american film in 1999:

the blair witch project, which i had not seen before my professor screenshared it over zoom. i happen to be of the opinion that a movie simply cannot be legitimately frightening because suspension of disbelief doesn’t go that far, but this was at the very least deeply unsettling and quite stressful. i’m more interested about the making of the film, though. i’m sure there are plenty of places you can research this more in-depth than this quick paragraph, but the things that stuck out to me are the ‘method’ approach not just of the acting, but the whole production. the actors portraying the students in the film were publicly stated to be dead in the months leading up to theatrical release, and remained so for months after. their imdb pages even listed them as deceased. official film websites usually include extras, trivia, interviews with actors and directors, that sort of thing - blair witch’s website instead functioned as an extension of the “missing, seeking information” vibe in regular publication about the film. the actors were not given scripts or warning about what shenanigans they would encounter in the woods, and weren’t fed very much to help exacerbate their stress. part of what makes the film so effective is the performances, but finding out that the actors didn’t read lines or have cues and were genuinely terrorized also begs the question of whether it’s really acting. still, this movie rocks and, i’m told, was incredibly important in the history of horror.

we watched the boondock saints as well. this movie was kind of strange; it has that same fantastical hyperrealist vibe you get from a lot of action/violent movies in the era (think tarantino). it’s about these two brothers in south boston who fall into some information about a meeting between higher-ups in the russian mob, which leads them onto a crusade of vigilantism against all the particularly evil organized crime guys in town. it’s pretty ridiculous most of the time, especially willem dafoe’s character (the fbi guy on their trail), but, whether heavyhandedly or not, it does kind of make you think about ethics and how much authority individuals have to take care of business. plus they’re good catholic boys just like me :)

if you haven’t seen office space then you probably should right away. it’s the absolute peak of “job sucks, i just wanna grill for god’s sake” americana. which reminds me, office space is written and directed by mike judge, the guy who makes king of the hill. apt. it kind of does the american beauty thing where the solution to the issues of disillusionment with work and difficulty with fulfillment are treated with checking out entirely - peter in office space says “i’m not gonna go to work anymore. no, i’m not gonna quit, just, i don’t like it, and i don’t wanna go”. this movie’s extremely cathartic, hilarious, and hits many of the same anxieties we still have about work culture nowadays, with some notable changes from the late 90s. many of us today i’m sure would be thrilled to have access to the kind of job that peter says makes his life worse every day than it was before, for example.

you should probably also watch when harry met sally. yeah, yeah, it’s a romcom, but the good kind. the very good kind. minimal bullshit (you do need some to make a romantic plot work), very funny dialogue, and really bizarre characters that are extremely relatable in their own way. i watched this on recommendation from a friend, and it also happens to be one of my mom’s favorite movies. do with that what you will, but i really earnestly recommend this one.

that’s all for today folks, if i think of more stuff to add on here i’ll either make a post referencing it as its own topic or i’ll add it to this list, or both. if you see something missing from this list then let me know and i’ll add on.

originality

i got the sense during high school that nothing i had done in my classes was original. especially looking at english classes, i was certain that nothing i had written or said during discussions was something that you could have called by that name. of course i wasn’t plagiarizing, but it felt that there was no way my conclusions or thoughts about beowulf or the great gatsby or what have you were things that hadn’t been said before. people had been writing and talking about those stories since before my grandparents were alive; how could i add anything that wasn’t, at best, redundant? and even if i set aside that kind of towering landmark of the english literary canon, and wrote about a lesser-known piece of literature for class, it was clear from the essay prompts and the way my teachers were able to run with ideas as soon as i suggested them that the thought had already crossed their mind.

the problem for me is that for something to be considered truly original, it needs to not only be something that nobody else has said, but something that nobody else could have said. originality is the pure expression of voice; the synthesis of an individual’s particular ability to respond to the world around them and add to it. i could make a statement that nobody has ever heard before, but if someone else is on course to make the same statement, whether within the next minute or the next century, then where does my voice fit in? is it meaningful at all for me to have said it instead of someone else?

in essence, i’m searching for originality that stems not just from novelty, but from true creative independence — media that could be exactly the same if it was made in a vacuum, without being informed or impacted in any way by its predecessors. even writing that sentence makes me realize how impossible of a standard i’ve set. most of my classes have talked about how all media is reactionary in the sense that it’s a response to what came before it. this plays the leading role in how we understand art, and gives it its punch. seminal movements in literary theory are founded on the idea that what i’m describing can’t exist, almost by definition.

going forward, i find in the way i live that i’ve more or less let go of the need to be unique, or at least of the impossible standard i’ve described. i can discuss movies and read interesting books, then go on to write interesting essays and blogposts about it. my friends tell me it’s interesting to them, and that i say things they hadn’t thought of before. maybe that’s the only way to really know if what you’re doing matters, if it exists. at the same time, you’re supposed to be internally driven. don’t care about what other people think or say. do what makes you happy, and do it to make yourself happy. you don’t have to be the best, or even very good at it; you just have to be happy or die trying. the irony is that, in the same way no piece of art exists in a vacuum, neither can a person. you create from within, but creation is measured and given meaning by the world it inhabits. a human life is the same. pulling on a previous post, it seems like the best way forward is to not make it about going forward. framing your life around where you’ve been and where you’re going, perhaps how you’re remembered, defeats the purpose of being and having been. still though, we ask ourselves, if we fall down in a forest and nobody hears us scream, do we still exist? what if we fall down in the street, and the traffic lights keep blinking? somehow we have to find a balance between being the center of our own universe and the hard fact that our perception lies to us about that. the world doesn’t turn on a single point, but we can only ever understand it as it relates to us. what the world is to each person is necessarily founded upon their own interpretation. to a human mind, the only possible world is the one we build around ourselves, and yet we constantly need to verify it against what other people have built. creativity has to come from within, but meaning can only come from without.

‘self-care’ and the language of wellbeing

in response to this article about jonny sun and lin manuel-miranda’s book ‘gmorning gnight’

the article i linked above really aired out some of the more egregious offenders on this topic, so i won’t talk about gmorning gnight or the cretins responsible for creating it. that said, i’ll talk about rupi kaur even though the other writer, alex nichols, did, because her work is a good entry point into the problems i’m going to talk about.

rupi kaur is inane in the purest sense of the word. she writes (or steals) her poetry, which rarely consists of more than 20 words as best as i can tell, and pairs it with tangentially related line art. rupi kaur is bad because her poetry, when intelligible, seems to exist purely to evoke a hollow sense of warmth in the reader. the outcome of reading a page from ‘milk and honey’ might be some sense of identification, but it is and can only ever be shallow, because kaur’s poetry never touches on anything beyond the superficial. you read 10 words in a black typewriter font on a white or off-white page, and then look at the accompanying line art that looks like it was copied straight off the shoulder or wrist of the worst kind of girl in your english class. kaur makes picture books for the eternal adolescent; her verses reassure you that your feelings are big and deep without actually plumbing those depths. the subject matter pays lip service to the content of adult life, but the themes are invariably juvenile. readers who are somehow able to engage with it sincerely feel validated in their emotions, and nothing more is asked of them. it’s the least challenging thing you could possibly write. it is exclusively aesthetic.

perhaps i’m being overly harsh, and i just don’t understand her poetry, or what her mission is as a poet, particularly as a brown poet. in an interview with vice, kaur shared a bit about why she does what she does:

shah: there’s this idea that your poetry is a more democratic format, but that sometimes has its own baggage—the whole plagiarism thing, for example. a woman of colour, nayyirah waheed, accused you of plagiarism. how did you deal with all of that? it’s hard. especially because you know you both come from communities that deal with a lot. and the reason that both of you are writing is because you’re trying to overcome that pain. It’s really sad that someone got so hurt. all those things are so real, and that’s what makes it so complicated.

i also feel that plagiarism is such a heavy, loaded word—it can also silence people. people who would not be writing otherwise. me using a couple of words that the other person also uses, doesn’t equal plagiarism. if another brown girl with the same last name wants to write about feminism and what it is to be an immigrant, it’s like me saying “you’re copying me.” we’re living in a world where me and so many other artists are writing about similar topics is just a reflection of our times.

if i’m being harsh, let it be known that vice was softballing throughout this interview, which is as much about instagram as it is about poetry. “the whole plagiarism thing” is how they subtly hand-wave waheed’s serious accusation.

kaur writes for feminism, and for decolonization, huge topics with decades of history and nuance to pull from. when asked about the claims of plagiarism, she just says that it’s “really sad that someone got so hurt”, and then talks about how the accusation has made her feel bad. the next question:

shah: it must be weird, because you’ve got all the recognition for it, but there could be a hundred other people doing it. is it hard to keep it real? do i feel guilty—why did i get all this success, and the other person didn’t? for sure. i wish the world was fair.

asked point-blank why ‘milk and honey’ has the success that it does, kaur’s response is easily substituted for ‘idk lol but it sucks not everybody can be as valid as i am. it’s so unfair.’ i’ll admit it can be difficult to view one’s success objectively and try to diagnose the reason for it. i’ll also admit that my reading of this interview is, shall we say, uncharitable. but the larger point is that kaur offers nothing in the way of insight into her work when asked. she doesn’t know, she can’t explain. she doesn’t even take issue with the idea that any of a vast number of social media posts or notebook doodles could be perfect substitutions for her poetry. she just got lucky.

i happen to think it’s deeper than that. i’ve already spent more time on her than i meant to, so i’ll just say this: rupi kaur is, apparently accidentally, the distillation of what’s wrong with how we approach our emotional and psychological health. the key thing here is superficiality; a fixation on pretty words rather than meaning.

i think it used to be the case that when people talked about your wellbeing, they just meant the physical health of your body. i say i think, because a revolution in our understanding of wellness and health was in full swing by the time i got old enough to really think deeply about anything.

i attended a boarding school for most of high school, and a three-year one at that, so most of the student body was at their third school in as many years by the time they became sophomores. part of our orientation activities included learning about how to adjust to a new environment, and they taught us the basics of depression and how to keep an eye on each other to spot it. my gym class (hilariously entitled ‘moving and learning’) was, on paper, entirely about holistic wellness as opposed to just making sure we were capable of running a mile and shooting hoops. we had readings and discussions that dealt with maintaining ourselves in each of the different spheres of health, not just the physical. notably, they included your emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

this is the case online too. mental health as opposed to solely physical health has exploded in public conversation. the prevailing opinion you’ll see online today is that most if not every person should see a therapist. joker, a recent blockbuster, was essentially about the horrors of life without access specifically to good mental healthcare. i’ve grown up in a world where the health of your person - as opposed to your body - is placed at the forefront. we have all sorts of ways to talk about this, and most everyone i know has had a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or some kind of mental disease.

so what? what’s wrong with any of this? why did i feel compelled to think or write about it? the general thesis i’m going to try and convey here is that somewhere along the line, we have gone astray from actually helping people with how we talk about wellness, and its popularity is to blame.

between talking about mental health with teachers, advisors, classmates, other citizens of online, family, and friends, i’ve more or less internalized the entire vocabulary and theory of wellness that can be learned outside of psychological research. i’ve known how to see it when people around me are suffering from mental illnesses. i know what depression is. i know what anxiety is. i know the words to say and the habits of mind to practice to keep yourself and the people you meet from being miserable, or at least to help them shoulder the weight.

the first time i went to therapy, i was asked what symptoms brought me in, what i needed help with. i listed everything i was experiencing, and he told me that i had more or less recited the dsm entry on depression. we talked a bit more about other things, like drug use, i suspect to rule out other disorders, and then i was given my diagnosis right there. i could have diagnosed myself. frankly, the fact that i saw a professional at all indicates that i already had. there is comfort in having the authority of degrees and certifications to back up my suspicions, but the plain truth is that i billed my parents’ insurance so that i could have someone tell me what i already knew and put it on their stationery so that i could make things neat with my school administration. i already knew what was going on. the way i see it, this story is both a credit to and a condemnation of the culture of wellness. it’s incredible that, by function of being party to the social institutions that are requisite to life, i was able to learn and recognize how to know when something is wrong. that infrastructure has done a lot of good for my growth as well as for how i understand the growth of my friends.

the problem is that when it came to actually getting better, it didn’t help. as i said, i knew all the habits of mind and the things to tell yourself. how to frame your thoughts so that you can function more healthily. i feel very strongly that none of these things, therapy included, contributed much to eventually getting my shit back together. what did help was dropping out of school, getting two jobs, and spending more time around people. invariably, when i was open with my friends about what i was feeling, the conversations would follow the same lines you read online and hear from guidance counselors; you are valid, your feelings matter, don’t be so hard on yourself. while true, i already knew that.

rupi kaur and twitter invite you to practice the language and the e·mo·tion of mental unhealth because it is easy and is capable of infinite recursion. rupi kaur says so herself when she accedes that there are many people who write the exact same poetry that she does. even so, she acquires both social and fiscal capital from it, and helps open the space for corporations to do the same. the language of wellbeing has done more good for corporate social media engagement and rupi kaur’s personal brand than it has for my depression. that bothers me. it should bother you too.

gi joe tells us that knowing is half the battle. true to form, the culture that educates us is desperate to be a glass-half-full kind of culture, so i suppose we can be understanding if it forgets the other half. therein lies the rub, though, and it’s why the superficial way we discuss issues of wellbeing is at best woefully inadequate. everybody knows their trauma or their self-esteem issues or what have you aren’t their fault; they just don’t believe it isn’t their fault, not really, and that’s what we need to work on. some good can be done by reassurance, but this kind of insubstantial aphorism doesn’t do anything beyond that, and for anyone who actually needs help, reassurance just doesn’t cut it. if self care bot is an effective treatment for your ‘depression’, you aren’t really depressed. conversely, and more the point, if reading a tweet that says “just be in tune with yourself” is the only thing standing between you and the void, it’s not going to help. you need to do something.

the point of this is not to say that other people aren’t being depressed correctly. the point is that when the only language we have to talk about these things is mainstream (and profitable), it is devalued. everyone who has a bad day can say they feel depressed, and they have the vocabulary ported over from medical spaces to describe it as a condition. we need to remember that there is a difference between having depression and feeling depressed, or having anxiety and feeling anxious. if you truly do suffer from a medical condition of this nature, the bottom line is that nobody can fix it for you, and nobody can make you better. you have to be better yourself.

the appeal of this self-care approach to wellness is clear; you’re feeling shitty and hopeless, and then you read a tweet encouraging you to drink water, because it’s good for you. you get some, and you feel a little better. it helps because you haven’t eaten anything today, but it feels like it’s helping because you can tell yourself you did something. the authority of a viral account or c-list celebrity has held your hand and guided you through a process that should be clear to any toddler - drink when thirsty - and you get to feel like you’ve done something to help yourself. superficial wellness-speak can give you the sense that you’ve accomplished something without actually having to do so. you’re being patronized, and the wealthy members of the culture machine are reaping the profits.

literature, experience, and storytelling

this week in my critical theory class we read an essay by walter benjamin entitled “the storyteller”. it serves as a critical examination of how the way people tell stories has changed. prior to the invention of the printing press and the wide practice of literacy, the only stories that most people heard were told to them in person by bards or the like. this is where we get folk tales, most of mythology, and epics. nowadays we call these kinds of stories and this mode of storytelling ‘oral history’. benjamin’s assertion is that what was once fundamental to the act of storytelling is now lost, if not obsolete:

memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. it is the muse-derived element of the epic art in a broader sense and encompasses its varieties. in the first place among these is the one practiced by the storyteller. it starts the web which all stories together form in the end. one ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the oriental ones, have always readily shown.

oral history is taught as something quaint, something romantic. this is because in a plain sense, it is. you don’t need to remember anything in 2020, except when taking exams. the whole of human knowledge is available within minutes online if you know a little bit about how to look. when i’ve gone to the bar with my dad and his friends, they’ve often lamented the extinction of the bar argument. they talk about how if you and a fellow patron had a disagreement over who won a heisman in what year, it used to be the case that you would argue about it. the right answer was whichever was supported with more convincing evidence, or, far more likely, by popular vote; you might tap your friend or the bartender on the shoulder to weigh in on the issue at hand. nowadays if we’re talking and aren’t sure about the fact of the matter, i can pull up several relevant wikipedia articles and put it to rest inside of a minute.

when i asked my dad if he missed it, he laughed. he said that that kind of discussion, in the past, was probably worse because it didn’t have anything to do with truth, and was more about the activity. people like to drink and fight about stuff, but it’s deeper than that. the old way was a fundamentally democratic approach to discussion; the point was to talk to your neighbors about sports, not to determine the historical facts. similarly to how portable google has redefined the subtle and delicate art of the drunken bar argument, the tendency towards immediacy and truthfulness has redefined, according to benjamin, the art of telling a story.

the intelligence that came from afar—whether the spatial kind from foreign countries or the temporal kind of tradition—possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. the prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself.” often it is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. but while the latter was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.

the essay also disparages novels as a medium as responsible for the death of the storyteller. benjamin understands stories as live and active things, especially in that romantic sense i talked about earlier, where you would only know narratives that had been personally related to you by someone else. novels represent the atomization of storytelling. an individual constructs a narrative and tells you exactly where it begins and ends and what happens in the middle, and puts their name on it. it’s a private endeavor. when someone goes to the store and buys a copy of that novel, they read it in solitude. again, it is a private endeavor. benjamin’s view is that the real outcome is not just that his chosen medium is perceptibly less valuable, but that it speaks to a larger ill:

more and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.

this brings me to another essay i’ve wanted to write about. a friend sent me a copy of mark greif’s book “against everything”, which includes an essay titled “the concept of experience (the meaning of life, part i)”. greif starts by noting that our whole lives are lead in the pursuit of happiness, which, i grant you, isn’t particularly insightful. what’s interesting is what he claims to be the problem:

the problem is experience; specifically, a concept of experience that gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.

greif goes on to discuss how, for most people, experiences are individual moments that we view as almost external to ourselves. we travel to faraway places and attend nominally exciting events so that we can encapsulate them in our memories. when we inevitably find ourselves in the future and want to be assured that our lives were well lived, we can look back on a collection of experiences and tell ourselves “see all the things i did, this life must have been good”. greif likens this to curation or collection. because we conflate a wealth of meaningful experience with happiness, the next logical step is to focus on obtaining as much experience as we can. you can see this in action already; a study from expedia and something called the ‘center for generational kinetics’ found that 74% of americans prioritize experience over ownership.

every profile on tinder mentions the desire to go on an ‘adventure’ - i think they might hard code it into the app - but the reality is rarely adventurous in character. i can’t find the tweet but a while back i saw something like “mfs will talk about wanting to go on an adventure and then smoke weed in their car in a jcpenney parking lot”. there’s a small but dedicated genre of tweet about how people in small / midwest / rural towns have fun. it usually consists of smoking pot in a parking lot or loitering at walmart. there’s nothing that says those aren’t experiences, though. i’ve spent a lot of time smoking in cars and searching for the funniest thing in the home good section at walmart, so i can tell you: that was almost always just a backdrop to simply being around my friends. it’s the activity we ‘planned’ so that we could justify being around each other, while the actual (but unspoken) point of it was to interface with each other in person for once. i think everybody knows this, because everybody has fun doing ‘nothing’. everybody loves to spend a whole day doing ‘nothing’, but we tell each other and ourselves that we’d rather be doing something exciting. we’re convinced that we need to go to exotic places and do exciting things in order to be fulfilled, but at the end of the day doing these things for the sake of them doesn’t meet the desire that initially drove us to them. experience becomes less and less valuable when we view it this way. kafka once said “we photograph things to drive them out of our minds. my stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” walter benjamin would criticize our practice of compulsive photography as a way of converting not just what we are told, but what we live, into information. the mindset of endless accumulation is, therefore, increasingly a failure. according to greif, what we really want is to be able to share experience:

you can wish your experiences had been more plentiful, or longer lasting. you can wish they had made you someone else—or that you could retell them to anyone who’d understand. but you do not wish you hadn’t had them. the need to retell experiences becomes your last means to try to redeem experience from aimless, pure accumulation—and either you cannot find a listener or you realize that you are mute, unfit to communicate the colors of this distant realm of experience in any way adequate to the wonders you found there. thus everyone longs to tell his story today, but not as literature.

anyone who’s tried to write something personal has been through this. the process of using the written word requires a few layers of translation across entirely distinct languages. the way sensory information enters your brain and is processed there has precious little to do with the ways in which we communicate that information to other people. there are some workarounds; for example, impressionist art creates images that have little, directly speaking, to do with the actual experience of our visual sense, but by blending light and color together, evoke an emotional response in the viewer that might resemble the wonderful ‘distant realm of experience’ that greif’s talking about. the theoretical argument of impressionism is that its approach creates art that is closer to what we ‘actually’ see when we look at the world. of course this brings up the same issue my dad discussed when i settled a bar argument with google — when you look at a monet, you aren’t looking at real life in the empirical sense, and the modern world relies on empiricism. we want exact knowledge of things, and to have them explained to us. i couldn’t tell you why, because it seems that more and more, people are yearning to live in a world of wonderment and mystery. they experience the latter desire a priori; it exists without need of experience. i could point you to capitalism or to ad firms or decry the societal ills proliferated by social media, but i don’t think it really matters who we blame for this cognitive dissonance between what we want and what we tell each other we want.

top text

time to embark on whatever this is going to be. because i skipped this in the ‘about’ page, i’ll take the opportunity of this first post to talk about what exactly’s going on here.

anyone who knows me (and therefore everyone who will ever read this) has heard me talk about doing something to this effect. the goal is to get into practice writing things that someone other than me will see. as much as i love keeping a private journal, i think limiting my written audience to myself and my teachers is starting to have a negative impact on my own perception of my work. if the goal is to eventually be paid for my writing, then i really ought to do something about it not being worth very much.

alternatively, this can be a way for me to streamline the “what have you been up to” conversations that are a constant part of adult life. here, mom. here, old roommate. here, people i haven’t seen since high school but still try very hard to keep in touch with. look. i made this for you. to that end, most of the content is essentially going to be me doing my homework, only you get the privilege of seeing what that means for me. i’ll be taking readings and stuff from class and putting it up here along with whatever it makes me feel like writing. hopefully i can use this to find a comfortable blend between the way i talk (aggressively casual) and the way i write when i’m writing seriously (convolutedly ostentatious), and in the end y’all can look back on the days when you knew me before i was the king or something.

i’ll also be putting up some review / reflection type things. i’m thinking of calling them meditations as a nod to the aimless stream of consciousness i’ve tended toward when i’ve written this kind of thing for myself in the past, but that name also sounds kind of wack and reminds me too much of descartes. the point is, you can also expect to see me talking about media on here.

in the spirit of summation, here’s everything i plan to post:

• meditations on books / media
• stuff about my classwork
• anything i feel compelled to write about. anything at all

i can’t promise a schedule or anything like that. this is first and foremost a personal project; it’s taking this form so that 1. i can theoretically develop a body of original work to show off, and 2. whoever reads it can hold me accountable. please harass me if i fall off the wagon. i put good money into this site so it better be worth at least a few good sentences.

p.s. i’m really new at web stuff, so even though blot dot im does almost all the work for me, things might be a little wonky until i get my feet under me. if you think something looks ugly or wrong, you know better than me so let me know