tumblr writing 2 

bookbat:

fuckdudeskilldudes:

stayinbedgrowyourhair:

there is a certain writing style that smart/angry/gross ladies on tumblr utilize and i used to be WAY into it but now i’m realizing that it’s v limiting and conformative in a way that the aforementioned ladies would not be in favor of but i’m starting to unwittingly adopt its cadence and now i don’t know what to do besides hate myself

like I guess what I mean is that any kind of ‘cadence’ or ‘style’ or ‘tone’ or ‘voice’ or ‘whatever the fuck’ is limiting and conformative, but different kinds are limiting in different ways, and I am specifically choosing the constraints of this particular way of writing because a) i think the constraints are interesting, b) it’s very important to me to be extremely funny in bizarre and vaguely understated ways, and most importantly c) and I appreciate the freedoms that it offers/enables in my thinking

does that make any sense

Oh, so this is relevant to me

I used to write the most painfully earnest shit on here all the time, and then a couple of months ago I posted something (x, if you really want to know about my Internet Milestones) all “sorry this is insanely personal sorry I’m talking about gross food stuff and fucking IDK what else to do with this OK oh god” and since then I have posted NOTHING ELSE but gross food stuff and fucking. And now I have like twice as many followers as I did when I wrote stuff that was vaguely political or “objective” or potentially applicable to anyone else’s brain (still not a lot of followers, but a lot for me, especially because in the real world no one ever looks at me and I kind of cultivate that). Also because of the weird sympathetic force fields of words and the internet, I’ve started reading a lot of people (mostly online but some off) who are breaking and peeling open words in ways that make them adaptable to writing about appalling body things. Because usually those things are sealed off, by grammar or vocabulary or the demands of lyricism (that thing I linked above—I like it in a weird personal way, but it’s really inappropriately pretty, right? Also look at all those semicolons, look at how much I’m trying to make my ideas NOT spill over and contaminate one another). And so you have to make words strange, you have to use that unfamiliar warped theory register, you have to steal words from high academic theory and make them base, you have to fuck with the possible rhythms and cadences of grammar, you have to turn punctuation against itself and make it a way to multiply meanings rather than contain them—and lately I’ve been more or less stealing styles from a lot of people who are doing these things, because that’s how you learn, right?

But then HAHAHAHAHA some of the people I’m creepily imitating now read this blog, SO. I mean, I generally think of tumblr as some sort of elaborate / durational / accidental collaborative art project where we all consume and reinterpret and swallow and reswallow one another’s ideas, so I don’t think it’s all that terrible or embarrassing, really. But it’s really weird to be in this medium where people can watch your influences acting on you in real time, where anyone can trace how both what you say and how you say it change, and how they interact—where we can literally see and read one another being limited and interpellated by language.

Anyway I guess I just twisted your thread to talk about my personal shit. Sorry!