I’m going to be going to SF next month, which I am excited about. I’m excited to meet friends, old and new, and to talk to people, and to get out of my current bubble, my current circumstances, to stretch my legs a little bit, to refresh.
In the meantime, I feel like I’m making progress in thinking about my substack, where I’ve written two essays so far and I’ve drafted almost a dozen. A thing I’ve been struggling with for a long time is figuring out the boundaries or “chapters” between different classes of my work. I at least now have the clarity that yes, I am a writer, author, this is my craft, this is my contribution. That’s great, that’s a big part of why I set out to do these wordvomits. I’ve written enough to feel confidence and conviction in my writing. Great. What’s next?
One thing I was going through recently was literally just processing and sorting out all my existing wordvomits. The breakthrough happened when I realized that, rather than try to sort them one at a time, I could instead look for “what goes with what”, and sort them into similar buckets. This is an insight I’ve had for some time re: twitter and youtube, and it feels like the main thing that kept me from doing it sooner with my wordvomits was a sense of feeling defeated from past attempts at trying. Which in turn is making me think about what other things I’ve been imperceptibly deterred from. But anyway – I think part of why I haven’t been writing wordvomits for a long time is that I didn’t want to come back here until I felt like I had something different to say, some new way of seeing things, some sense that I’m not just repeating myself in a tedious manner. Repetition is not a bad thing in of itself, I’ve definitely written about that, repeatedly. But I have bigger dreams for myself, I’d like this project to be something that I want to revisit, enjoy revisiting.
I don’t know if that’s hubristic of me. This is another theme that’s been coming up for me lately. I know when I step into the role of advising people with their creativity, I know that one of the best suggestions that really works is to lower one’s standards and just make and produce stuff. And yet… aren’t there too many of these wordvomits for me to even begin to make sense of? Well, here again I can step into the role and see, and say, well, make little bits of meaning as you go, make little piles, connections, and don’t be in a rush to do it all at once because that’ll be overwhelming, and you can’t possibly process all of that information all at once. But while a part of me knows this, another part of me remains stubborn, tyrannical, demanding – demanding perfection and demanding it now. And as I write this I do feel some relief knowing that while I have not dismantled this demanding part of me, I know how to deal with it. I wrote a whole book about how to deal with it. And I can feel my trust and faith rising within me, the believe that I will go through this, work through it, solve it. I can now begin to see the dozen or so “meta-essays” or “containers” that the rest of my wordvomits are clustered around.
I have written a tremendous amount, an amount that’s almost inconceivable to me, and I used to feel suffocated by it, overwhelmed by it. And so I put it out of mind, ignored it, but that wasn’t a very satisfactory solution, because then I felt shallow and empty (at least in this particular domain of writing). Maybe you could say that I was always processing it in the background of my mind, though that doesn’t feel very truthful to me. It might be more truthful to say that I needed some time away from it before I could return to it with fresh eyes, fresh perspective, and have it activate for me differently than it did before. That feels accurate. I’ve felt a smaller version of this re-reading my book after writing it. I needed to step away from it to see it clearly. And maybe right now I’m once again feeling that I need to step away from myself, from my circumstances, to see myself clearly.
Back to the substack. I have a bunch of ideas swirling around, a bunch of essays in mind. But what I’m really thirsting for, yearning for, is VISION. Glorious vision, scathing, bold, brilliant vision, something that will lead me from myself into myself, beyond myself, connect me with my ancestors and my descendants. I am to be a bridge between worlds, I know this. I am trying to build it. It takes a lot of felt knowledge to do this. I have to know the world I’m in, I have to know myself, and I have to know the world I am trying to co-create.
Talking in less grandiose terms, the bridge is built of bricks, the bricks are words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs that constitute ideas, perspectives, frames, ways of seeing, things to point at. I’m very happy that I came upon the idea of writing up drafts of essays, so that I don’t necessarily have to write an entire essay before I can ideate the next one. I can sketch out the outline of the bridge. I want to get more concrete, more precise. What precisely am I hoping to write? I know who I’m writing for, I think. Thoughtful people. I already have some of the audience, though I should be careful always to consider the audience that I want that isn’t here yet. But the bigger question is where do I want to take them? I want to represent possibility. I want to inspire the imagination. But I don’t want to write 20 essays about imagination. I don’t think that’s healthy, and I don’t think it’s great writing, either. (When reviewing my wordvomits, I found that about 6-7% of them were about writing, which I think is a nice % to strive for, and I felt good that I had subconsciously arrived at a pleasant balance. So maybe I can “just trust” that it’ll work out. But part of that is that I do at least some gnashing and grasping and fumbling along the way.)
So what do I think great writing is? A tough thing to describe, always “I know it when I see it”. I think it’s expansive and inclusive at the same time, it gets you to consider what you haven’t considered, rethink, review. See old things in new light. Re-enchant. I want to go from the very big to the very small, I think that’s something that hasn’t come through as much as I’d like. I’d like to talk about people, events AND ideas. I want to do everything and I want to do it artfully in surprisingly small amounts of space, with an economy of words. I ramble in these wordvomits so that I can be more cogent and concise when I need to be. I practice my rhythms in big open spaces so that I can be intricate. So… what am I writing about next? I don’t need to have a final, definitive answer but it’s good to practice. The first one was about voyagers, the big open sea of history. Second was a gallery, a sense of possibility, creativity. Maybe next something a bit more autobiographical and introductory? History… creativity… what would be different? I do still want to try and come up with essay summaries of FAN and Introspect… I’ll attempt those… maybe something about making good art that lasts?
What would Visa do? Lol. Okay he’d lead me through a bunch of questions. What are you trying to do here? Trying to find something really exciting, compelling, novel, fresh, surprising, yet relevant, timeless. I want there to be culture in it. Maybe we could talk about what it means to be fresh? Fresh aesthetics? Tattoos and paintings and music? Maybe tap into your frustrations? That’s not very “focus on what you want to see”, but you do know that frustration is power – definitely worth writing even if you don’t think you want to publish it. You want to publish something at least once a week, so tomorrow go with the painting? From the gallery to talking about a specific painting, that’s quite logical and sensible?
I feel like I haven’t got it yet. I know when I have it, it’s thrilling, exhilarating, it grabs me and pulls me. It’s like when you know there’s a good meme. Hm, maybe a history of memes? I have a few threads about being a meme historian. Something about internet history and meme history? The pain of linkrot? What I think when I think about Twitter? Shigeru in the cave? Something about still believing in the power of a blogpost to change the world? Reminiscing on Starbucks? I remember when Starbucks used to be high status in Singapore… the first one was at Liat Towers… you could smoke at them. The Starbucks card my friends bought for me. Reading Ray Bradbury.
Oh, and how about my fascination with ads and architecture? Larger than life goddesses? Something that parallels with the Monuments post. I’ve always been interested in ads. And they’re part of the memetic fabric of our time. We know it goes all the way back to history. I could talk about how I used to read magazines. Talk about pamphleteers. Yes… Ogilvy, Dichter, my perspective on marketing, selling, playing in a band… lots of texture and color here and a lot of humanity, Anthony Bourdain-esque. Oh, I should re-read Bourdain, I loved his style.
Maybe I could write something specific in praise of something else? Hamilton? Eh, I don’t love it that much. Terranigma? A love letter to the video games I’ve played and loved over the years? Mmm, that brings me back to the Starbucks days, that’s something I’d have written for the love of it. What else am I a fanboy of? Samurai X? Attack on Titan? How real these things felt? Hayley Williams? That feels like something I’d want to put in more effort into. Lets go through my notes. Mass Effect Andromeda, is another thing I could write extensively about. And use it as a vehicle for my views on other things. Yeah I really liked Yegge’s post on Borderlands.
Something about food, something about being Tamil. Something about being raised Hindu. I can talk a lot about that, that’s my experience. My experience growing up Singaporean. I don’t know if I want a whole post about that specifically, but that’s something I want to talk about, in an essay, and I don’t particularly want to do threads about it. Autobiographical. Grounded, it’s where I am. Walk my readers through my Singaporean life. That sounds like it might be a series. Yes, if I’m going to be speaking/writing authoritatively, it helps to show my credentials, to show what I’ve been through. I’ve been around. I could also weave in the challenge of writing about it. Yeah this feels like fertile ground. Autobiographical, that’s a recurring thread.
So I want to have like these several interwoven threads, such that a different one comes into focus each time, so it feels like 7 or so different classes of essay, and it circles and swirls around and then they come back. “Against Flanderization” is this sort of… you’re in my classroom and I’m teaching you about art. The Singapore / autobiographical stuff is something else. I’m nervous about writing it, but if I’m nervous, wouldn’t anybody else be too? Media studies, meme studies, society studies, peopling. I’m still oddly procrastinating on a review of King Warrior Magician Lover, why? Maybe because Introspect still feels fairly recent. But I’ll get to it eventually I’m sure.
So, do I have the thing I was looking for? Autobiography for the third post. The painting – Jeremy Mann – that goes in media studies. Revisit some of my favorite blogs and see how they handled the patterns. Alright. Time for bed.