blogging philosophy

❀ dandelion46 is one year old! ❀

what follows is a moodboard from january 2023 on the spirit behind this blog, and why i chose blogspot rather than something more official like a paywalled substack. i've annotated it to provide context and flesh out some of the ideas. 

In LA feeling like my whole life was a secret which was delicious¹

Oscar Wilde quote on how it would spoil his pleasure if he told ppl where he was going²

The i live to the side lispector quote³ - this being the most generative space for me - why I hardly have any pics of ppl on my instagram - "monk mode" Catherine shannon - i like clicking around on the internet⁴

This blog a way of being part of the convo w/o being a part of the convo

Free bc I think thoughts should be free 

Something done in a spirit of spontaneity / why i like self publishing⁵ / Foucault quote abt discovering the Grand Canyon⁶ / my Grand Canyon trip / one of the most pleasurable experiences I’ve had in my life was my solo trip to the salton sea when I was 24⁷

Want to keep this headspace when I’m back in nyc - this blog dispatches from life-as-adventure 

Oh also at some point talk about alt lit, like say why I felt hesitant, the community based around blogging then was sort of dark, existed on the fringes of it⁸

But these other ppl downtown they have blogs too specifically they have blog spots or stuff set up on their websites⁹ - it’s just less Blaring than sub stack & that’s important to me - watched a streetcar named desire last night & it’s important for me, also, to have a paper lantern over the naked bulb¹⁰

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¹I moved to LA when I was 24 and stayed until I was 26. I moved there in part because I didn't want to be folded into the Official literary/art world while I was still somewhat reckless and malleable. I had bleach-blonde hair and a lemon tree whose fruit-laden branches draped over my balcony, and I'd go to a dive bar in East Hollywood with my best friend and sing karaoke under colored Christmas lights, then drive up the 2 till I reached the snow. In New York, this era of my life rarely comes up. When I thought about starting a blog, I felt animated by the spirit of that time -- one of exploration, improvisation, and play, connected to a commitment to deepening.

²Full passage, from The Picture of Dorian Gray: "I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life." Decided I wouldn't publicize the blog a ton; would post about it occasionally but not make it my Whole Thing, and would add to it furtively, so there'd be more to discover when people return to it. 

³From Agua Viva: "And I live to the side -- a place where the central light doesn't burn me. And I speak quietly so that ears have to pay attention and hear me." 

⁴See "Cyberspace." 

⁵I'm a zine girl from way back. A phone note expanding on why -- also from January 2023, like this moodboard -- "during the traditional publishing process, oftentimes many months (or years) separate a work’s creation from its release, & many people ferry it along: editors, designers, marketers, etc. with self-publishing, there is no such separation, no such crowd. i like this, that self-publishing is an action borne of excitement & pure artistic vision, out of a sense of momentum & possibility: ‘this is just something i can do.’" I also just like the culture of zines. 

⁶I can't find this, but as it was recounted to me, it was about how Foucault was exploring the Southwest without a map and all of a sudden found himself at the Grand Canyon. When I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time (pictured above), it was misty out, and all of a sudden the mist cleared and it was just there. 

⁷See "Salton Sea Story."

⁸I grew up reading blogs that were part of the first wave of alt lit. The ones I remember the most are Megan Boyle's (which had the URL "Beethoven the movie") and Ana Carrete's (which had the URL "I do not have penis envy"). I also remember Zachary German's and Natalie Chin's book-logs.

There was a whole community on Blogspot then; this was the late 2000s - early 2010s. It was writers a little older than me who I watched reverently; they were doing readings at KGB Bar and on rooftops, they were putting out books with small presses, they were wearing American Apparel, and they were cool. There was also pretty heavy drug use and depression in this scene, and I was young and wary of identifying too much with its sensibility. I remember feeling haunted by a peer's tweet that read "alt lit has been the single worst influence on my maturation and development." I thought, "I should keep this at arm's length." But I also -- more crucially -- felt, "this type of writing excites and enlivens me, and my growing involvement in this world feels like the most vital thing in my life," a life in which I had not yet found "my people," and was living in an environment that didn't inspire me. 

So there was something of a tense and unresolved flavor to my relationship with the scene and the friends I made in it in my late teens and early twenties. I wanted to stay separate -- not just because of my anxiety about over-identification, but because of a prideful lone-wolf quality that I cultivated then. (I wish I could have eased up on this or let it go, but I wasn't there yet.) But I also wanted to meld with this world, and did meld with it -- it led to important, charged friendships, a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and the publication of my work for the first time. In short, an affiliation -- one that was formative, one that is permanent. 

Some critics have tried to paint alt lit as shallow. I firmly believe, having engaged with it as much as I have, that it's the opposite. I think the prose is actually characterized by its level of perception, directed inward (e.g. Tao's and Megan's work) and outward (e.g. Honor's and Madeline's, to name two contemporary examples), as well as by its humor and commitment to emotional honesty. 

Anyway. All of this is to say: My participation in this scene established my relationship with blogging. So that is part of why I write here, and why I write the way I write here, and why I write on Blogspot, specifically. 

⁹Some active blogs I like by peers that I see this blog as 'in conversation with' (N has always made fun of me for using that phrase, lol): Emilie's, Meetka's, Moselle's, Mia Kerin's, Catherine's, Health Gossip. Some inactive ones: Meg's, Aria's, Romy's, Megan's (no longer public). And Theresa Duncan's, sort of, though wary of identification there too, etc etc blah blah blah. 

¹⁰Blanche, in A Streetcar Named Desire: "I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can stand a rude remark or a vulgar action."

salton sea story

"oh, where'd you study abroad?"

"outside london."

this is true, but it isn't the truth. the truth is that three months before i boarded the plane, i met an overeducated man. i leaned closer. he said, "i saw europe." he said, after a pause, "you should see europe." i filled out the paperwork and stepped into an older, browner world. 

my tutor -- that's what they called them -- was named tudor, with a d. tudor poured me milk tea and said that americans were riff-raff. i went to see my redheaded friend in shoreditch. he was life-sized and grinning; the girls wore sequined headbands. i thought, i need to get to the city. 

after we sign the lease, my roommate has a nervous breakdown. sometimes you move from brown to blue too fast. i remember the documentary i'd seen in the british town, the film with the sky. it's new year's day in southern california, and when i leave i don't tell her where i'm going. 

minutes pass, dozens of them, with the windows down. in the 1950s bombay beach was a boomtown. now it's the site of a documentary about the death of the american dream that took the top prize at the tribeca film festival. will my time here be marked by beauty, lyricism, empathy, and invention? probably. but also, this is home. 

it starts with pool at the biker bar, where the wood-paneled wall is lined with dollar bills. i tape one above the piano. we go back to shorty's house and do jello shots, the dogs winding around our legs. 

at 5 a.m. i sneak out, stand on the beach salted with small carcasses. pesticide runoff is always a possibility in a casino without walls. sometimes, fish die. sometimes, the mountains flush purple in the distance. sometimes, you don't care that your roommate has stolen a thousand dollars from you and won't open the door. so what if the film will later be cast as problematic. so what if tudor is probably right about america. the inland sea recedes, leaving a soft grey shadow. 

marine life

 i only eat seafood in two contexts: 

1. when i'm with my family or having a relaxed night out with friends

2. when i need to remember that humans are at the top of the food chain

a thought: poetic scope as nonconformity

a thought i wanted to record, sitting on taylor's porch with lunch. i was thinking about how it seems to me we're in an age of poetic minimalism, with the dominant edit suggested during workshops being 'cut it down.' sculpted, spare poems are the order of the day. and i was comparing this to the sweaty maximalism of the beat poets, howling against the repressed conformity of their era, and thinking about how both styles are the inversion of the flavor of their times. consume consume consume, & the poetry goes minimal, paralleling nonconformist lifestyles like the fire movement. fit your life into this narrow little box, & the poetry goes maximal, wild & unrestrained

the futurists are interesting in this context, marching in lockstep with their era's push toward industrialization. likely why the movement is remembered as fascist, though not all its members were

uhhh ... i'm thinking it's time to read the dharma bums*

i'm in colorado right now, in a funny state of mind. funny as in, amusing to me. funny as in, i don't want to explain how i got here because i don't want to reference the past, or how long i'll be here because i don't want to reference the future. funny as in, ha ha. sitting at this granite countertop tap tap tapping away. 

i'm very much floating, buoyed by the natural beauty of my environment. colorado is unreal gorgeous. last night i watched buffalo playing and cavorting at sunset for like 45 minutes, the city lights twinkling on in the background. 

i'm staying near boulder, where the 50th annual jack kerouac school of disembodied poetics summer program is happening at naropa. i'm not actually here for that -- i came to colorado for a family reunion and am staying out west through early july to do a poetry reading in montana, spend time with family and friends, and be outside -- but i'm planning to stop by the campus to check it out.

in preparation, i watched a little documentary about the school, in which a mellow older man's commentary on early "town-gown relations" surprised me. he said that the poets who founded the jack kerouac school, among them anne waldman and allen ginsberg, were seen as untrustworthy sophisticates -- "hotshot bicoastal poets," he called them -- when they came to town, breeding skepticism and some unease among the locals. 

i have to say i was delighted by this description of them; even though, of course, it's historically accurate, i feel like it's fair to say that a lot of these poets are remembered as of a piece with the hippie culture of boulder. i liked the idea of locals being shocked by their worldliness, contorting their minds around this rush of new life. it took my mental image of naropa and the beats out of the realm of stereotype and back into reality, which i always appreciate. and it made me feel freshly interested, hearing naropa spoken about as this oasis for artists moving back and forth between west and east coast metropolises. 

from anne waldman's 'fast speaking woman'

it made me think about where naropa fits within that culture, and why something like naropa is needed. i think it's largely because artists get exhausted by the grind of the city. it's why they appreciated it then, and why i'm appreciating it now: at the risk of sounding corny, my soul really feels cleansed here, bathed in the beauty of the environment and the silence, the silence i always crave in my life in new york. it made me think about why artists are drawn to buddhism, with its emphasis on inner silence -- perhaps by fortifying a spiritual practice that's focused on tapping into inner silence, we can steel ourselves against the chaos of a place like new york. it also made me think about the dharma bums, which i'd considered picking up as part of my engagement with the jack kerouac school. being part of both a cosmopolitan art scene and the great big world of mountains and rivers is its central theme. (it was a central theme of my latest chapbook, too -- it's something i think about a lot.) 

well, that's really all i wanted to say for now. i will leave you with some pictures of the colorado landscape. today i am going for a hike around bear lake at rocky mountain national park. hope everybody reading this had a nice summer solstice and is enjoying the new season. xx 

*update from after the trip: i tried to pick up the dharma bums but couldn't do it lol. i made an earnest attempt -- returned thrice to the bookshelf at trident bookstore to leaf through it. every time, i winced at the dialect and lack of subtlety (in both tone and perspective... i'm sure this book was revelatory at the time but it just hasn't aged well... i'd wanted to embrace it but i just... ughhh... ). i was much more engaged by a long biography of kerouac that sat next to the dharma bums on the shelf, called memory babe. 

nail diary 3

silver toes & nails @ majestic nails near parents' (may) -- color: opi's "silver on ice"

red toes & white nails @ qq nails in chelsea (april) -- toe color: essie's "e-nuf is e-nuf" & a smooth white like fresh snow on the fingers, gel in an unlabeled color 

street life 2

i drive to the biker bar in bombay beach

i drive to the bookstore in aberdeen, montana

i drive to physical therapy in my hometown

i drive to big bend national park 

i drive to arches national park 

i drive to my boyfriend's house up north 

i drive to my boyfriend's house in the hills

i drive thru the pines on unpaved roads 

i drive cross-country in a silver chevy

i drive like theresa in her alfa romeo spider 

no car shifts better - like a knife thru butter

i learn to drive stick on bulltown road 

and i drive to new york before i live here  

and i drive to the ocean after  

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my cars

2002 volkswagen jetta (navy blue)

2012 chevrolet cruze (silver) 

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a song from my surf rock phase of 2021 

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incomplete list of poems i've written while driving

dream, come true 

when it all falls down 

formation zero 

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and she said if you lived in brighton beach would you keep your car

and i said if i figured out how to keep my car on the streets of downtown manhattan then i will figure out how to keep my car anywhere