Hi there! My good friend Robin told me that I should start a substack. I was not sure about this, because
I’ve seen too many people come a cropper on the internet.
It was just another form of “blogging” in my head and “blogging” is filed in my head as a land of mostly mediocre hot takes;
I’m allergic to hot takes [see #1],
But hot takes are the only way to “succeed” at blogging, because they are what get you Clicks and Views and Virality and ultimately allows people to find you who will read your words and care about what you say, which is really the goal.
I also try to avoid mediocrity,
But blogs are un-edited and un-reviewed and that makes them frequently a site of undigested thought. I have the same problem with many blogs that I have with many podcasts, which is that they waste my time. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time.
HOWEVER, Robin encouraged me that if I’m worried about being an ass online I’m probably very unlikely to do something really horrible, and she reminded me that I don’t have to write hot takes. I will probably spend most of my time here doing vanity projects like cataloging the allusions in Gaudy Night — a project which could take me years even if I weren’t using it to procratinate on my dissertation stimulate my writing glands.1 I will probably also draft things when I need to just type dangit, get some words about anything written so your brain doesn’t forget what it’s like to compose a sentence.2 I might publish those, I might not. We’ll see.3
So here goes.
“Words beget words”, Robin said. She didn’t talk about writing glands.
I might set myself a project like Phil Christman’s tinyletter of yore: write something in a given space of time and publish it to the friendly audience.
This post kinda falls in that second category—I am, after all, composing it in the window of time on my calendar under “Dissertation”, specifically because I was blocked on the Diss and needed to just put some words somewhere—but it’s also the First Post so it is in that way sui generis.