#34 - Not too Much of a Mediocre Thing

Making it Personal; Bow to the Low-Brow?; Plant Life

Hello, my friends,

Autumn is very odd in Los Angeles — it was nearly 90°F here for the past couple of days. I’ve had a cough for the past two weeks and haven’t made it out to the gym so I’m feeling a bit restless. Olipop, a delicious soda that comes in many flavors, has brought some relief but it’s impossible to drown my brain’s machinations with only 5 grams of sugar. The tongue is happy, though.

“The Pancake Eater” (1981) by Red Grooms

Making it Personal

A couple of weeks ago Florian Magenza of The Practical Polymath talked about personal websites. A personal website is “…a bit like hosting dinner,” he wrote:

There are a bunch of decisions that you’re making that reflect your taste and preferences from the dishes you’re going to make to the choice of plates you’re going to serve them in. The intent is to share a bit of your taste with your guests, to cut them a slice of your personality.

Looking back at my history of personal websites — a history that started in 2005 (though I did have a MySpace blog before that) — I agree with Florian with unexpected intensity. More than hosting a single dinner party, a personal website is like having an open table for family, friends, and total strangers. I designed, hand-coded, and pored immeasurable time into cultivating what I served. Dipping into the old versions is akin to seeing my public persona in media res. In a few ways, I’m still this Oleg:

Introducing a poetry reading I organized called “New Voices”. This picture, along with an event flyer, photos, and my poems were on the second version of my website in 2006.

But in most ways I’m a very different person than I was 17 years ago. For instance, I no longer make mistakes like that with my sideburns.

Personal websites serve different purposes for different people. Mine have generally been about attempting to collect too-often-dispersed writing into a single place. But more than that, they have been a place to explore and perform ideas and identity. My most recent site isn’t as much a place of deep collection as an attempt at the “person as brand” aesthetic. A marketing conceit that I am uneasy about, partially because it unsettles me to stuff myself into sound-bite categories. That said, each section of this current site does bring me some joy and defines what I do in acceptable ways. I was going to write that this is true for all of them except “Editor”, but then I realized that just before writing this I’d been on the phone for an hour providing feedback for my friend Joe’s novella.

“Who are you?” “What do you do?” “What have you done?” “What do you need?” “What is this?” “Why are you sprouting tentacles?” “What are you?” “Where are you taking me?” “Is that a starship?” “Will you let me say goodbye to my family?” “How long will I be gone?” “What does this button do?” Are all questions I ask when I arrive at someone’s personal website. Indeed, one of the reason I enjoy slow social media platform Are.na is that I stumble on so many people’s personal sites and I get to invent who they are in my head. Those sites are a small, time-bound piece of that person transmitted by electrical signal through a silicone forest and I’m here to receive their tiny handshake. To return to the metaphor that started this section, though, I’m over for dinner and am hungry to eat. What will they feed me?

Invited to my website to for a meal? Bring your metal dentures, I’m serving frozen yogurt topped with movable type.

Website toppings. Image credit: (cc) Sailko

Bow to the Low-Brow?

The other day I read Grace Bialecki’s article “What It Takes to Be a TikTok Poet,” a piece that wrestles with the enduring, frustrating, and impossible question of why so many people like badboring poetry. I, and I’m sure many other creatives, have wondered the same thing: Why do so many people have hyperbolic reactions to completely pedestrian artistic expression? One comment that stood out in the article was the response to a fairly benign breakup poem that said “crying throwing up” — who is this person, I thought, that read this shockingly superficial text and had such a reaction? And how do they make it through the day?

I know it’s pointless to wonder but my mind is not a good judge of utility so it breaks down and analyzes despite my best intentions. Low brow or “accessible” art requires no interpretative power, it’s adherents subscribe to a hermeneutics of the visible. The craft of the pop poet is to choose a clear topic and a memorable vehicle — depth isn’t really a consideration. Sometimes, there isn’t poetic technique involved at all. It works because quick social media like Instagram and TikTok are built for posts that receive instantaneous comprehension. It works because people agree with the message, respond, and like, energizing the algorithm. Some even vomit or fall on the floor (see first comment), which is a little like those fake martial arts masters videos on YouTube.

I suspect that I’ll never be able to appreciate or replicate what most pop poets are doing and that’s okay. I have my own taste and write in my own style. Probably that means that I will not have 1.2 million followers on social media. Lambasting those followers for liking poetry that I find boring is just as useful as getting into heated arguments about what poetry is (and isn’t). Sure, we can all have our opinions, but it’s not like my saying that all @yung_pueblo writes is platitudes with line breaks will change the world. After all, 2.7M followers disagree.

“Crowd” (1963) by Andy Warhol

Plant Life

My mom gave Michael (and me) a new Venus Fly Trap for the balcony a week or so ago and now it’s nearly dead. I don’t know what happened. It was absolutely thriving when she handed it over, all it’s little jaws verdant and ready for action. And now it’s practically rotting. This is the second Venus Fly Trap that has met it’s ultimate fate here. Do I have a black thumb? Am I just dumb about plants? Both? I had the suspicion this week that perhaps our balcony just isn’t the ideal environment for certain plants (read: Venus Fly Traps, basil, that one cactus that recently gave up the ghost for reasons that are beyond me). I have kept some plants alive including a cactus that I thought was defunct but that just randomly starting sprouting a new finger over the past two weeks, a Poinsettia we got at Christmas in 2022, two African Violets, and the hanging plant I shower every few days. These plants seem to be doing fine (though I did recently have scare with the Poinsettia). Hopefully they stay that way. And like with people, I’m going to keep trying to find the ones that thrive here. And in this newsletter, too!

If you look very closely, you can see two tiny basil plants. Those were my little basils on July 10th, 2023. They’re about two inches tall now but don’t seem to be growing much taller. I feel like their lives are very fragile and they could die any day. But I’m powerless to help.