About

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its particular beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure…. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream.

Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka”

Background

It’s easy to be a writer. Step 1: write. Step 2: go back to step 1. But when you tell someone you’re a writer, that person will have certain expectations that go beyond steps 1 and 2—even, or especially, if that person is yourself. I’ve been published a handful of times, mostly in my college’s literary journal, but I’ve never been good at the writer’s hustle, constantly sending out submissions while simultaneously churning out new material. After receiving a year’s worth of rejections for my poetry collection and not feeling particularly motivated to go another round, and having not really written much of anything in the meantime, I felt like I was failing.

And I’ll be honest, that was depressing.

But then I read the above passage from my pal Wally B., and it got me thinking. It occured to me that accepting my failure to achieve some sort of writing career freed me up to consider whether that was even what I wanted. And the fact of the matter is, at least at this point in time, what I mainly want is for my writing to be out in the world. I don’t so much care if I’m getting paid for it or even published, I just don’t want it languishing on my hard drive.

So here we are. Welcome to my failure. I hope you enjoy your visit.

The Categories

Make ‘Em Ups: I started as a fiction writer before realizing that I was better at pretty much anything else, and while most of my stories don’t really hold up, I have written a few that I’m pretty proud of.

Neither Concisely nor in French: A lot of my nonfiction writing is fairly short and off the cuff, but occasionally I feel the need to write a longer, more formal(ish) essay.

Office Hours: Some of my best writing was for college classes, and it seemed a shame not to include those here. Rather than just posting esoteric academic papers and hoping people were forced to read all the same books I was, I’m using the opportunity to present some commentary on what I consider good practice when it comes to academic writing, as well as present behind-the-scenes material like notes and professors’ feedback, which will hopefully have slightly broader interest.

Poems: I write poems.

Rants & Ramblings: Sometimes I need to figure out what I think about something by writing about it, and sometimes I just want to complain.

The Great Political Screed: Rants and essays specifically relevant to socio-political issues. (At some point I kind of forgot this category existed, so it may not be entirely comprehensive. Besides which, my politics tend to seep into most things I write.)

Years in Review: Since 2014 I’ve been making Year in Review lists of the media I’ve consumed that year. What started as just a few names of artists and albums has become a rather involved group of lists including (depending on the year) books, movies, music, podcasts, TV shows, video games, and even YouTube channels, complete with synopses, reviews, and embedded videos. (As part of transposing previous entries from Facebook to here, I decided to revisit the older lists, which until 2017 had no supplementary content, and add reviews and embedded videos to make them more consistent with the newer lists. Such updated lists are titled accordingly…in a way.)

🖼️: I also make photographs, drawings, and computational art. These tend to be more experimental than my writing.

Find Me Elsewhere

Published Work Available Online:

Media Tracking Accounts:
Though my Year in Review lists include only positive reviews, I do write negative reviews for the things that don’t make the list (also 3-star reviews for what end up being “Honorable Mentions,” though I do now link to those in the YiR posts). If you want to see those, and first drafts of Year in Review entries, see below.

Social Media

Other