Long time, no blog. Sorta.
As has been the case for some time, most of my (most succinct) material is relegated to my account on Twitter. If you wish, you can follow me at @vmarinelli. To manage my own (notoriously terrible) attention span problems, I can only follow back less than 1% of those who follow me there, but, for whatever it’s worth, I do follow back most of those who follow me at my local, more conversational account, @vmarinelliRVA.
I also have an active account on Tumblr, here. Tumblr is kind of a weird hybrid of social media (in the vein of Twitter and similar apps revolving around “following” and having “followers,” and a dynamic of sharing and exchanging material) and “regular blogging.” The good thing about this is, if you’re clueless about its social media elements, you can just read posts there as you would on any blogging service, leave comments, etc.
At least half of what I post on Tumblr is fairly ephemeral silly internet shit, but every now and then actual material of substance gets posted. I’d love to have some sort of semi-automated digest I could post here on a weekly basis (with the option to remove the more ephemeral/ridiculous items in advance, so as not to overwhelm), but since I have no coding skills or the slightest clue about how one might go about such a thing (Oh Lord, won’t you send me a WordPress plugin geek), I’ve just been leaving this site to rot, while I post stuff here and there and also while I work on more substantive material – all of which manages to skip over this blog.
Full disclosure: It’s very possible that part of my reluctance is subconscious; this blog is still syndicated at feministblogs.org, which used to make me really happy, until the 2008 Presidential election, when certain minds began to conflate gender essentialism with feminism (adding bonus racism!), and I was more ashamed than I could begin to articulate at having my own articles showing up on the same website with theirs. For the most part, I silenced myself rather than deal with my disgust (and shame at having been, at one point, closely linked to some of these authors).
At any point, I could have opted to have my feed removed – but this felt like defeat (and also, potentially, an affront to the person who maintains that site, with whom I have no beef whatsoever). And I could have blogged more actively on these subjects – but this also felt like defeat, because, while I am (most certainly) a committed, politically engaged feminist, I didn’t want to be a “political writer” or a “feminist writer.” Not because those are bad things to be (hardly! and I thrive on many such writers’ works), but because it’s just not the best use of my skills. Whenever I’ve detoured in that general direction, it has made me utterly miserable, and it has taken away from other work I need to be doing.
Eventually, I’ll figure out what the hell I’m doing with this space which is more expansive than what is afforded through my two primary Internet venues, but which is curiously far less expansive than what I need (for the writing of not especially “short” stories, and, ultimately, all the books – both prose and poetry – I am slowly piecing together).
Meantime, I’ll try to pop in here at least once a week, to provide a clumsy weekly (or so) summary of stuff posted elsewhere which may be of interest here. Since this is the first time I’m doing that, I’ll go back a bit farther back.
- September 18: A blast from Ms. Magazine’s musical past. (Note: This project – which is ongoing – later led to this post on Twitter, reconstructing a conversation with my husband:
“Whatcha doing?”
“Clearing my head.”
“Looks like you’re digitizing 30 year old back issues of Ms. Magazine.”
“That’s how I clear my head.”) - September 19: A little thing on existential leaps of faith; also, Manic Depression is, indeed, a frustrating mess, particularly when complicated by comorbid conditions.
- September 23: A brief note to late teens/early 20s me. Also, a tasteless joke at the expense of the self-anointed literati.
- September 24: In which we learn that an old friend of my husband’s is dying.
- September 25-27: A few choice comments about our present economic crisis. (I was yelled at for making a few people cry with that last link.)
- September 28: An awesome quote on the craft of writing from my dad, from his 1978 journal.
- September 30: A journal fragment (my own) from 2003, concerning anxiety. Also, a rather huge “memory lane” item, from my first daughter’s earliest days in Minnesota.
- October 1: A comment on how health insurance and the possibility of insurance reform stands to affect us.
- October 6: I drop hints about a big story I’m working on. Which I might even finish! Bonus, incredibly cute picture of my eldest daughter.
- October 7: A report from my first week on lithium.
- October 8: A really huge thing happened.
- October 9: I burned a bunch of stuff and it was awesome. (The second batch didn’t go quite as well, alas.)
- October 11: Be still, my freaked out little heart. More on the continuing (now almost four year) estrangement from my mother. Also: Sylvia Plath oven mitts.
- October 12: Recounting how a song with the refrain “Woe is me, shame and scandal in the family” used to be a household standard, when I lived and went to high school on Kaua’i, plus this related item regarding “drunk driving,” and an item about considering sending out work again. (It’s probably not coincidental that I’ve barely sent out work – after having published somewhat regularly between 1998 and 2005 – during the last several years’ estrangement from my mother.)
- October 14: Recalling our family’s horrifying encounter, some years ago, with “the Shoner Bear.”
- October 15: A little item from that time when I turned my boss in to the Feds for trafficking in child pornography.
- October 20: My mother, collecting sculpture material, ca. early 80s. Haunting, even as such images go.
- October 23: A thing about Googling people from high school, the eyeroll-inducing aesthetic of pimping, and losing my virginity as part of a strategy to avoid sexual harassment. (Well, it made sense at the time.)
Okay, that’s about as digest-y as I can get this.
Consider yourselves approximately as caught up as me (which is to say, still ridiculously behind).
