april showers, may showers

what i've been doing, thinking, & reading this spring

It has been a washout spring. My room faces east, which means I can tell within moments of waking whether it will be a good or bad day. Good, if the walls are bathed in molten pink, like someone has melted down my rose gold iPhone from 2017 and gone hog-wild with the remnants, painting with their palms. In spring nothing feels as reverent as opening the curtains and making eye contact with the sun.

A bad day, though, if there is just grey behind the curtain, grey grey grey, endless grey. Close your eyes and go back to sleep grey. And recently London has been endless grey, windy, wet, cold, more like February than late April and early May. April showers are bad but May showers are the absolute worst.¹ Impossible not to feel inside and insular, the perfect weather for navel-gazing. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been driven to non-fiction lately, why I’ve finally spent a neglected Blackwells voucher on collections of essays and memoirs and criticism and philosophy rather than the new fiction releases I’ve spent so long waiting for. I think fiction has started to feel like a falsehood, a dream which absents from rather than confronts the world, and which I forget easily. I know this isn’t true, and if it is, it isn’t entirely a bad thing. But I would like some answers. I would like to understand the world and understand myself.

I am spending this washout spring learning and unlearning and learning again that such understanding is ultimately impossible. But here you go: here’s what I’ve been doing, thinking, and reading this spring, beyond praying for a little sunshine, just a little, please.

Adolphe Valette, India House, Manchester, 1912. Valette was really good at rain, probably because he lived in Manchester.

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Accidentally going viral + reflecting on a changing Substack

If you’re reading this as it goes out, there's a reasonable chance you subscribed to twenty-first century demoniac after my last essay on the literary it girl discourse went unexpectedly viral. Needless to say I wasn’t expecting the response — both positive and negative — that the piece evoked. Suddenly I found myself watching my subscriber count double in days, discovering my own words screenshotted on my feed, and encountering the unpleasant experience of being ‘sub-Substacked’. I’d set out to critique the discourse, but found myself accidentally slightly more towards the centre of it than was comfortable.

Accidentally going viral forced me to reflect on my relationship to writing and the internet, particularly how Substack operates as a medium and how it has changed over the past year or so. At the risk of sounding like a hipster from 2015 (‘I liked it before it was cool!’), I started writing on Substack three years ago, shortly before it hit the mainstream. Since then, the platform has grown exponentially and begun to frame itself as a competitor to Twitter, for better and for worse. Because Substack increasingly does feel like an extension of Twitter, liberated from the 280-character restriction. And just like children often inherit their parents’ worst traits, Substack has picked up a poisoned chalice. It has become the hot new place to be a hot-take haver. People increasingly talk across rather than to each other, rushing out rapid responses to the latest trending topic (girlhood essays etc etc etc). Discourse translates seamlessly from one platform to the other and back again, despite the best efforts of Musk to blacklist his growing competitor. I know I have played a part in this, by writing about internet culture and ensuring I post before the discourse has moved too far on, as well as by cross-posting my writing on Twitter, trying to capture the zeitgeist.

I like to write more diaristic pieces like this one, because they remind me that this is a blogging platform, not just a place for polished content meticulously designed to tap into the latest trending topics. But as I ‘grow my platform’ (yuck!) I find myself caught up in exactly the same maelstrom of self-promotion and self-obsession which I have always sought to criticise, obsessively checking the stats section of my dashboard and refreshing my activity. As I said in my last post, it’s difficult to develop an authentic voice on a variety of topics when my rapid responses to trends, memes, and internet culture rake in double the views of my more considered, philosophical pieces; when I can go viral for what some have (erroneously) considered a discourse-bait hit-piece, but struggle to draw readers to my other work. I don’t want to be just ‘girlblogger who writes about internet culture’, but as my following grows, I feel myself being pigeonholed into that niche — and I can’t just claim I’m being forced in. I’m reaching out and closing the door behind myself.

How can I — or any writer with a moderate following on Substack — avoid this? Is it even possible, as Substack grows and morphs as a platform? Earlier this week, Substack announced ‘Creator Studio’, a new initiative providing an ‘opportunity for video-native creators who want a more direct, intimate relationship with their audience and to make money from subscriptions’. As you may have noticed, one of this blog’s regular bugbears is the elision of ‘content’ and ‘art’, ‘creator’ and ‘artist’, which made the ‘Creator Studio’ launch a red rag to a bull. From the language of the press release — ‘creators’, ‘opportunity’, ‘audience’, ‘monetise’ — you wouldn’t gain any sense of what has made Substack so unique and refreshing, providing an online home for writers free from the demands of traditional social media and advertising, where we can earn money but don’t have to aggressively build a brand to do so. I don’t need to criticise Creator Studio here, because everything I would and could say has been said already in the comments of the press release.

Over the last few years we’ve seen each and every new platform poison itself — and its users — in service of the supposed greater good of making bank. Last year BeReal went from a startup protesting the incessant, algorithm-driven attention economy, championing just one moment of engagement a day, to constant CTA notifications and bids for users’ time, allowing second posts and moving shots and the creation of image reels.² I remember when I first joined Instagram a decade ago, and it felt so novel and exciting. Now I open it like an addict, craving a hit I know will hurt me in the not-that-long run.

I don’t want this to happen to Substack, but I fear the ball is already rolling and all our complaints are just Sisyphean demands against the inevitable. Experiencing my fifteen minutes of fame, at least in a small corner of the internet, has driven home just how vulnerable our online creative spaces are, how important it is to build an offline community which shares your passions and with which you can engage meaningfully about the successes and failures of your creative work. There is a vast difference between in-person, face-to-face critique at a workshop, which might be followed by a pub trip or a mundane chat, creating a separation between criticism of the writing and criticism of the writer, and being a part of the discourse. In the discourse, no one talks to each other, but across each other. And criticising an opinion also involves criticising the person who expresses it, perhaps as a result of the self-promotion in which we all have to engage online, and which was part of my reason for writing about ‘it girls’ in the first place.

I’ve always felt that Substack facilitates a simulacrum of the former mode of critique, allowing longer comments and encouraging mindful, long-form responses rather than short comebacks, but as the platform evolves into a more conventional type of social media, that seems to be changing. I received some incredibly thoughtful, considered responses to my last piece, both in comments and DMs. But I also felt that my points were taken on bad faith and distorted beyond belief by people seeking to make their own points — something I undoubtedly also do. ‘This discourse is so boring’, I saw someone say on Notes, and I wanted to yell back I know! That’s what I was trying to say!

When you are putting your views out into the world, some people will always disagree with and misconstrue you. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, and it is certainly a discomfort I personally need to get more comfortable with. But I didn’t like feeling that I, as opposed to just my work, had become a part of the discourse — just another dumb Substack girl putting words on a page in a bid for attention who thinks this makes her somehow more interesting. I felt I was relearning the lessons I was taught as a kid in the noughties era of ‘stranger danger’ internet panic. Everything you put online is there forever. Not everyone on the other side of the screen is your friend. I wanted to log off, delete the apps, but I couldn’t. So much of my identity is entangled here, wired into the internet. I don’t know how to disentangle those threads, pick myself piecemeal out of the machine. I don’t know if I can, or if I even want to.

Maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing. In the immortal words of Jemima Kirke’s Instagram story: ‘I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much’. Or, as Rayne Fisher Quann puts it in an excellent recent interview with the writer Gordon Glasgow:

I think especially in this age of instant consumer feedback, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in how your art will be received and very easy to lose sight of the personal, sensuous experience of making it. I write for myself, I think, and I try to think as little as possible about who could be reading it (I try not to even think about what my own opinion of it will be when I read it back in the future). I write because I feel like I have to.

In the midst of all the discourse, this felt like a timely reminder from the patron saint of women-writing-online. Despite my ‘I have nothing valuable to say, I should delete everything’ wobble, I know why I’m writing here, and it isn’t because I think it makes me interesting, or attractive, or because it provides me with more validation than I can glean from a 280-character tweet, or because Substack claims it will help me ‘build a bigger, better version’ of myself. It isn’t to elicit a certain response from a certain audience. I am doing this because it is what I have always done. I am doing this because it is what I cannot live without.

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Looking at art, reading about art

Two things will happen, if you work at an art gallery. First of all, you will spend all your time telling other people to come and see incredible, immaculately-curated shows which you will have visited only once, and sparingly. You will be too busy telling other people about the art in the gallery to go and look at the art in the gallery. Secondly, you will realise that you do not, will not, and cannot know enough about art.

So I’ve been trying to catch up. First and foremost by seeing more art, which is easy to do in London. I wrote in February about the Slow Art movement, and since then I’ve been trying to implement Slow Art’s more mindful, engaged way of looking, encouraging myself to spend longer in front of certain works than I might usually and to gaze without the intermediary of a screen. I’ve also been allowing myself to think about the way I move through the gallery space, the pressures exerted on me by time, company, technology, self-confidence or a lack thereof. If there are interactive pieces, as in the current Yoko Ono retrospective at the Tate, do I feel comfortable to engage with them alone? Do I allow myself to revisit certain works multiple times, or to skip others, or do I feel myself funnelled in a linear way through the museum? How do I feel about the immersive exhibits which have sprung up across London? What actually moves me about a piece of work beyond its immediate aesthetic potential? In the past, I’ve been guilty of viewing art as a photo op or a consumer item, something to be branded on a tote bag or iPhone case, edited into a new Tumblr avatar. Unlearning this way of seeing has been harder than I expected, if rewarding. Leaving a good show has the effect of stimulating my mind and quieting it at the same time, a bit like sex or swimming in the ocean. When we saw Klimt’s The Kiss at the Belvedere in Vienna in March, my boyfriend called it the most profound experience he’d ever had in the company of a work of art, something akin to religious feeling. Perhaps he was experiencing what Walter Benjamin famously called the ‘aura’ of a painting, its presence in space and time, born of its physicality and history and thingness. Looking at a Klimt reproduced on a tote bag or a screen just doesn’t have the same effect.

When I read about art, I’m drawn not only to straightforward criticism but to works which weave together ekphrastic description with critical analysis, intertextual and historical context, and an element of the author’s own autobiography. I recently read Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side: Women, Art, and the Spirit World, which blends memoir and art history to consider the influence of spiritualism and the occult on female artists from Hildegard of Bingen to today, with a particular focus on the nineteenth-century when women like Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton ushered in Modernism — and the men took all the credit. I finished The Other Side shortly before the opening of ‘Portraits To Dream In’, the Francesca Woodman / Julia Margaret Cameron show at the National Portrait Gallery, which put the two female photographers, working a century apart, in artistic dialogue. Critics of the show suggested that the connections between the two were tenuous and founded solely on their shared femininity, but I don’t agree. If anything, I wanted to see the connections go further; perhaps reference Cameron’s spiritualist female contemporaries as discussed by Higgie, as well as the nineteenth-century fad for spirit photography, which Woodman’s work echoes a century later.

For me, art does not exist in a vacuum of beauty or aesthetics but operates as one part in a wider system of meaning and sensual experience which has both communal and individual dimensions across time and space. Last year, my reading group discussed Susan Sontag’s seminal essay Against Interpretation. Sontag’s work on illness has been incredibly influential for formulating my thesis, but much of the thinking I’ve done since reading Against Interpretation has been engaged with its critical argument, in particular its famous call for ‘in place of a hermeneutics…an erotics of art’. I don’t think I entirely agree with Sontag here. I appreciate her concern with aggressive over or misinterpretation — nothing kills a painting like a paragraph on a wall — but I’m uneasy about her wholesale rejection of interpretation and analysis, its depoliticising and anti-intellectual rejection of depth. Part of the sensual pleasure of art comes from thinking through and with it, from the joy of making connections. Part of the sensory experience of art is also political, because a feeling for the Other as expressed in art is always political.

Experiencing art means experiencing the world too, developing a more attentive way of seeing, a new awareness, and meaning is never static. For Sontag, interpretation ‘excavates, destroys’, but I prefer a more constructive image, of artifice upon edifice, a new palimpsestic stage in the life of a work. For how could you ever disentangle erotics and hermeneutics, to separate what your body feels in front of an artwork from what your mind does? And why would you ever want to?

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Non-fiction polyamory

As I suggested at the start of this post, I’ve been engaging in non-fiction polyamory, flipping between different texts and building a bedside table Tower of Babel. Not to mention my lengthy Substack saved posts tab. Here’s a few bricks from that teetering structure, and a few thoughts.

Marina Warner, Forms of Enchantment: Writing on Art and Artists

I love Marina Warner (who doesn’t) and after hearing her talk on a panel, I raced to pick up this paperback release of her most recent book. Drawing together Warner’s writing on art and artists from across the decades, it is as enlightening about her own preoccupations — myth-making, magic, fairytales, and symbolism — as it is about the artists she discusses. Perfect for picking up and putting down again when you require some creative stimulation.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Yes, I am still ploughing through The Second Sex — and no, that is not an innuendo. I’ve read parts of de Beauvoir’s monumental feminist text throughout the years, but decided to work through it from cover to cover when B. bought me a copy for Christmas. I’m about two thirds of the way through now, and yet each chapter still brings a new revelation. So often I think or feel something about contemporary feminism, gender roles, sexual relations, and have to go hunting through its pages — because de Beauvoir has already thought it. In part a historical document yet still surprising and startlingly relevant today, everyone should read The Second Sex.

Millie Jacoby, 'Nihilist kitsch: Running away, Milan Kundera, and being a hater’

Millie from

the dybbuk diaries

is one of my favourite writers on here. Here, she talks about her lifelong drive to romanticise the future and to run away in search of it, culminating in a move to Australia, and the harsh dissolution of that romanticising impulse. Poignant and elegantly written, it perfectly strikes the balance between the personal and analytical which I find many writers on here fail to do. Ironically, I read her piece the day after booking a two week trip to Sri Lanka in the autumn, in a desperate attempt to get better at being alone in the interim period between the end of my job and the start of my PhD. You can look forward to the inevitable essay I’ll get out of it.

Freya India, ‘What's Become Of Us? Who said I want to be connected to people like this?’

This piece from

GIRLS

deftly put into words something I’ve been struggling to express for the last few months, that we have a moral responsibility for our use of the internet and our conduct thereon. That the internet isn’t just making us ‘miserable’, but shallow, narrow-minded, and cruel. I have felt this, the last few weeks. I have felt it in myself and in others. But Freya puts it better:

I honestly don’t know where we go from here. Distancing ourselves from these platforms, yes. Staying away from things that, no matter how normal they seem now, we feel are changing us for the worse. But I also think a good place to start is to change the way we talk about social media. Not just about our vulnerabilities but our vices. Not just about our anxiety but our arrogance. And to look at ourselves, honestly, all of us, and think, for once, not only about how all this is making us feel. But who the hell is it making us become?

She’s not wrong. Now, if only I could work out how to get myself out of here. Oh, wait.

Note from 2025 - I know the blog referenced above has descended into some troublingly right-wing takes over the past year. I’m leaving this reference in, because it would be disingenuous to remove it, and I recall finding the essay interesting. But I no longer condone her work.

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1. Ironically it is really sunny today, for the first time in ages, but I am sceptical.

2. I wrote about my BeReal addiction a year ago, and have since deleted it. Which was easy, until a friend mentioned it yesterday, and the FOMO hit. The real challenge will be Instagram and Twitter.