Hello, I’m Kyle Kirshbom—here’s another issue of Blanket: a newsletter for people who don’t mind something different each time. If you want in on the amorphous action please consider subscribing.
I received more commentary than anticipated for my previous post. A post that was geared towards general housekeeping seemed to have touched on something lost or taken for granted when it comes to writing online.
I’m no expert, but I have struggled with the neccessaryness of online writing for almost my entire life. As a child, my father encouraged me to start a blog. It can be about anything, he would say. But that lack of direction stifled me and continues to.
A blog can’t just be about anything; it has to be important to you, and it has to be something you’re motivated to write on. But at some point, you have to make a decision—what’s important to you? And not only what is important to you, but what do you think others will find important?
It’s hard enough to answer the first, but the second question will lead to an infinite regression of self-doubt. And you inevitably write very little for a very long time.
There is a flip side to that, however.
Allowing yourself the opportunity to deeply consider your motivations, your interests, and what you want to put out in the world may force you to be a more discerning person, which will hopefully lead to less bullshit in the world. Bullshit that comes out of a need to impress an audience, placates subscribers, or the type of bullshit you don’t believe to be meaningful at all.
Bullshit can also be good. Small talk is a kind of bullshit. It’s a gesture toward a commonality without any obvious demarkations. A person will throw something out to see where it lands. It doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, but it’s more of a journey towards meaning, to be abstract about it. This is all to say that I intend to mire in this exact brand of bullshit for some time until a larger topic reveals itself.
Below will be the first of, hopefully, many of what I’ve decided to call Small Talk. It was actually going to be called something else, but then I said that thing about small talk, so I changed. Transient nature of creativity, vacuous field, endless possibilities, yadda yadda yadda. It is what it is because that’s how it is. What’d I say about meaningless bullshit?
Small Talk
Ronson was an early chronicler/investigator into the early years of cancel culture. His findings feel almost blase at this point, but it’s interesting to see how a decade later we’re still talking about the same thing.
Wood Allen, recently retired, now has a substack which I immediatly subscribed to. I have no doubt that his children are handleing the technical side because I’m pretty sure the man doesn’t know how to use the internet, but as a fan I’m happy to support.
Check out his memoir too. By far the best book I’ve read this year. The first half is a brilliant career play by play, the second is entirely dedicated to the Mia/Dylan Farrow incident. Unless Mia or Dylan come out and say they made the whole thing up, or Woody comes out and says he did it, we’ll never really know what’s true. But reading the story from Woody’s perspective casts doubt on the validity of the charges. It’s important to hear from both sides, so, if anything, I encourage people to read what the man has to say. Reading his pov might shed some preconcieved notions. It’s a bad habit to immediatly assume the worst of people.
I can imagine a Hungarian mathmetician was moments away from blowing his brains out before he found out his insane puzzle was being made into a toy.
Return to early 2000s browser games but with RW meme celebrities. The world is so fucking funny.
I really enjoyed this one. You are onto something with the Small Talk angle. I think it should be the title of a book. Explore Small talk across various societies as part of culture, the loss of the art of Small talk in a digital connected world, great small talkers in history, an endless treasure trove of meaningless bullshit in about 250 pages……