Hi friends (and strangers, potentially),
I got my start online with LiveJournal in high school, and then transitioned pretty naturally to the feminist blogosphere of the mid-2000s, which was a truly wild environment. Mostly, I was a commenter! But I dabbled with longform writing — I had a short-lived WordPress account, to which I will not be linking, and pitched in here and there on other sites. That was a very specific period of internet history, and as microblogging/short-form platforms like Twitter and Tumblr rose in prevalence, I ended up gravitating more toward those instead. I started accounts on those two sites in 2009 and spent the next…god, decade (!) rejoicing in firing off stream-of-consciousness thoughts, with little planning and zero editing.
I still do this, as anyone who follows me knows. But I’ve also taken real joy in the opportunities I have to do things that take a bit more care — my reviewing for The Singles Jukebox, individual Tumblr posts where I write about books I’ve enjoyed, that sort of thing. And I found myself wanting a place where I can indulge that desire to write at length, without it being sandwiched between all the other nonsense I share on those sites.
So here we are, on a newsletter titled after a somewhat nerdy pun my friend Saoirse suggested (guess where the name ‘Dorian’ comes from!). These past couple years I’ve started tracking my listening and reading habits much more closely than in the past, and I needed a venue where I can share my thoughts on those things at whatever length I want to.
Expect recaps of musical and literary highlights, probably in the form of a collection of micro-reviews of albums and books that left an impression. Expect the occasional deep dive on an individual work that needs more than a few sentences to explore. Expect things that don’t fit into these categories but still are broadly “media criticism”, and maybe expect some things beyond that! I really don’t yet know where things will go, we’re figuring it out on the way. But hopefully it’s a fun ride.
First up: to celebrate my being invited to contribute to the most recent issue of Ryo Miyauchi’s This Side of Japan, I want to write a post talking about some Japanese albums I’ve discovered and enjoyed this year so far. Look forward to that…sometime soon.
Thanks for joining me on this experiment.
~ Dorian