#Scurf157: Sentence thoughts 💀
On tweeting sentences that stand suspended in nether (forever)
Typically I don’t bother to tweet out all of my sentence level tweet worthy thoughts. So conscious of my own self, my grammar and of the thought’s political reprimand — I mostly end up withdrawing from pressing that send button. But sometimes I also do manage to tweet out that single (usually drunk) thought which is then deleted upon sheer embarrassment the morning after.
Confronting my own thoughts on the page — see? i said confronting and not loving or like coming to meet or some other smothering romantic BS like that — is not the same story though. On the page, even as I hate or loathe or sense that I am getting carried away, I continue to write, to pour, to jot, scribble and gut out my words.
Like a private massacre. Who’s gonna see? No one’s there to judge. Most of the times, even I don’t go back to my journals.
It was the same thing with this blog that started off as a tiny letter dispatch for three people out there on a chilly December night in 2017. Over the years though the waters have shifted. Here too, I find myself in the trenches. I’ve started to set aside dispatches I would’ve earlier pushed out without a second thought. In that sense, this blog (now substack) was like a public notebook to me where I’d scribble out words, usually at the sentence- or the paragraph-level that came to mind. Some would roam in the inner recesses of my mind for ages (read: three weeks) before I’d muster them out, while others would be out in a blip.
Now, its a whole new world out there (or here?).
Every word put out feels like an involuntary commitment to a digital history the access to and ownership of which could be taken away at any moment. There’s whole wads of words, sentences, paragraphs stacked away in the reaches of my email drafts, docs, sheets that will probably never ever be accessed for any literary or even idea-level merit. Not even by me. While there are others that will always float along the surface of this blog, showing up on searches inside the drawers of my (and mine alone) sleep-deprived mind.
Even though no one really reads these dispatches I end up mediating a whole lot of them in what seems like to be an effort in vain. Often, though, I also find myself returning to, if only in thought, these sentence-level thoughts. Some of them tease me a bit, make me want to do something more with them. Finding them on the blog is easier, I have found, as compared to searching for them in drafts and sheets.
A lot of times I also get a frisson of thrill when I land upon a tweet of mine (mostly a sentence thought) that I had once put out and continues to resonate with me till wherever I find myself in the space time continuum.
Scrolling through my own Twitter feed then becomes similar to flipping through the pages of an old diary that yields in more brief, fewer and farther in between thoughts that are nonetheless as joyous and enamouring. Increasingly though, twitter is shrinking bit by bit as I recoil from its wild seas much like thousands of other writers, creatives and idlers. Where will our unsung sentence thoughts end up then?
some music, reading and watching i’ve tried to squeeze in these last few slightly exhausting days:
there’s the music of lapgan waiting to be used in hindi movies. grunge, hiphop, hindi masala. keep listening through both their albums to find the one you love the most. i’m a true hindi movie baby so nisha-aha-ha-ha-ha-ha really cuts it for me
read everything written by elisa gabbert but especially some of her essays. every six months i think i find one of her essays that stays with me for a while. this time its this one on self pity. go figure
i watched passages as soon as i landed on the indian soil in october, and came out a bit underwhelmed. the costume and set designs stayed with me just as much as the delicious cast. but i rewatched it this week and its turned into a kind of an obsession. i’m going back to it for notes on dialogues, pauses, glances, what words don’t say, use of music, and most of all costume design. watch it if you have Mubi or hmu if you’d like a link
it then follows that i’ll listen to all podcasts, interviews and read every bit of media out there about the movie that is out there. this letterboxd podcast interviewing Ira Sachs stood out in that crowd
this photo i saw on the internet (a while ago) and i really just love everything about it. i want its pinkness because it reminds me the pink i loathed in my childhood. its reminiscent of the exuberance of girlhood which i lived through in my teens with cousins and friends. the photo captures the silliness of sleepovers where girls gush over spilled dreams and shared secrets. maybe a shared dream to join a ballet class or a growing crush for a mathematics teacher or some sort of inane gossip about a girlfriend who missed the sleepover. the thin legs, the bare knees, the tattoo just above the knee, the wonky feet are all perhaps a manner of capturing the gawkiness, awkwardness and capriciousness of that very effervescent age. the knees hidden behind the pants though, they say it all. the nerves of being a jangly, slightly out of place teenage girl who is beginning to find her place in the world, on the cusp of something so big threatening to uproot and take over her life any moment now. if i had to find a movie that reminds me of this movie it will be Juno. it has to be Juno. Elliot Page’s was and will remain to be one of the most abiding silly girls written in hollywood. a simple, non-cheesy, even mildly saccharine sweet film. inject glow, the skinny unscraped knees, the shoes, the drama, the casualness, the aerial shot, the wooden floor board aesthetic, the inscrutably muted lackadaisical langour of it all, into my veins
oh and this was also the fortnight i finished reading Kundera’s towering best The Unbearable Lightness. more thoughts on that in the next one