In April, editor and founder of Tyrant Books, Giancarlo DiTrapano, died suddenly at 47. He was widely loved in the New York independent literary community for his commitment to elevating stories that mainstream publishing houses would turn up their noses at—work about freedom under capitalism, addiction, social inequalities, sex, and, often, self-analysis so aggressive that Random House would likely call it onanistic. He sniffed out greats, including PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Atticus Lish and novelist Nico Walker (whose acclaimed autobiography, Cherry, about his time robbing banks to pay for his heroin addiction after returning from the Iraq War, was just adapted into a stunningly mediocre movie starring Tom Holland). This quote from DiTrapano is used most in the articles about his death:
“Tyrant stuff isn’t for everyone, but nothing should be for everyone. Or at least nothing that’s worth anything. You know what’s for everyone? Water. Water is for everyone. And if you’re publishing something for everyone, well, you’re publishing water.”
At the time, I didn’t know who Giancarlo DiTrapano was; I only learned about him because the day after he died, I saw an outpouring of broken heart emojis and eloquent captions from a disparate collection of writers and scenesters I follow online. A love for DiTrapano was an invisible string tying together the internet golems of my literary elite. New Yorker freelancers wrote notes app tributes in MLA-compliant English, while poets tweeted micro-obituaries relaying the kindness of his character. I started scrolling and clicking on their bylines, in pursuit of more invisible strings.
If you dig deep enough into the archives of any millennial/zoomer-cusp's writing, you will inevitably end up at one of three places: LiveJournal, Thought Catalog, or Tumblr. These were the birthplaces of my generation’s obsession with “the personal essay,” but more importantly, they were no-frills playgrounds where we could stretch our legs and find out what kind of sentences we enjoyed stringing together. In investigating the works of my Instagram literati, I soon found myself digging through graveyards of decade-old confessional essays, almost always about gaining personal agency through the rabid pursuit of experience. You could spend a whole afternoon bopping through poet (and wife to aforementioned Nico Walker) Rachel Rabbit White’s TC archive, which is studded with titles like “Girl on Girl: The Depressing Realization That I Will Always Be Straight,” “I Did Coke All Night With the ATL Twins So You Don’t Have to,” and “Do You Know I’m Going to Leave You?”. You could spend even longer trying to untangle “Adrien Brody,” Marie Calloway’s (no relation) 2013 autofiction piece about fucking an older, married journalist during a weekend in New York City (she originally published the essay on her Tumblr along with other stories and introspections, but her account is now, alas, nowhere to be found).
In the early 2010s, I wasn’t posting long-form pieces on personal agency, but I had my own set of budding opinions and secrets that craved a home—preferably in a place that was more off the beaten path than Facebook, but more public than my notebook. Tumblr felt cozy, but still like anything could happen. You could be an online celebrity for, say, running an Edward/Jacob stan account or posting threads of white men wearing Google Glasses, and no one in your History class would know. You could check The Hype Machine to find undiscovered songs that suited your taste, and roll your eyes when people ask if you’d heard of Pitchfork. You could snap a pic and submit yourself for Hipster Runoff’s “Perfect Alternative Breasts” for the prize of post-Playboy microfame, or even slide into their ask box to protest the contest’s misogyny. It was a great place to feel cool, but it was an even better place to figure out if you even cared to be cool in the first place.
Similar arguments can be made by anyone with a strong allegiance to a particular social medium, especially if they grew up with it. Former Myspacers still get nostalgic for curating Top Eights and slipping into the inboxes of floppy-haired pop-punk drummers, just as TikTokers relish the parasocial closeness of dueting a D’Amelio dance. But while algorithm monoculture relies on rapid microtrends that create a frantic need to keep up in real time, on Tumblr, you could float at your own pace until you found a pocket of culture that spoke to you personally. For me, this meant floating towards a writing culture that didn’t make me feel as disillusioned as my liberal-arts compatriots did.
I had heard of Tyrant Books before DiTrapano died, but mostly just by name and occasionally by sight on one of their “Double Suicide or It Wasn’t Love” totes. Their online store sells twenty or so titles, and each book has a striking cover and a list of effusive review blurbs in the product description, curated the way only a true fan could. I bought LIVEBLOG by Megan Boyle, hooked by its summary:
In 2013, Megan Boyle was unhappy with the life she was living and wanted to document it on the internet for an audience. Her hope was that if she documented each thought and action on the internet, then she would begin to behave in a manner more appropriate to the life she wanted to live. She needed a judge and a jury to see her crimes and non-crimes, her actions and thoughts, and her life.
It arrived in the mail 10 days later, a 600-page doorstop with a sexy holographic cover. In it, Boyle documents every CVS trip, drug pickup, or piece of small talk that punctuated her days for three years, often in near-real time. In other words, LIVEBLOG is exactly what the title says it is. It’s engrossing, maddening at times, but it’s hard to say exactly what I took away from it. It made me think of my own Tumblr archive hidden in its ghost-town domain, and whether its content had been maddening, too. Had I been self-publishing “water,” as DiTrapano would call it? Did it even matter?
Glass of gin in hand, I logged on to www.***************.tumblr.com for the first time since 2017. Watching the homepage for my early-internet identity pop back to life in front of me was disorienting, like seeing a splashy advertisement for a soda flavor I hadn’t thought about in years. Color-changing titles, dropdown menus with cheeky copy, so much white space it felt like an Apple Store… the 2010s of it all was palpable and deeply humbling. Under the dropdown were a few pages I had made, all sorted by tags, : “home” (home page), “read & stare” (writing & selfies), “listen” (playlists & ripped songs), “tweet” (dead twitter account from college), “stalk” (monthly post archive), and “ask” (anonymous ask box). (I would like to take a moment to honor the sacred Tumblr ask box, where many of us first mastered the art of flirting with strangers online).
I wanted to push the bruise that would hurt the most, so I clicked on “read & stare” to find a compendium of lowercase-only diary entries, disposable film camera pictures, and love letters to no one. Behind every post was a clear awareness that it was all going to be observed under the public eye of the internet—maybe even the eye of myself, a decade later—and it didn’t take long to decode the type of character I wanted to project: moody, sexy, brilliant, doomed. I wanted to be a combination of Krysten Ritter, Simone de Beauvoir, and every American Apparel model, all at once (in many ways, I still do).
My old selfies had a self-serious charm that made me laugh. There’s a picture of me lying down on a golf-course path that I had just sprayed “SOOO PUNK” onto in black paint, smiling and smitten with my own quirky vandalism. There are a handful of front-facing Android phone pictures I took on the train on good hair days, my Manic Panic split ends stuck in my Urban Outfitters infinity scarf. Lots of black thigh-highs, sweaters casually falling off shoulders, performative pouting, and party pictures with hipster friends in faux-leopard jackets. Some of it feels a lifetime away, but the blueprint for my present-day selfies is there: head tilted slightly to the right, wide eyes, imperfect cat-eye liner. The whole page dripped with a desire to be both the artist and the muse.
In my text posts, common themes were the “art of writing” and “being a writer,” without much mention of what I wanted to write, or the writing itself. At the peak of my Tumblr days, I was surrounded in my waking life by creative writers who thought their confessional autofiction could singlehandedly demolish society’s evils, even though most of them wouldn’t have been able to define “anticapitalist” if put on the spot. In the early 2010s, alt literature was post-postmodernism, but not quite on to its next “-ism” yet. There was no reason to believe writing a 500-word essay about getting a Joy Division tattoo wouldn’t one day lead you to becoming the next Zadie Smith (or at least Cat Marnell).
But I found myself quickly disillusioned by the identity culture of being a writer, which too often eclipsed the act of writing itself (famously, one of my friends once hooked up with a guy who used two unread copies of Infinite Jest as bookends). On weekends, I would come home drunk on jungle juice from a basement poetry reading or a scriptwriting salon hosted by Film-major frat bros who wanted my number but not my copyedits, then burrow into my bed and log on to Tumblr, whose lightweight discourse and open community weighed less heavily on my self-esteem.
Some of my entries were snippets that never got fully fleshed out, often in the tone of an on-the-nose ‘40s femme fatale movie:
she sits and sags in her salivating seat
sweating and writhing in an unforgiving heat
blinking and breaking and losing her mind
killing him, killing him
just to kill time.
Others were ideas for essays that I thought would better help me feel more like my peers’ image of a writer:
thinking about writing a creative observational nonfiction piece about the emotional/ psychological differences between getting fucked up with friends vs getting fucked up alone
but there’s a good chance I’m only considering it because I want to justify drinking on my own by saying, “it’s cool, it’s research”
But most often they were just feelings—fleeting, infuriating, and full of meaning, at least at the time. I hunted through pithy daily posts for my “crimes and non-crimes,” the kinds Megan Boyle wanted the judge and jury of Tumblr to reach a verdict on. What “crimes” was I happy to flaunt, and what “non-crimes” seemed too mundane to matter?
if I were single, I would hate my best friends because they’re gorgeous and complain constantly about how many beautiful boys want them.
people who aren’t sad should be relieved that they’re not sad. they shouldn’t fabricate problems to give themselves that coveted moody, pained aura that they think defines an interesting person worthy of someone’s attention. sadness isn’t something to be donned and shed at a moment’s notice just for the sake of seeming deep. sadness is not an accessory. it’s debilitating. it’s lethal.
tonight is elliott smith, *******, and cupcakes
i’ve been unruly
I had very little to gaze at besides my own navel. Obsessed with alternative structure, I believed that in order for a piece to be “good,” it had to be either a thousand pages or 140 characters long; anything in-between was just kowtowing to mainstream notions of what a story should look like. In retrospect, this was such a silly, self-serious justification for simply wanting to blog about my feelings. I only had about 300 or so followers, and on a good day, I would get maybe 10 notes on a post and some sort of neutral reblog comment like “feel this” or “saaaame.” Tumblr wasn’t a void that shouted back at me, but sometimes, it would whisper. Most days, that felt much better than exchanging printed poems with hyper-competitive peers at Starbucks—or, even more dully, having some apathetic professor explain how well or not well my essay on (X) subject argued (Y) thesis against (Z) peer-reviewed counterargument.
Missing from my archive are the longer, completed pieces that lived in my Microsoft Word files and the Jenga towers of stapled papers in my bedroom: a one-act play set to Arcade Fire’s Funeral, a magical realist novella about delusional neighbors in a luxury apartment building, a script adaptation of “Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon. Some of it was terrible, but a lot of it wasn’t, and I regret that I didn’t post any of it just because I thought that being emotionally vulnerable with my public diary was more important than being professionally vulnerable with my content. It seems surreal now, in today’s online culture of of personal hyperdocumentation, that I didn’t see how much the two relate.
In the light of 2021, my archive could definitely be seen as diluted, confessional “water” in that I was “publishing it for everyone.” Maybe “curating” is a better word. On Tumblr, I led with my Ritter/Beauvoir/American Apparel persona and kept my long-form writing offline so I could be perceived as an internet muse, while keeping the smug secret that I knew I was much more than that. I envy the Marie Calloways of that time who could publish an essay on her Tumblr alongside demure selfies and have it plucked by Muumuu House under the approving eye of Tao Lin with barely any edits to it, but I also would have crumbled under that pressure immediately had that happened to me at 19. Boldness in sharing my writing was a skill that took me a few more years to learn, but I credit Tumblr as the place where that boldness began to grow.
When cultural figures like DiTrapano pass, the creative communities left in their wakes often go through a sort of identity crisis about whether an era has ended, and if the next era will live up to the old one. As reference points shift, questions start to arise: How do we know which authors are innovative and which ones are derivative? Will the parties still be as fun? What “-ism” are we moving on to next? Do we even want another “-ism” at all? It’s impossible to predict what literary references we’ll be trying to one-up each other with a few years from now, but it’s safe to say their authors will have forged their skills in fires of online self-publishing, likely on a website with sleek UX owned by Amazon. To have been a pioneer of online navel-gazing feels, to me, like the ultimate reblog.