Introducing Seasonal Matters
A new home for my lengthier digressions
The following text is taken from the introductory post to my new Substack, Seasonal Matters. Keep on reading to see if it’s something you want to follow!
I started Dancing About Architecture, my music writing newsletter (and the first public venue I provided myself for writing) in 2020, which lay in dormancy as I gave my attention to other pubs: Organ Grinder, Tone Glow, and Bandcamp Daily. Last year, I archived all my previous writing on DAA and published my first new post on my own platform (for myself) in over 3 years. That post was a polemical essay that I wrote to accompany a diagram/artwork that a friend of mine had made. I anticipated that I would henceforth use DAA to sporadically post miscellany of this nature; I surprised myself when I decided to get back into music writing and other related things, like uploading mixes. When I recently found some older theoretical writing that I wanted to polish up and post, I realized it felt kind of odd (especially given its length) to post it on DAA, given that I’ve set a tone and don’t want to clog people’s feeds with stuff they’re not here for. So I decided to set up Seasonal Matters as a home for the longer writing I do that isn’t necessarily about music. I may still post more casual writing that isn’t about music on DAA, like this two-part log of my last trip to the National Gallery. But this new blog is for my lengthier digressions. This is the negative (as in “defined by what it’s not”) impulse that gave rise to Seasonal Matters; however, given that all my thoughts tend to circle around particular historical, philosophical, and aesthetic motifs, perhaps a positive definition for this newsletter will come to take shape—in which case, I will quietly slip that mission statement at the beginning of a later post, or maybe onto the about page.
My first posts will be (1) a re-upload of the essay I wrote about my friend’s art, which I’m choosing to archive here instead of on Dancing About Architecture; (2) an essay on Foucault, in which I give expression to several long-held frustrations. I hope they reward the kinds of readers who also spend a lot of their time thinking about things like this. And thanks in advance to anyone from DAA who takes an interest in this side of my work. Both posts are up now and can be accessed below.
‘Til next time!
Read “Meme/Art/Propaganda: A Reading Guide” here.
Read “Genealogy and the Foucauldian Concept of History” here.