This week’s Tuesday Blogversation is with Andy Sturdevant. He publishes to a blog named South 12th. I’ll admit that I’ve only been reading his posts since January of this year, but he’s been at it for much longer (10/18/2008). It’s a mishmash of items that upon first glance may be hard to follow but if you read back a few pages (or more like me) you can tell that it’s much more than just random. He will also be MC’ing the MNBeardoff on 3/31/2010
Andy Sturdevant ( blog ) works for an artists’ resources organization in Lowertown St. Paul. He’s originally from Louisville, Kentucky but has been a Minneapolis resident since 2005. He’s got a curiosity gene so he’s been involved with the following at different times; arts writing, judging spelling bees, curating, standardized test grading, illustrating, selling art supplies, and radio.
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There’s a lot of randomness to the topics in your posts, is there a hidden theme?
Maybe there is, insofar as there’s a hidden theme in my own interests. There’s definitely things I’m more interested in, and things I’m more likely to want to write about. If you look at everything I’ve put up since January, for example, you see common threads: books, social interactions, South Minneapolis, the 1970s, old pop music, short lists, dubious menswear, urbanism, contemporary art. I am sure all those things relate to each other somehow. My hope is that when you look at it all together there you come away with some sense of who I am, what sort of ideas interest me, and what all of these themes might have to do with one another. Or at least, you’d get an idea of what sort of conversation we might have in the kitchen at a party.
What makes something “bloggable” and not?
If it catches my interest, and it’s something I can write about for an audience. That could be something I read, or some conversation I overheard, or something going on around the neighborhood. There’s not a whole lot of what you might call confessional writing or, uh, “oversharing” on S. 12th. But if something happens to me, and it seems interesting and seems consistent with the hidden themes, then sure, up it goes up. I suppose you start to get a sense for these things if you do it long enough.
Do you filter yourself even if something seems post worthy to you? aka… what rules do you put in place for the content?
I write using my real, full name, so it’s not hard to track me down. For that reason, I keep a lot of the writing sort of abstract. I also don’t usually write explicitly about other people I know, even pseudonymously, unless they’re somehow also collaborating with me, or they’ve got a well-established presence online. There are people that come up a lot, like Herbach, who even has a tag devoted to him — but he’s got a blog and a novel and radio show, so he’s out there already. A turn-of-the-screw account of my daily social life and its ins-and-outs would be crushingly dull, anyway. Like, have you ever read Andy Warhol’s diaries? They’re fascinating as a historical document, but as straight reading they’re — well, crushingly dull. Just a lot of lists of names, names, names. No one wants a catalog of every person I meet out over the weekend for drinks. I like a little distance.
Also: I try to avoid writing about being drunk. That doesn’t look good in the Google searches.
In your commentaries do you prefer brute force honesty or beating around the bush? What topics cause you to sway one way or another?
I am probably kind of a creampuff. My inclination is if I’m not engaged by something or interested in it, I just don’t write about it. I find people that write continuously about things they seem completely enraged by to be kind of creepy. Like most people, I have strong opinions on art and politics and culture, but most of the time I find it more interesting to ask “Why is this?” instead of “What the hell is wrong with these cretins?” I find it makes for better reading. That’s a lot of it, really: what approach will make for the most entertaining, interesting read?
What got you started?
Reading the New York-based blog This Recording, probably, in 2007-08. I guess TR has a reputation for being terminally insider-y and snarky, and there was a lot about it that put me off even at first, but at the same time they had a whole bunch of good writers that seemed very adept at mixing their own personal writing in with broader cultural commentary, outbound links to related topics, and with images, music and other types of media mixed into the text. Moreover, the writers had a real talent for self-mythologizing. This all seemed like something I could do. It made sense to me that if a blog was going to work, and it was going to be something people would be interested in, you had to tie your own experiences into other things going on around the world at large. It’s not really enough to write, “OK, well, it’s winter in Minneapolis and I am stuck inside and everyone is cold and in a bad mood and gee, doesn’t it suck?” But if you find a way to put that general sentiment together with, say, archival photos of winter of Minneapolis, and songs from your winter playlist, and link to bits of writing from other Minneapolitans whose work you like voicing similar sentiments, and throw in links to whatever’s going on around town, and do all of this in a consistent voice, you start to have a more immersive, complex, and engaging finished product. The reader invests more in it.
The other thing was that all the TR writers used the Tumblr platform, which makes it very easy to mix in other types of media and linking with straight writing. It was a format that made a lot of sense to me. So I used Tumblr, and that made a big difference.
Did you blog before South 12th?
Not really. Or not in any significant way, at least. I’d blog on MySpace sometimes, back when that was a viable option. I had a few start-and-stop personal blogs through WordPress and Blogger and wherever else through the ’00s, but they never amounted to much. It was mostly me complaining about my personal life, which is not something anyone wants to read about, no matter how well written it is. And these were not particularly well-written. They had cool, 22 year old titles, though. “The Boy Looked at Johnny” and “Top 10 Young American Painters” both come to mind. Awesome, Andy!
Has the blog been affected or shaped at all by your professional life?
That’s a funny thing. I’ve only recently started working at a job in the fine arts, and they’re all very creative, engaged people. Before that, I was working very straight-world jobs and trying to do the classic blogger secret-other-life thing. You might say one of the things that shaped S. 12th and drove its content, early on at least, was that I was purposefully writing about the parts of the world I found colorful and lively and funny to counteract the dullness of my 9-5 work. You spend all day collating copies and making coffee, and inevitably you start mulling over idle thoughts like, “Hmm, I wonder what the least popular names for babies in 1970 were?” or “I wonder what those purple things I saw hanging from the trees on 13th Avenue this morning were?” A little Googling, and there’s your post for the day. Then, back to collating those copies. But I have probably said too much. If former bosses are reading: I wrote everything on lunch breaks, nights and weekends.
How did you get the word out?
The usual. Facebook, I suppose. And from other blogs. Tumblr makes it exceptionally easy to link to other people’s work, so it’s easy to amass a lot of like-minded readers relatively quickly. And other local blogs, too — MNSpeak, Eyeteeth, Because Emily Says So, and others have been very generous in referring readers to me in the past.
Besides the social interactions that you gain from posting, is there an ulterior motive?
Ha! Is that a backhanded way of asking if I am trying to get a book deal? I had joked for a while last year that what I really needed to do was turn S. 12th into a stunt memoir-style blog, where I follow the old “I am going to __________ every day for _____ days/weeks/months and write about it every day!” formula, and then land a book deal. But really, I just enjoy writing, and meeting other people whose work I like is my only real motive.
Which blogs outside the TC Metro do you see as ‘required reading’? aka: you read every posts…
A very brief list of other blogs I feel a shared sensibility with are Falling and Laughing, Brainland,Wipe Your Feet, The Ragbag, and Mumblelard. I find Firmuhment beautiful. Nerd Boyfriend is how I plan my wardrobe. Kottke is a good way to find out what is going on around the Internet without having to read all of it. I find Tomorrow Museum and The Masticator consistently challenging, and I find MNFTIU and Unremitting Failure consistently hilarious. And of course The Infrastructurist, because I wish some days I’d been an urban planner.
What local blogs do you recommend?
Off the top of my head, I’d give full and enthusiastic recommendations to Better Matters, Mt. Holly Mayor’s Office, Powderhorn 365, Eyeteeth, Madge World, Twin City Sidewalks, Your Man for Fun in Rapidan, Little Brown Mushroom, Hardland/Heartland, Alright Hamilton, Fambled, and Good Morning Andrew. TC Sidewalks and LBM in particular have a very wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary approach I find very attractive. Take TCS, for example: it’s primarily just about urbanism, but there’s so much video, found art, analysis, theory, local trivia, photography, personal narrative and gossip mixed in there it’s a different experience every time you read it. But I know every time I read it I’m going to enjoy it.
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Tuesday Blogversation is a weekly series on iamdez.com featuring bloggers of all kinds from the Twin Cities (Minneapolis / Saint Paul) area. If you’d like to be considered for an interview please send mail to dez [at] iamdez [dot] com or get ahold of me on twitter.