An unconventional jawn

The only two mailing lists I subscribe to are Dirk’s Friday Fresh Fish Flash, an important business text about a local seafood shop; and Blackbird Spyplane, which is a style magazine that ate a lot of mushrooms during the pandemic and never looked back.

You know Blackbird Spyplane is written by a good writer because it breaks every single rule of writing well. It is the only contemporary writing that I wish I had written, because it drops wisdom with a solid, confident, bafflingly legible voice. It hits. It is, in large part, responsible for the existence of text. I stare at each post with awe, as if I’m watching a baffling sunrise. How does this person think when he’s writing it? Is he in character, or is this a reflection of his authentic self? How does he edit it?

What follows is an attempt to take note of every single linguistic rule that Blackbird Spyplane breaks within a single post, and to define what they’re doing and why. This is because I think reverse engineering something that is meant to wash over you with its healing vibrations is both fundamentally hilarious and useful. I wanted a map for understanding how this all works. I wanted to dive into this thing and see if there’s anything important underneath it, something that I can learn from and become better.

This analysis is by no means exhaustive. I picked the post mostly at random; it is this one, on the ideas of subjectivity & third-party gaze in fashion, as I find it to be both evergreen and broadly representative of what Mx. Spyplane is attempting to do.