Summer Knowledge
6/6/2025 - What is Summer Knowledge?
I am sitting at work with nothing to do, trying to gain a surface level understanding of the poem which has served as my online namesake for the past 5 or so years. It is my identity in the most logical sense of the word, the code through which I am perceived in the spaces where my life is spent the most. Summer Knowledge, a username that has served me well, because even though I use the same name on all online platforms, almost none of them are found through a simple google search due to Delmore Schwartz’ 1959 poetry collection cluttering the results. It’s a beginner’s guide level of anonymity that prevents the most casual of cyber stalkers from keeping well-rounded tabs on my online presence. Not that that matters. Or that I think I have cyber stalkers. All I know is that sometimes I try to cyberstalk myself, and it’s not as easy as it should or could be, because of Delmore Schwartz.
Delmore Schwartz, a 20th century existentialist writer guy, an inspiration to Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, a man I found out about through an online high school vocabulary program called Membean, that used a quote of his to help define the term “paranoid” (a quote that I later found out was actually misattributed to him, funny enough). I googled his name and read some of his work, my favorites being his short stories, like The World is a Wedding, a parody of Great Depression-era bohemians and the feelings of entitlement that enable them to sit around and write poetry while New York is under financial collapse, or The Statues, a surreal piece that highlights the fragility of our emotional wellbeing when hinged wholly on distractions from the facts of our lives that make them feel not worth living. Basically pretentious stuff, but I liked his writing style, the way he’d take three sentences to describe something that should’ve taken one, because he found satisfaction in the rhythms of words. Delmore Schwartz died destitute in a NYC hotel room, alone, in the mid 1960s. Summer Knowledge was the last poetry collection published before his death. I never read it, opting instead for a best-of collection my parents had gotten me for Christmas. But I knew the title, and as an ardent lover of summer and its heat, and its existence as a period of freedom from school, and the expectations school placed to be constantly moving forward and away from the girlhood I closely identify with, I knew it would be a fitting username.
Until now, and even, I would say, now, I have only ever really skimmed the title poem in this collection. It is long, much longer than the poems from his best-of collection, and today, 5 years removed from the Delmore Schwartz obsession, it is even harder to unpack as my 3 years as a college English major have indoctrinated me into believing the benefits of concision, and ‘Summer Knowledge’ might be as wordy as it gets. But, as I try to prevent my eyes from glazing past words and sentences my mind subconsciously deems inessential, I find bits and pieces that stick out to me. “Summer knowledge is green knowledge, country knowing, the knowledge of growing and The root’s recognition of the fullness and the fatness and the roundness of ripeness”. Yes, summer is a time of growing, a time when I have historically been blessed with the resources (time specifically, the most precious resource of them all) to dedicate myself to my interests (album listening and internet fandom engagement) in spite of how useless they are in developing the skills that society deems worthy. A time when I have gotten to grow into myself and learn what I am truly passionate about. Of course, as a recent college grad settling into her first “career” job, summer is no longer a constant period of freetime. Really, summer hasn’t truly been that since I was 16 years old, when I got my first part time job as a crew member at Mcdonald’s. Still, something about the longer days of summer, and the weather that permits leaving the house at almost any time of day, helps the season retain its sense of infinity, and helps me to retain the motivation to use summer’s infinite day as an opportunity to self-develop.
Now, there are other lines that I don’t feel like expending the mental energy to try to unpack. “The knowledge of the fruit is not the knowledge possessed by the root in its indomitable darkness of ambition, sucking the rain”. I think my old English professor, the one that I used to not like because she criticized my use of nominalizations, until I realized she was right, might have something to say about the heavy use of nominalizations in this quote, and how it makes it difficult to understand. Maybe reading Delmore in high school CAUSED my heavy use of nominalizations. But anyways, that is something that I want to get better about. Challenging myself. Challenging myself to interpret a line of poetry that is not easily understood, or challenging myself to finish a TV show, even if it is not necessarily the thing that interests me the most at that exact point in time anymore. If summer is a time to self-develop, then it also has to be a time to challenge oneself. And there are other lines, like the one that adorns the bottom of this site, that seem to say much more than that last line in less words. “Summer knowledge is the knowledge of death as birth and rebirth, of death as the soil of all abounding, flowering and growing to the fruit’s fulfillment”. I was going to analyze this line, but I thought that some things are maybe better left unsaid. Maybe the hypothetical readers of this site can unpack this one on their own and see what it means to them. I have my own interpretation.
Anyways, that is what Summer Knowledge is. That is what it means to me. A poem that I have only half-read in the 5 years that I have known of its existence. That hasn’t kept me from identifying with it in my own unique way. And besides, outside the poem, both words have their own clear, inarguable meanings. Summer and Knowledge. Summer knowledge. I am summer knowledge. I possess knowledge of summer, and summer is what I have knowledge about. Yes, my favorite season, summer, which I prefer to be knowledgeable of. There it is. I am summer knowledge.
6/6/2025 - I think what I want to do is impossible and other site updates!
So I cannot for the life of me figure out how to have my header be the same distance from the main box on this page consistently across screen sizes. I promise on my screen it looks really cool - The text "summer knowledge" is resting on the border of the main box. But on other screen sizes that header just ends up anywhere. I've tried flexboxes and stuff and I just can't get it to work. sigh
Beyond that, though, I added this little box to display site updates. I think I'm literally gonna get rid of it though. It's pointless. Instead I'll just link to the site updates on a different page. Yayy.
I'm still trying to figure out site aesthetics. Do I wanna add blinkees? Is that cluttered and aesthetically incohesive? The page feels quite plain right now. We'll see.
6/5/2025 - An exciting site update
I just spent two hours getting the nav buttons on my site just right, only to realize that they look completely fugly not ONLY on mobile browsers, but on any screen that's not exactly the same size as mine (whoopsy!). Also, I feel it apt to note that I am coding this website through neocities itself, which doesn't seem to have an undo button, and also, I am coding it on my shitty laptop that has numerous broken keys, most of which seem essential to coding (ex. ), 0, p, {, }, ', ", >, /), and the back and forth between the keyboard and the scrollpad to get to the ONSCREEN keyboard is getting very tedious. Still, I persevere. I WILL have a really cool website. TRUST
6/3/2025 - Welcome to my page!
I am just getting started with this site. I do not know how to code in html and refuse to do anything but take shortcuts by skimming for whatever very specific issue I am immediately encountering on w3 schools, so this site WILL look bad on mobile. Actually, It'll probably look pretty bad for anyone who is not viewing it on a 14in laptop screen, but.
Anyways...
I hope to use this site as a journal for my interests and to share things I find on the web that I want to write about. I hope to make it very cool and pretty and very very retrooo~. I will write a blog post sometime about why I want my site to be retrooo~. But today is not that day