hello

i don't know what to call this substack help

Dear Caelan,

I think you’re right—on the continuum of intimate, personal journaling to published long-form essay writing, there is value in exploring the middle ground. Prior to this, I have explored that middle ground exclusively through letters and emails and obnoxious block texts to the most forgiving people in my life. I almost never write for an audience, unless it is an audience of one other person, usually someone whose mind I trust just as well if not better than my own. But there is something different about the uncertain liminal perception of something like this; I have no idea what it is, but it is different and worth exploring.

I started posting reviews on Goodreads this summer because I found it useful to track my leisure reading. I’ve found some joy in having a semi-public record of my reading impressions, but (not to be obnoxious), the medium of Goodreads is way too limited for my purposes. Anyone who knows me knows that I find it very hard to draw distinctions between what is or isn’t “literature.” For all that I do love books and I always will, I have never found books to be the most compelling form of textual production. As a kid, I spent hours reading junk mail, catalogs, community announcements, newspaper classifieds, advertisements and infomercials, cereal boxes… all sorts of what you might call “ephemera.” Such that I have a literary sensibility, it has been equally shaped by the books I have internalized and these more floating pieces of text that have filtered into my life. In the past year, I have dedicated my literary research to expanding what can or should be afforded the dignity of close-reading. Working with the Opal and its archive of asylum patient writing was both personally and academically gratifying in ways that I am still itching to explore. The more that I go about the world with an eye for its vibrant textuality, the more curious I become, the more questions I have, and (at the risk of sounding like an annoying parody of myself) the more firmly I believe that close-reading has powerful personal, social, and cultural stakes.

In short: I want this substack to be a select but expansive record of texts that pass into my life. This might include books I’m reading, but it might also include receipts, denser academic articles, random photographs I’ve taken, anything I pick up off the street to the great sanitary chagrin of all involved, random stuff I find online (especially as I try to get my brain prepped for my digital humanities program and righteously justify my addiction to twitter)… you get the gist. I never actually finished reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (sue me) but I did like the premise of taking random shit from the world—billboards and films and the like—and unraveling the underlying mythos. I don’t really know what the main purpose of my close-readings will be, seeing as I haven’t started this quite yet. But uhh... I think, or at least I hope, I will pay homage to the things in the world that have compelled me, delighted me, troubled me, confused me, and transformed my understanding. If anything, it will at least be a precise record of my own curiosities.

Okay now I’ll stop talking and get into it…

Love,

Annie

PS: the photograph at the top of this post is from a few days ago while I was calling you, actually… I was walking home down Grand Ave from Lake Merritt, and it was past 7pm so Walden Pond Books was already closed. I was transfixed by this shadow on the storefront, mostly because I actually have no idea where those shadowy letters were coming from. I’ve walked back every day since then to figure it out but they’re not there any more.