Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

It’s been more than a year since I started this Substack newsletter, and I’m really enjoying it. I hope you all are too. My schedule was completely blown out of the water by changes in my school courses, so posts have been erratic this summer. I know. Not only am I going to do better, I’m going to do more! This is an excellent idea and not at all a case of biting off more than I can chew.

The first change is a new newsletter under the U&S umbrella. I think that’s how it looks to users, and I hope this works the way I intend it to. All I know is that I created Criticism, Craft, and Creativity this morning. I have a stack of unread books on these topics that is literally three feet tall. Maybe more. Plus ebooks on two devices. Plus my favorites, which are already properly shelved together but that you might like to know about.

If I read and review one book a month, I have years of material. I hope to post more often, but this is already a dumb idea given my workload and courseload. But I really want to share these books! Anyway, I’ll review one a month at least, with the first title in August, probably Roland Barthes’s Mythologies because I’m already reading it for school and enjoying it.

I made a cool logo:

Useful and Strange is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Paid subscribers to Useful & Strange can choose to sign up for the Criticism, Craft, and Creativity newsletter too, which will help buy me some time to do the work. More subscribers means more frequent posts. I hope you’ll consider joining the paid ranks for reviews of books in a genre where I’m actually an expert. Exciting stuff.

Speaking of paid content, I’ve moved my Useful & Strange essays behind the paywall too. I am likely being overly cautious and maybe even a little ignorant about how all of this works, but I’m concerned about large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT using my essays for training data. Until I learn more, I’m making those slightly more challenging to access. I’ll make new essay posts free for a couple of weeks before I move them behind the paywall.

I really like writing, just like I really like reading. It is not a chore for me. I am not looking for shortcuts or workarounds or ways to make it look like I’ve been reading and writing when I haven’t. To quote one of my all-time favorite songs, “Express Yourself” by Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band:

It's not what you look like

When you're doin' what you're doin',

It's what you're doin' when you're doin'

What you look like you're doin'!

I like the effortful thinking to do these things. Not everyone does; I get it. But I don’t see any reason to farm out the thing I like to AI, and I don’t see why AI should get the fruits of my abilities and interests. I want readers like you to have them. So again, I hope you’ll become a paying member to see those.

The Readings posts will remain free and open for everybody. Speaking of which…

This long article by Anthony Cummins in The Guardian about the literary power of small presses was like fresh air blowing through an open window. My own small press has three new books scheduled to come out in the next year, so it’s nice to see other teensy publishers putting out award-winning and worthy work.

This is an even longer essay by Laura Hartenberger in Noema on what we can learn about good writing from the kinds of writing AI creates. The effort to communicate, the human spark of inspiration—Hartenberger makes an excellent case for people who want to write to keep writing.

Bet you never expected that I’d read yet another article about Boygenius. Were you ever mistaken.

For that matter, I’m reading the next Annie Ernaux in the stack I bought in January. This time, it’s Se Perdre, published in excellent English translations as Getting Lost by both Seven Stories Press and Fitzcarraldo, one of the publishers mentioned in the Guardian article. I like what I like, and apparently I like a lot of it.

A Church on Harvard’s Campus