Writing inspiration: last archive day

Waking up at 4:30 a.m. when the local Starbucks (closest food) does not open until 7:30 a.m. isn't ideal, but it did give me some time to reflect on a few things after seeing the work of my betters.

• These people took care of business. When I was sitting there reading folders full business letters and contracts, I had to stop and think that this was just one side of what Author A (let's call his/her/gender neutral them "A") was doing every day. Let's not forget the usual things: building or making or buying houses, gardens, boats; getting the plumbing fixed, etc.
• And they took care of friendship. Reading another whole set of letters, I realized that they were not about anything consequential to researchers because that's of course not the point, is it?  But the letters were about things that were absolutely, vitally important to A and their correspondents' lives: family doings, asking about mutual friends, civic engagement, shared tasks, gifts, ill health, visits and travel, and oh, incidentally, work. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees in this and try to cherry-pick one reference to what we see as A's "real" work, when actually, their life can't be separated out any more than ours can today. When you read them as a whole, you see a fabric of human connection being woven.
• And they kept things and kept track of things. Notebooks, story plans, drafts, scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, diaries. It's heartening to see that A sometimes starts a notebook and then leaves the rest blank, since I'm guilty of this, too. But did you ever stop to wonder what would happen if someone needed to research you and your work? (Not likely, but still.) What would they find? I'm not the first to comment that the electronic age has changed what we keep and discard, and recycling has probably taken the rest. Would any of us even have an archive?
• And they wrote. Every day, sick or well, rain or shine. As you see the authors get older or, in the case of younger authors, become ill, it seems--well, gallant is the only word for it. In the midst of all of the above (and all that's not included there: eating, sleeping, exercise, excursions, being with friends, reading, domestic or romantic crises, tragic losses) they put words on paper, not on Twitter and FB (I'm sniping at myself, not at anyone out there). Sometimes they didn't succeed in finishing something but kept the scraps anyway. It's a good reminder that even the things that didn't work out were part of the process for something else. 

Anyway, this is a "note to self": do better, and remember that if you don't keep at it, it won't get done. 

Nothing. What's new with you?

Still plodding along, still working hard, and still relishing a sabbatical that's almost over--that's what's going on here.  In other news:

• A lovely trip to the archives in which I could revel in reading and taking pictures of materials all day long, and at the end of the day get something to eat and not cook or clean or do any of the other housekeeping stuff I've been doing all year. It felt like a vacation, though I was working hard every day. More archival trips, please!
• Winter is receding, sort of, and has settled down into a grey skies, grumpy rain, and chilly wind pattern that beats the heck out of the ice, snow, and general misery we've had since November. Some day the sun will shine again, I'm almost sure. As a special added bonus, apparently the weather cleared up here while we had an epic snowstorm in Archive City.
• About the sabbatical: so many ideas, and so little time!  
• I've gotten so tired of seeing "woke" as an admiring descriptor that I silently correct it to the overused slang of another era, "peachy-keen" (1950s) and "bitchin'" (1960s) being two current favorites,  though maybe I should give "swell" (1920s) or "gnarly" (1970s?) a try as a change of pace.
• Big collaborative project is going well.

What's new with you?

Notes from the archive

I'm in Archive City again (well, an Archive City), and settling into a routine. All I do is eat, and sleep, and write, and walk to and from the archive. It's not a vacation, but it is a break, and a welcome one.

It's funny: the city isn't cool and quiet, and yet I have an impression of things being cool and quiet because that's what an archive does for you.  Some thoughts about the experience:

• There are campus tours going on, lots and lots of them, and it's fun to see the maybe-someday-students and sometimes their parents walking around and talking. They are chattering and hanging out in the sunshine as I go into the cool stone building where their voices echo when they go inside for a quick tour.  Soon, they're back outside, and it's quiet and cool again.
• At one archive I've worked in, you're assigned a table, but here, you get to choose, and everybody seems to choose a spot and stick to it. I think it lessens the distractions, not that there are a lot in a room full of people reading.
• This must be what it is like to be an athlete in training, not that I would know. You get up early, work on one task before the archive opens (writing); then you go to the room and read; then you come back to your room and resume writing.

And some thoughts about the process:

•  For some folders, I've laid out the work plan and am supposed to be simply checking problem areas in the transcriptions from before as well as taking photographs of the manuscripts. (I have managed to turn off the bells & whistles and am no longer the fool with the noisy camera.)  But then I start to read the manuscript, and I just want to sit there and let those words unfold, with all the crossouts and inserts and everything. It's like hearing a more direct voice from the author with all the hesitations and choices.
• Reading fluent, graceful English in the form not only of manuscripts but of items as small as a thank-you note is a pleasure. 
• It also makes me realize just how much debased and trivial junk I read on the web every day--stuff that says nothing and yet it's there so I read it anyway. I think that's why the web is so addictive: a lot of the writing and many of the ideas are basically junk food, repeated endlessly as they cycle through their 24 hours of fame. You read and read, but it's never satisfying. 
• Oh, author, why did you stop writing that story just when I was getting interested in it?  Why didn't you finish it? Maybe you found it boring or unpromising, but I didn't.

Research World: On archives and concentration

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was a little ambivalent about this trip to the archives; I had too much to do, and so on--all work that I was supposed to be doing and never actually completing. What I hadn't counted on is the magical powers of concentration that research libraries somehow beam in to the heads of those in their research rooms.

Think about it. You leave a very hot, humid space outdoors, where you're trying to figure out all the basic daily life in a new space (How do I get back to where I live? When does the bus come? How do I get my key/print documents/get some tea/do laundry?) and are consequently feeling frazzled.

Then you go into a cool, quiet research room where you know what you're supposed to be doing. Even though there's wireless internet in the room, you barely notice it except to look up something related to the archival materials you're reading. You don't fidget, and you don't think about the other writing you're supposed to be doing. You work your way through the folders, reading, taking pictures with your newly silent camera, transcribing, and otherwise doing the work you know you're there to do.

You're in Author space. Everything you do for 7-8 hours in that room relates to Author. You start making connections just because of the sheer volume of Author time you're putting in. Even when you walk somewhere for lunch and the heat hits you as you leave the building, your brain is still working on Author questions.

Best of all, you feel capable of making judgments now that you couldn't when you first started to look at the papers. You recognize not only Author's handwriting but that of various associates, so you can tell who is writing what. You get to know the issues that the letter writers are talking about, even if they're using some shorthand way of alluding to them.

Even outside the reading room, you don't want to let the world intrude except for some escapist reading or a little Netflix. You ignore the news and various crises in education; you stop looking at Facebook and Twitter. All of it seems too noisy and stressful if you're in Research World.

I'd like to bottle Essence of Research World and take it back home with me.

Thoughts from the archive

• Walking into an archive (and a town) I've never been to before doesn't feel strange, somehow, for as soon as I caught sight of Author's familiar handwriting, I felt right at home.
• It's completely irrational, but let's say Author has a side subject that ze is interested in writing about, like geometry or cutting out paper dolls. Every time Author starts talking about geometry or paper dolls (which other researchers have already discussed), I want hir to talk instead about what I'm interested in having hir talk about. See? Irrational.
• Those who (ahem!) have recently purchased a camera to take photos of materials like the cool kids do should be warned that they should test the camera before going to the archive. Camera manufacturers like to put in enough loud shutter clicks, beeps, and little musical flourishes when the camera turns on and off to embarrass the most intrepid researcher, especially when said researcher can't figure out how to turn them off without diligent Google searches for guidance. If you were in an archive recently and some fool had a noisy camera, that was me.
  

Repeated lessons from the archives

I'm calling these repeated lessons because they seem to occur to me anew every time I get to an archive.

When I'm reading letters, I'm struck every time not only by the graceful way in which the letter writers express themselves (even when they're obviously annoyed) but also by how much of the language of the standard forms (congratulations, thanks, condolences) seems to be a lost art. It makes me want to seize my fountain pen and go forth and write--if only there were anyone who wouldn't think I'd taken leave of my senses to do so.

It's surprising, too, how much the pattern of a person's handwriting lodges itself in your brain, so you can pick it out immediately even if you're scrolling slowly through microfilm.

Along with pattern recognition, there's something else that happens: sometimes a phrase or word will puzzle me because of the handwriting, and I'll type two different possibilities for the transcription. If I look away or look at something else for a minute, though, and then look back--boom! The actual meaning of the phrase comes through as clearly as though it were typed.

The more I read, the more I start to feel as though archives of letters are a vast text in themselves but that I can only find out the narratives of the characters and their relationships if I keep reading and reading. If Mr. F is a mutual acquaintance of Miss Y and Mrs. Z, I can play "guess the context" better with every letter that I read.

It does no good to rant silently to myself about conventions of dating letters that range from "Saturday" to "July 17" with no hint of a year in sight. Sometimes the year is clear from the context (mentioning an event, a dinner,a visit, or a work in progress) and sometimes from the paper or handwriting. Still, when I find a correspondent who puts an actual year on the letter, I applaud. And I have it easy, comparatively speaking. I can't even imagine what you medievalists and early modern scholars go through between the handwriting, the abbreviations, and the various orthographic and language barriers.

When I'm working in an archive, I don't want to stop, or eat, or go home. There's always just one more source, isn't there?

(I'm trying a new template, but that's not a lesson from the archive.)

The plot thickens

Thinking about the "failure" hypothesis for MPF, here's what I come up with:

Hypothesis 1: "Failure"--does that mean simply failure to become as famous as Famous Author? Problem: Like most writers, Famous Author had a lot of friends who hadn't become famous or indeed ever left his home town, but he used the concept of failure primarily for this one. Is it just that MPF didn't live up to Famous Author's expectations? Other references speak of MPF in glowing and affectionate terms.

Hypothesis 2: MPF died fairly young and on a significant national holiday. He was a military man, so did he maybe kill himself? Problem: See #3.

Hypothesis 3: A letter of condolence to MPF's widow speaks of MPF and his loved ones being "prepared" for his death and his dying in peace (so much for #2). It also speaks of remembering the good parts about MPF and his life. Now, this could mean that he had an illness (TB, cancer, etc.) that led to some kind of physical deterioration. It could also mean something like alcoholism, which could help account for an early (and expected) death. Problem: MPF, as a public figure, apparently gave eloquent speeches, although I haven't found any yet. (That'll have to wait for the microfilm to arrive.) Of course, all the stuff about "peace" could simply be standard condolence rhetoric.

What's interesting about this, to me at least, is the way in which it affects my reading of the letters. I read a sentence and think, "Is that genuine praise of MPF or the praise of pity?" It's like reading the letters and a negative of the letters in which everything could have two meanings.

I'll have to receive more documents before I can unravel this.

Last archives post::what's major and what's minor?

Notorious Ph.D. has an interesting post about the two broad research patterns that researchers follow when going to archives: one is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and the other is to go in search of a specific person, text, or idea and see where the search leads you. In the comments, Tenth Medieval quoted something from Robert Darnton (or maybe it was on his blog) that resonated with what I'd felt during my recent trip:

As the tenor of a life begins to emerge from the manuscripts and I see a story unfold from one document to another, I have the sensation of making contact with the human condition as it was experienced by someone in another world, centuries away from mine. It may be an illusion, and I may get it wrong. I may sound like a romantic. But the archives, in all their concreteness, provide a corrective to romantic interpretations.

That sense of an emerging narrative--that's what's so seductive about working in the archives, especially if it's a story that you haven't seen someone else tell. The problem is, of course, that not all stories are going to be of interest to anyone but you, which adds a third dimension to Notorious Ph.D.'s questions: Which parts are major, and which ones are minor? How can you tell which leads are worth pursuing because they'll actually be important, and which leads are just the means of satisfying your own curiosity about a particular idea? And, more importantly, is this a distinction that you should even be making as you're looking at materials?

Frankly, unless you're looking for something very, very specific, I don't think that you can make that distinction when you're in the midst of working with materials, although it's hard not to, given the time constraints involved in being at a research site. You can't know what's major and what's minor at that time, although you can know what's been published and what hasn't, which can tend to guide your search. If Author Y's love letters have been well mined for articles, you need to know those articles going in so that you don't "discover" a narrative that's already been written.

Also, the work you put into getting some information may be vastly disproportionate to the space it ultimately occupies in the finished work, but it may be very important nonetheless. In a recent biography that I read of Author X, for example, only a paragraph or so was devoted to one part of his life, yet I knew (because I knew the author of the biography, which took him many years to write ) that finding this information had involved painstaking research in half a dozen archives, just for a seemingly minor piece of information.

So what if this one small piece of information that you found in the archives proves that Author X really did read and respond to Author Y, or really was present in, say, a war zone even though generations of critics have said that that didn't happen? Some theorists might say "Who cares?" and that it's a minor point, given that queer theory, postcolonial theory, or whatever says that theory Z explains it anyway without the need for facts, and what are "facts" but an artificial construct based on hegemonic and ideologically driven narratives, blah blah blah, etc. But the thing is, if it's a point that no one has mentioned before, it deserves to be seen and heard, doesn't it?

I can see that this post is "casting about until a pattern emerges" and not getting there, so I'll finish with this: Part of what archival research is about is letting the narratives that are there in the documents, and the narratives that are not there but are implicit in the documents, teach you what narrative you ought to be constructing once you're away from the archive. So, in other words, you need to pursue those insights but also let them rest at the same time so that you can discern the patterns.

Lessons from the archive III: monkish life

When I told people I'd be coming to Research City, they said things like, "I live right near there! Let's get together" or "I want to take you out to lunch."

But I didn't contact them, partly because of basic inertia, partly because I didn't want to take hours out of research time (how selfish is that?), and partly because I didn't want to disturb this whole monkish life thing that is working in the archives.

There's a simplicity to this trip, after all the travel planning (which I hate) and arranging that goes into it. It's a combination of knowing what you're going to do and not knowing what you're going to find.

Knowing what you're going to do: Every day I get up, make the bed, go to the archive, work, eat something that's easy to find, read, and get some sleep. Except for a nightly phone call to my family, about all I say every day is "Yes, I'm finished with this box; can I have the next one?" and, at lunch, "Do you have iced tea?" I'm not here to fight with the phone company, or pay bills, or cook, teach, or do anything except work: read and think. (And write--I finished a long-promised and long-delayed article I had started and sent it off while I was here.)

Not knowing what you're going to find: I didn't find any smoking guns, anything that would tie together an entire line of reasoning, as I had done in a previous trip here. But reading through the materials was a kind of revelation, in that it made me see connections that I hadn't seen before, and that's a really good thing. I found enough to make me want to come back and live the monkish life a little more. It's not a contemplative life in a religious sense, but it's a contemplative life in an academic sense, and that's fine with me.

Lessons from the archive II: as the days dwindle down to a precious few

When I arrived and started working, it felt as though I had all the time in the world here. I could pursue some loose ends, look at letters of minor interest, and so on.

But now, every piece of writing becomes an exercise in time management, or maybe I should say time anxiety. What if I spend a lot of time on Box X, when Box X + 1 has what I really want? What if I get back and discover that the part of the letter I didn't transcribe is the one I need?

The answer to this one is simple, but not cheap: throw money at the problem. Plan to return, or, barring that, request copies.

That's only part of the solution, though. What's different about being here is that if I see a lead, I can pursue it, something that's difficult to do long distance.

Also, and I think this is the real issue: I like being inside Author's head for now. It's nice to be immersed to the point where you start to see certain phrases showing up in her letters to several people, or to see her sense of humor, or to read her response to a cranky lecturing letter she's received from someone.

But now I want to know more about certain things: why did she abandon some stories and finish (and publish) other ones? With some of them it's obvious, since the plot has no place to go, but others are at least the equal of those she did publish. More to the point, why were a number of stories that she didn't finish or publish about a particular kind of relationship?

I guess she's never going to answer that last one, so coming up with an answer, however hypothetical, is my job.

Lessons from the archive

• No matter how much a word looks like "podcast" in the author's handwriting, it is highly unlikely to be a word that the author would use.
• It may be easier, on the whole, to be a tortured creative genius and fill notebooks with tiny handwriting in black ink than to decipher that handwriting years later.
• No matter how much energy I think I have, it is never as much as that of an author who likes to write letters.
  

A brief hiatus

I'm in Research City, spending long, concentrated days in the archives, enjoying hours spent seemingly inside the head of the authors whose letters I'm reading, and wondering if, with all this typing and transcribing, absorbing words and sentence structure, I'll start to sound like these authors once I'm done.