How's the weather?

cloudy with a chance of crap!

I’ve struggled to write this issue because the crush of the last month has left me breathless and bewildered, entirely uncertain of where to begin the next story I want to tell, which includes a bit about Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, a few books I’ve read recently, various Twitter links, and lambasting of a lot of overtly racist, fascist, anti-intellectual laws. Quite a lot to process. But it dawns on me that I graduate in six weeks and these next few issues will be the last time—at least for a while—that I will talk about what I am learning in library school, which is, of course, the original charge of this newsletter. So I’ll start there.

I characterized my courses last spring in terms of reference: how do you answer questions you know nothing about? The summer examined curation: how do we choose what goes in the library? This past autumn was description: once we’ve brought these things inside, how do we relate them to what we already have?

This semester is about archives, which is admittedly not my primary purview. I am a discrete object kind of lady. I like making connections between things that are seemingly disparate, and archives draw their meaning from their mass. But the most progressive practices of reparative description—that is, describing things in thoughtful, comprehensive, person-centered ways—derive from archives, and archivists are at the forefront of how special collections can serve people as well as document their lives.

I’m taking two classes on archives this term: Folklore Archives and Modern Literary Archives. The former is about the creation and maintenance of folklore archives, or those concerned with the histories, stories, traditions, and cultures of ordinary people. Folklore archives come in many shapes and sizes, but they are most often associated with places and peoples who have suffered from colonization, as they document peoplehoods that oppressive colonial powers (have tried, continue to) try to suppress and subsume in attempts to justify their sweeping disruption of life. To that end, in Europe, we see the strongest folklore collections in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ireland, and Finland, whereas they make less of a splash in England, Spain, and France.

Folklore in many ways responds to the top-down methodologies of anthropology, which historically deputized white Europeans to go out and learn about the greater world and report back on what they’ve found using ethnographic methods, locating expertise with an external observer. Folklore foregrounds instead the tradition bearer, or the people who retain cultural memory and relay it through many forms—stories, riddles, jokes, songs, proverbs, and so on. Popular conceptions of folklore understand it exclusively as oral history, but it also comprises social history (such as customs, performance, and dress) as well as material culture (such as dwellings, settlements, and, in the case of one project I just completed, holy wells).

Folklore archives offer ways to redistribute power by locating traditions with the people who continue to keep them, either in memory or practice, instead of removing those artifacts of expression and documenting or displaying them as isolated remnants. One of my favorite recent readings explored the duality of human memory and archival memory—what’s in your head and what’s recorded on page or tape—and how they need one another to be alive. Simply hearing a song on recording cannot imbue it with the embodied memory of hearing it every year at a specific time, such as when I watch When Harry Met Sally each New Year’s Eve such that Auld Lang Syne aligns with the turn of the calendar.

Anyways it’s a good class that emphasizes collective responsibility, which you may remember from the last issue is one of my big talking points these days, so I dig it.

Modern Literary Archives offers a different perspective—it’s an English class, which is a welcome change of pace because I haven’t thought like an English student in three years yet I keep showing up to class wearing the exact same outfit as various classmates, which confirms that I remain an English student at heart even as I’ve departed for thornier pastures. The first time this unintentional coordination happened was a veritable “Hey, I really like your style” moment, but now it’s just a running joke.

For the first half of the semester in Modern Literary Archives, we spent each class session examining selections from the personal and professional papers at the Lilly Library for various heavyweight writers, artists, and political figures: Sylvia Plath, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Sacco & Vanzetti, Virginia Woolf, Florence Deshon, Don Belton, and so on. We’ve asked ourselves what the archival materials offer in terms of reading their works in new or different ways. How does examining Sylvia Plath’s teaching notes from Smith College inform our understanding of her contemporary poetry? What do Florence Deshon’s letters tell us about this prolific silent film actress, whose works are now primarily lost to time and decay, and her short, visceral life before she died by suicide?

We also discuss the ethics of reading archives. A few of the Lilly’s personal archives remain under various physical and copyright restrictions, meaning that they cannot be photographed, even for personal research. Sometimes, these restrictions are imposed by a person’s estate; sometimes, the creators made those decisions themselves. These restrictions are not unique to the Lilly, and they influence scholars’ ability to publish their findings in monographs or articles, either by requiring researchers to acquire publishing permissions from noncommunicative estates, enforcing publishing fees, or even curtailing direct quotation from materials.

We also have materials in the Lilly that are extremely personal, such as diaries that writers never intended anyone to read. What do we do with those? They’re in our holdings now, unencumbered by locked boxes and available to view. I wonder if I have the wherewithal to hold others’ innermost thoughts, and I often find that I’d rather leave them untouched.

Another recurring question in Modern Literary Archives is how these vast accumulations of materials arrive in the Lilly—a path involving negotiations and a lot of money. Literary archives are expensive, and they are primarily sold as one-and-done type deals that can tie up an acquisitions budget for years. But why are some of these materials, like those of Nadine Gordimer, the South African author and activist, even in Indiana? Sometimes, the person made the choice themselves, perhaps concerned with the physical safety of their materials under governments who sought to mute or destroy their life’s work; sometimes, the donor held a personal connection with the library or director, who cultivated the relationship and secured the donation. Many times, agents or dealers broker these purchases, as Amy Hildreth Chen writes in her compelling and concise book Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market.

How things end up where they are brings me to my last class, which is an independent study on the economic, interpersonal, and technical relationship between bookdealers and special collections librarians. I have long been fascinated by the way materials enter institutions and I am curious how dealers and librarians alike perceive that collaborative effort. Today, I finished synthesizing the survey data I collected, and the outline sits at 7,400 words, excluding the 16 hours of interviews I have yet to compile—there is, as ever, a lot to say. On this topic in particular, I promise: more later.

I’m giving the nutshell “what are you studying this semester” to prime you for what I think has been the theme of these past two months and also the past five years of my life and will continue to be the theme for the next two months and also the next rest of my life, which is “choice.” A fancier way of saying this is the circulation, retention, and destruction of materials in libraries and archives, but the pithier way is choice: how are our choices constrained by systems of power? How does the individual choose with and against the collective?

I have been struggling to organize my thoughts around choice, because many of the stories I’ve read recently, both about choices now and choices in the past, are hung on the shoulders of individuals when they should be strung up within systems. I am trying to make sense of that.¹ Choice and individual choice and systematic choice (which one might call…decision-making) returns me to archives, and material documentation writ large, and the process of keeping or destroying them, which strikes me as one of unifying themes of recent crises. There are in-between states for archives, of course. They are dynamic entities: there’s the making, the using and the not using. Then there’s the processing and organizing and storing, which leads to a keeping path. There’s also fearing and sneering, when leads towards a destroying path.

About a month ago, The New York Times published an opinion piece that’s a litmus test for this fearing and sneering. On first read, it was benign and irritating, mostly because I could not quite articulate a sensible critique in response, which troubled me.² Entitled “The Battle for the Soul of the Library,” the piece (which was not authored by a librarian or someone with sustained library experience) attempts to argue that libraries are being taken over by “woke” leftist librarians with destructive progressive agendas that throw the library out of balance and bar children from debating topics like racism.³ The author (who works for a conservative think tank) attempts to argue that libraries are meant to be neutral and provide materials to let kids think for themselves, but not too much, because that’s dangerous and unbecoming. He underwrites all of this with the notion that “a library’s authority rests upon its reputation for neutrality.”

I have written about 10,000 words about how libraries are not neutral, so I don’t feel a burning need to rehash that, but my Grandma Phyllis had a bunch of questions about this piece—like, what is “woke” and “what does he mean when he writes ‘classical liberalism’ and ‘woke orthodoxy’? Isn’t he mixing up terms?” Her questions underscore one of the most enduring features of this article and the cancel culture drivel writ large: the authors’ failure to define the terms of their argument.

There’s a lot of hand-waving in this piece about what a woke librarian is, without any attention to the Black American roots of the word, which first meant being alert to the specific dangers of living as a Black person in White America, then broadened to mean awareness among Black people of social justice concerns writ large. The author of this piece defines woke librarians as those “who see it as their duty to promote progressive views on race, policing, sexuality and other issues.” Fine, not that off base. But then he proceeds to use the term eight times in the piece, twice in the phrase “woke orthodoxy” and once in a magnum opus of poorly written sentences that concludes by warning of a “woke ascendancy” (which honestly sounds kind of cool). Alternatively aligning “wokeness” with militant eradication of conservative ideals or the militant indoctrination of students, the author performs linguistic gymnastics to draw the term under the wider catch-all umbrella of incendiary phrases (like “cancel culture” and “socialism,” apparently) to befuddle readers. It’s moral panic hogwash.

If you ever read a piece that peddles in confusion and cloudy terminology, leaving you wondering “What on earth did I just read?” be alert for these moral panick-ers. In this particular version, the author attempts to advance some nebulous notion of library neutrality beneath his flimsy terminology. Neutrality benefits the status quo, and the status quo remains in favor of white wealth and history. This isn’t a new observation, but it’s important to remember when someone attempts to argue that libraries are responsible for both-sides-ing every last opinion.

Libraries are not bottomless depots where ideas passively accumulate for the picking. They are places of deliberation, in that the materials comprising the holdings were deliberately chosen; the fact of the matter is that US public school curricula and library holdings (general and special) broadly remain conservative, as I’ve explained time and again in these letters. The closest to neutral I could envision a library is in terms of our charge to provide equitable services to patrons—but even then, equity requires evaluating circumstances and needs of each person and meeting them where they are. That is not passive.

Pieces like this attempt to frame movements towards equitable documentation and representation as somehow drowning out the already dominant body of work instead of attempting to repair our material legacy. What bothers me most is that the authors frame librarians’ work as individualistic and self-serving of personal political agenda instead of directly contending with the consequences of systematic representation and organization of ideas. But again, the flaws of that argument are buried under evacuated terms that employ a lot of hand-waving, veiled racism, and oblique transphobia (framed as the “sexual content” question) to obscure a patently bland and tired argument in favor of the status quo.

Reading and discussing this article with GP is a good analogy for my last month. I couldn’t articulate a response because I faced a swirling vision of nonsense that was hard to pin down. Compounding crises clouded my ability to think and to see the links between them all: Tennessee school boards banned Toni Morrison’s works and Art Spiegelman’s Maus; librarians and school teachers in Texas were advised to follow the “Every opinion has an equal and opposite opinion” law; the Texas state government attacks and criminalizes parents’ care of their trans children; Florida targets LGBTQ materials and advances punitive surveilance with its Don't Say Gay law; Idaho bans abortion and child care in a one-two punch against women & families.

We watch in terror and awe as a pointless, violent war claims the lives of soldiers and civilians alike; in horror with our continued indifference at the family separations at our own borders; in disgust as our elected representatives alternatively praise fascism then attempt to double back on their foul words. And still, calls for neutrality abound.

Crisis demands clarity. We need to cut through the clouds of crap that right-wing bigot spigots fling our way and understand how these issues are the faces of a many-headed hydra called fascism. Seeing it clearly and naming it properly helps us fight it.

Here’s what cut through for me: While Ukrainians barricade the streets of their home towns to delay a dictator, shuttle neighbors and loved ones to safety, and request poetry amidst a war, people around the world race to preserve digital archives of Ukrainian heritage institutions, understanding that their physical counterparts risk destruction should a new imperial regime take hold. There are lots of stories of individual people saving their archives in moments of calm and crisis; there are lots of stories of oppressive collectives choosing to destroy them. My hope for the next few issues is to offer you a way to think about choice as a beacon of clarity through crisis. Next time, I’ll tell you a story of Max Brod, Franz Kafka, and choosing to disobey your best friend.

Housekeeping and birdseeking

house

• Got a lot of messages in response to that NFT issue from friends who work with computers professionally, and they are all at the bottom right corner of this graph

Cain Maddox @ctrlshifti

working on a theory

• You may have noticed a format change in the title. We are moving beyond the confines of a weekly delivery schedule! Volume 2 will last for…a time, maybe a few series, a few months, or another year. We’ll see.

• What I read this month: Ink by Elizabeth Hunter. Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern. Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen. How High We Go in The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu and Patch Work: A Life Among Clothes by Claire Wilcox.

• What I’m currently reading: The Company We Kept by Barbara Kaye

Bird

• A perched partner.

More later.

1. I’m not a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type person, which you may have gathered from the everything about me, because the notion of individual responsibility is widely overblown and a method of deflecting accountability from systematic, societal failures (e.g. everything about how the United States handled the pandemic, etc.).

2. Because, as you may have gathered, I like to pick things apart.

3. One of the other enduring tenets of arguments about intellectual neutrality is this desire for debate. Where are these people having these debates? Who are they debating with? Are conservatives just walking around trying to debate people, like that character in Disney’s Hercules who approaches Hercules in Thebes and asks, “Wanna buy a…sundial?” (I guess this is just Twitter.) What I’m hearing in this thirst for debate is that adults want to debate topics that have no material bearing on their lives, because to this group of people, systemic racism and sexism are thought exercises, not lived experiences. They fear their children will engage with social difference, gain empathy, and challenge the status quo.