marginalia is no longer marginal

I'm reading Susan Howe's Melville's Marginalia. Years ago, at the start of my own antiquarianism, I got deeply into writers' marginalia myself. I looked into Melville's reading, as have many scholars over the decades. He was one of those who left traces of his responses to reading. This morning I went to the web--of course--following an impulse to see if the scholarship was still out of the way, out of print, hard to find - itself, in short, marginal. But no. There's a fabulous web site that shows us everything. Here's your link. Go deep.

freedom of information

I've used the Freedom of Information Act to get access to previously classified government documents a number of times over the years. I started making such requests during the immediate post-Reagan era and in those days the FBI in particular was moderately cooperative in its correspondence with you but otherwise extremely slow to respond. I got the FBI surveillance files on the novelist Mike Gold (Jews without Money etc.) but it took about five years. You have to be patient and persistent.

Fortunately, by now some documents, once released to one scholar or journalist, are made unclassified and available on the web. It's not as difficult as it used to be. What you get is often disappointing, though: entire pages of my Mike Gold materials are blacked out.

Those interested in trying their hand at FOIA requests need to consult two terrific web sites: one hosted by The Reporters Committee of Freedom of the Press (link) and another by The National Freedom of Information Coalition (link).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, sunshine is not a natural state.

beware the doctor with the pencil mustache

One of my favorite archives is the New Deal photo library of the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). Thousands of photographs are organized in categories: Art, Civil Works Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Conservation, Disaster Relief, Education, Farm Security Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Film, Health Care, Historical Projects, Housing, Issues and Events, Music, etc. Under "health care" there are hundreds of posters, including anti-quack warnings such as the one I've reproduced here. It is dated August 30, 1938. I'm glad to see that the good doctor was one who did not "demand advance payment." And don't you love the evil dark image of the monocled medico shown toward the right side of the poster? We should beware the pencil mustache too, I suppose.

The final tell-tale sign of the quack cancer doctor? That he advertises.

mere alphabetic adjacency

Tan Lin is turning me on to the work David Bunn, who some years ago took possession of the entire Los Angeles public library's card catalogue. Tan had noticed my interest in Erica Baum's word-centered photography of old catalogues and suggested I get to know Bunn's project.

Leah Ollman wrote an article for Art in America on Bunn in 2000, and here are two passages:

As libraries replace their card catalogues with on-line databases, the cards themselves--obsolete, bulky, worn--are usually discarded. Artist David Bunn rescued two million such cards and, in his elegant installations, directs our attention to the strong poetic voice still coursing through them.

In 1990, David Bunn took possession of the two million cards in the Los Angeles Central Library's catalogue somewhat in the manner of an eccentric heir claiming the unwanted portion of an estate. To administrators at the library, the card catalogue was not so much an inheritance as the deceased itself. Its contents had been made available on-line several years earlier, and it sat, an unwieldy, inconvenient corpse, awaiting suitable disposal. Why fill a storeroom with information that can now be saved on a chip the size of a postage stamp?

And later in the same article:

Strains of both Dada and Duchamp course through these found objects rendered into found poems. Mere alphabetic adjacency is the operative force, making close neighbors of utter strangers and catalyzing all sorts of disarming associations. Some of the poems are more like quips--"Sometimes a great notion/ sometimes a hero/sometimes a little brain damage can help" (1996)--while others offer swatches of casual beauty: "The sea is a magic carpet/the sea is also a garden/the sea is for sailing/the sea is for sailing/the sea is strong" (1997). The multiplicity of meanings and contexts for a single word, the very thing that stymies subject-driven computer searches and causes them to produce a cumbersome load of search matches, is what makes these snippets blossom on the page.

The poems often read as lists, oral recitatives drummed into memory, the rhythm of repetition building density, layer upon layer:

And the band played on/and the bride wore ... / and the bridge is love/and the children came too/ and the dawn came up like thunder/and the desert shall rejoice/and the doctor recovered/and the floods came/... and the flowers showered/and the morrow is theirs/"and the next object ..."/ and the river flowed on/and the sound of a voice ... / and the third day ... / "and the two shall become one flesh"/and the walls came tumbling down/and the years roll by.

The catalogue enables Bunn to narrate what he calls "a whole constellation of stories," some focused on a particular moment in time or a brief thread of plot, others conjuring the grand, seamless narrative of existence, without beginning or end, shape or evident purpose.

Kafka = Kold Kash

Kafka's friend, the brilliant editor/critic Max Brod, saved his strange pal's papers despite his pleas that they be destroyed. Brod's lover-secretary got them after his death and now her daughter has them somewhere in or near Tel Aviv. Finally, because the daughter needs some cash, it seems that these papers will be made available, once some archive buys them (for many millions). This is all a big deal, although the Times, in covering the story this morning, hasn't much to go on: their writer in Tel Aviv quotes various Kafka scholars relevantly and irrelevantly. Is the question of Kafka's possible interest in the Hebrew language, in his Jewish identity, in Zionism, relevant to the news of the extant papers? Not necessarily. And via the headline we learn that the pressure of the daughter of the former lover-secretary to release the papers is "Kafkaesque." It doesn't seem Kafkaesque to me at all - in fact, the opposite. The motive (originating in her, not put on her) is purely to turn the writer's extraodinarily uncommercial writing into lots of cash. Such straightforward normative valuation seems unlike anything I've ever read in Kafka. Here is your link the Times article.