Next best thing
“The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”
— From Elif Batuman’s article “Kafka’s Last Trial”, in the New York Times Magazine.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Meaning yes, message no
INTERVIEWER
When you say that sometimes you think your poetry is weird, what do you mean exactly?
ASHBERY
Every once in a while I will pick up a page and it has something, but what is it? It seems so unlike what poetry “as we know it” is. But at other moments I feel very much at home with it. It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way.
INTERVIEWER
Is the issue of meaning or message something that is uppermost in your mind when you write?
ASHBERY
Meaning yes, but message no. I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.
— John Ashbery, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt in Paris Review, Winter 1983.
INTERVIEWER
When you say that sometimes you think your poetry is weird, what do you mean exactly?
ASHBERY
Every once in a while I will pick up a page and it has something, but what is it? It seems so unlike what poetry “as we know it” is. But at other moments I feel very much at home with it. It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way.
INTERVIEWER
Is the issue of meaning or message something that is uppermost in your mind when you write?
ASHBERY
Meaning yes, but message no. I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.
— John Ashbery, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt in Paris Review, Winter 1983.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Flag Project, Ebony G. Patterson
Flag Project (work in progress), by Ebony G. Patterson. From Shot in Kingston: The Digital Scene, an exhibition of digital photo- and video-based work by younger Jamaican artists, part of Alice Yard’s 4x4 anniversary programme. Photograph by Rodell Warner.
Flag Project (work in progress), by Ebony G. Patterson. From Shot in Kingston: The Digital Scene, an exhibition of digital photo- and video-based work by younger Jamaican artists, part of Alice Yard’s 4x4 anniversary programme. Photograph by Rodell Warner.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
On “systemic indelibility”
Imagine that you are struck with a curious and rather outlandish thought that you don’t necessarily want to defend for the rest of your life but nonetheless feel compelled to share — if only to see how others react. You write an impassioned paragraph detailing your idea but pause before posting the entry online. Without an editor, you are the sole judge of the quality of your work, and you are aware that by hitting the “publish” button, you would be subjecting yourself to possibly harsh, often anonymous criticism. You must take into account the Internet’s systemic indelibility: that henceforth your entire intellectual stance could be defined by a single, possibly ill-conceived argument.
So you vacillate between killing the conversation before it begins or risking becoming “misrepresented and burned”.... Inevitably, this ends in some form of self-censorship. Not every form of online self-censorship is necessarily harmful — if people stopped documenting such things as the intimate details of their breakfast, society would hardly be worse off — but aside from oversharing, what will happen to plain sharing? Withholding inane tweets or provocative photos is one thing, but what will become of intelligent exchange and thoughtful conversation?
— Atossa Abrahamian on the epistemic consequences of a medium that “never forgives, and never forgets.”
Imagine that you are struck with a curious and rather outlandish thought that you don’t necessarily want to defend for the rest of your life but nonetheless feel compelled to share — if only to see how others react. You write an impassioned paragraph detailing your idea but pause before posting the entry online. Without an editor, you are the sole judge of the quality of your work, and you are aware that by hitting the “publish” button, you would be subjecting yourself to possibly harsh, often anonymous criticism. You must take into account the Internet’s systemic indelibility: that henceforth your entire intellectual stance could be defined by a single, possibly ill-conceived argument.
So you vacillate between killing the conversation before it begins or risking becoming “misrepresented and burned”.... Inevitably, this ends in some form of self-censorship. Not every form of online self-censorship is necessarily harmful — if people stopped documenting such things as the intimate details of their breakfast, society would hardly be worse off — but aside from oversharing, what will happen to plain sharing? Withholding inane tweets or provocative photos is one thing, but what will become of intelligent exchange and thoughtful conversation?
— Atossa Abrahamian on the epistemic consequences of a medium that “never forgives, and never forgets.”
Monday, September 06, 2010
“What’s valid?”
Boscoe Holder — artist, musician, dancer, raconteur, and a man who squeezed more pleasure out of life than most — died in 2007. He left behind several outrageous novels’ worth of stories and memories, and — more important — a large and crucial body of work, including hundreds of paintings and drawings in his studio.
Earlier this year, several of Holder’s portraits were included in an exhibition in Berlin co-curated by Peter Doig, the British artist who now lives in Trinidad, and the American writer Hilton Als. A few days ago, the New York Review of Books blog posted a conversation with Doig, Als, and the artist Angus Cook on “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master”, accompanied by images of fourteen paintings.
I’m glad to think that Holder’s work may be reaching new and wider audiences, but reading this conversation left me bemused and bothered at statements such as:
Peter Doig: ...The drawback of Boscoe having lived and worked in Trinidad is that there is so little kept history — there’s almost no public archiving. It’s hard to know where all the Boscoe paintings are. The Caribbean being what it is, sadly, there’s not much interest in history. I mean, sometimes for good reason — people like to forget history. People like to knock down old colonial buildings.
Get rid of them, you know, who cares? Nothing is under preservation order. The weather destroys things. Photos disappear into the sunlight, books get eaten by all sorts of insects and stuff. I mean, everything there is kind of temporal, really. The forests and the jungle take over....
Hilton Als: I’ve been dreaming, literally, since last night, of the next show that I want to do with you. And we have to do it, and it’ll be called “After Rousseau.” And it’ll be Caribbean art, which no one ever shows, because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes. But it will be not just a show of paintings, but all sorts of things, like newspapers, all the shit that gets disappeared....
That’s what’s interesting to me, that it would be not just painting, but about the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.
I responded at the NYRB blog with this comment:
It’s pleasing to see a significant Trinidadian artist receiving critical attention and appreciation. (And I suppose the four small, unsigned Boscoe drawings I own are now worth a bit more than they were a few days ago.) But aspects of this conversation perturb me.
Words are slippery. They can mean different and unexpected things in different contexts. “Discovering”, in the Caribbean, is a heavily freighted word. Here in Trinidad and Tobago, we used to have a public holiday called Discovery Day, commemorating the occasion in 1498 when Columbus turned up off the south coast of Trinidad. We took Discovery Day off our calendar twenty-five years ago, but the notion of the Caribbean as a landscape ripe for discovery endures.
And I’m disturbed by statements like “there’s not much interest in history” and “everything there is kind of temporal, really”; and “the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.” Perhaps one ought not take casual conversational remarks too seriously, but these raise crucial and troubling questions about autonomy; about who has the right (or the resources) to claim or “reclaim” the past; and about what the late Trinidadian philosopher Lloyd Best called epistemic sovereignty.
This conversation also raises questions about what “history” means, and to whom, and who gets to write the definition. Someone who was born and has always lived in the Caribbean, like me, might think we are frequently over-burdened by a history that includes five centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation. (I refer readers who don’t understand what I’m talking about to Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History”, as good a primer as any.)
I too worry about historic preservation in my country, the status of our archives, museums, and libraries, and the under-funding and -staffing of most public institutions charged with stewardship of our heritage. But I also worry that this state of affairs leaves the Caribbean vulnerable to external agents with their own concerns and priorities. I don’t espouse a crude cultural nationalism, or discount the often valuable work of foreign researchers, archivists, and collectors. And “outside” perspectives have their own validity. But there is a very long history of the Caribbean’s social and cultural complexities being represented by foreign voices. Caribbean artists, writers, thinkers, and citizens grapple with the challenge and the imperative to describe and define our own reality in and on our own terms.
Finally, I’m entirely puzzled by Hilton Als’s statement that “no one ever shows” Caribbean art “because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes.” Caribbean artists working in every conceivable medium — hardly just topographical painting — show in galleries and museums all over the world, even if they don’t always achieve the publicity or financial success of some of their North American and European contemporaries. In close proximity to Als in New York, and just in recent years, important shows of contemporary Caribbean artists have run at the Brooklyn Museum (Infinite Island, 2007-2008) and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut (Rockstone and Bootheel, 2009-2010). A retrospective on the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer just closed at El Museo del Barrio. El Museo is collaborating with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Bronx Museum to organise a major tripartite Caribbean show to open in late 2011. These are only the first examples that come to mind.
As Peter Doig aptly says: “it makes you think, well, actually, what’s valid?”
Boscoe Holder — artist, musician, dancer, raconteur, and a man who squeezed more pleasure out of life than most — died in 2007. He left behind several outrageous novels’ worth of stories and memories, and — more important — a large and crucial body of work, including hundreds of paintings and drawings in his studio.
Earlier this year, several of Holder’s portraits were included in an exhibition in Berlin co-curated by Peter Doig, the British artist who now lives in Trinidad, and the American writer Hilton Als. A few days ago, the New York Review of Books blog posted a conversation with Doig, Als, and the artist Angus Cook on “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master”, accompanied by images of fourteen paintings.
I’m glad to think that Holder’s work may be reaching new and wider audiences, but reading this conversation left me bemused and bothered at statements such as:
Peter Doig: ...The drawback of Boscoe having lived and worked in Trinidad is that there is so little kept history — there’s almost no public archiving. It’s hard to know where all the Boscoe paintings are. The Caribbean being what it is, sadly, there’s not much interest in history. I mean, sometimes for good reason — people like to forget history. People like to knock down old colonial buildings.
Get rid of them, you know, who cares? Nothing is under preservation order. The weather destroys things. Photos disappear into the sunlight, books get eaten by all sorts of insects and stuff. I mean, everything there is kind of temporal, really. The forests and the jungle take over....
Hilton Als: I’ve been dreaming, literally, since last night, of the next show that I want to do with you. And we have to do it, and it’ll be called “After Rousseau.” And it’ll be Caribbean art, which no one ever shows, because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes. But it will be not just a show of paintings, but all sorts of things, like newspapers, all the shit that gets disappeared....
That’s what’s interesting to me, that it would be not just painting, but about the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.
I responded at the NYRB blog with this comment:
•
It’s pleasing to see a significant Trinidadian artist receiving critical attention and appreciation. (And I suppose the four small, unsigned Boscoe drawings I own are now worth a bit more than they were a few days ago.) But aspects of this conversation perturb me.
Words are slippery. They can mean different and unexpected things in different contexts. “Discovering”, in the Caribbean, is a heavily freighted word. Here in Trinidad and Tobago, we used to have a public holiday called Discovery Day, commemorating the occasion in 1498 when Columbus turned up off the south coast of Trinidad. We took Discovery Day off our calendar twenty-five years ago, but the notion of the Caribbean as a landscape ripe for discovery endures.
And I’m disturbed by statements like “there’s not much interest in history” and “everything there is kind of temporal, really”; and “the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.” Perhaps one ought not take casual conversational remarks too seriously, but these raise crucial and troubling questions about autonomy; about who has the right (or the resources) to claim or “reclaim” the past; and about what the late Trinidadian philosopher Lloyd Best called epistemic sovereignty.
This conversation also raises questions about what “history” means, and to whom, and who gets to write the definition. Someone who was born and has always lived in the Caribbean, like me, might think we are frequently over-burdened by a history that includes five centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation. (I refer readers who don’t understand what I’m talking about to Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History”, as good a primer as any.)
I too worry about historic preservation in my country, the status of our archives, museums, and libraries, and the under-funding and -staffing of most public institutions charged with stewardship of our heritage. But I also worry that this state of affairs leaves the Caribbean vulnerable to external agents with their own concerns and priorities. I don’t espouse a crude cultural nationalism, or discount the often valuable work of foreign researchers, archivists, and collectors. And “outside” perspectives have their own validity. But there is a very long history of the Caribbean’s social and cultural complexities being represented by foreign voices. Caribbean artists, writers, thinkers, and citizens grapple with the challenge and the imperative to describe and define our own reality in and on our own terms.
Finally, I’m entirely puzzled by Hilton Als’s statement that “no one ever shows” Caribbean art “because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes.” Caribbean artists working in every conceivable medium — hardly just topographical painting — show in galleries and museums all over the world, even if they don’t always achieve the publicity or financial success of some of their North American and European contemporaries. In close proximity to Als in New York, and just in recent years, important shows of contemporary Caribbean artists have run at the Brooklyn Museum (Infinite Island, 2007-2008) and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut (Rockstone and Bootheel, 2009-2010). A retrospective on the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer just closed at El Museo del Barrio. El Museo is collaborating with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Bronx Museum to organise a major tripartite Caribbean show to open in late 2011. These are only the first examples that come to mind.
As Peter Doig aptly says: “it makes you think, well, actually, what’s valid?”
Sunday, September 05, 2010
The world’s strange bounty, no. 4
Spectators of the Apollo 11 launch on a beach near the NASA Kennedy Space Centre, 16 July, 1969. Copyright-free image posted at Flickr by NASA.
Spectators of the Apollo 11 launch on a beach near the NASA Kennedy Space Centre, 16 July, 1969. Copyright-free image posted at Flickr by NASA.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
“How fortunate the specialist!”
A traveller who has just arrived in a country where everything is new to him is held up by the difficulty of making up his mind. How fortunate the sociologist who is interested only in manners and customs; the painter who cares only for the country’s aspect; the naturalist who occupies himself with insects or plants! How fortunate the specialist!... If I had a second life, I could be happy spending it merely in the study of white ants.
— André Gide, Travels in the Congo, trans. Dorothy Bussy, p. 12 (Modern Age edition, 1937).
A traveller who has just arrived in a country where everything is new to him is held up by the difficulty of making up his mind. How fortunate the sociologist who is interested only in manners and customs; the painter who cares only for the country’s aspect; the naturalist who occupies himself with insects or plants! How fortunate the specialist!... If I had a second life, I could be happy spending it merely in the study of white ants.
— André Gide, Travels in the Congo, trans. Dorothy Bussy, p. 12 (Modern Age edition, 1937).
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The world’s strange bounty, no. 3
From the September-October 1934 issue of Albums du Crocodile, on “Tatouages du ‘Milieu’”, assembled by Jean Lacassagne.
From the September-October 1934 issue of Albums du Crocodile, on “Tatouages du ‘Milieu’”, assembled by Jean Lacassagne.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Poetry and innocence
Innocent fun. I’d like to stress the innocence. Hours go by and nobody’s been harmed. The neighbours don’t even know you’re at home.
— James Merrill on the fun of poetry (from a 1991 interview with Thomas Bolt, published in BOMB.)
Innocent fun. I’d like to stress the innocence. Hours go by and nobody’s been harmed. The neighbours don’t even know you’re at home.
— James Merrill on the fun of poetry (from a 1991 interview with Thomas Bolt, published in BOMB.)
“More demanding than most of what passes for scholarship”
The year after the publication of Romantic Image, Kermode became professor of English at Manchester University, where he worked until 1965. From then on, he gave much of his energy to the writing of reviews and essays. Some of those from the late 1950s and the 60s were collected and published in Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962) and Continuities (1968). It is strange to think that the New Statesman and the Spectator once published pieces as freighted with reading as these. Kermode himself wrote in the introduction to the latter volume that any literary journalism that was able to satisfy non-specialist interests “without loss of intellectual integrity” was “more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship”.
— R.I.P. Frank Kermode (1919–2010), one of the few contemporary literary scholars with a genuine sense of the duties of a public intellectual, and one of the very few I actually enjoyed reading.
The year after the publication of Romantic Image, Kermode became professor of English at Manchester University, where he worked until 1965. From then on, he gave much of his energy to the writing of reviews and essays. Some of those from the late 1950s and the 60s were collected and published in Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962) and Continuities (1968). It is strange to think that the New Statesman and the Spectator once published pieces as freighted with reading as these. Kermode himself wrote in the introduction to the latter volume that any literary journalism that was able to satisfy non-specialist interests “without loss of intellectual integrity” was “more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship”.
— R.I.P. Frank Kermode (1919–2010), one of the few contemporary literary scholars with a genuine sense of the duties of a public intellectual, and one of the very few I actually enjoyed reading.
Monday, August 16, 2010
On being a free man
I’ve not been humiliated by employment, in my own eyes.
— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed on BBC TV in 1994.
I’ve not been humiliated by employment, in my own eyes.
— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed on BBC TV in 1994.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
On asceticism
I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realised that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness.
— Susan Sontag, Journals, vol. 1, p. 280.
I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realised that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness.
— Susan Sontag, Journals, vol. 1, p. 280.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The world’s strange bounty, no. 2
Cassava plant with sphinx moth and tree boa, engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705). Courtesy the Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum.
Cassava plant with sphinx moth and tree boa, engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705). Courtesy the Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Mental events
Sort of as a result of the interdependence of life and intellectual work, ideas (understood simply as creativity in one’s discipline) rarely occur from pure concentration on the abstracted problems of intellectual work. A sort of decollage, if you will, a thinking by analogy and intuition, the cross-classification of life and work, produces the best ideas. I find this concept easier to grasp in terms of a conjuncture. At any given moment the combination of the books you are reading, the environment you are in, the emotional sensations you are experiencing, the intentions that impel you to think, are utterly unique. And ideas are the mental events that result from such conjunctures.
— From Robert Minto’s reflections on C. Wright Mills’s essay “On Intellectual Craftmanship”.
Sort of as a result of the interdependence of life and intellectual work, ideas (understood simply as creativity in one’s discipline) rarely occur from pure concentration on the abstracted problems of intellectual work. A sort of decollage, if you will, a thinking by analogy and intuition, the cross-classification of life and work, produces the best ideas. I find this concept easier to grasp in terms of a conjuncture. At any given moment the combination of the books you are reading, the environment you are in, the emotional sensations you are experiencing, the intentions that impel you to think, are utterly unique. And ideas are the mental events that result from such conjunctures.
— From Robert Minto’s reflections on C. Wright Mills’s essay “On Intellectual Craftmanship”.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
“With you giving them the real stuff”
“I must let you know how much I have been enjoying your broadcast.... I was awfully surprised when you said that it was the first time you stood before a mike. And would you believe me that there are still many fellowes [sic] around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.”
This is a fan letter written to my grandfather Ken Laughlin (the letter misspells his name) by E.C. Lyons of Woodford Lodge, Chaguanas, Trinidad, on 26 January, 1937.
My grandfather was a sports journalist for over sixty years. When his weekly programme Ken Laughlin on Sport went off the air in the mid 1990s, it was the longest running radio programme in Trinidad and Tobago, and possibly in the southern Caribbean. In January 1937, he gave the first live radio commentary on a cricket match in the West Indies. It was an intercolonial game, Trinidad vs. Barbados, at the Queen’s Park Oval. He was twenty-three. E.C. Lyons’s letter is one of several congratulating my grandfather on this pioneering broadcast.
(Note that the letter is dated 1936, but this is clearly an error. All the other correspondence relating to this broadcast is dated January or February 1937.)
I’d guess that over the decades he must have got many more letters from listeners in different parts of the Caribbean, but it was this batch, from the very start of his career, that my grandfather decided to save. After he died in 2001, I found them in a box of documents and memorabilia that came into my hands. I’d lost track of them a while back, but found the letters again yesterday (while searching for something else, naturally), and decided to scan a few of them and post them online in my little Flickr family archive. Some of the other fan letters came from San Fernando, Moruga, and Georgetown, British Guiana.
I posted links to the letters on my Facebook page, and got a few comments, including one asking whether the letters were important enough to be archived, and how I planned to preserve them. Well, they’re already in an archive: mine, and scanning and uploading them is one form of preservation. I’m pretty much a pack-rat, and a good couple dozen shelf-feet of documents of all kinds are filed away across several rooms of my house, in different degrees of sortedness — everything from family papers like these letters (or like my other grandfather’s certificates of discharge from the Royal Canadian Steamship Company) to correspondence with friends and colleagues to newspaper clippings on subjects that interest me; also exhibition catalogues, theatre programmes, set lists from jointpop concerts, handwritten notes from Alice Yard meetings, maps of just about every country and city I’ve visited, and masses of material related to the various magazines and other publishing projects I’ve worked on over the years.
This isn’t terribly unusual. I imagine most people working in publishing or in vaguely literary pursuits have similar personal archives. These dozens of feet of boxes and files are obviously important to me, and I hope some of the material I’m so carefully holding on to will turn out to be important to other people in the future. But I also know that my most important archive is one that can’t fit in boxes and manila folders — it’s the online archive anyone can access by typing my name into a search engine.
I can control only some aspects of this. And that’s exactly why I’ve kept this blog going for nearly eight years (and counting), why I have my own website, why I post images to Flickr and share thoughts and links at Twitter. “If it’s not on the web, it doesn’t exist.” Does anyone still remember who specifically first had this insight? Probably not, because it’s so irrefutably apt a summary of how we understand knowledge and our access to it in the Internet age that it might as well be a collective expression of faith. So why wouldn’t I want to use these various media to profess my version of myself, my thoughts, my hopes, anxieties, and dreams?
(A kind of digression: an archive is a record. It is also an assertion — of existence, of significance. It is evidence. It is a model for categorising and understanding the world. It can even be a creative undertaking, a work of art. And while historically the fact of being archived has often been a form of validation — this is important because it is in the archive, that is not and may be discarded and forgotten — cheap online storage available to (theoretically, almost) everybody forces us now to reconsider what an archive is, and again makes it possible for “anyone” to be an archivist, so that personal archives are easy to both assemble and make publicly accessible. The ability to make a public archive has radically expanded.)
In my mind, this is also tied up with bigger ideas of self-determination. Naturally, this is because I’m from a part of the world that historically has been described, portrayed, and defined overwhelmingly through stories told by people from elsewhere: stories about what the Caribbean, the tropics, and small island societies are and should be. I’ve never seen a pirate ship and never worn a grass skirt and, thanks, I do speak fairly good English, even if my accent amuses you. I live in a middle-class suburb of a medium-size city in a largely industrialised country that happens to be a small tropical Caribbean island. Many of my friends are writers, artists, and thinkers working hard to understand themselves as individuals, ourselves as a society, trying to understand what concepts like nation, culture, and history really mean, trying to imagine and build individual and collective futures. Whether or not we acknowledge the lines of succession, many of us are engaged in what the late Lloyd Best repeatedly described as the imperative to comprehend ourselves on and in our own terms. An essential aspect of this process is making sure my — our — ideas, stories, images, and languages are also represented in the global conversation and the global archive of the web. Because if we’re not there, we don’t exist.
It may seem that I’ve strayed a long way from my grandfather’s fan letters. There’s a specific reason I chose E.C. Lyons’s letter to open this post. This is the bit of that letter that I specially like:
... would you believe me that there are still many fellowes around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.
I’m moved by the suggestion that my grandfather’s voice — a Trinidadian voice, speaking Trinidadian English, and expressing a Trinidadian reality — was more meaningful to those listeners in Woodford Lodge seventy-three years ago than the voices of “the Americans and English people” who otherwise occupied the airwaves. It helps me understand the part he played in the still-incomplete epistemological enterprise Best described, and maybe it helps me understand the part I’m playing, or trying to play.
So, yes: these letters are important enough to be archived. They exist physically in my personal archive, and now they exist digitally — epistemologically — if necessary, defiantly — in the archive of the world.
“I must let you know how much I have been enjoying your broadcast.... I was awfully surprised when you said that it was the first time you stood before a mike. And would you believe me that there are still many fellowes [sic] around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.”
This is a fan letter written to my grandfather Ken Laughlin (the letter misspells his name) by E.C. Lyons of Woodford Lodge, Chaguanas, Trinidad, on 26 January, 1937.
My grandfather was a sports journalist for over sixty years. When his weekly programme Ken Laughlin on Sport went off the air in the mid 1990s, it was the longest running radio programme in Trinidad and Tobago, and possibly in the southern Caribbean. In January 1937, he gave the first live radio commentary on a cricket match in the West Indies. It was an intercolonial game, Trinidad vs. Barbados, at the Queen’s Park Oval. He was twenty-three. E.C. Lyons’s letter is one of several congratulating my grandfather on this pioneering broadcast.
(Note that the letter is dated 1936, but this is clearly an error. All the other correspondence relating to this broadcast is dated January or February 1937.)
I’d guess that over the decades he must have got many more letters from listeners in different parts of the Caribbean, but it was this batch, from the very start of his career, that my grandfather decided to save. After he died in 2001, I found them in a box of documents and memorabilia that came into my hands. I’d lost track of them a while back, but found the letters again yesterday (while searching for something else, naturally), and decided to scan a few of them and post them online in my little Flickr family archive. Some of the other fan letters came from San Fernando, Moruga, and Georgetown, British Guiana.
I posted links to the letters on my Facebook page, and got a few comments, including one asking whether the letters were important enough to be archived, and how I planned to preserve them. Well, they’re already in an archive: mine, and scanning and uploading them is one form of preservation. I’m pretty much a pack-rat, and a good couple dozen shelf-feet of documents of all kinds are filed away across several rooms of my house, in different degrees of sortedness — everything from family papers like these letters (or like my other grandfather’s certificates of discharge from the Royal Canadian Steamship Company) to correspondence with friends and colleagues to newspaper clippings on subjects that interest me; also exhibition catalogues, theatre programmes, set lists from jointpop concerts, handwritten notes from Alice Yard meetings, maps of just about every country and city I’ve visited, and masses of material related to the various magazines and other publishing projects I’ve worked on over the years.
This isn’t terribly unusual. I imagine most people working in publishing or in vaguely literary pursuits have similar personal archives. These dozens of feet of boxes and files are obviously important to me, and I hope some of the material I’m so carefully holding on to will turn out to be important to other people in the future. But I also know that my most important archive is one that can’t fit in boxes and manila folders — it’s the online archive anyone can access by typing my name into a search engine.
I can control only some aspects of this. And that’s exactly why I’ve kept this blog going for nearly eight years (and counting), why I have my own website, why I post images to Flickr and share thoughts and links at Twitter. “If it’s not on the web, it doesn’t exist.” Does anyone still remember who specifically first had this insight? Probably not, because it’s so irrefutably apt a summary of how we understand knowledge and our access to it in the Internet age that it might as well be a collective expression of faith. So why wouldn’t I want to use these various media to profess my version of myself, my thoughts, my hopes, anxieties, and dreams?
(A kind of digression: an archive is a record. It is also an assertion — of existence, of significance. It is evidence. It is a model for categorising and understanding the world. It can even be a creative undertaking, a work of art. And while historically the fact of being archived has often been a form of validation — this is important because it is in the archive, that is not and may be discarded and forgotten — cheap online storage available to (theoretically, almost) everybody forces us now to reconsider what an archive is, and again makes it possible for “anyone” to be an archivist, so that personal archives are easy to both assemble and make publicly accessible. The ability to make a public archive has radically expanded.)
In my mind, this is also tied up with bigger ideas of self-determination. Naturally, this is because I’m from a part of the world that historically has been described, portrayed, and defined overwhelmingly through stories told by people from elsewhere: stories about what the Caribbean, the tropics, and small island societies are and should be. I’ve never seen a pirate ship and never worn a grass skirt and, thanks, I do speak fairly good English, even if my accent amuses you. I live in a middle-class suburb of a medium-size city in a largely industrialised country that happens to be a small tropical Caribbean island. Many of my friends are writers, artists, and thinkers working hard to understand themselves as individuals, ourselves as a society, trying to understand what concepts like nation, culture, and history really mean, trying to imagine and build individual and collective futures. Whether or not we acknowledge the lines of succession, many of us are engaged in what the late Lloyd Best repeatedly described as the imperative to comprehend ourselves on and in our own terms. An essential aspect of this process is making sure my — our — ideas, stories, images, and languages are also represented in the global conversation and the global archive of the web. Because if we’re not there, we don’t exist.
It may seem that I’ve strayed a long way from my grandfather’s fan letters. There’s a specific reason I chose E.C. Lyons’s letter to open this post. This is the bit of that letter that I specially like:
... would you believe me that there are still many fellowes around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.
I’m moved by the suggestion that my grandfather’s voice — a Trinidadian voice, speaking Trinidadian English, and expressing a Trinidadian reality — was more meaningful to those listeners in Woodford Lodge seventy-three years ago than the voices of “the Americans and English people” who otherwise occupied the airwaves. It helps me understand the part he played in the still-incomplete epistemological enterprise Best described, and maybe it helps me understand the part I’m playing, or trying to play.
So, yes: these letters are important enough to be archived. They exist physically in my personal archive, and now they exist digitally — epistemologically — if necessary, defiantly — in the archive of the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
