Got distracted by the archive
Several times a week, I think, “I gotta check the archive.” By this I mean, “search my gmail.”
Everything is there; I don’t delete anything, just mark it as ‘read.’ Mostly I’m looking up addresses, login information, often filling in memory gaps, sometimes trying to make sense of the timeline. I have one of those five-year journals, and every few months I’ll rediscover it. If I head to the archive, I can account for most every day, at some point having emailed someone and said something about a meal, the weather, a plan, a mood.
I used to think, “I should write a book.” Up until like, yesterday, I thought this. “I am a writer and writers write books, so I should write a book.” This was a deeply held belief, from grade school, from whenever someone first told me I was a writer and I believed them and wove that into my identity. I’ve never come close to writing a book, though. The book the book the book the book. It’s possible I could write one still, but there is no book that I have to write. Whenever I try, I just think, “I have nothing to say, it’s all in the archive.”
The archive contains the good stuff. It also contains garbage. But among the garbage is my actual honest true self and a record of everything that’s happened to me since 2005. I’ve said everything I need to say in the archive, kept everything that’s been said to me. I just need to print it all out, do some trimming, and there it is: my masterwork.
This is a little bit of a joke and a little bit not a joke.
A few years ago I saw an exhibition by a French contemporary artist called Sophie Calle. One gallery contained letters, videos, photographs from 107 women that Calle had commissioned to analyze and interpret a breakup email she had received. I remember thinking, “This is something I could do.” Not in that flippant way that you sometimes think when looking at modern art, but in a revelatory way: “Oh, if emails can be the basis for art, then maybe I’m actually an artist.”
Some art: Last year I started writing about my friends. I wanted to write a draft of a book (the book the book the book the book) and didn’t know where to start, so I decided to start writing character sketches of my friends and see what happened. What happened was the list of friends became the project. I made it through the list, a very rough first draft. It’s not artful writing, and they aren’t exactly character sketches, more like a brain dump. It’s uneven. Some friends got pages and pages, some just short lists of memories. I got distracted a lot when writing it, because I’d take to the archive and get lost in it, reading emails from 2012. I think the next draft, if there is one, will include some emails themselves, gchat transcripts. I can’t imagine anyone would be interested in reading these as a book, except perhaps the people they are about. I’d like to eventually print them and distribute them — love letters to my friends.
More art: After the friend project didn’t lead to a book, I decided that I could probably write a novel about a woman obsessed with a pop band. I have some experience in this area, and thought it would be funny if, in the book, the character turned it way up — quit her job to work in the pub across from the band’s recording studio, found a cousin of their stylist to room with, got a side job walking their producer’s dog. I took to the archive for inspiration — it contains thousands of emails that some friends and I have exchanged about a pop band and its members over the last five years. I wrote 17 pages of the novel, but abandoned it after deciding that nothing I wrote on this topic could ever be more compelling than the emails themselves, and that the actual emails would be completely nonsensical to nearly anyone but us.
Sometimes I think the greatest thing I could do would be to print these emails and preserve our scholarship about this pop band. Beautiful bound books, one for each of us. Then maybe one for the Library of Congress.
“How to download all your emails, how to print them, turn them into a bound book” — I’ve googled it a few times. It’s not straightforward, there’s no button. You can download all your emails, but they’re in a weird format and there’s no good way to get them into a better format for easy printing. I’m going to have to buy an expensive computer program to do this properly, learn how to lay things out. If this is my art, I’m going to have to spend a lot of money on it. And a lot of time.
The artist Vija Celmins is best known for her drawings, but she spent five years on a project in which she made exact replicas of 11 stones she collected from the beach. In a recent New Yorker profile, a friend recalls Celmins working on the stones and saying, “I’m crazy, why am I doing this?” I liked picturing her obsessing over these stones and laughing at the absurdity of it, doing it anyway, for literal years. And I like picturing myself painstakingly laying out my book of emails about a pop band for five people and the Library of Congress, doing this for literal years, and laughing, too.
This summer I was in Dublin with my parents, and I saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College. They only have a few pages on display, but in the queue leading up to it, there are exhibits that show how the monks transcribed the pages, how long they spent on them. They had one example of a leather satchel that a monk would have kept the pages in. I thought about my pop band archive project, thought, what if instead of a bound printed book, I hand-transcribed the emails, adding flourishes and drawings, and kept them in my little satchel. It’s kind of a joke, but maybe there are no jokes.
Watercolor by Matt Davis
Referenced:
“Vija Celmin’s Surface Matters”, by Calvin Tomkins
“Take Care of Yourself,” by Sophie Calle
“The Book of Kells,” by some monks