Fossil records and paper trails

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

We took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, and afterwards, I tweeted this thread:

The more I’ve gone over it in my mind, the more absurd and funnier it gets. Here is an institution dedicated to what we can learn from seeing physical objects in the fossil record in person… and they’ve gone “paperless” — no paper trail! (I should note, however, that they do print admission tickets so you can prove that you’ve paid to get in.)

I have also been meditating on my own absurdities concerning my life in paper. For example, my diaries are an attempt to make my own paper trail in an increasingly paperless world. My own “paper of the past.” My own fossil record.

But these archives are mostly for the short term, the short past: they’re to trace my own patterns, remember what I did last week, last month, last year, last decade. I am under no delusions that they will last, although they’ll probably last a lot longer than the hard drive I bought last month.

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped carrying a pocket notebook because I am in love with Apple Notes — the simple “notebook” on my phone that syncs across all my devices. I have files going for the newsletter, new books, shopping lists, etc. I am aware that these artifacts will mostly be lost, probably in the close future. They are the equivalent of “scratch” paper that will be tossed in the recycling later.

One final reach: The big news yesterday was that the FBI had searched the former president’s house to retrieve records he’d illegally removed from The White House. (Previously, he’d flushed paper down the toilet.) To a paper junkie like me, it is thrilling that paper can still, potentially, bring you down.

Like a good American, I have my pet conspiracy theories, and I wonder if the move to “paperless” is an attempt to rob us of our paper trails, the proof that things really happened the way we remember them happening.

So, I keep my paper trails going.

(Paper is a wonderful technology.)

Stealing from the archives

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Ten years ago, I was working on the book proposal for Steal Like An Artist. Next year we’re releasing a 10th anniversary edition, so I’ve been digging in my archive for inspiration while writing the afterword.

The “archive” in this case is just a banker’s box. Most of the book was written fast an the computer, so there’s not as much fun material (false starts, deleted scenes, etc.) as there is when you open the boxes for the other books.

Most interesting might be the gigantic stack of index cards, many of which appear in the back of the book. (It was funny to see “Gesamtkunstwerk” scribbled on this card, as the word is in the zeitgeist thanks to this review.)

The index cards serve to show just how long I’ve been obsessed with the ideas I’m still writing about. (For example, there was a card about centrifugal books.) Steal was a book that tried to cover a lot of ground with very few pages, and there were so many seeds tossed in there that I was able to grow entire books out of some of them.

It makes me laugh to see how simple the illustrations are. (I got a lot of mileage out of Photoshop’s “invert” function.) I really wanted the book to just feel like a fancy zine.

I’ve had a decade now of people asking what “font” I use. Everything was just marker on typing paper. (“But what kind of typing paper?” my friend joked on Instagram.)

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My favorite object in the box is the “dummy” I made for my editor, Bruce Tracy, by printing out a dust jacket for a book with the same trim size. (The Cute Manifesto by James Kochalka.) The legend is that design had a few options in the cover meeting and the late Peter Workman pointed at my dummy and said “that one.”

In the old days, my publisher would send me reprint notices on a postcard. (They stopped at the 10th printing. I think the book has gone through at least two dozen reprintings at this point.)

As for the book itself, it doesn’t even feel like I really wrote the thing. There are more years now between me and the me who wrote the book than there was between the me who wrote the book and the 19-year-old me he was writing it for. Time to finish up this afterword, put the archive back on the shelf, and write something new…

The fate of an archive

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

My mom brought me boxes of my old cassette tapes. The tapes range from 1996-2003, recorded from the ages 13-20. An archive from another lifetime, when I wanted to be a famous musician. My six-year-old has been sticking random tapes into the four-track, listening for drums and other stuff he could sample for his own songs.

I doubt he finds anything worthy.

I used to look at all those tapes and see a waste of time — what good was all that to a writer! — but now I see years spent dedicated to a creative task, learning what it’s like to practice and study and steal and share and try to express yourself and bring something new into the world. That time is never lost.

Plus, it was something to do.

Meanwhile, my stack of diaries fell over yesterday, like a cheap metaphor:

3 stories about the fates of musical archives posted in the past 2 days:

1) The 2008 Universal fire turned out to be “the biggest disaster of the music business,” destroying masters by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, John Coltrane, and on and on and on.

2) Bob Dylan’s team can’t track down historic footage of his Rolling Thunder shows, not because they’ve been destroyed, but because of a filing error:

“The negative was lost,” says a source close to the Dylan Camp. “Which [was] really horrifying. Part of the problem with corporations the days is all the consolidation. And in the consolidation of our storage system, somehow the numbering system fell off. There was just no way to find the negative — and we looked. Man, did we look. Now everything is in Iron Mountain. We went there and just couldn’t find it. It’s really sad. My worst fear is it’ll turn up tomorrow. For all we know, its sitting in some collector’s basement.”

3) Thom Yorke’s minidisc archive from the OK Computer era (1995-1998) was hacked, so instead of paying the hacker’s ransom, Radiohead released 18 hours of the recordings on Bandcamp.

It pleases me to look at Yorke’s minidiscs, and then look at my cassettes, and think how one archive contains treasure and the other trash. (“it’s not v interesting / there’s a lot of it,” wrote Yorke. “Yeah, right,” thought I.)

But, despite their wildly different results, both archives were made with essentially the same effort: We hit RECORD and tried to make a noise that pleased us.

Now my six-year-old presses RECORD and tries the same.

Another archive begins.