Archive Fever (1)
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas
Photo courtesy of Dan Machold, licensed by Creative Commons.
Having spent years researching Record Cultures, I spent a lot of time in archives. I visited some of the largest (and smallest) repositories in the United States. Some had great prestige and far-reaching reputations. Others operated on the leanest of budgets. Each location had its own rules, quirks, and dispositions. Most all of them helped me — educated me — in some way. Now that I’m at the end of this research and writing cycle, what did I learn from archives big and small? What attracted me to archival research in the first place? What follows are tentative thoughts on archives after visiting more than a few. (Those enticed by the post title, nicked from Jacques Derrida, will be disappointed. My interests in this biographical sketch are mostly personal, though I have a strong affinity for Foucault’s interest in the discursive rules and contours of archives. Derrida’s interest is an examination the archival possibilities manifest in digital technologies, though he too is interested in the archive as an event and the archive as a space). See Nasrullah Mambrol’s “Analysis of Derrida’s Archive Fever,” if you’d like to see the ways in which the two thinkers’ thoughts on archives diverge.
“Archive” would be a bit grand for my grandparents’ attic, but that’s where I first felt the urge to dig. My grandfather, who died when I was four years old, ran the Stewart Electric Shop in Brownstown, Indiana. The shop sold “white goods” (refrigerators, washers and dryers) as well as “brown goods,” phonographs radios, and televisions (my mother was thrilled to be the first kid in her town to have a TV. The family was not wealthy, but being the local RCA-Victor retailer did have benefits). My grandparents’ house had technological items, including a Wilcox-Gay Recordio disc-based home recording machine, and promotional items, too — including a plaster “Nipper,” RCA-Victor’s advertising dog listening for “His Master’s Voice.”
The next time I encountered such an interesting collection was through my job as a project secretary at the Peirce Edition Project at IUPUI, now part of that campus’ Institute for American Thought. I was an English and Philosophy double major and got work via the Peirce Project, a critical edition project dedicated to the work of American pragmatist, semiotician, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce. Among my tasks at the Peirce Project was to catalog the project’s growing collections. While I was wholly unqualified, I did my best to learn archival practices on the fly. I spent a lot of time working through the papers of Max Fisch, a philosophy professor from the University of Illinois, who had relocated to Indianapolis for crucial work as General Editor of the critical edition project in 1975. While Fisch’s earlier papers were held at the University of Illinois, the later papers are at IUPUI — and were the ones I helped to organize. I got a sense of Fisch’s work in philosophy and semiotics (this is something that you could do for a living?), his personal biography, as well as his dispositions and his sense of humor. I was scandalized that he would tear out the articles he wanted from journals and throw away the rest (something I’ve done since).
No less exciting was a small collection from University of Chicago semiotician Charles Morris, which included a childhood book of magic tricks he had written and decorated and a letter from philosopher Thomas Kuhn, asking Morris whether The Structure of Scientific Revolutions sounded like a good book title. When I encountered the book later on in graduate school, I’d understood the importance of what I’d seen.
Arriving at the MA program in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, one of the first things I remember doing was getting a tour of the Popular Culture and Popular Music libraries on campus (I met my good friend and co-author Rob Sloane on that tour). These collections held lots of surprises, pretty far removed from what I’d been digging through back in Indianapolis. I was most impressed by the BGSU Popular Music Library (which now also house the Schurk Sound Archives). Now I was chasing after rare sound recordings (all those bootlegs!), bits of popular ephemera: detective and romance fiction, advertising and promotional materials, counter-culture newspapers and zines, and so on. I was also thrilled to find a complete run of the Working Papers in Cultural Studies, (1972-1979), which offered a glimpse into the inner workings of the British Cultural Studies and the Birmingham School.
Once I got to the Radio-Television-Film program at Texas, my next archival deep dive came courtesy of Thomas Schatz’s Hollywood Studio System class. He sent the class to the Harry Ransom Center, which was an archive like I’d never seen. Sprawling collections from most every human endeavor. The earliest known successful nature photograph, the Watergate papers, Aleister Crowley’s Tarot cards. A Gutenberg Bible. The scissors from the Salvador Dali sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
My project ended up being about Spellbound. Specifically, I was interested in Selznick’s desire to promote film music, not “film songs” that routinely acted as film tie-ins even in the sheet-music/so-called “silent film” era, but the instrumental art-music themes that evoke so much of films’ affective powers. I dug into the relationship between Selznick Pictures’ deal with ARA Records for a Spellbound album, released in 1946 (after the film’s release in 1945). I got a front-row seat to the film studio’s anxieties about giving up control to a record label (while working on my dissertation, I always told Tom Schatz that the record industry is the only one that makes the film industry look squeaky clean). I saw Selznick’s own brilliance, but also his debilitating attention to detail (down to the promotional stickers for Duel in the Sun). And those endless memos! In digging into Selznick’s interest in film music, goes back to the release of film music on discs sent to radio stations as early as 1940’s Rebecca. An even bigger surprise came when I learned that ARA head Boris Morros was coerced to spy on the Nazis by the Soviets who threatened to kill his parents. At the close of the Second World War, Morros offered his services to U.S. intelligence as a double agent — and he used ARA scouts to get the job done. This led to the longest footnote of my academic career in an article I wrote for Music, Sound and the Moving Image, “The Selznick Studio, Spellbound, and the Marketing of Film Music,” published in 2010.
This Selznick research led to an unexpected offer from Harry Ransom Center film collection curator Steve Wilson to work as a proxy researcher in the Selznick collection for writers that couldn’t (or didn’t want to?!) travel to Austin. This led to work for a number of researchers, including further research on Hitchcock’s film music for Jack Sullivan on his book Hitchcock’s Music and work on Selznick’s relationship with his father-in-law, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. I still had in mind a film studies dissertation (with vague gestures toward a project on film and the rise of American urbanism and high on “city symphony” films). But already I was working on this side project about the recording industry between the world wars, which would end up becoming my dissertation and taking me in unexpected directions nearer the end of my Texas stay and reaching into the first years of my professorship at Bellarmine University.