Tag: special collections

Memory and Community: Person, Place, and Thing

Person: Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz is a poet of German and Mexican descent, born in Germany but raised in northern California. Her work reads like a scrapbook, image after image placed on top of one another. Her third book Wunderkammer translates to “a cabinet of curiosities”. Each poem heavy with German history, German artists, and fragments of the personal. Each image is locked in a multi-leveled vitrine for the reader’s consumption. The poet’s mother was a hoarder, the poet is obsessed with archiving, the need to “collect, assemble, and name”.

In 2018 I attended Cynthia Cruz’s craft talk at the Poet’s House entitled “The Archive as Resistance”. In 2010, as a Hodder fellow at Princeton, Cruz scoured through archives to research for Wunderkammer. She drew inspiration from German visual artists: Hanna Darboven, Gerard Rictor, and Rosemary Trockel. As well as great German writer and thinkers Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Throughout her collection, she created “totems and objects that carry memory or meaning”. She describes the poems in Wunderkammer as dense, long lines, and no space, a type of claustrophobia”.

  • taken from Cruz’s Wunderkammer

Wunderkammer is an exploration of trauma and how trauma informs and changes people. A part of her research involved reading about the building of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The creation of a museum that houses artifacts and relics of Berlin Jews chronologically create a sense of closure as if the Holocaust was now in the past. When in fact that past has not passed. Questions of how it could have happened and it’s impact are felt throughout and informs contemporary Germany, Berlin, and the world.

In conversation with Sharon Macdonald’s “Is Difficult Heritage Still Difficult?”, Cruz’s work remains personal (fictional or not), her use of German history is through her lens (girlhood, failure, and mental illness). Macdonald’s piece deals with the right way to present such a dark past: facts versus emotions, how much of the horror to show, heritage versus nationalism, and etc. Through the poems in Wunderkammer, Cynthia Cruz takes fragments of her past, her mixed cultures and works from people from her native country to make a sort of collage.

Place: The Historic New Orleans Collection

In 1938, General L Kemper and Leila Williams purchased two properties in the French Quarter—The Merieult House and a late 19th century residence on Toulouse Street. Throughout their lives they gathered a hefty amount of important Louisiana artifacts. After the couple passed, their home became the Historic New Orleans Collection.

The Historic New Orleans Collection – Merieult House. 533 Royal St., New Orleans, LA 70130.

In 2016, during my first trip to New Orleans, I got to witness the award winning and traveling Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865 exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection. I walked in with two childhood friends and my one friend’s aunt, we moved separately, sometimes we regrouped but we never spoke. From what I recall, you could hear a pin drop, it seemed like every visitor was busy absorbing the information to say anything of value.

Historian Erin M. Greenwald curated the exhibit which includes period broadsides, paintings, and prints illustrating the domestic slave trade, interactive displays, historical records by tracking the shipment of more than 70,000 people to New Orleans. While there were interactive components, most affective, was the “Lost Friends” ads placed after the Civil War by newly freed people attempting to locate family members. The preservation of those ads made everything so three dimensional. In Cloonan’s “W(H)ITHER Preservation”, she writes, Preservation allows for the continuity of the past with the present and the future”. I was there on vacation, steps away from Bourbon street, filled with tourists and bachelorette parties, but on a ground drenched in history and blood. The presentation of the ads-from floor to ceiling- daughters looking for mothers they had not seen in 30 years, gave the memory institution have a pulse.

Thing: Little Free Library (Take A Book, Share A Book)

A small wooden box full of books, where neighbors are encouraged to take a book and leave a book. Little Free Library is a non-profit whose mission is to increase access to books for readers of all ages and backgrounds. The organization boasts 90,000 street libraries in 90 countries. Those who want to start a Little Free Library can order a kit through their website or build their own. Their website also has a map where the user can type in their zip code and find the Little Free Library nearest to them. There are two in walking distance from my apartment in Bushwick. I think the idea is adorable and promotes community building.

This reminds me of Chatman’s four concepts in “The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders”. She names deception, risk-taking, secrecy, and situational relevancy as reasons “information outsiders” remain on the outside. But with something like the Little Free Library, it’s open to everyone, there need not be any sharing of personal information or personal stories. There is a freedom, no need to sign up for a library card, or fees for lateness, it is almost encouraged for it to be anonymous. The only concern is not enough people knowing about such a uniting program.

-Herbert Duran

Resources

2018: The Archive as Resistance: A Craft Talk with Cynthia Cruz. (n.d.). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from Poets House website: https://poetshouse.org/audio/2018-the-archive-as-resistance-a-craft-talk-with-cynthia-cruz/

Chatman, E. A. (n.d.). The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders. 15.

Chatman—The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/924614/mod_resource/content/1/Chatham-Information%20Povertyt.pdf

Cloonan, M. V. (2001). W(H)ITHER Preservation? The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 71(2), 231–242.

Cloonan—2001—W(H)ITHER Preservation.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/924550/mod_resource/content/1/Cloonan_2004.pdf

Cruz, C. (2014). Wunderkammer. New York: Four Way Books.

Exhibition – Purchased Lives: New Orleans And The Domestic Slave Trade, 18081865 – New Orleans, LA. (n.d.). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from http://www.americantowns.com/news/exhibition-purchased-lives-new-orleans-and-the-domestic-slave-trade-1808aeur1865-22900958-new-orleans-la.html

Macdonald, S. (2015). Is ‘Difficult Heritage’ Still ‘Difficult’?: Why Public Acknowledgment of Past Perpetration May No Longer Be So Unsettling to Collective Identities. Museum International, 67(1–4), 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/muse.12078

Macdonald—2015—Is ‘Difficult Heritage’ Still ‘Difficult’ Why Pu.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://lms.pratt.edu/pluginfile.php/924553/mod_resource/content/1/MacDonald_2015.pdf

Purchased Lives Exhibit Opens At The National Civil Rights Museum. (2018, January 25). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from Black Then website: blackthen.com/purchased-lives-exhibit-opens-national-civil-rights-museum/

What We Do. (n.d.). Retrieved November 7, 2019, from Street Books website: http://streetbooks.org/what-we-do-1

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“Archives, Advocacy, and Change” at the New York Academy of Medicine

“The archival profession is inherently an activist profession.” -Rich Wandel

Last night, the New York Academy of Medicine hosted a panel called “Archives, Advocacy, and Change” as part of their Changemakers series. The panelists were Jenna Freedman, founder of the Barnard Zine Library; Steven Fullwood, founder of In the Life Archive; Timothy Johnson, director of NYU’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and co-director of Tamiment’s Cold War Center; and Rich Wandel (quoted above), founder of  The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center National History Archive.  Continue reading →

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Visiting the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection and Archive

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“He just went right over to that picture of him and Diane and smiled.” Eileen Chapman, Associate Director of the Arts at Monmouth University, explained to me what it was like when Bruce Springsteen himself came to visit the archive of his fan materials at the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection at Monmouth University. “He mostly wanted to just look around, but he didn’t request anything.” Still, she seemed pleased with the memory. “I can’t believe I forgot to ask him to sign the guest book!”  Eileen acts as director of the archive, assisted by Alana, a social work student at Monmouth. Together with another student assistant, they have tackled the work of tracking, arranging, and housing the collection, corresponding with patrons, providing reference, and serving the reading room.

There are no professional archivists on the staff, and none have ever worked there, but the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection is not a typical archive in a lot of ways. Most notably, the collection has nothing to do with Monmouth University’s library system, although it is housed on the Monmouth campus–the collection is not in the library, the librarians do not work on it, and the library system, for now, is not in the process of acquiring it. The archive is a single house located on Monmouth’s campus across the street from the student center, and adjacent to the performing arts building. It still looks a lot like a house–until the Springsteen collection moved in, it had been a living space for Monmouth students.

Eileen explained that the collection had been kept at the Asbury Park Public Library until 2011, when she suggested that the Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection (the group of fans who support and act as a kind of Board of Directors for the collection) move it to Monmouth University, only a few miles north of Asbury Park. She said that the public library really didn’t have space to house the quickly-growing collection, nor did they especially have the tools to provide access to its wide range of audio-visual formats. Various parts of the collection were being in stored closets and other strange spaces in the library, she explained, and library staff and directors began to disagree with the Friends over the treatment of the collection. Eileen was eventually able to convince Monmouth to take it on, although it took years. She told me that it had been a hard sell to the University to agree to house the collection–the library director did not agree that it would be relevant to the school’s library, and it remains apart from it today. The archive house only gets a few visitors a week–maybe 4 or 5, according to Eileen, and none of the University faculty have incorporated the collection into their coursework.

There are other subtle downsides to the archive’s move: unlike the public library, the house is open from 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays only, rendering it inaccessible to most with a full time job. Its location–set back from an arterial street of the campus–is not exactly easy to find, even with a GPS. I had in fact taken a cab from a New Jersey transit station in order to get there, but then had to wander a bit before I saw the little unmarked house. Further, moving it even a little way outside Asbury Park makes it a harder stop for Springsteen tourists to make (although all visitors need to make an appointment with Eileen before coming in).

The archive house still retains some of the cozy feeling of a home, although much of the actual living spaces are occupied by steel shelving and Hollinger boxes, housing around 20,000 items of Springsteen fan material. The front living room of the house operates as the collection’s reading room. There is a large circular table for researchers to review material, and a reference desk across from the front door. There is a TV equipped with VHS and DVD players, as well as stereo equipment for playing records, CDs and cassettes. The kitchen has a few PCs, a microfilm reader, a flatbed scanner, a copy machine, and some arranging space on the counters. The rest of the house is the collection: the downstairs bedroom-like space holds newspapers and printed out internet-published articles, while bedroom spaces upstairs house academic papers, A/V materials, fan ‘zines, printed books, posters, t-shirts, and more. Decorating the living/reading room are beautiful, rare photos by Barry Schiener, a rock photographer, of Bruce in the ’70s and ’80s.

I love the idea of the archive house. Springsteen himself writes frequently of houses in his songs–the bedroom as personal space, the threshold, the porch, the yard, all hold immense weight in the universe of his lyrics. Only cars get more airplay in his lyrics than houses. It should go without saying, too, that his work glorifies the lives of working class Americans perhaps better than any other artist’s does–what better space to honor that vision than a simple home? Still, the collection might be even slightly more accessible if there were some signage by the road.

Eileen spends most of her time at the University working at the arts center, so when I visited on a Friday in November, a student assistant, Alana, worked with me. She has been working at the collection for four years, and is now in the middle of getting her Masters degree in social work from Monmouth. She seemed excited that I was studying to be an archivist, but hadn’t decided to go that route herself, although she loves working with the Springsteen collection; for one, Monmouth doesn’t offer a library or archives program.

Unfortunately, the collection barely has an online presence. The archive’s site has inventories of the collection by format, but no functioning OPAC (it remains un-integrated into the University library’s OPAC). Alana uses an excel spreadsheet to manage the archive’s inventory. For now, however, the collection is small enough that with some assistance, it’s not too difficult to assess and retrieve items of interest. When I requested to browse some of the ‘zines, Alana seemed unsurprised, and brought down a few boxes that she knew were popular. I mentioned that I was looking for a ‘zine a friend had made, and she worked with me in the inventory to find it, although there were no author names associated with ‘zine titles. My friend’s ‘zine (probably) wasn’t there–I should mention that almost all of the material in the collection has been donated.

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While there are a myriad of examples I could make of what professional archivists would do differently in the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, there’s a whole lot that they get right. Would a University library even be the appropriate space to house the fan collections of the man who sings, “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby/than we ever learned in school”? Indeed, professionals are trained to provide better far better access to materials like these, and I am dreaming of the day that the collection gets a detailed online catalog, but absorption into a more sterile academic environment would likely mean losing the comfortable feeling of the archive house. It was a pleasure to talk to Eileen and Alana (Alana and I talked a lot, actually), and our feeling of camradarie was facilitated by the homey environment. It’s harder to just hang out with librarians in a library or archive, not in the least because of . In this sense, I think Alana and Eileen have beaten the burnout blues that plague a lot of University librarians. I felt that I could walk away knowing that the archive was conceived of and run with the rabid love of fans–this seems especially important given Springsteen’s powerful interpretations of alienated work in America.

When it was time to close up, Alana gave me a ride back to the train station (the archive house is located about 2 miles from the Long Branch New Jersey Transit stop on the Shoreline route). I had suggested that I could walk, but she seemed to expect that she would drive me, without us talking about it first. She said she frequently drove visitors to and from the collection. We drove past her old dorms on the way and she pointed them out–brick and square and overlooking the Jersey shore, but we were listening to pop radio in her car, and not The Boss. She assured me that she did indeed love Bruce, but, you know, some of her friends were bigger fans.

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