I spent much of yesterday in the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, reading through the microfilm archive of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the predecessor of today’s Advocate, the sole remaining daily outlet here.  I’m doing this at the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, wherein I have not set foot since high school, because they have the only complete set of the paper’s microfilms.  The LSU Library has weirdly spotty holdings, and is completely missing the first year that I need to read.  Which is just bizarre.  That said, it’s been cool, if time-consuming and mildly nausea-inducing, going back through these papers and watching history unfold.  But I’m really wishing there were a better way to get the stuff I’m looking for.  And so I’ve got this running dialogue in my head:

– Do I really need to read the entire paper, for the whole year? 

No.  There’s a particular set of stories that I’m trying to track. 

– Couldn’t I do that electronically, by, like, figuring out what days the stories I’m tracking appeared, and then just hop on the microfilm to get the stories themselves? 

No.  The Advocate’s own electronic archive only dates from 1995.  And Lexis-Nexis, which happily does index the Advocate, dates all the way back to 1994. 

– What year does the story you’re trying to track start?

1953.

– So, you’re, like, loading up the machine with the film of Jan. 1- Jan. 20, 1953, and paging through the entire thing, looking for relevant headlines?

Yep.

– How long is that taking?

About an hour per month.

– How many years do you want to cover?

Twenty.

– Twenty?

Not wall-to-wall.  But the stories I’m looking at extend at least over that period of time.

– Isn’t there a better way of doing this?

…

That’s where I pretty much stall out, every time through this little dialogue.  And I stop, and I search around for another index that might help me, and I grind my teeth and go back to the microfilm.

The good news is that there’s a dissertation out there that covers much of what I’m interested in, and that will probably help me narrow down the post-1953 work I need to do.  The bad news is that the dissertation has been checked out, and isn’t due back for another three days, assuming it comes in on time.

Of course, it’s also available on microfilm.

I finally get it—why researchers develop archive fever.  I spent part of yesterday afternoon in the special collections of the LSU Libraries, and am completely entranced.  Not only was the staff immediately and overwhelmingly helpful (making phone calls on my behalf when part of what I wanted to see wasn’t, in fact, available, and granting me immediate access to their collections without the personal background check required in order to obtain borrowing privileges at the main university library), but I was able to sit down and start paging through some absolutely fascinating manuscript material.  And I’ve already stumbled upon something I wasn’t really looking for, or that I didn’t know that I was looking for, but that’s absolutely perfect for what I need.

Yes, cryptic.  The new project, incorporating some of this archival material, will with any luck be coming to a screen near you early in March.  Assuming the rest of the research goes as swimmingly, and that I don’t get totally lost in the archive.

Sabbaticals are good.  But, like, really no-kidding good.  I spent the early part of yesterday in my pajamas, in front of the computer, working on the new project.  And then I pulled myself together that afternoon and went grocery shopping, laying in all of the basic supplies such that I don’t have to leave the house if I don’t want to.  Cooked a simple but good dinner last night.  Hung out and chatted with R.  Did some reading, and went to sleep.

And I get to do it again today.  Without the grocery shopping.

My library access here is still in process, but once it’s available, I’m going to go spend a couple of days digging through various special collections.  And then there will be more days in my pajamas, in front of the computer.

I’m writing.  I’m eating well.  I’m exercising.

This, I think, is what balance feels like.  It’s only a shame that it takes a sabbatical in order to find it.

What follows is lengthy, a draft of the ElectraPress proposal that I was circulating before my dean decided that he loved the electronic part and hated the cooperative/open source/open access parts, which were of course the parts that were most important to me.  The proposal (like the Cinema Journal note I linked to last week) is mostly manifesto, long on why something like ElectraPress is needed, and seriously short on the particulars of how to go forward.  But I’ve been in touch with several folks over the last few days, including John Holbo, and it’s clear that going forward is what needs to happen.  So I’m going to cross-post this here and at ElectraPress; I’d love any feedback, ideas, brainstorming, and above all, participation that you out there might care to provide.

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For some months, I’ve had a project on hold, one that I wish I’d had the time, the energy, the funding, and the general wherewithal to push forward much sooner than I have, but… haven’t.  My leave is now coming up, just around the corner, and I’m hoping to come back to this plan, to make it some kind of actuality.  I’ve been spurred into revisiting this plan today by a couple of John Holbo’s posts at the Valve, in which he first clarifies some of the positions that he took in the recent Slate article, “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs” and then goes on to ponder what a possible future for the academic blog—one in which it is taken seriously as a mode of scholarly publishing—might look like.

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I just remembered, like just this second, that at some point in the last few days I had a dream in which I was bartering with someone, and had given her something that she valued sufficiently to offer to compensate me by indexing 100 pages of my book.

And I was completely depressed when I realized it was a dream.

I’ve nearly gotten through the copy-edited manuscript, which has been a pretty overwhelming and, at moments, frustrating task.  I’ve got six small queries yet to finish dealing with, three of which have to do with whether an emphasis appeared in the original text or if I added it when I quoted, and one of which similarly has to do with the use of an ellipsis in the original text.  All of this running-down of sources that I, in many cases, haven’t looked at in five years has produced a kind of paradoxical reaction in me:  on the one hand, I’m extraordinarily grateful for the web, and particularly for Google Print and for Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, each of which has allowed me to see several original texts without having to go track the physical copies down in the library.  This seems to me the best of what these services can do:  they’ve allowed me to check the page numbers on citations, to check weird wording in quotes, and to find the pagination for articles in volumes.

But at one and the same time, I’m immensely frustrated by the texts that I can’t get ahold of this way.  Some of them are in my personal library—but I can’t get into the office until later this morning, and would like to be able to access that information now, because once I get into the office I’m going to have office-type crises to deal with.  Most of the texts that I don’t own are in the library, but my relationship to the idea of “going to the library” has dramatically changed in the age of the web; physically walking across campus to that building over there requires a kind of time-investment that I can’t make right now, and that seems particularly problematic when all I need to chase down are three references.

Perhaps this is merely laziness speaking, but in an age when I can access almost any information via this magic box on my desk, those bits I can’t get at rankle all the more.  I’ll always want to do my primary reading of print copies—at least until there’s been another major change in the technology, of course—but for this kind of reference-consultation, I want everything available, and now.

The lecture that I’m set to give tomorrow, which I’m doing some heavy-duty work on this morning, is part of a series of lectures, classes, and screenings collectively titled “The New Documentary Impulse.” Much of this series, as you might expect, has to do with recent work in politically focused documentary film and video, but there are a number of lectures exploring other manifestations of the documentary impulse as well.

As you might guess, I’m focusing on the blog, and particularly the ways that the blog—particularly, though not exclusively, the personal blog—contructs a diachronic narrative archive of the self, a sort of first-person database documentary, in which the “character” of the self is constructed gradually, over time.

This talk is aimed at a pretty generalist, non-blogging audience, and so might not be terrifically revolutionary in its materials or its implications, but there are a couple of claims that I’m making that I think are worth pondering at greater length, in a deeper fashion.  I’m not going to attempt to expand on that treatment much right now, but I do want at least to rehearse the claims here before unloading them in the lecture.

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I got nothing more to say but this.  It seems to be coming a few months later than I expected, but it’s on the internets, so it must be real.  Right?

Today begins the second half of my summer.  I’d say that it began yesterday, except that that would mean that I’ve already missed a day of the second half, and I’m already in something of a panic this morning about the fact that the summer is already half over, and that significant chunks of the second half are going to need to be taken up with preparations for the fall semester.  Which leaves less than half of my summer to get some things done.

(And not to mention, of course, that I’ve got not one but two major trips still ahead of me this summer, which leaves even less time.  I will not hyperventilate.)

In any case, I’m about to hit the freeway, driving into the city for my first day at the internship of sorts that I’ve arranged with these folks.  By working with them, I’m hoping to get my multimedia skills updated to twenty-first century standards (as my last serious multimedia work ended last century) and to figure out what I need to know about structuring, designing, and producing a substantive digital narrative project.  My goal for what remains of this summer (…inhale…exhale…inhale…) is to sketch out the contours of my project, and to figure out what of it can be accomplished during the fall, such that I begin my spring semester leave ready to roll.

Speaking of rolling, the 10 awaits.  Happy second half, all.