lessons from day one at the Marbach archive
– The thing that you are looking for may not actually be there but it is more important to understand why is it that it is not there. What do you do with the things you find there?
– The archive is a curated experience. What are the relations between the things you find and the thing you don’t?
– trace the archival networks and understand why some gaps remain. Think of the incommensurable. Think from the gaps.
I am preparing for the archive visit that starts tomorrow and found myself trawling through (what else?) the immense data of JStor to look for stuff on Carl Weissner. And out of nowhere the fabulous concrete poetry journal came to the screen. Two poems that caught my eye:
more adventures… starting tomorrow.
links updated: 06.12.2021
I have long wondered the fate of this blog. This website started as a post-midnight idea one winter night in Kreuzberg where I lived between 2015-2018. As the years have progressed, I have undertaken quite a few foiled ideas on this blog. Yesterday, as I started reading on a particular archive, something of a clarity brick fell upon my post-midnight brain. This is about the future of this blog.
The essential use of this blog has always been to aid some form of archiving; hence being named, archivbox. The name came from this cardbox I saw on the streets of Kreuzberg one day when I was taking a walk. The name seemed right for something that is a relic of internet culture: the blog. Now that I am writing and reading things about archives of Indian poetry and about postcolonial literature in general, I am curious about blogging as a research phenomenon. Think of a reaction channel but somewhat more reflexive and definitely more background. With the possibilities of embedding and linking seemingly disparate and farfetched things together, a blog is the research journal we need to go about our business of thinking about things.
Given its the desultory existence, this blog, however has had no raison d’être so far. I find the thought of writing a private journal on the internet a little too voyeuristic if not downright self-centred. In the coming posts, this lack of purpose will be willed into something more productive in a more academic sense. The blog as a journal of a person is too boring. The blog as a roll-call of publication even more so. This is something else. This is about producing more content to make myself read and process more things. Notes, connections, archives, etc, etc.
Other than the usual tabs (About, Current), you can find all my posts about my objects of research in the links below: