The Electric Archive

At some point in college, I discovered the parts of the libraries where the fun stuff was kept. In the sort of space where you would end up after getting lost, often beyond the spread of daylight, magazines were bound and packed on shelves that ran back to the 19th century. Everything was there: the articles, the ads, the art, all unrevised by time. In the old Vanity Fair, you could find uncollected Dorothy Parker reviews, good and bad all filed together. In a yellowing New Republic, you might read the juvenilia of, say, Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg. You could seek “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” as it first ran in the New Yorker (coiled modestly around some spot art of dogs) or “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” as it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (a smiling Dr. Spock on the cover, black-and-white photos across the spreads). In the classroom, I had learned to think of writing as canonic, penned by giants. In the archive, I was free to realize that the best of it was born of more human constraints: deadlines, passing news prompts, and the need to fill columns beside the latest vacuum cleaner ad. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2016-09-12 00:00:00 UTC ]

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