Undergrad Research: A Trip to the Archives in NYC, Part 2

Note: this is the second of two installments about David's archival research trip. The first can be found here.I landed at La Guardia, took a taxi to the apartment building on W 71^st street, unloaded my bags, and finally sat down in New York City, contemplating everything I would see over the next few days. The Berg Collection wouldn’t open until Tuesday—it was Saturday when I flew in—so I had two full days of sight-seeing available to me and I took advantage of it. I visited Times Square, the Empire State Building, Liberty Island, Ellis Island, NYU campus and Washington Square Park, Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station, the site of the World Trade center, The Strand, and up, down, and around Central Park on a tour-bus. By mid-week, I was used to catching the subway and disembarking near Bryant Park, a brief walk away from the ice skating rink and, most importantly, the Stephen A. Schwarzmann building, the iconic section of the New York Public Library. After two full days of exploring Manhattan from top to bottom, I was ready to begin the research that brought me to New York in the first place.There is always a difference between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. I expected the Berg reading room to be an unsettlingly quiet room, observed by predatory librarians making sure that the timid, silent researchers at the tables didn’t destroy the priceless artifacts in their hands. But in reality, the room’s acoustics reminded me of the sixth floor of the PCL where occasional conversations and the jostle of books and pencils on the desks aren’t followed by an agitated, “Shh!” It was also staffed with helpful, caring, and most importantly, smiling, librarians ready to assist me however they could.The Kerouac archives are, at first glance, daunting: they consist of 90 boxes of materials, as well as several oversized materials. The sports materials—real and fantastical—reside in 4 of those boxes. I figured I could finish a box a day, even having enough time to eat lunch and take an extended trip around Manhattan. What I didn’t expect was that I’d only make it through box 59—the first box that contains Kerouac’s sports diaries of 1936 and 1938, as well as his horse-racing newspapers and personal baseball statistics and analyses of his Pawtucketville teams—after two and a half days of work. When I started to read his sports diaries I became absorbed in his day-to-day accounts of sports events across the nation, including the wins and losses of baseball teams and horse races, as well as his detailed predictions for future events. He was dedicated to reporting the outcome of every game or race he encountered.Boxes 60-62, which contain the fantasy baseball materials, weren’t as time-consuming as 59. I had plenty of time to examine the contents, including fantasy baseball newspapers, cards, statistics, letters, and diagrams for how to play the game. If you can imagine a 14 to 16-year-old Kerouac, sitting in his bedroom, developing his own sports newspapers and stories, some in pencil and others on a typewriter, you also have to imagine a much older Kerouac—in college, on the road, and eventually bloated and worn-down by excessive drinking in the early 60s—keeping a systematic record of his fantasy baseball league, teams, and players, some with fleshed-out backstories.Whatever I thought sports meant to Kerouac before this trip was an underestimation. He lived and breathed sports. Before he ever had dreams of becoming a novelist, Kerouac had dreams of becoming a star athlete and a journalist. What appears to be an amusing anecdote about a football scholarship to Columbia University becomes the realization of a young Kerouac wanting to excel on the field and become a sensation. Before becoming part of the nomadic Beat gang of writers and artists in the 1940s and 1950s, Kerouac was part of the Lowell gang in the 1930s, playing baseball, running track behind the textile mills, jotting down the statistics of his friends’ batting averages, hits, and runs in a steno notebook.It was thrilling to sit there amongst all of these materials and realize that I loved every minute of it. While looking at his sports diaries, I had to remind myself a few times that this was it. I wasn’t reading about these diaries; I was reading these diaries.My subway ride back to the apartment gave me time to think about the future and what all of this meant to me beyond the thesis. Not only had I collected materials that would enrich my thesis, I had also gotten a brief taste of scholarly research. I wanted even more meals in the future.The future still looks cloudy to me past the month of May when I graduate. I still don’t know which graduate school I will attend, or if I will be attending graduate school at all. My future has never felt so uncertain. But knowing how accomplished I felt after returning home to Austin after this trip, and knowing how much fun I had working with these primary sources and one-of-a-kind artifacts, I know that I can do this for the rest of my life without regret. I learned that I love research, and I believe research is quite fond of me, too.

Undergrad Research: A Trip to the Archives in NYC

Note: this is the first of two installments about David's archival research trip. The second will be published tomorrow.This January I was fortunate enough to take a trip to New York City and conduct research at the New York Public Library for my honors thesis, “Making the Team: The Real and Fantastical Sporting Life of Jack Kerouac.”Before the trip was even conceivable, though, I was in the midst of applying to graduate schools for the fall 2012 term. Graduate school has been an aspiration of mine since high school, and now, nearly five years later, I was finally applying and taking my first steps into a new tier of my academic career.It was hard to convey to other people how terrified I felt in approaching such a critical moment in my life. As I completed each application, I grew anxious about submitting them. This was the first time that I was really taking a stand for myself and my future. Graduate school was part of the plan, but that plan was never set in stone. It was only what I had imagined for myself thus far. For the first time, I started to imagine different paths for my future that didn’t involve graduate school.This isn’t a great mindset to have if you want your applications to express confidence, but these were the thoughts that ran through my head. As each application was submitted—four in total—it was as if my confidence in my plan was being cut short by every click of the “Submit Now” button. By the end, I was quite drained.Returning to my thesis research, last semester I came across a short book written by Isaac Gewirtz, the curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, titled, Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats. The book was a basic introduction to Jack Kerouac’s fantasy sports materials housed in the Berg archives, which detailed Kerouac’s obsessive interest in creating horse-racing newssheets as an adolescent and maintaining his own fantasy baseball game for most of his life. I had only read about these interests briefly in his biographies and a few of his novels, but I had no idea how extensive they were in reality. The book spurred my hope to go to New York City and see Kerouac’s fantasy sports materials in person.With the assistance of a generous COLA Honors financial award, I made plans to stay a week in Manhattan in mid-January and comb through the Berg Collection. It was to be my first taste of hands-on archival research. I was excited and anxious weeks before the trip, quite similar to my feelings when I submitted my graduate school applications. I would pore over the Kerouac finding aid on the Berg website, examining every box’s contents, reading every description, and thinking endlessly about how each item could support my thesis.When the day finally came to fly out of Houston’s Hobby Airport, I wasn’t only worried about my thesis; I was worried about my future. If I can’t make it a few days in this archive, come back with the necessary information, survive a new city, how am I going to cut it in graduate school? I was mentally attacking myself and preparing myself for failure. I told myself, “You’re not going for fun, you’re going for work.” I imagined I had to be rigid and stern in my demeanor, firmly dedicated to being a “scholar,” or what my conception of a scholar was supposed to be. Never have I had the impression, of course, that the American Studies faculty here at UT are unemotional, stone-faced academics. Quite the contrary, they are some of the most engaging, talkative, intelligent and cool—yes, cool—people that I’ve ever encountered. So, how I came to believe that a scholar should be a stern stick-in-the-mud is beyond me, but that’s what I felt I had to be to make it through this experience.It wasn’t until my plane descended into New York in the early evening—when I caught my first glimpse of the thousands of yellow-orange lights sparkling in the dark across the expansive city, the Brooklyn Bridge gently arching across the quiet flow of the water below, and the Empire State Building merely the size of a snow-globe sized replica of itself—that I realized I was about to land in one of the biggest cultural metropolises in the country and the world. Whatever feelings I had about not having fun and being a righteous fuddy-duddy were gone. I was in NEW YORK CITY.

Grad Research: Bombs and Belvederes

Last week, I introduced a collaborative project that I've been working on for the past few years, Mystery Spot Books. This week, I submit another bit of writing from our first book, Mystery Spot Vol. 1, on buried cars in Tulsa and hydrogen bombs hiding in plain sight in New Mexico.Sandia Base was a field test area for nuclear weapons run by the U.S. government that operated from 1946 until 1971. The former test site lies southeast of Albuquerque amidst a seemingly unbroken expanse of dry mesas and their tributaries of dusty roads. In May of 1957, at what is now called the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site, a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb fell through the closed bay doors of a plane that was approaching Kirtland Air Force Base to the south. The plutonium pits were safely stored on the plane, but radioactive pieces of the bomb were scattered across the mesas. In 1996, the Center for Land Use Interpretation placed a descriptive marker at the site to commemorate the incident. The marker is a wooden post that stands in the middle of a field and holds a plaque describing the 1957 event. The Air Force cleaned up the site in secret, but if you visit the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site today, you can still find radioactive pieces of the hydrogen bomb hiding in the sagebrush.Six hundred and fifty miles east of the Sandia Base, also in 1957, the city of Tulsa buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere in an underground bunker designed to withstand nuclear fallout. The car was a time capsule, slated to be unearthed during Oklahoma’s centennial celebration in 2007. The concrete enclosure was intended to protect the car from decay, but a defect in the design of the bunker allowed water to seep in over the years and severely damage the Belvedere. A second car, a Plymouth Prowler, was placed in an above ground vault in 1998 and will be sealed there until 2048. If you visit Tulsa in 2048, you might see a well-preserved 1998 Plymouth Prowler emerge from its sepulcher, or perhaps a design flaw will allow time to do its work on this time capsule as well.Some things get buried so no one can find them; some things get buried so everyone remembers them. But things don’t always stay buried. What you find if you visit the Broken Arrow site or Tulsa, Oklahoma, is more than the radioactive scraps of a destroyed bomb or a bizarre representation of local pride. One way or another, things come to the surface, and what is revealed when they do is not simply the contradiction between what we hide and what we honor, but the fact that the latter is often a mask for the former.

Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis on Unplugging at Flow

Dr. Randy Lewis has a new piece over at Flow that questions why it is so difficult to imagine unplugging from the constant buzz of electronics that characterizes modern life:

Yet… are we not curious about how it would feel to experience the “great unplugging”? Would we relish the ensuing silence as we restore the old ways of communicating and connecting with one another? Or would we lapse into a languorous funk without Google and HBO, Avatar and Annoying Orange? Would we feel permanently stuck in the isolation tank of our own boredom, marooned with the hideousness of our own organic thoughts? Would we start sketching the “Real Housewives” on the walls of our condos in crayon, breathlessly narrating their erotic adventures like an ancient bards singing the tale Odysseus and the sirens? Would we pine for our iPhones, laptops, and flatscreen TVs like postmodern amputees cursing the loss of our cyborg appendages? Would we grieve for our machines?Probably. But what fascinates me is how loathe we are to even imagine this scenario. We are increasingly unwilling to contemplate the absence of the various screens that convey so much of our entertainment, sociality, and labor. Like Francis Fukuyama’s Cold War “End of History” argument in which capitalism’s apparent triumph over socialism foreclosed any discussion of alternatives, the new media juggernaut is so powerful that it has blotted out our ability to imagine anything else. We are all hopeless screenagers now.

I'm reminded here of a neuroscience experiment described at io9 last October:

A group of researchers from Germany and the UK designed a fairly complex psychological test to determine how people planned for negative events in the future. First, they asked the about the likelihood of 80 different disturbing events happening, such as contracting a fatal disease or being attacked. After they'd recorded people's responses, researchers told each subject the actual, statistical likelihood of such events happening. In some cases, people had overestimated the likelihood and in some cases they'd underestimated it.Then, after some time had passed, the researchers asked subjects again about the likelihood of these events happening to them. Interestingly, they found that people had a much harder time adjusting their expectations if the real-world statistical likelihood was higher than what they had first guessed. They had little trouble adjusting expectations for a more favorable outcome. It was as if people were selectively remembering the likelihoods of future events — forgetting the bad odds but not the good ones.

What does this mean? io9 sums it up nicely:

Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that's why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them.

I think there are lessons to be drawn from these findings with respect to our reliance on technology, too. Perhaps our inability to imagine a world without these [im]material comforts, even though many of us actually lived in that world, is a chemical intervention to protect us. Because we are so individually and socially embedded in technology, maybe imagining the scenario of loss that Randy wonders about is too much for our grey matter to handle.Read the piece in its entirety here.