Changing Gears

The last time I wrote about my writing process, it was to tell you that I was stuck in the middle of painful restructuring. I have now finished that stage and am on to the final rewrite of my novel. Hallelujah! Followed by, Oh sh*t! as I realize how many weeks since the restructure have already disappeared in the rearview. The writing was to be the no-worries piece of this project because putting words on the page has always come easy to me.

My problem is that I always think I’ve got more time than I actually do. I tend to overschedule until I burn out and then I go into a sort of vegetative state to recover. If my overscheduling included getting tons of writing done, I could work with that. But I de-prioritize my creative work, thinking I can “fit it in” sometime. I focus on seeing family and friends, cooking, working, and at least for this past half year or so, taking full advantage of my open schedule to spend lots of time with horses. That is pretty spectacular and complaining would not be gentlemanlike. All the same this is not getting me any closer to my goal: to dedicate myself to writing. My brain is stuck in “Vacation” gear. What I need is several shifts up and clearly labeled “Writing is Actually Your Job Now, Go Do It.”*

20160701-DSC_0394Author Elizabeth Gilbert gave a TED Talk on this topic that sums the issue up pretty well. Whatever one’s particular problem is–lack of motivation or inspiration, or feeling overwhelmed–ultimately there is only one solution, and that is showing up to work. Saying you will solve the problem another day means the problem will not get solved. Not settling your hands onto the keyboard means no inspiration can speak through them. Any step you can make towards managing a seemingly un-manageable project can only be made by working on it, not by worrying about it. If you don’t show up for the work, the work does not get done. If you do show up for the work–well, some days you end up writing 5,000 words when you sat down to write 500. Mostly not. But those are the days that redeem the rest.

Changing gears is, like most actions in life, something that simply must be done. There’s no game plan for it. It’s not a multi-step process. It’s deciding to do it and just doing it. The only way I will sit down and show up for work every day is by sitting down and showing up for work every day.

As I write this, in itself a procrastination from the novel which is open in Scrivener a simple click away, it occurs to me I can decide to do it right now. I was tempted to pick September as a start point, only a few days away, but this is the failed “someday” approach. I wrote today and felt the rust flake off the gears as they started to turn.

I’m shifting up tomorrow.

 

  • Of course, I’m pretty good at getting writing done (or anything else, for that matter) when someone else is the boss. Getting paid sure helps, too.

Smoked Salmon, Potato, and Dill Tart

20160508-DSC_0264It is hot outside. Like, so hot. I am barely tossing together salads these days, let alone turning my oven to 450 for a nice golden tart crust. However, looking through photos recently, I realized I never did anything with the ones I took of a pretty decent smoked salmon tart I made for Mother’s Day this spring. Consider this a #latergram.

20160508-DSC_0256If you have a thoroughly air-conditioned kitchen, this would be an excellent dish to make ahead and have for cold summer lunches, or serve with mixed greens and chilled rosé for a perfect summer dinner.

For the base of my recipe, I used this one from the BBC. I liked two things about it. (1) It called for a quite easy custard mix of egg and cream, no separate heating or complicated multi-step whisking, and (2) it added thin slices of potato to the usual combo of salmon and dill. Potatoes are such a natural pairing with both dill and cream bases, and I felt they would provide a nice textural dimension in a tart that would otherwise melt in your mouth.

salmon tart with dill potatoesSteam the potatoes rather than boil them as the BBC suggests–it takes less time overall, and it’s easier to keep the potato slices intact with the gentler cooking method.

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I threw in much more dill than strictly called for, and used lemon instead of lime as that’s what I had around. Otherwise I stuck close to the recipe in an attempt to overcome my naturally relaxed approach to cooking–custard-filled pastry does not take kindly to anarchy.

This was a successful smoked salmon tart. Lovely, if not perfect: well-set custard, not too rich but rich enough to complement the fish and potatoes, and against which the dill and lemon popped.

(The shortcrust was gorgeous, if I do say so myself. Sparing you the photos because really, how many pictures of crust can a person look at in his lifetime, but I did a much better job with this one than my delicious Thomas Keller failure of recent memory.)

Friday Fave: Kate McKinnon

I wasn’t originally planning on seeing the new Ghostbusters, but when a friend wanted to get together one afternoon this was the only thing that appealed to both of us–everything else was too political or too heavy, and the films I really wanted to see weren’t out at the time. I was definitely looking forward to seeing something that pissed off Milo Yiannopoulos so badly; that alone made it worth it to me. I had witnessed his campaign of racist and misogynist abuse of Leslie Jones on Twitter (if witnessed is the word? I was online at the time and following some of the threads, but I had decided several months before not to follow Yiannopoulos himself), as well as the general whining about remaking an action film with all female leads, which also made me want to see it. All that said, I have not found previous Melissa McCarthy films especially entertaining, and was not expecting this one to be either, even if it did have Kristin Wiig in it.

Rarely am I so happy to be wrong. Leslie Jones was awesome, as was–somewhat unexpectedly–Chris Hemsworth. I had already settled on him as definitely the most talented of the Hemsworth brothers by miles (possibly the only talented one, at that), going by what I had seen him in previously. The cameos by the original cast members were cleverly and seamlessly worked in. I was also pleased to find that they used the original Ray Parker Jr. recording of the theme tune throughout, in addition to the new and distinctly worse version.

My favourite part of the film, though, was Kate McKinnon. I haven’t liked a performance in a comedy film so much since Emma Stone in Easy A (which I only started watching because I didn’t know what it was–literary snob that I am, I had been studiously avoiding it). Aside from the occasional Stefan sketch or “commercial”, I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since Amy Poehler and Tina Fey left, so I only knew who she was by process of elimination. That scene where Holtzmann starts dancing to “The Rhythm of the Night”, though? I’ve never felt the slightest doubt about my identity as heterosexual woman, but that was hot. Throughout the film, she and Leslie Jones are the funniest things in it. I came home, pre-ordered the blu-ray, and started looking up old clips of SNL.

Turned out I had seen her in a couple of skits, but hadn’t noticed her because the skits as a whole are so funny. (If you didn’t see The Day Beyonce Turned Black when it came out, you can find it here, and it’s hilarious.) She has a well-earned reputation for impressions–her versions of Justin Bieber and CNN’s Kate Bolduan are brilliant. My favourite CNN skits are almost always the ones where the cast themselves can’t keep from cracking up, and she also seems to have a knack for giving her co-stars fits of the giggles, as she does in this skit about alien abductions. She also has a cat named Nino, and talks about him probably as much as I do about my animals, so I’m sold.

And she’s Holtzmann, who is all kinds of awesome. If you haven’t seen Ghostbusters, go check it out, it’s well worth it.

Friday Fave: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

This is one of those albums for which I’ve started avoiding looking at the year it was released, because it makes me feel old. (It turns 22 this year. Probably gets played on those oldies stations that I also avoid listening to because a friend told me a few years ago that Blind Melon’s “No Rain” is officially an oldie now and how can that be &*%^$ possible?)

I discovered the single “Possession” on a flight from Atlanta to Miami when I was 15: It was on a list of maybe eight tracks the airline had compiled of rock and pop music on the in-flight “radio” station. I listened to that channel for the entire flight, sitting through the other entirely forgettable songs just to hear “Possession” maybe three times. I got the album as soon as it came out, and I have never stopped listening.

I still listen to a lot of the music I loved when I was a teenager, but most of it is still dear to me out of a sense of nostalgia: I am not the person I was when I fell in love with those songs, and in a lot of cases my taste has changed to the extent that some of it now sounds shallow and hackneyed–the lyrics capture a glimmer of how I felt at the time, but the songs aren’t strikingly inventive in any way. Fumbling towards Ecstasy is one of the exceptions. Every song on it is still as compelling to me as they were the day I brought the album home, particularly “Possession,” “Ice,” and the titular “Fumbling toward Ecstasy.”

While there’s plenty to be said about originality and inventiveness in popular music, a large part of what I’ve always valued in rock and other short-form songs is the use of lyrics–without the imagery and expression, the greater part of the artistry in rock stems from using existing melodies and rhythms in new ways. She captures something of Romanticism in its original literary sense, and a lot of the imagery she uses in her songs subverts and questions the representations of women ingrained in our culture, particularly those of Christian iconography. Most of the songs on her first four albums aren’t about love at all, and those that are are not about winning the guy but about struggling to keep one’s sense of personal identity from being subsumed by obsession, about questioning whether love and passion are the same thing, about whether overwhelming physical passion is ever a truly healthy thing.

A lot of television and film reviews these days discuss the idea of the male gaze, and how more and more directors are creating love scenes and other interactions on screen to present such exchanges from the woman’s perspective, and to appeal to the tastes of female viewers. This is something that McLachlan does in her music that few other musicians were doing at the time–she uses the female perspective in ways that weren’t often heard on popular radio stations back in 1994. Most pop love songs sung from the woman’s perspective even now are limited to celebrating a particular ideal man, questioning what a man wants from a woman, or occasionally rejecting that in favour of another man (or preferring being alone). Before Sarah McLachlan and her support of women artists via the Lilith Fair, there wasn’t a lot of pop music making it onto the charts that asked not just was this man or that man worth it, would he treat you well, but what do you really want in a lover and a partner? (Regardless of that partner’s gender.) She also cast the woman in a relationship in the role of the protector and the provider–and, in “Possession”, as the stalker. (Everyone always brings up “Every Breath You Take” as the quintessential example of a really creepy song being misunderstood as a glorious love song, but when you look at the lyrics of “Possession”, which were in fact inspired by things that two stalkers wrote to McLachlan in the early years of her career. It isn’t as airily romantic as her voice implies; the words are more evocative of paranoid delusion than they are of sane, if melodramatic, love.)

She wasn’t alone–there was Aimee Mann, the Indigo Girls, P. J. Harvey, Melissa Etheridge, Salt n’ Pepa, and a few others active at the same time–but she was a rarity, and she has used her fame to promote other women in music and music education in general. This album is still the best of McLachlan’s work and, together with its bookends Solace and Surfacing, still sounds vital and a little different from anything else around.

 

Friday Fave: Allie Brosh and Hyperbole and a Half

I discovered the blog Hyperbole and a Half quite by chance about three years ago when someone I was once in contact with on Facebook at the time happened to post a comment that Allie Brosh had updated her site for the first time in a long time. I was curious, so I clicked on the link.

I think I spent the next two hours laughing until I cried and my stomach hurt.

Brosh’s blog is like many other blogs, mostly about herself and her relatively uneventful, non-celebrity life with her boyfriend and her two dogs, but she has a genius for relating the most trivial–and sometimes the most awful–experiences in a way that is both honest and incredibly funny. (Dooce’s writing has a similar quality, but lacks the fantastic illustrations.) Brosh captures this tone even in explaining and confronting her struggle with depression, which I return to every so often, particularly when I’m having a difficult week myself. The episode I find the funniest, however, is This Is Why I’ll Never Be An Adult.  If you read nothing else on the site, read that episode. Cleaning *all the things* in a single go is an ambition I continue to nurse–I used to be able to manage it when I lived in a flat in Edinburgh, but the house in Atlanta is proving a different beast. (How do closets and cabinets get so dirty? They stay closed 95% of the time. It isn’t fair.)

There’s actually not a great deal I can say that wouldn’t be better captured by just going and reading the blog itself, so have at it. I know some of you reading this will already be familiar with it, but like Black Books, I find it bears many, many repeated viewings. It is safe for work in the sense of no nudity or much swearing, as far as I recall, but laughing may be a problem. She has one book out, containing the best of the blog and some new material; a second book, Solutions and Other Problems, is due out sometime soon, in which we are promised much new material. If the publisher can just settle on a release date.

Black Forest Gateau

A few months ago I asked my friends for suggestions about what cakes to make in the future. Most of the requests I got I tried to act on quickly, depending on the availability of ingredients and whether I possessed all the tools needed to accomplish the dish in question, but one I put off. My friend Zoe asked for a Black Forest gateau, and in Googling recipes I came across this:

Black Forest Gateau

And just stared at it for a wee while, in awe. I know this woman has a good photographer–or is herself a good photographer–to produce images of her creations, but that cake is amazing. And she apparently created it in her own kitchen, no exceptional tools or training needed. I looked at a few other recipes, and decided that nothing was going to equal that cake. I wanted to attempt it, but lacked the courage. After a few weeks’ thought, I decided to give it a try as my birthday cake, in lieu of buying one this year. (Choosing a birthday cake has always been something of a ritual for me, and something I’ve been known to spend a disproportionate amount of money on. If you’re in Atlanta, give one of Metrotainment Bakery‘s creations a try some time. Their Georgia peach pound cake with bourbon caramel sauce is insanely good.)

Some adaptation of the recipe proved necessary, as thickened cream is something that apparently exists only in Australia, and I didn’t have cake tins of the specified size. (I found a nearly brand-new set of the requisite three tins at an estate sale about 24 hours after I finished the cake. As you do.) I also did something wrong with the ganache–at first the butter wouldn’t blend properly, or I didn’t have enough chocolate; it looked greasy and unpleasant. I added a bit more chocolate and cream, which improved it greatly, but it still lacked the consistency I wanted. I haven’t had much trouble with ganache in the past, so next time I’ll use a different recipe for that element.

Ganache mishaps aside, it was actually far less difficult than I’d feared. The cakes themselves are very easy, and turned out perfectly. They didn’t seem dry to me when they came out of the oven, but after being soaked with probably more than half a cup of syrup and kirsch each, they did not turn into a soggy mess. The other steps were almost as easy as the cake, but there was a fair bit of waiting for everything to come to room temperature before assembly, so I ended up running a bit low on counter space.

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Once everything had reached the requisite temperatures, the fun part began: dousing everything in kirsch. Because the alcohol evaporated out of the syrup in cooking the cherries, I added a few tablespoons of fresh kirsch to the cakes as well; the cherry flavour certainly came through in the finished cake, but I couldn’t taste the alcohol, as you would in a rum or a whiskey cake. Whether or not this is a good thing I will leave to your discretion. (Side note–I bought a variety of preserved cherries for the project, thinking I would need all of them–tinned cherries, frozen cherries, cherry jam. I may in the future add a swirl of cherry jam to the cake before baking, but on this occasion I used only the frozen cherries, boiled in kirsh. They were Trader Joe’s dark sweet frozen cherries, and they held up beautifully after a ten-minute boil, so I recommend them.)

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My finished cake didn’t look like Thalia’s, but I don’t think I did too badly. The cream looks like it overwhelms the cake, but it actually deflated a bit when the cake was chilled and I ended up adding a bit of the excess filling when serving slices once the cake was a couple of days old. It was also huge–I couldn’t get the top of the server on until a few slices had been cut and some of the fruit eaten. Next time I am determined to get the ganache to drip prettily down the sides–I am in the process of thinking up a recipe of my own for my next attempt.

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The Friday Fave: Writing Letters

Letters

I am an only child, and when I was growing up there were only a couple of other kids my age in my neighbourhood, so I spent a great deal of time playing on my own. One of my odder games was to sit down with one of my mother’s old fountain pens and pretend I was writing letters, immensely long sermons of letters in copperplate, the way I saw people doing in the costume dramas my parents watched on Sunday nights. The only problem was I couldn’t write in cursive at that point, let alone copperplate, so I mostly just scrawled loose lines of spikes and loops over good printer paper that I probably hadn’t bothered asking permission to use. I’d like to say I was three or four years old during these escapades but I was probably old enough to know better.

When I was in second grade my teachers announced that my class would be doing a pen-pal project with another second-grade class in Burkina Faso. I was captivated. Not only would I finally get to write a real letter–not just a Christmas card to a family member–I loved the idea that something I was going to write would be sent to someone on the other side of the globe, whom I’d never met. (I had it in my head that we would each be paired off with one other student in the other class–it didn’t occur to me that the other class full of students was likely much bigger than ours, and whatever we wrote and received would be shared by all the students.) When the planned exchange fell through due to political events, I was terribly disappointed–I’d been practicing my penmanship and studying Africa on the globe for weeks. I still wanted a penpal.

I got one eventually, later the following summer, although we only managed one letter each. I remember that her name was Chrissy, but not much else–I have entirely forgotten how I made contact with her, what state she lived in, and who found her address for me, but I still have her letter.

After that, letters were the part of summer I most looked forward to. I gave up attempting to make my handwriting look like copperplate, at least for the time being, but I wrote as much as I could. One stretch of two or three weeks was spent writing tortuously long recaps of All My Children episodes to one friend spending the summer in New York, because I was certain she wasn’t able to watch it where she was. I don’t know where I got this idea. Another summer was the year of a postman in Florida assuming that I was my best friend’s “little boyfriend” because I had taken to plastering stickers all over the back of the envelopes.

I started collecting volumes of letters by my favourite writers and artists. One Christmas my mother gave me the Oxford Book of Letters, still a favourite possession, to which I started adding hand copies of letters from other volumes when I found that it didn’t include Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife. I was about sixteen, and took this as an almost personal affront, being convinced that it was the loveliest letter ever written.

I met Margaret by chance at my senior prom, and we hit it off instantly. I was due to leave for Scotland in a few months: transatlantic phone calls being both impractical and prohibitively expensive, and email being a thing but Internet access being unpredictable, letters were our only reasonable means of keeping in touch and getting to know one another better. So I started writing more letters. Lots and lots of letters.

Letter box
Some of Margaret’s letters to me

I don’t imagine they were particularly good, my imaginative life at this point being dominated by equal parts Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Matchbox 20, and Sarah McLachlan. There were tearful letters and homesick letters and plenty of angst about boys, in between being breathlessly enchanted by living in such close proximity to the North Sea and plenty of Mediaeval ruins. There were also, later, drunken letters, which must have been dreadful to read. Sometimes I still want to go back and read these; the rest of the time I think it’s much better for my present and future state of mind that I never do. I’d probably die of embarrassment.

I lost a great part of my will to write at the end of 2001, so addled by anemia that I usually lacked the energy to concentrate. I started relying on email and phone calls more, and lost the discipline to make it to the post office when I did manage to finish a real letter. I made sporadic attempts and recovering my old drive to write letters over the next several years, but it didn’t come back properly, not like it was.

Writing Desk 1

After my mother died I lost most of my interest in writing any sort of personal document at all; whatever inspiration I had went into fiction, where I didn’t have to think about my actual situation and surroundings. I still haven’t resumed my journal, but a couple of months ago my itch write letters came back with a vengeance. I took possession of my parents’ old escritoire–it had been used for storing excess stationery and dried-up pens for most of my life–and all the good writing paper my mother collected but never used, and returned it to the purpose it was designed for. The hutch is still home to some of my mother’s favourite china, but the desk is all mine now, one place to keep my pens, journals, and letter paper and nothing else. It is the nicest place I’ve ever had dedicated solely to writing, and has done a great deal to re-ignite the joy I once found in focusing on what to say to another person.

We are in danger of losing letters as an art form, but I don’t think the rise of email and social media is the culprit. It started to decline at the same time that reading challenging novels and poetry for enjoyment did, which occurred long before we all got access to the Internet. Letters are so much more than a means of transmitting information; for the writer, they can be exercises in introspection, a means of illuminating how we feel about an event or another person, for ourselves as much as for our correspondent; for the reader, they capture something of the writer’s spirit that can’t be communicated over the telephone.

They are also invaluable documents of the past, both in the sense of our shared cultural and national histories and our own personal and family histories. Even the most trivial of comments shed light on the personalities that wrote them. In going through my family’s collection of photos and letters, I found a postcard that my grandfather wrote to his mother when he was away on a scouting trip, aged perhaps 13 or 14, about a century ago now. I never got the chance to know my grandfather well, and fragments like this are invaluable to me.

There’s a great trend these days for devoting all one’s disposable income and time to experiences rather than things, but it bothers me that along with the laudable impulse to be less materialistic we’re forgetting all sense of permanence. One tenet of the anti-immigration argument is that a high number of immigrants inexorably and irretrievably changes our culture (as though time and innovations in technology don’t alter anything). We inexorably and irretrievably lose our culture and our past because we don’t read enough of it, not just recent commentary on previous centuries but the letters and records that have survived. One of the Internet’s greatest blessings is how easy it has made it for us to rediscover and access those documents. Letters are one of our richest resources for learning about where we came for and growing as individuals, and I still continue to hope that it never quite goes out of style. So write a letter. Write to your family the next time you go out of town, in addition to the necessary emails that you’re alive and well. Write to loved ones who live out of state or across the country. If you are so moved, you can take part in awesome projects like this and write to random strangers. Also, there’s nothing quite like finding a handwritten letter in the post, amongst all the sales catalogues and bills.

 

I’ve run out of words…

Woke up this morning to news of another mass shooting. I hate that we have become so accustomed to these incidents that the news really didn’t take over the media until it became known that this is the worst mass shooting in U.S. history–again. Thinking of all those who now have to struggle with the loss of their loved ones.

Updated 6/14/2016

Fortunately Lin-Manuel Miranda did not run out of words, and I hope he never will. If you didn’t see the Tonys on Sunday night, his first acceptance speech was a sonnet to his wife and son and to the victims of the Orlando shooting:

“My wife’s the reason anything gets done
She nudges me towards promise by degrees
She is a perfect symphony of one
Our son is her most beautiful reprise.
We chase the melodies that seem to find us
Until they’re finished songs and start to play
When senseless acts of tragedy remind us
That nothing here is promised, not one day.
This show is proof that history remembers
We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;
We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.
I sing Vanessa’s symphony, Eliza tells her story
Now fill the world with music, love and pride.”
If you are so inclined, you can watch the live reading here.
I am done with moments of silence. If anything is to change, we need more noise, enough to make the NRA and other gun rights fetishists take notice instead of pivoting the conversation. If you wish to write to or call your representatives and senators in Congress, you can find contact details and a form letter here. I don’t think gun ownership needs to be prohibited to prevent the absurdly high incidences of accidental shootings by children and massacres like this–we just need better gun laws. The second amendment is quite specific in its wording–“well-regulated.” Nowhere does it say that everyone in the U.S. can and should have as large and sophisticated a personal arsenal as they can afford.

Happy Birthday, Federico García Lorca

Federico Garcia Lorca signatureOne of the writers who made the deepest impression on me growing up was not a novelist, but a playwright and poet. At the point in my education when I was actually good enough at Spanish to sometimes think in it, and could read it with some facility, I fell in love with Federico García Lorca. His poems (especially in Spanish) had a rhythm and a power to them that transmitted much more than the words on their own. In this way he reminds me of Dylan Thomas, who frequently sublimated syntax and vocabulary to the pure sound of language.

   But above all I sing a common thought
that joins us in the dark and golden hours.
The light that blinds our eyes is not art.
Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

May fingerprints of blood on gold
streak the heart of eternal Catalunya.
May stars like falconless fists shine on you,
while your painting and your life break into flower

– Federico García Lorca, “Ode to Salvador Dalí”, trans. Christopher Maurer et al. 

The piece I learned almost exclusively because of how it felt to say it aloud in Spanish was Lorca’s famous elegy for a bullfighter, “Llanto por [Lament for] Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”. It draws heavily on musical forms–Lorca’s first area of study in the arts. Below is a recording of a gentleman who vaguely resembles Sean Connery reading it aloud; even if you don’t understand Spanish, it really sounds gorgeous. Leave it on in the background while you go look at Facebook for a few minutes, then check back.

I didn’t know anything about Lorca when I fell in love with his writing. (I generally don’t research authors–I figure I learn everything I need to know about them through their writing, unless I’m actually studying them.) But he was an interesting man in interesting times. He wrote in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. The country was heading towards civil war. He was passionately involved with other men, had an unrequited love for and close friendship with Salvador Dalí, studied in Spain as well as at Columbia, was dedicated to bringing art to the underserved.

He was assassinated when he was only 38 years old.

But his sleep now is unending.
Now mosses and grass
pry open with practiced fingers
the flower of his skull.
And his blood now courses singing,
sings through salt marshes and meadows…

Federico Garía Lorca, “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”, trans. Alan Trueblood

The Friday Fave: The Internet Archive

Internet Archive

When I was about ten a friend of my father’s noticed my obsession with the queens of England throughout history, and gave me a couple of volumes of Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England. He offered the entire set, but my father refused to let me have them all, for which I’ve never quite forgiven him. I was entranced–not only were they books on one of my favourite topics, they were old books that looked like they’d come out of a Victorian library somewhere. I think until that point the oldest books I’d been allowed to get my grubby hands on probably dated from the 1950s. I was hooked, both on Strickland and antique books.

I wanted to complete the set, but none of the second-hand bookshops I looked in had even heard of Agnes Strickland–she’d been out of print too long, and while entertaining, the books aren’t of much use to serious historians today. A local antiquarian bookseller had a full set, but they were in better bindings (and much better condition) than mine and cost upwards of $12,000, which to me was a fantastical amount of money to charge for a handful of books, even if they were a hundred years old. I kept hoping I’d find a library that had a set, but never did, even when I got to St. Andrews where the library and bookstores had an abundance of old books to browse through.

I finally discovered the Internet Archive in 2007 after I’d returned to Atlanta, and to me it was like stumbling into wonderland. It had pdf copies of every volume of Strickland’s series, and I didn’t have to pay to download a copy. Aside from that, there were scans of books on just about every obscure topic I could come up with. The Paston Letters. Biographies of lesser-known figures from the French Revolution. A collection of the music scores owned by Jane Austen’s family, in case you were wondering what they played on the pianoforte when they got bored. The grammars and exercise books for French, German, Latin, and Greek used in schoolrooms in the UK over the past two or three centuries. Several of the books and pamphlets on abolition and the law cases referenced in the film Belle.

Once I’d downloaded a ridiculous number of texts, I started looking at what else was available, and realized just how impressive a resource the Internet Archive is. There is just so much here. Dozens of silent and black and white films, including She Done Him Wrong, starring Mae West and a young Cary Grant–not his first film, but it was only his second year as a movie star. His Girl Friday and Night of the Living Dead were also available the last time I checked (which was a while ago, admittedly). Reefer Madness is in there somewhere, too. The Librivox collection is now hosted on the site–a public effort to collect readings of every book no longer in copyright. (If you have any interest in building up a portfolio as a voice actor, this is a useful thing to do. If you’re a listener, it’s a bit hit-and-miss–some readings are excellent, some not so much, but it’s an amazing effort on the part of the contributors, and like the Archive, there is no charge for the downloads but donations are appreciated.) There’s a collection of old radio broadcasts, from the original Gunsmoke to Winston Churchill’s speeches. They have a collection of geneaology resources that you don’t have to pay Ancestry’s silly membership fee to access. There is also a huge trove of audio recordings of rock concerts–loads of 90s indie rock, as well as better-known bands such as the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, etc. The archive also includes a repository for software, but I have yet to explore that corner of the virtual warehouse, so I don’t know what treasures it might be hiding.

The part I’m currently spending my spare time exploring is the set of scans of documents relating to the American Revolution provided by the Boston Public Library. This includes papers relating to well-known events such as the Boston Massacre and formal letters between commanders and the like, but there are also muster rolls, receipts for deliveries of supplies, court-martial records, and personal letters that detail what life was like for non-combatants at the time–the people who weren’t famous, whose letters have never been collected into convenient volumes for easy reference. I get that the technological revolution of the last two decades has brought its share of attendant evils and I am a strong believer in continuing to buy paper books and supporting independent bookstores (and your local library!), but this kind of access to our past is only possible thanks to the recent advances in communication technology. Collections from numerous libraries in the U.S.–and even a few international ones–have been digitized and uploaded or linked to the site. For history buffs, film fanatics, anyone with a consuming love for rock music–this site is a gold mine. Check it out sometime, when you have an afternoon to spare.

The Archive relies on donations to survive. If you are so inclined, you can support them here.