paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the memory industry A weekend of reading, pretty much all of my weekends are about reading, so this statement is a bit odd. Some sort of awkward place to start that says the same thing � my only trips lately have been of the mind and to Office Depot where I helped Quinn purchase cartridges for her computer printer. There would also be that trip to the drugstore for shampoo and that trip down memory lane. I read the following sentence in David Harvey�s book The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change: �The growth of a museum culture and a burgeoning �heritage industry� that took off in the early 1970s, add another populist (though this time very middle class) twist to the commercialization of history and cultural forms.� First, I must say, that I am always impressed with the language of post-modernism, heritage industry, is only one of the things I admire, but today it is enough. Heritage is really an industry these days, now that we have all come to terms with the fact that the United States is not a peaceful melting pot. That there is no culture beyond the ever-increasingly-hungry terrain of consumerism and late-capitalism that is not, somehow, implicated in this heritage industry. If not the heritage industry, than the museum culture, the backward gaze for a clearer time when the rules, although oppressive, were understood, or some other culturally constituted structure with an equally innovative name. The heritage industry lets us consume intangible things about who we are and where we came from. I have a history of my family name printed on parchment from the Internet, with the family crest. It is kinda cool. Something else to hang on the wall to make some sort of statement. The heritage industry may also be the little dresses from Estonia that my grandmother brought back for me and my cousins that we wore and wore with our long braids, for many years, our mothers letting out the skirts and then finally making new ones. It may also be the way we seek to preserve things in museums, my favorites are the small ones. The way we formalize items of insignificance by displaying them in museums. It used to be that museums were for �high culture� artifacts. Now, they are for anything. And I think that is cool. But it is also eerie because of this flattening of time and context. Sometimes museums make me feel haunted. Other times, tired. Sometimes they are absurd or surreal. Other times just stupid. Sometimes I want to buy the postcards more than see the artifacts. That is my obsession. Because in the museum, history is still out of reach. Even in literature, or well-researched history books, it is out of reach. There is nothing to grab, only theories and traces. But those traces are really important to knowing why we are the ways that we are, even if it is only in the haziest and vaguest of contexts. Why do some us live in houses? Why are these houses now antiques that we live in when before they were the places that manufactured happiness and dreams? And why are we still holding on to the project of modernity? Friday night I saw an extended advertisement for Coca-Cola during the previews of the movies. (Quinn and I went to see The Hours). It presented something called Football Town where, the script announced, that we didn�t have to lock our doors, that everyone was friendly and welcoming, but really wanted their team to win. In effect, it re-wrote the clich� of the American Dream and made certain that American football replaced baseball, that small towns replaced cities in importance, and the look of the Victorian-era house filled the suburbs (the new urbanism). And everyone drank Coke, of course. It was one of those creepy artifacts of our culture � part propaganda for consumerism and the lifestyle that only America can offer (or wants to offer) and part an edifying moment � kind of a handbook for living. Smile this way, wear this, have friends who look like this, and you will be as happy as these people are in these moments. But the thing is, we could all archive our lives to display one moment, great hair days looking thin and the next great accomplishment, decent hair days, looking thin. I�d like to add an industry to the conversation about industries�.the memory industry. First, we need to think of the rules that distinguish something as an industry. Sounding good is not enough, but profitability is, and the memory industry is definitely profitable. If it weren�t, then it would not have its own aisle in the hobby stores, I wouldn�t be able to dash out for memory necessities at the drug store, and it wouldn�t be a cross-over hit, sneaking into the territories of office supplies and gift shops. The indicator of the industry status of memory is that a fair amount of people received memory book kits for holiday and birthday gifts over the course of the last six years and that �scrapbooking� has become a verb-of-common-use. It has surpassed paint-by-number and is sanctioned by the heritage industry and the museum culture both. What is cooler than a perfectly preserved and neatly arranged selection of photographs and thin memorabilia organized in volumes of books? What better way for those who come years after us to understand that we did not keep up with the Joneses, we were more unique than the Joneses. All of us. That we recognized the fragmented nature of our lives and sensed somehow that photographs were not enough, did not comment enough on how we really felt about anything. One moment we are in the matching Christmas sweater great-aunt Viola knitted for us out of hot pink acrylic yarn she found on-sale at Ben Franklin in 1978 and was just now getting around to the project that sparked her vision�. All of us girls in our matching sweaters. And oh, grandma knitted a series of little caps, she really shouldn�t have. In the old order of photo albums, would anyone know how we really felt about those sweaters? But is there something we can add to extend the circumstances? What I wouldn�t give to extend the circumstances of the matching hot pink sweaters and caps, the matching sweatshirts with herds of buffalo silkscreened on them and bits of fake feather and beadwork glued onto the surface. The group pose with the perfect Lawrence-Welkian smiles. Somehow, with the memory book, it becomes more personal. Even if I would be, essentially, lying because the sweater is horrible and it is just a shame that Aunt Viola didn�t knit for someone really cold in need of something really bright and festive. Instead of grateful, I think that Christmas, we girls all felt a little snotty and over-privileged as we packed the sweaters away in boxes under our beds or on the top shelves of our closets. And the next moment, it�s a wedding months later and we girls are in our bridesmaid or flower girl dresses with our hair all done-up. That is the beauty of the memory industry. All of the bowls of cereal, coffee rings on notebooks full of scribbles, tired novels read, interesting novels read, gallons of gas pumped into the cars, paycheck stubs and wine bottles are silenced. It is one moment matching sweaters, the next, cousin Annie�s wedding. One moment, matching sweatshirts, the next, grandma�s eightieth birthday, cousin John�s college graduation, cousin Annie�s baby, cousin Gerta�s winning horse show. And the really neat collections have backgrounds of cool paper, quotes in groovy shapes on cool paper, and some �hand-done� touch that connects them to the photo albums of old but still instills our self-consciousness about our lives, what they mean, in this world after universal truth has shattered. I feel a bit sarcastic because on the one hand, I love Post-modernism. It is such a mightily needed antidote to modernism and the project of modernity. Which, although I love the literature and art and don�t like to make sweeping generalizations about the ages, I think by the late 1960s the time had arrived for a change. Not only that, but I have only known the age of change and seen modernity in action as a relic. Old housing projects that are abandoned or have been blown up, streets of houses that are exactly alike, systems of power that privilege some voices and silence others. It isn�t the individual artist that drives the herd of culture, it is this sort of contagion that creates us, that speaks to us and speaks in, our language and thoughts. I can�t get my mind around it, but it is this invisible, unidentifiable convention that is between the words we use and the meaning we signify when we use them it is that known and internalized. But never is there a convention for this convention, unless somehow, there is some great meeting for all of the secrets and obsessions of the ages. Now, I do not curate my life well at all. Quinn has been known to snag things and save them. So this online diary has been quite an undertaking for me. I love how technology has allowed me to participate easily in the memory industry. Because even though sarcasm gets into my language because there is something so horribly commercial about those memory book kits at Hobby Lobby, I like to look at other people�s lives that have assembled. I like to read online journals. I like it that I have this collection of writing. I wish that I were a better curator of my life. Sometimes I vow to value my work more. But I always think there is more where that came from. I could do it better the second time around. Or something. Actually, I�m not certain what I think. But I know I don�t want to end up like my grandmother whose desktop contains, not even in any layers of chronology, stuff from every decade at any given time over the last 60 years. That is a bit un-nerving. I helped her organize it into boxes some years back, but I know that it has all returned and is there, all mixed up, in some great heap. A quote from Eliot, a photograph of my cousin standing in a wading pool, a horse shoe from her daughter�s first horse, a button from a dress her mother wore, a calendar given away free at a Hallmark shop in 1974, a receipt for a stack of resumes printed in 1968, a letter from her son while he was away at war, part of a manuscript for a book she is finishing, a letter from her editor about a book she wrote ten years ago�.. 2:42 p.m. - 2003-01-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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