Methods #1

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of record to make as we undertake the river journey. This is still very much an open question but I'll write a little about it here, trying to avoid presenting my thoughts as more integrated than they actually are:

• I like the idea of keeping a book of notes and sketches. Not that I draw particularly well, but I'd like my written notes to interact with evocations of the space in another form (sketch maps, diagrams, drawings, etc). I'd also like to make my own recordings as we go. So, I'm effectively talking about documenting the journey in three media: text, image, audio. [It strikes me that this formulation is oddly reminiscent of Roland Barthes' title - Image-Music-Text, which wasn't in my mind at all when I started writing today:o)]



• When I talk about written notes *interacting* with images (or, indeed, notes with images and images with audio), certain processes come to mind: annotation, cataloguing, illustration, and so forth. These have their own histories and philosophies and I'd like my practice to pay some kind of attention to them. After all, annotation, cataloguing, illustration etc, are constituent processes of the overall practice of making an archive.



• I don't want to be too prescriptive about *what* I document or record. Serendipity is important. At the same time, I think I need to keep in touch with a certain point of reference, namely the complex that i think of in terms of VOICE-SPEECH-LANGUAGE.



• I want to treat Voice-Speech-Language as a very open-ended category. It might include such things as:
  
  
  
  
  • transcriptions of texts seen in the environment: memorials, signs, graffiti
    
  • notes on placenames, which are, in themselves, short texts
  
  
  • traces of languages other than English in whatever form
  
  
  • notes on overheard conversations
  
  
  • more formal recordings of interviews to be transcribed later
  
  
  • historical texts read in 'significant' places (e.g. the Eastmans at Fort Snelling)
  
  
  • new texts discovered en route
  
  
  • my own writing as a response to place
  
  
  
  


• My idea of reading historical texts in 'significant' locations is one that will need some preparation. I shall have to get a file of materials together in advance. It would appeal to me to do this collectively - read the stuff *to* each other - but if that doesn't seem an attractive proposition, it isn't a problem :o)



• Back when we thought we might use recordings of our own families, we wrote about the connection between past, present, and future. In particular, we talked about the limitations of a nostalgic focus on the past or an entirely future-directed kind of attention. I want to bear these things in mind as I make my document. I think it's easy to slip into a sort of romanticising mode as one writes, sketches, records, and I want at least to be aware of that.
  
  
• This romanticising dynamic seems to me particularly likely to assert itself in that first month of the journey precisely because of the nature of the terrain. The early stretches of the Mississippi pass through what are, by all accounts, areas of extraordinary natural beauty. It will be tempting to see them through the lens of the picturesque.

I'm going to stop for the moment. More later, perhaps...