Hello from my hotel room in Washington, DC — I am here for an exciting work trip! I am spending the week in the reading rooms of the Library of Congress exploring the Oppenheimer Papers as, back home in Los Alamos, we prepare to interpret the Oppenheimer House as part of our museum campus. I am an archivist by trade, but I work for a small non-profit museum and archive, where we all wear multiple hats.
All of my brain power for the past month has been dedicated to this trip, preparing and planning. I’m halfway through American Prometheus, a book I have (shamefully, considering my job) never read cover to cover. I’ve read chapters here and there and looked up passages and used it as something like an encyclopedia — but I loaded it on to my kindle for the flights to DC, opened it up and then never put it down. I can see why it won a Pulitzer — it’s eminently readable and engaging.
If any of you are interested in this aspect of my work (Los Alamos history), I can share more about this week. I will try to update periodically in Notes, too!
I am excited to be here, but I am also excited to begin the research for which I have been planning and plotting for so long. Siphon off all that has overtaken my brain and make room for my own interests again. I’ve been limping along, planning out some new topics for the newsletter and working on the next paid subscriber installment in my Personal Archive series. But until then, here are some distractions that have kept me sane:
When I am feeling starved for inspiration, I do a lot of diving into the depths of the Internet Archive. I love antique catalogs for visual inspiration, especially those produced around the turn of the last century. There is something about the graphic design being created a few decades out from either side of 1900 — with one foot in the Old World and the other striding forward into modernity. I adore the grainy product photographs and cut-and-paste aesthetics. I flip through them, looking at household goods and decorative pieces, trying to imagine what it might be like to still shop this way. I remember catalogs, with that intense nostalgia of a world long gone. The children yearn for a dELiA*s or J.C. Penny’s Christmas catalog. I stumbled across this 1884 catalog for art tiles from J.G. and J.F. Low, instantly entranced by the lettering of the title page:
The tiles themselves are gorgeous — classical themes, florals, twining greenery, and ancient emblems. Beautiful:
But when I flipped toward the back, the ads captured my imagination. Page after page of hand-drawn ads for various home decor, construction, decorative, and furniture. The most whimsical collection of lettering and illustration I’ve ever seen.
Sometimes inspiration is hiding in the back pages.
🍐 Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years
🍐 Thinking in the Margins What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read
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🍐 Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious Scientists, novelists, and philosophers have spent centuries studying the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. Each descent only deepens the mystery.
🍐 Curiosity Is No Solo Act It gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making.
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