Welcome to the Alchemists of Memory
How we see the past, how we build the future, and what to listen to along the way.
Hello hello!
Welcome to my web log, or blog. I hope you enjoy it here! I’m writing to you now with a distinct lack of direction as to where this will go— if you are following me here from my last newsletter, the gone and mostly forgotten tinyletter I named the Celestial Jukebox, you may know me mostly as a music writer, and I certainly will be doing that in the confines of this blog. But I’ve given myself a broader purview here: I’m interested in our cultural and ecological memories, in laying familiar things out in new and strange ways. That could mean playlists and reviews of musical things dear and fascinating to me, or it could mean maps or archival dives on topics of interest. It could mean weird internet bullshit that I’ve collected! It could mean a cataloging of cool leaves I see when I walk in my neighborhood!
The title of this blog comes from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. I chose it because it sounds cool as hell, but I also think that it reflects the sort of work I intend to do here. Trouillot is focused on how historical narratives are processed and built, how silences are necessarily constructed to create historical meaning. In the passage I quote, Trouillot discusses how his father’s friends belonged to a historical society on Haiti devoted to guarding the memory of Haiti’s first and only King, Henri Christophe. He uses the term “Alchemists of Memory” almost in passing, but I’ve always been fascinated by alchemy. The alchemist is always fradulent, but so is the historian in their own way— both of them must create something from nothing, producing wonders out of uncooperative substrate. That’s what I aim at: taking strange fragments and making something interesting.
Practically speaking, here’s what to expect in the next two weeks or so:
a series of end of the year music writing, focusing on albums and songs that have meant a lot to me this year
a cartographic exploration of american popular music
a reflection on early internet communities
a jpeg image of a frog:
See you soon! Yell at me in the comments below!
In the meantime, tell your friends!
best,
jsk