San Francisco, California
December 12, 2000

Dear Readers,

My friend Lisa discovered today’s itemsunder one of the bridges in Portland, Oregon, on a late night walk. First she came across a poem titled “Square Deal” (it was folded up with a couple of palindromes written on the reverse: “NEVER ODD OR EVEN / A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA”). Then, scattered over the next fifty yards, she recovered Brandi’s callous brush-off of Danny, Danny’s tragic journal entry, and finally his job application for McDonald’s. They were all clearly recently discarded, and we both felt Danny’s anguish. For a moment after I received them in the mail from Lisa, I even considered calling Danny to tell him Brandi was just not worth it, Bobby Brown should be laughed at, not cried at, McDonald’s has nothing to offer such a sensitive young soul, and life after high school, or even next week, would surely be loads better. Instead I published the series as the centerfold of the third issue of my zine, Other People’s Mail.

There’s something slightly sinister, maybe even deviant about keeping the contemporary correspondence of anonymous living people and sharing it with others. I’ve occasionally had ethical misgivings about this, especially when the only question readers bring away from O.P.M. is “Can you believe how amusingly crazy / illiterate / dumb / pathetic the person who wrote this is?”

Yes, I think a lot of what I’ve published in Other People’s Mail is absurdly funny, but I also think the zine offers something more than a condescending laugh. I find most of the writers in O.P.M. sympathetic, and much of the writing, however inarticulate, is genuinely moving to me. But still, I can’t deny that my hobby is voyeuristic and potentially invasive. My roommate in Austin, a good friend and trusty contributor to O.P.M., once had a nightmare that I was trying to convince her to let me publish pages from her journal in the zine. On some level she was disturbed by the project, and by extension me. I felt like a creep.

At the time Lisa sent the Danny saga to me, I was studying to be an archivist and working at the Center for American History in Austin. I was surprised by the personal nature of a lot of the collections there, and I was drawn to the immediacy and intimacy of working with primary sources. I think most people accept the practice of keeping personal material in libraries and archives as an essential part of preserving cultural memory and promoting historical understanding. I wonder, though, how many people actually recognize or have stopped to consider what sorts of things we archivists maintain for posterity? Lots of personal letters on every topic imaginable, notes, personal records, ephemera of all sorts, hair, clothes, and just about anything else.

Last week, a man came in to the historical society where I now work, in San Francisco, to help us identify some of the photographs and other items that the society had received as the result of a legal case. One of the boxes he sifted through contained a suicide note he had written as a teenager twenty years ago. Certainly this note has some historical significance – it helps to document the events out of which the collection arose – but it is also an undeniably, painfully private piece of writing. This collection, and others like it, are not only historic artifacts, they can be resources for people close to the events to use in trying to make sense of their own lives.

Just as old letters in historical archives can illuminate the past, more recent letters, even anonymous, inarticulate ones, have something to say about contemporary social experience. So I take pride in my sometimes voyeuristic profession, and I defend my own little personal archives of the unknown.

Sincerely,

Abby Bridge