My wife recently got me a refurbished Sony Walkman for my birthday. It arrived last week, along with some cassette tapes by Barbra Streisand, Father John Misty, and the contemporary folk band Beirut1. The Streisand, being of a superb vintage variety, sounds irrevocably underwater when played, and while the Father John Misty is of good quality and fun enough to listen to, it’s the new Beirut album I’ve had on heavy rotation.
I agree largely with Pitchfork’s summation, via Wikipedia, that "the note of surprise on Hadsel...is not so much that Zach Condon has recorded an album on a remote Norwegian island with free access to a church organ, it's that he hasn't done so before." But I think the true measure of this album for me, in cassette form, is in the materiality of the listening process. There’s something about fumbling with a tape deck that makes the sound, when it comes, feel so much more alive with the friction of the real.
Hello to the little hiss that arrives when I press play. Hello, chugging machinic sound as the tape whirls round and round. I struggle with putting the right side into the deck at first. Have I really lost so much dexterity in twenty years? Hello to the slight warping of sound that pours over silvery-gray tape winding through, Zach Condon’s organ playing mediated so clearly by distance and time.
Thinking like this, it becomes clear to me for the first time in a while—I have archive fever.
I’m enveloped in an obsession, sudden and all-consuming, with the way this tape is an archive in and of itself, and with the notion of the archive, broadly constituted. The allure of the archives has been a preoccupation for critical theorists, scholars, and philosophers, going back at least to Jacques Derrida’s 1995 book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression2. As far as the term itself goes, “archive fever” refers to this very preoccupation3; to an intellectual period when, as Julietta Singh writes in No Archive Will Restore You, “none of us understood the archive, and none of us could stop reaching for it.”
“You probably already know what a fever dream is,” I wrote in the first iteration of this newsletter, several years ago. It was a pithy way, I thought at the time, of explaining the pun that characterizes this newsletter’s name. Now, however, I feel like I have a little more to say about the concept of the fever dream, and why I still, years after finding myself enjoying the simple pun of the name, find it generative to think with.
If archive fever articulates one kind of obsession, the fever dream might be its manifestation. One of my favorite descriptions of a fever dream is from Jorge Luis Borges’ short detective story “Death and the Compass,” in which he writes
Nine days and nine nights I lay dying in this desolate, symmetrical villa; I was racked with fever, and the odious double-faced Janus who gazes toward the twilights of dusk and dawn terrorized my dreams and my waking. I learned to abominate my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
Perhaps at some point I’ll write a thorough analysis of this passage, but for now I’ll just point to the ways in which the figure of the double—a motif which frequently appears in horror, the gothic, and, as I noted in my unfinished doctoral dissertation, detective fiction—is inflected with a kind of contagious fear. Observe how the narrator’s body is interpolated into the monstrous through the vector of doubling.
The fever dream, in other words, is an experience of being struck with double vision. There’s something uncanny; something unnatural about the number two. In my dissertation, I argued that the figure of the detective was frequently doubled with that of his criminal antagonist. While this doubling was frequently a commentary on the anxiety of differentiation between self and other, an anxiety that rests particularly on the borderline, it also lent itself to an effect its authors perhaps did not anticipate—namely, an eroticized and queer kind of identification. After all, what’s gayer than seeing something of yourself in somebody else? Queer relationships are infamous for that do-I-want-to-be-them-or-be-with-them dynamic.
I studied doubles in detective fiction almost exclusively for seven years, writing entirely within the confines of recycled soft-cover notebooks. For reasons I still can’t explain, I was unable to complete the dissertation itself, instead chasing the same ideas round and round in my notebooks, far off in a fever dream of my own. I may no longer be an academic (unless, like being Jewish, it’s something you can never escape—which I suspect may be very true), but I still obsess like one.
Which brings me back to this newsletter—Archive Feverdream—and to the ways I hope it will function as a repository—or an archive—of queer and trans erotics, cultural criticism, and creativity, much of it inflected through the lens of the personal. I expect that my focus will shift and change between these three themes, while also likely finding a rough balance over time.
Archive Feverdream will publish bimonthly, on or close to the new and full moon. Feel free to unsubscribe at any time. Also feel free to hit reply and say hi, or leave a comment! I look forward to being on this journey with you.
There’s definitely something to be said about the ways in which this white musician with no connections that I can see to the SWANA region have appropriated the name Beirut for his project. Wikipedia says Zach Condon chose the name Beirut “because of the city’s history of conflict and as a place where cultures collide.” This reasoning fetishizes the city as a kind of orientalist romance, stripping it of all context. As I listen to this album, living in the imperial core of the so-called United States, I too am implicated.
Lest you think I am more of a scholar than I actually am, I haven’t read this book in its entirety, merely excerpts. The older and the more distant from academia I get, the more disinclined I am to pretend at knowledge I don’t actually possess.
When I was in grad school, it wasn’t uncommon to ask people what they were studying by inquiring after their “archive.” “What’s your archive,” students would ask each other. Even then I wasn’t entirely sure we knew what we meant by this.
I’m so glad to see a new post from you!! I can’t wait to see more. I’ve got the mind of an archivist and the madness too. It’s comforting to see it depicted, even though the itch and strain of the fever can be tiresome at times. I love the madness of it, despite it all ❤️
Heck yes, cassettes!