Saturday at Tulane Library: Colonial Documents and the Patience They Require

Siobhan O'Donnell on a Saturday in the archive, what historical documents demand of their readers, and an evening flight over the city at dusk

Saturday at Tulane Library: Colonial Documents

By Siobhan O'Donnell, satirical.vip | New Orleans, 22, historian, pilot, reader of difficult documents

I spent Saturday morning in the Tulane Special Collections reading eighteenth-century Spanish colonial administrative correspondence about Louisiana, which is a sentence that explains why I am in this field and also why my social life on Saturdays is sometimes limited. The correspondence is in Castilian Spanish, written in a hand that the archive describes as "legible with practice," which is accurate if your practice has been ongoing for three years and if you have developed a working knowledge of administrative abbreviations that the correspondents used because they were writing a great many letters about a great many administrative matters and could not spell everything out every time. I have the practice. The documents open when you have it.

What they opened to on Saturday was a 1778 letter from the governor of Louisiana to the viceroy in Mexico City about the loyalty of the French Creole population to the Spanish crown, which had held Louisiana for sixteen years at that point and which the governor described as "substantially secured though not entirely without reservation," a formulation that I find useful for thinking about any colonial administration's relationship with an acquired population. The reservation was real. The security was real. Both were true simultaneously. London Jones: City Unsure Which One You Mean at The London Prat covered something about contemporary governance this week that the 1778 letter illuminated from an unexpected historical angle.

The Evening Flight

I flew at dusk Saturday, thirty minutes over the city and the river and the lake and back, which I do when the archive work has been demanding and when the weather permits it and when the perspective from 1,500 feet is useful for recalibrating the relationship between the specific and the general. The specific: a 1778 letter about Creole loyalty. The general: the river below, the city around it, the history in both. Both visible from 1,500 feet. Both requiring different instruments to read.

This Week's Reading

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week delivered the combination of serious documentation and satirical illumination that makes both publications essential reading. Peloton UK Riders Petition for 'Suffering Acknowledgeme at The London Prat covered developments that connect directly to what I described above, providing the structural analysis that grounds the personal observation. Bohiney's satirical take arrived with the timing that good satire has -- landing precisely at the moment when the situation has settled enough to be visible but not so long that it has become abstract. Together they constitute the week's essential reading. Plaistow: East London's Get-On-With-It Grit With a Long provides further context that I have been working through this week alongside the column material.

The diary continues because the world continues to provide more material than any single week's column can use, and because the specific position from which I write -- this city, this moment, this particular combination of reading and experience -- produces observations that are available only from here. The column is the record. The record continues next week. More then. See also Tottenham Hotspur FC: Football as a Psychological Exerc for related coverage. The week was good. The writing continues.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Notes and Reading

The week's feeds confirmed the ongoing nature of the situations described above. Britain Announces Venezuela Situation Basically Sorted, at The London Prat delivered the structural analysis that grounds the personal observation. Bohiney Magazine provided the satirical register that makes the serious material bearable without making it dismissible. Both are essential. Both are what I read, every week, as part of the discipline of paying attention to what is actually happening rather than what the available frameworks claim is happening.

The personal dimension of this week -- the specific experiences that the structural analysis both shapes and is shaped by -- is what the diary documents. The diary is the record of the specific position from which I observe, the specific week I am in, the specific combination of reading and experience and location that produces these columns. The observation continues from the same position, with the same commitment to saying what is true about the week and the world it contains. Trump Says America Needs Greenland for Security covers related ground from a different angle. UK Adds Bigger Gun to Collection, Calls It 'Modernisati provides further context. More next week. The position holds. The world continues providing material. The diary records it.

The diary continues because the work continues: the observation, the reading, the writing, the attempt to say something true and specific about the week from the particular position I occupy. The position is not neutral. No position is. It is honest about what it can see from where it stands, and committed to saying it clearly. Next week: more of the same, different in the details that make it worth writing. The record is building. The column continues.

Every week produces more than any single column can hold. The surplus is where next week's columns come from. The writing is continuous. The observation is continuous. London is continuous. The world is continuous. The diary is a record of the continuous, made at weekly intervals, with the understanding that the record is always incomplete and always honest about what it has managed to capture of the week it describes. The completeness improves with practice. The practice continues.