The Time Machine: A Conversation with Michael Lesy

From his first book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), through his most recent, Angel's World (2006) and Murder City (2007), Michael Lesy has been collaging a history of America in small, carefully selected and arranged moments. His raw materials may seem ordinary: family snapshots, commercial postcards, newspaper clippings, restaurant menus. But when read correctly, they're rich in both historical and emotional detail. It's a way of seeing history that's not all about politics and power. It's the history of us all.

For Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (1997), he pored over thousands of postcard images produced by the Detroit Publishing Company in the first few years of the 1900s, selecting just under 200 for the book. One of the most fascinating went on the book's cover. It's a 1903 view of Cliff House, a famous restaurant on the western edge of San Francisco, looking out at the Pacific.

I'd stared at this photo many times over several years when I saw a similar one online recently. That got me looking for more, and for some information on the place. Before our telephone conversation, I emailed Mr. Lesy the photos I'd found and a thumbnail history:

The first Cliff House restaurant was built in 1863. With its great views it became a favorite haunt of San Francisco's wealthy and powerful, as well as local riffraff and wharf rats, giving it a somewhat disreputable air. It was damaged in 1887 when a ship with a cargo of dynamite ran aground on the rocks below. It burned down in 1894.

The rebuilt version in the photo opened in '96. A High Victorian French chateau, it was built by Adolph Sutro, a self-made millionaire and one-term mayor of San Francisco, who came to California from Prussia in the Gold Rush in 1850, and later made a fortune in Comstock Lode silver mining. It's said that by the 1890s he owned a tenth of the real estate in San Francisco, and a lot of its western edge still has names like Sutro Heights and Sutro Forest. He bought the original Cliff House to kick out the riffraff. Then when it burned down, he built this version. One website says: "The architects were Emile Lemme and C.J. Colley, micromanaged by Sutro. Opening in February, 1896, the new incarnation featured restaurants, art galleries, parlors and lunch rooms, settees and verandas." Next to it he also built Sutro Baths, a large complex of public baths and salt-water swimming pools that was a wonder of its time.

In his mansion near Cliff House Sutro had what was said to be the largest private library in the US. It was destroyed in the earthquake of '06.

Sutro had died in '98. Cliff House survived the great '06 earthquake, but burned down in '07. Sutro's daughter built the next iteration, in a much less visually bold neoclassical style. It's been rebuilt and remodeled a few times since, and is still in business.

My conversation with Mr. Lesy took place on May 23, 2009. I was in Brooklyn, Michael was at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where he teaches literary journalism.

*

J: Okay. So I'm sitting looking at this photo… There's so much going on in this one photo, it's extraordinary to me. One thing that strikes me is, when I was in high school and college in the '60s and '70s, we didn't, with a few exceptions, give people in the Victorian era any credit for having a sense of humor. You know, there was Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and the rest of them were these grim…

M: What about the limericks? What was that guy's name who did the obscene limericks?

J: Oh, him, yeah, yeah. I don't think we talked about him.

M: This may be a reflection on your high school. I mean there were all sorts of British humor magazines like Punch. They were very sophisticated.

J: I mean, it was "The Victorians." Which is a term I find weird. It's like saying The Eskimos.

M: Yeah, and we understand the Victorians here as our Gilded Age. The image that is on the cover of Dreamland is the new American century. Of course, everything that could survive did survive in the change of the century, but it's a different spirit.

J: Here you have this quintessential High Victorian building, this faux French chateau. It's a glorious building. Standing literally... I don't know if the term "cliffhanger" was in use at that point, but this building is literally a cliffhanger.

M: It's wonderful. My reasons for putting it on the cover had nothing really to do with the humor, but with the solidity of the waves, the energy of the children running into and out of the surf, little girls running backwards and forwards, the boy running away, the nanny… What I wanted to happen on the cover is for people like us to think of this as not just something staid or corseted or laced, but as fluid, alive, energetic, and as pleasant as possible, rather than something that was rigid and dead and past. And it is such a dreamlike image because it's so beautiful.

J: When we represent people going to the beach in the Victorian era, they're all dressed up, and we always laugh about that. They wore all those clothes to the beach. They didn't wear a bikini. And we think of them as just standing there and looking at the water and being "Victorian." But look at these kids.They're having a great time. They're kids.

M: You'd have to do your Googling again to find out when the ocean resorts opened. But I think the idea of lying on the beach fully clothed, or walking along the beach in your summer whites, was perfectly okay. The idea of a bathing costume, on the other hand… I have this feeling it's probably coming later in the first decade of the century. I'm not sure.

J: It would be interesting to look up like when they started putting up the little changing huts.

M: The idea of ocean air and of the vistas, I think, was for the aristocracy, probably before the 1880s. Any idea of actually swimming, I think, comes later.

J: I wonder if the nanny slipped off her high-button shoes and got her toes wet.

M: Maybe. That looks like a young girl. You can see on the far right of the edge of the frame an older girl, a younger boy. Who knows how to reconstruct the circumstances of the photograph?

J: I found a couple others, with the photographer standing in almost exactly the same place, because it's such an amazing vista obviously. And there are crowds. They're all dressed up. The guys are wearing their bowler hats and their celluloid collars and their three-piece suits. But you know, listen, when I was a kid in the '50s and '60s, you put on a suit and tie to go to the airport. That is something that we have gotten away from. We don't dress up to go to the restaurant anymore.

M: I do. But I know what you're talking about.

J: Getting back to the humor. The reason I brought that up is because this building… I don't know if Adolph Sutro meant it as a kind of visual joke, but it anticipates Surrealism, it anticipates Dada, I mean it even anticipates Photoshop and CGI. You know what I mean?

M: I guess these things had to come from somewhere. I mean, Dada or Surrealism were living off the bloated corpses of fin de siècle European culture.

J: There's some sense of humor, I would think, in putting that building there. Nowadays, and this is a gripe of mine, we use the computer and Photoshop and CGI to manipulate images. These guys were actually manipulating the view itself. What's that word? The viewshed. This was concrete. This wasn't just an image, they built this thing there.

M: Well, you look at some of the other grand hotels that Detroit Publishing photographed, all the stuff that was put in place by Henry Flagler, Florida East Coast Railway guy. I mean, they're Moorish, they've got all these inflected Oriental parts to it. They were quoting all sorts of things, and I think you're absolutely right. This is chateau architecture on the edge of an ocean. I'm not quite sure the exact year that the Plaza Hotel opened, but that's like a monstrous French chateau. Penn Station, before it was destroyed, had Baths of Caracalla, Roman allusions. They were taking stuff off the shelf and reusing it for things that the aristocracy had never imagined.

J: I can't get over that building standing there like that. Although the big earthquake wasn't until '06, and this was built ten years earlier, the boldness of putting this thing out literally over the edge of a cliff in an earthquake area is pretty amazing.

M: What did they know? There's this wonderful bio of Muybridge. Let's see if I have it on my shelf here. It talks about how Muybridge and everyone came west into the city of San Francisco, where people simply made themselves up out of whole cloth. You could label yourself a duke or a former duke or a former member of the Queen's Grenadiers, whatever. The place was absurd in a certain way and wonderful in a certain way... By the way, it turns out that the reason Muybridge ended up doing that kind of stop-motion photography of his was that he suffered a severe accident and brain injury. So part of what was going on here was an expression of the brain trying to recapture and decipher the world as it rushed past it... But this kind of absurd French chateau teetering on the edge of the Pacific, it's perfect. People were crazy dreamers.

J: I think you point this out in the book, or maybe it was the last time you and I talked about this photo a few years ago, that giant wave crashing just below it adds a whole other level of foreboding and tension and turn of the century-ness to it.

M: Yeah. I mean, look, this era is a moment of self-confidence, a kind of sense that none of the consequences of anyone's actions would really catch up with us. It's really a wonderful moment, given everything that we've lost and everything we're in the process of losing. This era is astonishing because it's so full of this kind of naïve sense of "I can do anything I want."

J: And it makes total sense that Sutro was an immigrant, came for the Gold Rush, a self-made millionaire who built himself not only this but his own mansion and what was said to be the largest library in the U.S.

M: Well, I wonder about that. I'd love to know more about that. But I mean, what could money buy? Money could buy racehorses, it could buy experiments in vision, in human consciousness, it could buy extraordinary mansions. It could buy whatever these people with huge piles of money fancied and wanted and desired and thought they deserved.

J: I sent you the 1907 photo of Cliff House burning down.

M: It's astonishing. God. That really woke me up when I saw that.

J: Boy oh boy. So that's just a few years after your relatively idyllic and yet tension-filled photo.

M: Well, the shit had hit the fan. The earthquake had happened in 1906. So, in the sense of people being exposed to catastrophe and photographing catastrophe… Any photographer would be affected by that catastrophe. The earthquake was one thing, but then the fires afterward, and as a way to prevent fires, the Army spread the fires. So it was the earthquake and then the fire.

J: I love the huge dark clouds… Everything about this photo is so much darker than the one from before. There's nobody on the beach. Even the water is low and flat and dark and depressed.

M: It's a natural before and after. The earthquake is the tipping point.

*

J: We're sitting here reading these photos in a way that's very different from the way one reads text and language. You read a photo completely differently from the linear way you read text, right?

M: Well, you read it associatively. I mean, if you're really a good text reader —  let's say you're reading Talmud everyday — you're reading that associatively, too. And if you're a Shakespeare scholar, you're also reading that associatively. If you're able to read a photo well, you are reading it based upon context that you've mastered. Look at your process with this photograph. You looked at the book, you went online, you found the image of the building aflame. You went from there to other images. In other words, the image itself caused you to begin a process of finding context and becoming more erudite and more associative. And then you doubled back, and here we are associating. I'm bringing what I can to the party. And we're suddenly realizing that the earthquake stands as a before and after. In order to read a photograph well, you must be able to read it in a conscious way, through associating one idea with another with another with another with another with another. You just can't read it flat.

J: Photos can lie to you, they can beguile you, they can do all sorts of things to you, can't they?

M: The other morning my wife and I were listening to birds, just a whole bunch of birds singing outside our house in the woods. And she said that she had read, I think in the journal Nature, that in fact we're only hearing part of the bird song. That they actually are communicating in a higher pitch as well. The way that most people think that they can see a picture is the way that we think we can hear what the birds are singing. And really, the people who are manipulating us with pictures actually can hear all the music that an image is putting out, and then focusing it on us. We think it's simple. We just hear one melody, when in fact they're using a whole set of notes beneath the melody we hear to make us think, to feel, to understand.

J: And this is a postcard image. It's, what's the word? It's vernacular photography. This isn't art photography.

M: Well, it is and it isn't. Walker Evans collected Detroit Publishing pictures. That was at the core of his collection. He had 9,000 postcards in his collection.

J: Holy cow.

M: I knew that when I first met him, I knew he had postcards. But I didn't know that he was particularly entranced with Detroit Publishing. He called them Detroits. He would get people to send him Detroits. He began collecting when he was just a kid. And a lot of his photography has a postcard esthetic, which he would call "lyric documentary." Go up to [the Walker Evans exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art]. There's one postcard on the wall that I sent him from Louisville, of a tank at Fort Knox. The book that accompanies the exhibit compares quite judiciously some of Evans' photographs with postcards of the same views. So you could say it's demotic or populist, but it is and it isn't. This was a very serious business with very high-end technology, and very, very skilled levels of mass production. At this point, we take it for granted. Because it's a postcard.

J: So the archive of the Detroit Publishing postcards that you were looking at, how many images were in that archive? It was enormous, right?

M: Well, I don't know if it was enormous. I think it was 60,000.

J: Oh, okay, so you've done bigger than that.

M: Yeah, of course.

J: So you, when you're doing your research, do you look at 60,000 images?

M: Well, some you don't have to look at more than very briefly. For instance, with that collection, there were a lot of photographs of private yachts or sailboats or sloops or racing yachts or whatever. In Detroit, there's a race across Lake Michigan. And one way that people spent their money conspicuously was to race these things. In the same way that a guy like Leland Stanford would want his racehorses photographed, these very rich men in Detroit and not-so-rich men in Detroit would want their boats photographed.

J: And their boats would become postcards?

M: No. They never became postcards, they were just part of what this company did to earn a living. But it was part of this collection. So among the 60,000 are too many pictures of sailboats.

J: What the photographers doing the postcard images was, they just fanned out across the country?

M: They did. I mean, they also bought stuff that already existed. They would end up on a railcar, a group of them traveling as a crew, and they'd get into, oh, I don't know, Cheyenne, Wyoming... The stuff that's to die for in the collection is done with eight-by-ten view cameras, very, very advanced black and white plates, and then very, very advanced color lithography. And at the core of that are the guys who fanned out across the country.

J: And then so you're sitting with, let's say, some tens of thousands of these.

M: Sure.

J: What is it you do to pick some out? Because Dreamland was, what, like around 200 images out of those tens of thousands of images.

M: Yeah.

J: What's that process like?

M: It's a process of becoming saturated with the stuff. You go through it once, you go through it again… I don't know what retrieval technology they have, I can't remember. I think it might have been laser discs. And they were hooked up to some sort of thermal printing device. So you could sort of press a button and get a shitty proof. Let's say I go in as soon as the collection opened and stay until I couldn't see straight. And I'd never leave, I'd just go for as long as I could manage, which was probably about six hours a day, and just keep pressing the button. So, not with every image, but eventually you'd get sort of transported. You'd get into a zone where the stuff would be coming across the screen, and you'd see it or you wouldn't see it, or you'd see it and then you'd want it. And so you take it. I mean, in a certain way, it's like taking a photograph out in the world, except this time you're taking it from existing photographs inside this imaginary world...

In the beginning, when I would be looking at all the pictures, I'd reflect on my own proclivities or my own peculiarities of taste. But as you get farther and farther along in the editing process, what you're reflecting on is the collection that you've made of the collection. And you don't think about yourself, you think about, okay, now what's the universe of possibilities. And once you're at that stage, where you're not simply out grabbing, but you're reflecting on this miniature collection, you're making a different set of choices than you would at the beginning. It's a process that gets more and more aesthetic and formalist, and more and more ideological and scholarly, and more and more I guess… I don't know if there's an English word for it, but you begin to figure out how you can tell a story with what you've got.

J: So at the beginning, you just find this rich cache of stuff and start immersing yourself.

M: That's all there is. I mean, you may have done your due diligence as a historian, know the history of the era. In other words, you've got a little bit going for you. So you're not a fool. In other words, you can still think associatively as you're looking at the pictures. You're not looking at them just blankly, just as pure surface. You kind of know what you're looking at. But you're ready to be surprised, and you're ready to ditch whatever you thought was true.

J: You've done, what, about a dozen books now, something like that. They're not all photography and text. Some are just text. But in all of them, you are working with materials that — and I mean this in the best sense — you're kind of doing history as bottom-feeding. Because you're working with snapshots, newspaper photos, postcards, newspaper clippings, stuff like that. So you're not starting with the presidents, politicians, the great epic sweep of history. And yet, in the end, you end up reflecting on those great events, but from the bottom-up, not from the top-down.

M: Yeah, oh absolutely. I remember the last time you and I had a conversation as formal as this, I said something about trying to subvert the academy. And that really is what it's about. It's simply trying to say to everyone there's more to the world, there's a greater thickness to the world and a greater depth and breadth to the world than you've been taught by anyone, or that you've even imagined.

J: So in a photo like the cover on Dreamland, it's just this one split second where… It's this infinitesimal little slice of time, and it's just packed with information.

M: Right. And I think what whoever took the picture understood is that if you simply find the right place to stand, whatever then comes in front of you, if you've chosen the right place to stand, you're bound to find something interesting over time. So the initial decision, which is where you stand, is the decision that every photographer and every writer makes, too. Where do you stand? Where do you stop and pause and look? And if you choose the right place, then the shit storm will come right by you, you know?

J: And conceptually, that's what you're doing when you're going through all these photos. You're picking the place to stand and look.

M: Always. And so the whole process, which on the outside looks like a historian's process or an archival process, is closer to the real-world process than anyone could imagine. The only one who could imagine it really is a guy like Borges, who understood that archives were entities, and if you entered that imaginary world it was as much a world as the world that you thought you were in outside the archive, having a drink and whatever. It's the same experience.

J: And there are all sorts of these archives, some of them quite enormous, all over the country and all around the world.

M: And more and more and more and more. You really do have this amazing alternate reality of images that's getting larger and larger. And the thing that's really interesting as a teacher is trying to teach people how to enter those archives and survive them, and come out with things to talk about, and, I don't know, songs to sing, that are not superficial. It's teaching people how to compose music out of the elements of these archives, and that takes some doing.

J: I'll bet.

M: I mean, as badly educated as you or I may have been, the people who are now 19 or 20 years old are abysmally educated. They may think that they've gone to good private schools or parochial schools, or they've been in advanced placement classes or honors classes, but they really have been sold a bill of goods. And when you ask them to do truly inter-disciplinary work, to see and hear at the same time, or to think in an associative way between literature, newspapers, letters, images, popular songs, foreign policy… To think all at once about all those things while they're looking at a pictures is very, very hard. Because they don't know so many, many things. So they can only hear part of the music. And to teach them to hear all of the music is… I've been trying to figure that one out, how to do it, for five years. And the kids I'm teaching at Hampshire, the ones who venture into the classes I teach, who aren't scared of me — I try to be as scary as possible to keep away people who are fools — the ones who come in are changed at the far end of the semester, because they've gone through a series of, I don't know, breath exercises or weight-lifting exercises or sprinting or swimming or whatever it is… They've been changed mentally and emotionally by the work that's presented to them so they can now hear all the music. And they can make their own music.

J: You put them through those exercises?

M: Oh, you bet I do.

J: Why the physical exercises?

M: Oh, I'm speaking metaphorically.

J: [laughs] Oh. So, but you're putting them through their paces mentally.

M: And emotionally. Because you have to look at a picture both intellectually and emotionally. I mean, the image has tremendous emotional power. And to simply look at it analytically without understanding that it has all these coiled psychological meanings inside of what appears to be a picture of a building that was built at a certain point by a certain person, and then was destroyed and then rebuilt… All of that you have to understand, but there's also other things going on that are psychological.

J: What happened to American education that they're so abysmally educated now?

M: I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. Part of it is simply test-taking. Look, I honestly think that as the data available to us has gotten faster and denser, the education that may have been adequate 15 years ago is not adequate now in order to take on all the stuff that's out there.

J: So there's all this data. But how to extract actual knowledge from the data seems to me to be a huge problem now.

M: The extraction is what you bring to the data. In other words, the data itself, the primary data, the 60,000 images from Detroit, the 180,000 Life magazine images that Google has put online, the 80,000 images in the Magnum archive… All of those are simply just lying there. It's what you bring to the party. So it's not just a picture of the speaker of the Japanese Parliament being killed with a samurai sword in 1954. More is caught in a photograph. The rush of it, the violence of it, the surprise of it, the horror of it… But It's not just that. It's the circumstances. It's the long before that you bring to the image so that you understand, that you can hear it all, that you can see it all, that you can see it in depth. There's a lot of information. A lot of it is just noise. But a lot of it is not noise. It's signal and noise.

J: And it's figuring out how to focus, or un-focus, maybe even.

M: Oh, it's both.

J: Because you and I have talked about how you go into almost a kind of a Zen state.

M: Yeah, you do. I'm sure that if someone hooked up electrodes to my brain or another researcher's brain, they'd find waves that are probably like meditative waves. But I've got to say, I don't want to privilege just looking at photos. I think a lot of people immerse themselves in written stuff, auditory stuff, physical, archaeological stuff… I mean, there is a zoning process, and a deep concentration that makes time disappear.

J: That's a great point. There's that online archive of turn-of-the-century music cylinders, and a few boutique labels putting very old recordings on CD. When I was working on my minstrel book, I spent hours and hours and hours just listening to this stuff. And you begin to, after a while there's almost a time machine effect. You do begin to feel it. Some of those songs that when I was first listening were just scratchy old records of some guy singing some goofy song, they're now among my favorite songs of all time. "Everybody Works But Father" is a hilarious song. It's completely understandable to me how that became a huge hit in its day. It's a great song to this day.

M: And that marks you as a complete freak. No, I mean it really does. That kind of profound knowledge, where you're able to be in the present but move into the past and stay in the past and then come back into the present, is very, very hard to do, and is very, very rare… It's under the heading of precious and useless knowledge.

J: I was going to say, what's the use of it?

M: It's precious and useless.

J: Do you mean that seriously?

M: It has no utility. It sets you apart based upon how everyone in the world, everyone else but you, understands music.

J: But, see, my excuse for it is that the more we know about the past, the better we are able to understand what's going on around us now. You're saying, nah, it's useless?

M: I'm saying that, given what we value in this world, it is useless. Because the only thing that we value is not this kind of subtle erudition, or not-so-subtle erudition… It's, you know, where's the key to the car. Are these guys gonna take my money and get me into a deal that's really gonna fuck with me? Can I trust this son of a bitch to keep his word? The stuff that we're working at, which is this kind of deep secret, hidden but available at the same time… No one can bear it. No one can bear the overload. No one can orient themselves within the torrent. And no one actually wants to. Because, like I said, you cannot take it to the fucking bank. As you practice it or as I practice it or as your friends practice it, it is something that we don't have a choice in. For whatever reason, we got hooked when we were kids, and we wanted to keep that alive in us, and we kept doing it. So there's a small group of people like us that get off on this shit. But honestly, John. If you were to say "Everybody Works But Father" at any bar at five-thirty in the afternoon, they'll look at you like… what… how… why? So I'm simply saying the world we have to respect, because we have to live in it and make a living in it and get by in it, doesn't value any of this shit at all. It's just how it is.

*

J: Now speaking of that, I was at [book designer] Laura Lindgren's house the day before yesterday and saw some proposal-type materials for your next book.

M: Yeah. It's called Repast.

J: Which is a study of menus and recipes from the turn of the century?

M: Yeah, right. The menus are all online. If you go to the New York Public Library digital gallery, or you can simply Google Miss Frank E. Buttolph menu collection. She collected the menus. It was because of the menus that Lisa and I thought we could make a book.

J: Lisa is your wife?

M: Yeah, Lisa's my wife. Lisa's grandfather and great-grandfather were both chefs. And she can read cookbooks the way you read whatever you read to pass the time. She does that with cookbooks. So she knows all about the culinary stuff, and I knew all about history, and I also knew how beautiful these menus were. So it took Lisa about a year to figure out history, and it took me about a year to figure out gastronomy. And so the book is about the first decade of the American century. And at the basis of it is, tell me what you eat, I'll tell you what you are. So it's a book about both what very, very ordinary people ate and what people who were extraordinarily rich ate.

J: So these are menus from both, say, the Plaza Hotel restaurant and the diner.

M: That's right. But at the time diners were called "quick lunches."

J: Quick lunches. Not diners yet. One of the things I noticed about them is that whether it was a quick lunch place or one of the grandest restaurants in New York City, the menus were huge! They had oysters, they had pheasant, they had goose, you could get a fried egg, you could get whatever.

M: But within that range, the more money you had the more often you ate, and the more food choices you had. If you were very rich, instead of having three meals a day, you had five meals a day. They weren't full meals, of course. There was after-theater supper, there was afternoon tea, there was mid-morning whatever, I'm not sure what it might be called. But if you were not rich, if you were just a working girl, you might have two meals a day. If you were a working stiff, or worse than that, just a temporary laborer, you might have one meal a day, and all you could drink. What people ate was very different, based upon income and gender.

Women ate separately, for example. The only time they could go into a restaurant is if they were accompanied by men. So women began to make their own restaurants, because more and more women were out in the world working in offices. So, for example, in Chicago, there were restaurants that were called cafeterias on the second floor of downtown buildings because the first floor rents were so expensive. They were walk-ups. And women stood in line with trays. There were no waitresses, by the way. Most of the people behind the counters, ithe people who were serving them the quick lunches, were Negroes. They were African American guys. And if they went on strike, the way the guys ran who owned these restaurant chains — and they were big chains, as big as McDonalds, as big as Starbucks, on every corner — the way they'd break the strike is they'd hire women. So women became the strike breakers against black men.

J: And that's where waitresses come from?

M: That's how they began. That's how women got into a lot of restaurants.

J: Oh man. See, that's great stuff.

M: Isn't it? Who would have thunk it?

J: But if you really thought it was useless knowledge, you wouldn't get so excited about it.

M: I'm not sure about that. I'm really not sure. It's like a dog that knows how to chase a fox.

J: Yeah. Okay. But at the very least, epistemologically, what you're doing is using these vernacular, demotic materials — menus, snapshots, newspaper clippings —

M: As a way in.

J: As a way into these larger…

M: Sure.

J: Is that unusual in academic historian circles at this point, or is that more done now?

M: I think that there has been this effort, starting in the mid-1950s in Europe, to look at ordinary things and to draw, slowly and modestly, big ideas from these ordinary things. But I also think that the way the academy works at the moment is that if you really want to get tenure, you write a journal article about a footnote in another journal article in which a source was named that you'd then explore further or dispute. That's probably no different than it's ever been inside the academy. It's just a way of producing a kind of knowledge that then gets turned into a kind of safety for these intellectuals, these academicians.

J: Well, see now, that seems to be the useless knowledge to me.

M: It is useless.

J: What you've been doing in your books is turning our gaze outward, not inward. We're looking at these moments — it's our history, it seems to me. I mean, this is the history of all the rest of us, you know what I mean?

M: I agree. And I think there's an absolutely honorable tradition of this. For example, there's that African American burial ground in Wall Street, where, based upon just dental samples, you can begin to figure out where these human beings came from and what were the circumstances of their lives, and so on. All of this is an effort to open up a past that everyone shares but they don't know they share.

J: Years ago I did some work on public programs for archaeologists in Annapolis, and they were never more thrilled than when they came upon an old privy. Because down in the privy was where they were finding everything… These little minute buttons and bits of shoe leather and the ancient human feces with the piece of corn in it that told them that people ate that kind of corn at that point. And they just got so excited about that.

M: Yeah, well, that's the kind of weird people we are.

J: Last year, I was doing a series for the New York Times where I was going around the different neighborhoods and doing the history. And I found myself fairly early on becoming very suspicious of anyone who claimed to be an expert, or was claimed to be an expert, in New York City history. Because just in New York City, the history is so rich and so dense and so layered and so fragmented that it's incomprehensible to me that any one individual could claim to be an expert about anything but one corner of it.

M: Yeah, and that, I think, is the beauty of it. I don't think in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of our grandchildren anyone's ever gonna exhaust the possibility of opening up things that are hidden.

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