TAMIMENT TIMES.

Having been involved in a whole lot of archival research studying throughout this last year, I surprisingly haven’t had to touch the Tamiment Library’s collection. So, going on the class visit trip to the top of Bobst to visit the old Tamiment for me was an exciting archival adventure. Before going up there and seeing what Tamiment was really all about, the idea of it, especially in comparison to all the most excellent collections in Fales, seemed a little dull. I knew they mostly concentrated on their collection of labor archives and the like, and I really felt like I had a pretty strong aversion to those kinds of papers. But then we went up there and sat in some classroom without windows and passed around books full of old documents and pictures. To my own surprise, there was a lot of stuff up in old Tamiment that I actually had a genuine interest in.

For one thing, the Triangle Shirt-Waist Factory fire has always extremely intrigued me and they had all of those old photos from the scene of the fire and some photocopies of newspaper clippings to look at and hold in your hands instead of looking at them online. Freshman year I got some crazy idea in my head about that fire and ghosts and businesses like that and wrote a poem about it in my old journal, so that really impressed me to see those things in person.

Then the guy took out some issues of Max Eastman’s self-published magazine, The Masses. By this point in the semester I think everyone is perhaps familiar with my complete obsession with the self-published magazine, it’s kind of all I ever talk about, so I’ll save you from more compulsive ramblings. I’ll just say this: I loved that I could look at and hold some tangible form of an historical pre-cursor to the magazines I’m most interested in from the 1960s.

When he started talking about all those old folk and labor song collections they had stored in the archives, he really pulled out those big guns. Although I haven’t been back to the archives yet, I was excited to learn that they were open to the public so my privileges will not be taken away as long as I am a part of what is considered the “public.” Once I am liberated from the chains of my current academic situation of finals and things, I will go back over to the Tamiment and try to listen to some of those old folk songs. I’m thinking about going into the business of playing traditional songs on the guitar and singing along with them sometime starting this summer. Maybe this will give me a little more of a potential repertoire to work with.


---nicole wallace.