Ever since the internet has caught
on the feeling of wanting to reach through the screen and smack someone has
become a feeling that almost everyone has felt.
I don’t condone bending physics in order to cause someone pain- even if
it is to smack some sense into them.
However, I do understand the frustration that it creates. My most recent experience was during my
digitization work.
In order
to properly enter the metadata for documents you have to inspect every single
one. In my case, this means reading a
lot of different letters by different people.
It is always interesting to see the breadth of people that communicated
with Folkways Records. Lately I have
been battling to finish the last of my box with at least half a dozen folders
of the same person. (Note: It ISN'T Langston Hughes!) He made a good
number of records for Folkways of cultural music. The first one or two folders seemed to be
similar to other correspondence I had seen.
There are exorbitant numbers of people who were insulted by Moses Asch’s
delayed response to the mail received.
Looking at this from an outside perspective, gaining more and more
knowledge of Moses Asch as I digitize more, I found that those insulted had no
empathy for the Folkways project.
During
the time Folkways made it’s over two thousand records, the amount of paper
going in and out of the company was quite large. Some of the individual artists or others who
wanted their records to be bought and sold by Folkways seemed to completely
forget the fact that there were tons of other people writing to Folkways. The particular person I was working on
digitizing seemed to ignore the fact that Folkways was juggling a number of
different people and records besides just him.
He would send letters complaining about the lack of correspondence when
only two weeks had gone by. Not to mention that Folkways was located in New
York and the artist was in Hawaii.
It is
not only the amount of paper that Folkways had to shift through and respond to,
it was also the events that happened during the course of the record
making. Moses Asch was hospitalized with
a compound fracture and bone infection that took a long time to heal
completely. Also, during the course of
the Folkways company Marian Distler, the true- or at least legal- “head honcho”
of Folkways Records passed away.
To an
extent this person expressed sympathy, but he would continue to push more
recordings onto Folkways during a time where there was very little money for
anything to actually happen. No matter
how many times it was expressed that Folkways did not have the budget for more
records that would not sell many copies, the person kept trying to sell more of
his records, ignoring everything that was said to him when he was responded to. Quite frankly, I would have stopped replying
to the man if I was in Moses’ position.
So far I
haven’t attempted to reach through the screen into the past to smack some sense
into this person. I have been very
tempted to, though. It is a good
reminder that you should never think yourself as all-knowing about someone else’s
life or affairs. You can never truly
understand what someone is going through or see what position they are in. All you really can go by is by what they tell
you. Sometimes even getting the entire
story won’t be enough, as in this case, but at that point it’s really up to the
person to look at the entire picture and not just the small window which suits
them best.
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