Revenge of the Automat

Welcome to my 100th post, which post I'd intended to be an announcement that it would be my last. I've just been too busy doing things lately to be writing about them, or even to be thinking about them very much.  I've stopped diarizing, too, and you may have noticed that I hardly send emails or letters these days. Or perhaps you didn't, which is another reason to give it up: people, or at least most of my people, don't generate much content in response to my own, so what's the point?

A funny thing happened though that decided me otherwise: someone, in effect, asked me to read my dissertation. It's a story worth telling at some length, so I will. And there will be a picture, a great one, but you will have to wait for it.

You must know, though you may have forgotten, that I wrote my dissertation on the automat, and that much of it was about the Automat, the one being a machine, the other its most famous application. The Automat restaurant chain is long gone, but the topic is a perennial favorite, and one that brings journalists my way with some regularity. Less often it brings others my way, too, such as restauranteurs, or trademark collectors, or, most recently, a filmmaker. The journalists want a quote or two, which they get. Most of the others want advice: they are interested in reviving one part (the automat as the core of a new chain) or another (the Horn & Hardart coffee brand) of the old outfit. They, too, get what they came for. But the filmmaker, she wants a lot more.

She found me via a former professor, as best I could tell from the intro a college student interested in making a documentary on the Automat. A nice enough idea, I suppose, but not one I feel any need to contribute much to. I email back but take a few days to review some of her YouTube stuff first and by the time I decide I like it she's already on her way to New York City for three months of archival research and interviews. And that's not all: she's previously interviewed at least one or two of the necessary sources, has started collecting footage from film archives, has visited the Byrnes collection at the NYPL, has compiled an introductory video (sorry, not for public viewing), and has her first round of funding (in an amount already in excess of the total spent on me while I was doing this research all those years ago). Should I be surprised to learn that she has read my dissertation too? I shouldn't be but still I am.

We email now daily as I follow her reports from New York and thereabouts. We talk about the archives and archivists, about the Horn & Hardart "story," about copyrights and titles. Knowing I'd appreciate it more than most, she sent me this photo from her interview with a former Horn and Hardart ad exec:

Frankly it's marvelous, and as she steers me back to the topic I find myself facing an unpleasant necessity: I have to reread my dissertation.

That's what this post is all about, not writing (or filmmaking), but reading, so let me now get right to it: I don't read what I write. Having defended my dissertation I've never reread it. I completed the captions for the Corning book and then never opened that again either. I've never read any of my publications in journals, not even the first time they appeared. I've kept diaries since 1999 and have never read any of them. And because I haven't reread this material you may be sure I've forgotten almost all of it, hence the looming necessity of reading my dissertation.

So here's the thing: the only piece of work I've written and then found myself rereading is this blog. I don't read it often, I don't read most of the articles at all and probably never will, but on occasion I write one that I'm later drawn to return to. That's reason enough to continue, I realize, so I will.

Consider this a postscript: One of the first questions this filmmaker asked me was How many bound copies of my dissertation are in existence. The question took me by surprise: I think of my dissertation, if I think of it at all, as a file on my computer. But hardbound copies do exist, and she got her hands on one, and if I'm going to reread the entire thing then I'm going to need to get my hands on one too: I'll read a blog on screen but not that. My books are mostly buried in boxes, so am I really about to order my own dissertation via inter-library loan?