Brendan Greeley

I kept on asking, like, how do I do this?

And they're like, go figure it out.

And so you do kind of figure it out.

I have I have ways of going into the archives now and recording things.

I'm much better.

at it than I used to be.

There are a couple of things I know, like I now always bring food in the bag to the archive because an archive is often sort of not near a good source of food.

So you have to have some sort of protein bar in your bag.

But you have to figure it out on your own.

You know, I looked at a lot of bank records in New Orleans and the records of the Citizens Bank in New Orleans were literally underwater during Katrina.

Jones Hall at Tulane University flooded.

And so they they did this amazing thing where very quickly they recovered them.

They got them out of the water and they irradiated them to kill anything.

But I've talked to other people who've looked in those those archives and you get sick.

flipping through them.

You feel gross after two days of doing that because I think there's bad stuff in those pages.

Some of the pages are stuck together.

So, you know, the archive itself is this living thing, you know, and also there are lots of theories about what gets kept and what doesn't.

When you're in an archive, you have this idea that, like, this is the record of what happened.

Nope.