Christine Borne

If you are visiting here for the first time because I’ve met you at SAA, or because you saw my resume posted in the Networking Cafe, or you found the stack of business cards that I will have inevitably dropped in the bathroom, welcome! Please feel free to look around. I’m currently engaged as a Project Archivist at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum through May 2011, and am looking for opportunities for next spring. I am open to relocating, preferably to New York, Chicago, Boston, or eastern Canada. If you’ve got a project, drop me a line!

"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!"

So when we last spoke, I was getting ready to be a Millionaire. Although I passed the test, they did not pick me to be on the show. If you want to read about what it’s like to get up at 4 AM to go to a game show audition, I suggest you read Bridget Callahan’s excellent recap of our experience.

Anyway, here’s a smattering of what I’ve been up to lately:

• On July 3 I wrapped up months of planning for the annual Local Author Book Fair at Loganberry Books. I met some interesting new people, including Susan Petrone, J.T. Dutton, Mara Purnhagen, and James Renner.

• I’ve also been heading up the monthly book club at Loganberry. Officially, the theme is Classics; unofficially it’s Reread Those Books That Confounded or Eluded You in High School. We’ve read Evelina, To Kill a Mockingbird (my first time!) and A Tale of Two Cities so far. Next up is Cannery Row (details here).

• I’ve processed numerous archival collections of varying size, scope, and arrangement at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives. There’s plenty more to be done in the next 9 months.

• I finally succumbed to Twitter.

• Next week I’ll be attending the Society of American Archivists national conference in Washington, D.C. I have not been to D.C. since our 8th grade field trip. This is the first major professional event I’ve attended since 2005, and is also probably the closest thing I’ve had to a vacation since Jim and I spent a weekend in Buffalo two years ago.

And of course, I’m still working on numerous fiction projects, which are all extremely secret.

I’m not a morning person. I’m not really a night person either — frankly, I do my best work while I’m dreaming — but tomorrow I might try and get up early so I can hoof it down to the Flats to audition for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

When I revealed my secret plan to one of my coworkers, he said, “Do you want to be a millionaire?” And I said no, not really. What I really want, friends, is to go on national TV wearing a cat t-shirt and show America the true soul of Cleveland. Nevermind that young Lebron James fellow.

Now I know how these things work. You take the test to show you’re smart enough, but then they size you up and and decide whether you’d make good TV watching. And I’ll have to convince them that although I’ve been on 60 Minutes every week for the last 40 years (that’s me, right? I can’t remember), they really do want to take a chance on an aging little chunk who hasn’t been to the dentist or had a haircut in years. (Note: being on TV would be a great excuse to get a haircut and go to the dentist. Should I tell them that?)

Anyway. There will inevitably be two questions asked: 1) Why don’t you tell us a little something about yourself? and 2) What are you gonna do with all that money?

Here are my answers.

1. I’m a freelance and contract archivist. What’s an archivist? Like a librarian, only — wait for it — archivists make it last longer! In my spare time I enjoy peering at the neighbors, drinking sherry, and falling asleep on the couch watching Miss Marple. Also I need to go on your show because here’s what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna put on a Miami Heat jersey and  punk Cleveland on  national TV because  Cleveland deserves it and because I’m mad at Lebron James for doing what was totally MY RIGHT to do in the first place.

2. I’ll take the money in pennies, please, and I’ll drop them all over the city for my husband to find because his only life’s pleasure is finding spare change on the ground. No really, I’m going to buy an iPod and then pay someone to teach me how to use it. No really, I’m just going to reinvest it all in Dan Gilbert’s precious temporary casino because if I don’t he will publicly diss me in 14-point Comic Sans. And to be honest, that’s the worst kind of diss ever.

Ha ha just kidding. It totally is about Lebron James.

"Bye bye Cleveland."

For those of you who waste your precious pennies on fancy cable, tonight is an exciting night. At 9 pm EST you’ll get to witness the most important event in Cleveland history: a basketball player deciding the fate of our city on national television.

Regardless of Lebron’s decision, I guarantee that Cleveland will be a smoking ruin on Friday morning. Clevelanders have been waiting for an excuse to smash and destroy everything in sight for years now. It’ll be like the ultimate knock-down, drag-out fight with that live-in, on-again, off-again significant other who we secretly resent for being better than us/smarter than us/sexier than us. It’ll be cathartic. King James doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. Cleveland needs to get pissed. If he tries to make us happy, it’ll just backfire.

Mark my words, this’ll happen. I’ve already booked my midnight Megabus ticket outta here. Not only that, I’m fully prepared to get caught in the Lebron Riots of 2010 — as I write this, I feel I am hurtling toward my destiny. “I’ll be waiting for the train at Tower City when it happens,” I nervously told a friend this morning. She politely suggested I outfit myself with some makeshift riot gear. I looked around my house to see what could possibly protect me but all I came up with was a couple of badminton rackets, but I got them at Big Lots so I doubt they’re really riot-quality.

But seriously, I know there are a lot of people who are sick of hearing about Lebron, and annoyed that Clevelanders can’t seem to concentrate on important things. But if you allow me to be annoying and academic for a moment, I might argue that the Lebron saga is about the most important thing of all: the search for meaning in an age without myths and heroes. Read more…

I’ve never been much of a summer person. I sunburn easily and wilt at temperatures higher than 75 degrees. I’m not sure why I keep insisting on living places that experience hot summers, although my aversion to heat does explain my penchant toward places like England, Newfoundland, and Seattle.

But this year I’m looking forward to summer evenings. To sitting on the front porch amid pots of basil, lime basil, mallow, and heliotropes, reading Agatha Christie or Philip Pullman until well after dark, listening to the crickets and probably also salsa music from someone’s car stereo up the street, which doesn’t bother me as much as you think it would because it just reminds me of living in Queens. To puttering around in the back garden, fussing over moonflowers that won’t grow, tending to pitiful Charlie Brown tomato plants, arranging ferns and Corsican mint under the arbor, figuring out WTF to do with all these radishes.

In the latest issue of Writer’s Digest,  Orson Scott Card tells you how to use four main elements of fiction — milieu, idea, character, or event — to determine your story’s structure.

As I was reading this over a bowl of generic Golden Grahams, I started to wonder: if I were going to write a novel about Cleveland, which element might dominate?

Cleveland itself would be the main character in the milieu story. Like Gulliver, my protagonist might arrive in Cleveland from elsewhere, poke around, notice how empty downtown is at rush hour, how nobody seems to understand “stand right, walk left,” and how absurd it is to evict the local convention and visitors’ bureau in order to install a temporary casino.

In the idea story, I might pose a question such as, “What would happen if Frank Jackson got attacked by radioactive sea lampreys?” or “What if Drew Carey ran for mayor — and won?” or just plain old “What the hell happened to this place?” and then plug in some characters who’ll spend the next 60-80,000 words exploring the ramifications of this nightmare scenario.

In the character story, Cleveland would have to happen to someone. I would have to create  a character with hopes and hangups and feelings — and then sacrifice him to the gaping maw of Cleveland. I would watch Cleveland grind my little friend between its jaws, swallow him, and then either assimilate him or regurgitate his mangled psyche back into the wider world.

In an event story, says Card, “something is wrong in the fabric of the universe.” Clearly, an event story would take place during the postapocalyptic dark age after Lebron James leaves Cleveland. Surely there would be a mysterious prophecy heralding the birth of a new savior. And of course that savior would rise from the lowliest roots to the greatest of heights, would be the One True Leader who would singlehandedly save Cleveland from itself. And then the steel mills would come back and everything would be all right again just like during the Eisenhower administration.

For the next year I’ll be working as a Project Archivist at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s new Library and Archives. Although I won’t be writing about the specifics of the collections I’m working on, you can expect to hear some of the reasons why archival work appeals to me creatively.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the day I bought my house.

Buying the house seemed like less of an exciting new chapter in my life than a creeping inevitability — one to be arrived at slowly, like going over a cliff in a Jazzy with no brakes. Exactly two months after we bought the house, I got the letter that no employee wants to get, the one that says “thanks but we can’t pay you anymore. Good luck.”

When this happens to you and you don’t have a house, here’s what you do: you get outta wherever you are, you get back to where you once belonged, you do that thing you always wanted to do, whatever it is. The bottom line is: you cut your losses and go. When this happens to you and you DO have a house, you are nothing but stuck.

Stuck is the one thing I can’t handle. L’enfer, pour moi, is not being in a room with people I can’t stand and crooked pictures on the wall that you can never quite straighten. It’s being stuck. I don’t have to be constantly moving forward, like a shark, but I do have to feel like I can find the exit door. When I was laid off and stuck with the house, suddenly I looked up and realized that familiar orange glow was nowhere in sight and that my life was filling with smoke.

I used to be a real job hopper, a real nomad. The thought of staying at a single job or living in a single place for more than two years filled me with dread. So I thought it was ironic that once I decided to come back to Cleveland, once I made the decision to put down roots, all I could find was temporary employment. It only just occurred to me that maybe it’s not irony: maybe it’s a sign.

Home ownership is not the American Dream; it’s only a small manifestation of a larger aspect of it — namely, the idea that everyone should have an equal shot at stuff like using their talents to make money and having the ability to pay for a small patch of earth. You’re supposed to look around at the house you bought and be reminded of your successes in life: “Look at what I, through my hard work, diligence, and financial restraint, was able to achieve!” But when I look around at my house I just see my failures, lurking misshapen and misbegotten in every dark corner like a monster in a David Lynch film. In every unfinished home improvement project I see the ghosts of those things I ought to have done by this point in life, the regrets I’ll have in ten years. I see the living and working abroad that I haven’t done, I see the career path in publishing that I didn’t take. I see reminders of what happens when you don’t realize (or worse, forget) what’s most important to you. I see why the Buddha extolled impermanence and wagged a stern finger when it came to attachment.

There are two things that make me feel especially patriotic. One is standing in front of Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m not exactly sure that it’s patriotism I feel, but if you are unprepared for the sheer hugeness of the painting you can’t help but feel sort of shocked and awed into giving your country a little bit of respeck.

The other thing is paying my taxes.

Now I’m an obnoxious liberal of such a rare variety that I often feel compelled to apologize to other liberal friends, who tune out immediately if I say the C-word. (No, not THAT C-word, wiseguy. The one that’s 50 miles across Lake Erie, and known for its Nanaimo bars, tragedy-stricken figure skaters, and terrible TV.) I like to think, though, that I’m not one of those awful, bloody humorless liberals obsessed with shrieking about subsidized corn and electric cars. If you arrived here by googling “obnoxious liberals who love paying taxes hate hate hate,” I bet we can find at least one dry patch of common ground: I cringed alongside you, my fellow patriotic American, when John Kerry clipped that turkey. OMG.

But I really do love paying my taxes, and to be frank, I would pay more taxes if I was asked. If I could just get on my soapbox for a moment — if only to see what it’s like to be a normal-sized person, for once — I’ve always felt that we should be conservative with our personal finances so that we can be liberal with our values. If you’ve ever gotten a text from me — especially in the middle of the night, or while I’m riding the bus — you know how much time I spend thinking up elaborate disaster scenarios. People who we don’t know, who we will never meet, but who in all probability are a lot like us, find themselves in all kinds of troubling circumstances for which no single person or factor is to blame. I believe there should be as much of a social safety net for those people as possible. I get queasy — real queasy — about the idea that anyone could go bankrupt from falling down and breaking their leg. Or that you could lose your entire life savings because of a benign brain tumor that your private health insurer would not cover. I would rather pay more in taxes so that no one would have to go through that. I say that not as a member of the Left Coast Intelligentsia but as a prickly Midwestern hausfrau whose gross household income last year was under $40k.

Indulge me for a moment and let me yammer about my family history. (If it makes you feel better, yammering about one’s family history is something librarians hate, so I’ll get my comeuppance.) My husband’s grandmother was born to Ukrainian immigrants in Eastern Pennsylvania. Her father, a coal miner, died in his early forties, leaving her mother alone to raise eleven children. And since these were the days before it was possible to score Octomom-like chat show appearances, they were poor. But as Grandma tells it, if an unexpected guest showed up at Sunday dinner, her mother always managed to find a couple extra pierogi.

In a nutshell, that’s the Cheapskate Evangelist philosophy of giving: be thrifty enough so you can always scrape up those extra pierogi. Am I trying to make you feel ashamed and guilty and terrible about your life choices? No. There are enough stories throughout world mythology and folklore to warn what happens to your everlasting soul if you get stingy with the wrong wayfaring stranger, so you don’t really need me to make you feel guilty. Just pick up a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and resign yourself to life as a toad.

Last night I had a dream that I was in this hipster food co-op with my friend Mark and Bridget Callahan. It was the day before Christmas and there were a million people in the co-op buying organic sustainable fruit baskets and fair-trade finger puppets from Guatemala. The place was just about to close, and everyone was getting in line, kind of like the scene in A Christmas Story when Higbee’s is about to close and all the kids are getting in line to see Santa.

Anyway, I got up to the front of the line with my purchases. But for some reason I was also trying to rent a VHS cassette — I think it was a Bollywood film. The hipster at the cash register got real mad because I wasn’t already in the system. Then the following exchange took place:

Me: What are you so grumpy about? (ha! Like I should ever ask anyone that)

Hipster: Just typical postmodern Midwest anger.

Me: OK. Merry Christmas.

If you want to have dreams like this, I suggest eating the wild mushroom pizza at Carrie Cerino’s before bed. By the way, this hipster looks a lot like the guy from the Strokes, only with a soul patch, so if he shows up in your dreams punch him in the arm and tell him he’s a weenie.