Summary
The tattered book worth risking everything for, the man who can't forget and chronicling history one voice message at a time.
Josie Long presents short documentaries and adventures in sound about record keepers.
Memories Featuring Bob Petrella Produced by Andrea Rangecroft
Messages from Manus Island Featuring Behrouz Boochani Produced by Femi Oriogun-Williams
The Exercise Book Featuring Jeremiah Produced by Andrea Rangecroft
Production Team: Eleanor McDowall and Alia Cassam Producer: Andrea Rangecroft
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in September 2019.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | Today's episode is about people keeping archives. |
| 0:09.0 | And as somebody whose memory in the past year has been completely obliterated by sleeplessness, |
| 0:15.6 | it's something that I feel a strange ambivalence about. |
| 0:19.3 | I used to have such a brilliant memory I'd remember every detail of my life |
| 0:22.8 | and now I'm just surfing along |
| 0:25.0 | on a wave of hopefulness. |
| 0:27.7 | The first voice you're going to hear is mine |
| 0:29.3 | and then you will hear other voices. |
| 0:36.4 | This is Shortcuts. |
| 0:41.3 | Brief encounters, true stories, radio adventures, and found sound. |
| 0:58.7 | Today, the archivist. |
| 1:04.9 | Each person creates his way to survive. |
| 1:10.0 | For me, creating, it can be an act of resistance. |
| 1:14.3 | I put my bag, I put some medication together, |
| 1:16.2 | and then I run with the book. |
| 1:20.2 | It is like a mobile clinic running by me itself. |
| 1:36.2 | When I was younger, I was obsessed with journaling and with archiving my life, trying to get as much of it as possible down on paper, to cling onto it, to try and savour it against the passing of time. |
| 1:43.7 | I think at the time I thought it would be important to keep all these records, as if anyone in the future would be interested in them. And now I'm terrified of somebody |
| 1:47.9 | finding them and reading them, but at the same time I can't bear to dispose of them to annihilate |
| 1:54.5 | that record of my life and my memories. So what I do is I have them shut away in boxes, hidden, in the hope that no one ever finds them, but that they never get destroyed. |
| 2:09.7 | Bob Petrella carries around the similar archive of his own, but his is at least locked away in his extraordinary memory. |
... |
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