Three years and two months ago I arrived in Funky City for my first tenure-track job. At last, my job had come along! My temping days were over, but alas, life was no song. My landing was not gentle, and I’ve written about some of the disasters that greeted me here. I often felt I was in my own personal Amityville Horror, in which a door hissed at one of the house’s new residents, “Gehhhtttttt ooowwwwwtttt.” Or maybe that was Prince. Whatever. As a kid, I laughed my ass off at that cheesy gambit, but I could have sworn my new apartment, my new office, and my new town were hissing at me. If I were superstitious, I would have breached my contract and run screaming, in any direction, away from here.
Even my computer was hazing me. Or do I mean “haunting”? Two weeks before classes started, I had a conference in London. I also had to correct proofs for an article. But the moment I turned on my computer, the screen started streaking, and then it faded to white. I soon learned that my iBook, which had served me faithfully for almost four years, was a notoriously buggy model, and that Apple was replacing parts for it, provided one send it in within a certain time frame. Of course, mine was not only out of warranty, but also beyond the help of AppleCare.
So in my iBook went into the shop, which sent it to California. Since my own office wasn’t ready, I wound up correcting my proofs and finishing as much of my conference paper as I could in the faculty office of one of my deans, all the while paranoid about ruining the good impression I had made during my interview, before departing for Blighty.
Before my conference I had four days in the British Library—without a computer. While I was able to finish my conference paper on the PC of a friend in London, I had no access to a laptop for note-taking. Sure, my bags were a lot lighter without a computer, but the pencil-and-paper method really got tiresome. Actually, I switched to pencil and paper after I filled the two knockoff Hello Kitty notebooks I’d bought at a Pound-Stretcher shop. When I ran out, I wrote on the versos (versi?) of the BL’s maps and fee descriptions. I’m sure the reading room attendants loved flipping through my pink notebooks full of notes in various languages and scripts, and that they loved even better that I was appropriating their employer’s free info once those pink notebooks were exhausted. Or, more likely, they didn’t care. For those four days, I was my own Bartleby.
This morning I was going through old conference materials in my file cabinet, when what flopped out but twenty A4 pages of close, tiny writing?
I spent today transcribing those notes into electronic files, like all my previous notes. This way, I can find relevant material in spotlight searches (hello, new OS) if I can’t figure out the content from my files’ names. The material is fascinating. In the three years since I took those notes, I have published two articles relating to them and completed a book manuscript based on similar material. I can still shoehorn the newly rediscovered material into the book, but while writing one of the articles a year ago I turned my computer and my files inside out looking for a weird detail I transcribed today. It was something I could have sworn I had read somewhere, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. But, with the deadline looming, maybe I had imagined it. It would have made such a difference in the way I framed my argument.
But no, that article is out there, skewed by ignorance of an obscure, extremely weird bit of ephemera that has probably not been consulted by anyone else at the BL since I entrusted it to Hello Kitty’s safekeeping in 2006. I would be embarrassed, were I not cynically comforted by the possibility that no one has read this article since its publication in February. Yes. Just move it along. Nothing to see here.
