Today Kathy strapped a bunch of wall calendars in some homemade shipping containers, with the intension of sending them off to TAMU special collections.
Why wall calendars? Because they contain day-to-day tracking of my life for the last thirty-odd years. (Assuming of course that anyone in the future is interested in such a thing.)
Plus: pretty pictures!
It occurs to me that I’m of the last generation to create such a complete paper trail, what with calendars, copy-edited manuscripts, page proofs, hand-jotted notes for books, pages and pages of research meticulously recorded in notebooks, incomplete drafts of unsold projects, files of reviews, speech and lecture notes, interviews in now-dead magazines, contracts with publishers. Even my tax filings!
Everyone after me has all that on digital media, pretty much unreadable after a few decades.
So hey— if you’re an academic who wants to devote your career to analysis of a certain mid-list writer, I’ve made it easy for you! Go for it!
Plus— I’m still alive! I can answer questions and offer insights, which you can pretend are yours alone!
Your stellar career awaits. Call me.
