The readings for this week covered a lot of ground, but the essays that stuck with me were about Don DeLilo and racism, respectively. I can relate to the idea of an author's work either not being digitized (and thus lost to the ages) or an author's work being on the web on sites that no longer operate and thus being lost to the ages. Because it's happened to me.
Back in 2003, while attending Tri-County Tech, I started sending off short "witty" humor pieces (at least I thought they were witty at the time, but I was twenty-four and probably thought everything I did was "witty") to smaller humor websites that thrived on reader submissions. Your National Lampoons or Cracked.coms of the world were too good for my sophisticated humor (again, I thought it was sophisticated, odds are it wasn't), so I sent off pieces dashed off on my mom's computer or at the computer lab on campus to various websites until I hit paydirt. The first site to publish my work was the Neurotic Eclectic (I remember the name, even if no one else does). It was a website run by a guy living in Arizona (for some strange reason, most of the early success I had with freelance humor writing came via websites based in Arizona), and he accepted one of my pieces based on the premise of has-been celebrities doing "books on tape" of Cliff's Notes-versions of American classics. Like I said, I thought I was witty at twenty-four.
At any rate, I had a good run with the website, and with other sites where I got acceptance, and over the years you could say I built up a pretty good archive of original material. You'd be wrong, however; within a year of publishing me, a lot of those websites that welcomed my work went kaput. It was and remains a fact that internet web sites live or die by viewer traffic, and sometimes they get infected by viruses sent by people who have nothing better to do. A lot of the sites where I was most prolific seemed to suffer this fate: there is a likely chance that somewhere, there exist archives of my work alongside others who wrote for the sites back then, but I wouldn't bet on it ever seeing the light of day. Like I said, most of my writing at this time was done on my mom's PC (which bit the dust sometime around 2006 or so) or at the computer labs, and I didn't think to save anything to either of those. I got my own PC in 2004, with internet connection (via old-school dial-up), but once my Norton Anti-Virus ran out (it had been free for a year, but I was too cheap to pay for it after that), that computer became a victim of random computer viruses, often spread via the very same websites I was submitting to.
I learned an important lesson then: don't submit material that you don't already have saved somewhere else, multiple times over if you can (not just to your PC or laptop, but also on discs or flash drives or Nanos or what have you). I also learned that internet commentators can be assholes: one site that published me fairly regularly had comments sections for the articles, and I got reamed cyber-wise by people whom at first I took seriously and then later realized were just jealous that their work wasn't considered good enough for the website (us writers got a regular log-in ID and password, instead of having to send everything via the "we might take a look at this" email address for freelance submitters, many of whom I gathered were commentators and frustrated humorists themselves). At least that's what I tell myself.
At any rate, all the discussion of DeLillo's lost work (stories that vanished in the pre-internet ether of magazine submission bins or were published, but in magazines now lost to time) hit a nerve. I would never presume to say that the work I did during those years when I self-identified as a freelance humor writer would be up to the level of DeLillo (I've read White Noise and Great Jones Street, and I once started Underworld without getting too far into it, so I'd probably substitute some other writer whose work I'm more familiar with, like Pynchon or Lethem), but I do mourn the fact that, supposing I ever did become a famous author and someone wanted to do research on my early work, they'd be hard-pressed to find it (then again, that might be a good thing: "juvenile" wouldn't begin to cover the tone of much of that early internet work). Archiving an author's work (not just his published books or stories, but also essays, correspondence, and so on) is likely to be harder in this digital age, where the idea is "nothing is lost" but the reality is "websites crash, magazines lose their online presence, and shit just happens." One of my favorite books was the first volume of Hunter S. Thompson's collected letters, which got me into the Great Gonzo Writer; I wonder if a collected volume of "the emails of Trevor Seigler" would have the same resonance.
The discussion of the apparent "whiteness" of the digital humanities, at least as it related to the civil-rights era, was interesting too, and I hope I remember to bring up in class the idea that digital technology sought to streamline itself so as to avoid much of the upset and tumult of the Sixties. Interesting too was the discussion of the move from overt racism (whites-only signs) to covert racism over the years, as a response to the work of MLK and other civil-rights leaders. This past NBA season, we had an example of covert racism being made public (Donald Sterling's comments to his girlfriend) resulting in the public shaming of a horrible person and the forced sale of his team (the Clippers). It would seem that such instances might actually support the notion, contrary to covert racism seemingly codified by digital design, that the online world can expose such thoughts more than hide them. Again, I hope that we bring this up in class more, but I think it merits some discussion about how the internet can both be a conduit for such covert racism and at the same time an exposing agent for such thoughts that we (and we are all prejudiced in some way or another) might think of as "private conversation." It also gets to the debate about a possible "chilling effect" on free speech, versus the idea of accountability for the things that you say.
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