i cannot bear to throw out my old notes from graduate school and college, some of which i know very well i won’t look at again, especially the ones in my untidy and inky scrawl, and yet and yet, they are notes! and anything could be useful again one day!the juvenile scratchings and ideas, things jotted down on the stump, those i can throw out without compunction (no vanity there!) but the syllabus of a class i didn’t take but attended the first day of? — if i hang on to the syllabus, surely surely i can still use the reading lists to teach myself all about the infancy of medieval medicine and 19th century cultural studies and the peculiarities of middle english prosody and spenser’s continental sources? the journal articles that i didn’t read –they still look interesting! nevermind if it was published in 1999 the scholarship would be outdated by now, nevermind if i really want to i could get it off jstor again! out it goes, yes, no? no. but something has to go!
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird