Parts four and five of Samantha Pitchel's series of David Foster Wallace Examinations have been posted at Culture Map Austin.
“If you look at his fiction, especially the fiction that he taught, you’ll see in the margin, he’ll write ‘do’ next to a block of text,” Whiteside explains. “[HRC curator Molly Schwartzburg] has an essay coming out about Wallace, about how the Ransom Center got the archive, how it was processed and why it’s organized, how it’s organized. And she writes in this essay, she couldn’t figure out what the ‘do’ meant. And I’m making the argument to her, that’s the teacher in him, he’s saying ‘do this passage.’“ Whiteside made this discovery while browsing through paperbacks in the collection. “The smoking gun here is page 140 of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, where he actually wrote ‘do in class.’”
While the endless parade of visitors is a boon for the archive, can the material itself handle the attention? Constant handling can damage the carefully preserved papers, and some boxes are checked out on a near-daily basis. “We are digitizing quite a bit of the collection in order to make a second copy available in the reading room for researchers who are here at the same time as other researchers,” Schwartzburg explains, “but because of copyright, none of that material will be visible outside of our reading room. That’s one of the challenges of contemporary archives, that we can’t make it available on the web the way we might, say, Edgar Allen Poe.”
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