There’s an essay by that title, which I should reread. I found a scrap of paper in the office where I had written: “My problem is that I am a person who does research but everyone tells me that is ‘not you’.” Gosh, people were convinced they knew identities then.
There’s a nice e-book now of a book I am in, and I think I’ll give the original away, it’s tattered. The Kristeva Reader can go, and Ferreira Gullar’s Vanguarda e subdesinvolvimento, and my copies of Oswald de Andrade, they’re all in such bad shape. I might be starting over in a new key, it’s getting easier and easier to discard books that defined an identity and a set of hoped-for projects.
Early Images of the Americas is a good book of its era, too, but now part of it, including Michael Palencia’s chapter on the Cannibal Law of 1503, is on Google Books. I’m getting rid of Meireles and Pessoa, and those are good poets, but the pages are yellow in these editions. I’m shedding good books I had kept of mementos of people and encounters, books I have affection for. Adeus, lembrarei sempre. I must lighten myself and make space.
I’m recycling Paul Julian Smith, Representing the Other. When it came out in 1992, it was still amazing the question it addresses was even being asked, and that there were now whole books, not just articles, on it. (It’s as though progress has been made in this time.) I’m also recycling the Fall, 1987 issue of Social Text, important back then because of Aijaz’ response to Jameson and some other things.
I am more confident now than then, or more evenly confident, so there is at least that.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 