I had the urge to purge a bit here in my Brooklyn office. I’m horrified to find that one set of filing cabinets is locked and I don’t seem to have a key. Secretary is requesting one. Not that there can be anything that important in there given how long it has been since I opened it.
I’m instead tackling a draw labelled off-prints. I’ve not used it actively since 2013 based on the top level of detritus shoved inside. And yet it is still hard to purge. I’m trying to follow the rule everything online goes. And the rest is set aside to scan. Do you know how hard it was to put a Mesagne hoard print out in the recycling bin?! It is fine. I will never use that piece of paper, it has no notes on it. Literally just a bad print out.
I found a piece of paper with the large scrawl of Bob Viscusi my old mentor long past. It has a list of places outside Rome, including Castello Orisini. Lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about Orsini because of Nemi. It felt like a whisper, a blessing from the past on my present. I have no idea what we were discussing that day. It has no date. I’m guessing maybe early 2012 before I took my beloved to Rome for the first time. Perhaps it is a list of places Bob wanted me to experience. I’m keeping it.
Ooo I found handouts and lots of notes from the Yale 2015 conference on Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Gold dust.
The process is proving hard and overly nostalgic. I have a stack of stuff already I want to scan to PDF to ensure I can have it on ready access. I feel I could just keep it all to re read in retirement. I know this is wrong.
I also found an outline I made by hand late 2005, early 2006 for a seminar paper I gave on my 30th birthday in Oxford.
It turned into this chapter.
I find it astounding how much of my methodologies and questions of interest have remained stable for 20 years.
And I see now that I was pretty good even then at roughing out the big picture, even as I was struggling intensely with finding my voice and feeling like I was doing justice to the evidence. The joy of this blog is watching that voice develop and using hyperlinks to track my sources rather than this rather overwhelming draw of papers. I did however find a remarkably systematic organization beneath the haphazard top layer.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 