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September042005

Legacies in the ether

Filed under: Headline Shooter

From today's Times piece about how email is changing the recorded nature of literary correspondence:


Although David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said he considers the collected letters of Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor, ''the best book I've ever read about The New Yorker,'' you won't see Remnick's collected letters -- or e-mail correspondence -- any time soon. ''Oh, God forbid,'' Remnick said. For one thing, The New Yorker routinely purges messages from its system. Deborah Treisman, who as The New Yorker's fiction editor is in communication with most major living writers, confessed she doesn't always save her messages. ''Unfortunately, since I haven't discovered any convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I don't usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months,'' Treisman said. ''If there's a particularly entertaining or illuminating back-and-forth with a writer over the editing process, though, I do sometimes print and file the e-mails.'' The fiction department files eventually go to the New York Public Library, she said, ''so conceivably someone could, in the distant future, dig all of this up.''

The impact on future scholarship is ''not something that I've spent much time thinking about,'' Remnick said. ''I'd say something a little bit radical: as much as I respect lots of scholarship in general, what matters most is the books and not 'book chat,' '' he said. ''Something's obviously been lost, even though I don't think it's the most important literary thing we could lose.''

Later: Why I love Nicholson Baker.

One writer who systematically saves his e-mail is Nicholson Baker, whose book Double Fold was a cri de coeur about what is lost when libraries convert newspapers and other rare materials to microfilm. ''I regret deleting things afterward, even sometimes spam,'' Baker said. ''I've saved almost everything, incoming and outgoing, since 1993, except for a thousand or so messages that went away after a shipping company dropped my computer. That amounts to over two gigabytes of correspondence -- I know because my old version of Outlook froze when I passed the two gigabyte barrier. When software changes, I convert the old mail into the new format. It's the only functioning filing system I have.''

Funny 1994 interview with Baker [ALTX; "What's wrong with things being sophomoric once in a while? The sophomore year has been given a bad rap."]

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