Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 8.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-05-09 06:09:13+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: belated birthday

Dear colleagues,

Two days ago Humanist entered its 37th year of continuous publication
without me or anyone else noticing. A sign of middle age on its part,
old age on mine?

I had occasion recently to recall the conference in Columbia, South
Carolina, at which the initial impulse to do something about
communication among computing humanists was conceived. A few weeks ago,
at a quite different sort of conference, at the great Jagiellonian
University, in the beautiful city of Kraków, I fell into conversation
with a literary scholar working on Cormac McCarthy's late novels,
discovering he was from Columbia SC, hence the recollection. He was
particularly concerned in his lecture there with the paranoia in those
novels, discussing them in such amazing detail, connecting them with an
astonishingly vast range of literature (including Richard Hofstadter's
1963 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford,"The Paranoid Style in American
Politics"), that I was inspired to ask him if such encyclopaedic
explanatory literary scholarship was not itself a manifestation of
paranoia. (A paranoid person, according to one definition, is someone
who has all the answers to every question.) He was amused, I hope not
troubled. At least he gave no sign of that.

I have been reflecting over the last months on the perhaps related
compulsion to scoop up everything somehow related to whatever topic I am
working on--in the spirit of being helpful to readers, I tell
myself--that is made so irresistible by online resources. This is the
late Roy Rosenzweig's 'problem of abundance', noted in "Scarcity or
Abundance?", in Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age
(2011). If one cannot in good conscience think that it's possible, with
a tight and narrow focus, to drill down to the core of what something
REALLY IS, then is one condemned to amass ever more related things in
the sure and certain knowledge that 'the right track' is a
will-o'-the-wisp?

Perhaps not a persuasive way to celebrate a birthday. But then my ideal
has for many, many years been the long conversation, not so much only
"between two friends, where one thing leads to another", as David Jones
wrote in The Anathemata (1952), but one whose wandering slowly maps out
a growing field of study.

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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