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I have a 3 and a half inch 1.44MB floppy disk labeled “Emails” floating around in a folder somewhere. Sometimes it emerges, and I laugh and take a picture of it and put it back in the folder. It was in an antique trunk full of paper from my youth in a closet in my parents’ house, but in April I found myself with an empty suitcase after selling all the copies of Ghosts of Distant Trees that I’d brought south with me (thank you, if you are among the people who bought a book from me in Arizona in April), and I filled the suitcase with paper from the trunk and moved into a box that is currently sitting, unsorted, behind me. I don’t know if the disk was in one of those folders or in another one still in the trunk. I don’t know what’s on it, exactly, but a friend from college remembers a year that I embarked on “an email sorting project” that involved a lot of copying and pasting into word documents, you know, for the personal archive. Email servers would not, in my predictions, be the archive, but a word doc on a floppy disk might be. My partner owns an external floppy disk reader that connects with a USB-A adapter, because he is the kind of person to own an external floppy disk reader, and though my current laptop doesn’t have a USB-A port I do own two adapters that I can use to connect via USB-C ports, which is supposedly a better connection, more efficient, more secure, etc, but has mostly meant I need to carry a lot of cables and adapters everywhere. I haven’t used it to look at what’s on the “Emails” disk. I’m sure it is, as the kids say, “cringe;” it is of the era when we wrote emails like letters, full of intimacy and manifestos and mundanities and yet somehow, 1.44MB seemed like it would be enough. I opened yet another new email account in July, at Protonmail’s lowest paid level, though I’m still too deep in Google platforms to extricate myself any time soon. The new inbox, which I’m using for just a handful of correspondences, is already at 464MB. My first gmail account, which I opened in 2007, is near its 15GB capacity, and also contains an archive that I cannot bring myself to simply delete and also do not want to read. In fact-checking myself for the final edits of Ghosts of Distant Trees, I reread a handful of threads (we did not say “threads” to mean “emails” then), and found rich exchanges about the literary tradition of settlers unmapping Alaska woven into emails about awkward run-ins with each other’s Denali crushes or exes on trails in the Southwest. I was struck by nostalgia for that mostly lost way of communicating and also resentment that this archive of evolving thoughts and relationships is at the mercy of a company whose current project Siva Vaidhyanathan describes in the Boston Review as “[taking] the labor of dozens of writers, editors, researchers, and institutions, [blending] it into a single fluent voice with no discernible author, and [presenting] it as if it had emerged from nowhere in particular.” The series Vaidhyanathan’s essay, “Infrastructural Imperialism,” is part of asks, “What Was the Internet?” and invites five writers to engage in the technological, social, and economic evolutions of online spaces. Editor Matt Lord asks in the introduction, “is [the AI-fueled overhaul of functional browsing, search engines, and organic digital encounter] the end of the web itself? And if so, is some kind of eulogy in order?” In March at the AWP conference, I moderated a panel on “Writing Impermanence,” with friends Anna Cabe, Bathsheba Demuth, Sean Enfield, and Monica Macansantos in spirit, and our conversation ranged from ecological and social impermanences to the virtual. Anna spoke about experiences on the early internet, and what remains of these archives of “lives lived online” as “detritus from history.” Now “the machine is being called the genius,” she noted. Bathsheba, an environmental historian, noted her worries about the archives lost to corporate consolidations. I’ve thought often in the months since about the relative permanence of letters mailed across oceans and stored in boxes for generations as opposed to the lost missives from Angelfire sites or deleted Twitter accounts. Ironically, I’ve wished the event was recorded, so I wasn’t limited to my haphazard notes, taken from the podium with an eye on the clock. Even as an early denizen of the web journal and the blogosphere – I was sharing my personal thoughts online before most of my peers had email addresses and screen names, for better or worse – I made pronouncements about the limitations of the form. In an act of determination and focus that confounds me now, I taught myself some HTML in the middle of the night on my parents’ iMac and wrote manifestos about how email will never take off because of our human need to tear letters in half or light them on fire. We need the physical catharsis of a slammed phone, I wrote with the confidence of a 14 year old who did not yet have more than 1.44MB of saved chats documenting a absurdly drawn out breakup, held in indefinite but precarious trust by Google. I did not foresee the petty violence of a pointed tap of the “end call” button or have meaning for the phrase “left on read.” There’s a eulogy here and also a warning, and a roundabout way of saying maybe my early online defenses of the analog were right, but even if there were a way to read them now I wouldn’t necessarily want to. Maybe this is a long way to letting you know that I’m looking into alternatives to Squarespace, where I am currently emailing you from and which recently raised its rates exorbitantly to pay for AI features I don’t need or want, so the next time you hear from me it might look a bit different, if I can find the focus to look into and switch website hosts again. Maybe I should hire a 14 year old to do it. Maybe I should look at the “Emails” disk. Maybe I should delete the breakup chat folders. It would free up some space. Maybe I should write a zine. Maybe I’ll send it to you, if the US post office survives this election season. I remember, in some lost blog or another, quoting a favorite translated passage from Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “To Friends Behind a Border:” Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years when the microphones in the hotel walls are all forgotten and can finally sleep, becoming orthoceratites.
The translation I remember, but I don’t know where I read, and I don’t know the whole poem or much of Tranströmer’s work at all, used “frontier” rather than “border,” and “trilobites” rather than “orthoceratites.” I just learned from Wikipedia that orthoceratites are unique to limestones of Sweden and the Baltic region, which is where Tranströmer was from, and is likely closer to his meaning. That specificity seems important. Like it comes from somewhere, like all writing by humans does.
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