OK, so I'm going to do two more.
Some of these are really sad.
I mean, some of them are kind of funny.
There's one that talks about warrant
and that one's pretty funny, but this is a little--
this is a little sadder one.
This is on a manuscript of Steve Orlen's, my colleague
here for many years.
And many of you I'm sure knew Steve Orlen.
And I have his office now.
It's called "Crime of Omission."
And it kind of explains itself.
And here's an excerpt from his manuscripts
that were left in a trash bag that I found in Modern
Languages after he died.
"Outside poet Steve Orlen's former office door,
I found three garbage bags marked for trash.
He had died four months or so before.
I looked inside, they're filled with notes and manuscripts.
Shouldn't there be an archive for this stuff?
I had dinner plans that night so I couldn't dally along,
but I triaged out what bits I could that I
felt too awful to discard.
I kept a small box, and I have a pretty good amount of this
still and returned the rest.
It's hard to know what matters.
The novel is not that good.
I'm sure he'd admit, which is probably
why he never published it.
A genre thing or a couple of drafts of one
with a bunch of readers notes, some in Orlen's hand.
On one page I found a note, presumably his son's.
I felt this too should be preserved,
maybe that makes me sentimental.
It's a shame we value product over process,
though I suppose we must.
Pentimento such as this might demonstrate a change from note
to final draft.
If we care enough about the work,
we might go deeper into the mine shaft,
going farther down with the candles
that we bought with our meager pay.
But what if we discard the drafts and call them trash?
We might believe the work we do is solo moan,
and some long nights it is.
Other times our progeny might scrawl notes
so we know that they were there and participating silently,
or what our lover said to us last night in anger
might shift a sentence's direction
without our thinking of it.
In the era of nearly infinite data,
it remains easy to disappear.
Now I'm housed in Orlen's former office.
I have in a case a pack of Lucky Strikes that he kept from 1948.
He smoked a lot.
He died from it.
It still smells a little like his smoke in here.
Perhaps his smoke will continue rising up.
I see it as a shrine, another thing of his.
Just rolled leaves and paper that he never saw fit to burn.
I keep wondering, what have I left out
that I should have said that I could have kept?
Our last conversation now feels freighted
as last conversations will.
He was a conversation lover.
Walking to the student union with him to enjoy caffeine,
he asked me if there was ever a time when I stepped away
from writing for a while, just gave it
up and did something else and if it was hard to make it back?
I thought at the time it was kind
of him to ask for my advice, as little as I had to give.
He'd written longer and deeper than I could have dreamed.
He said he was going to take some time away,
but feared he wouldn't make it back.
I don't remember what I said, but I wish I did.
He never made it back."