A comment I made on Facebook that I want to preserve here.

Hershel Parker What I was doing with the Vita was going through looking for speeches or articles I could put the titles of or the actual words of into a folder from which I can draw self-publications, once the book packing for the Berkshire Athenaeum is done and [almost] everything is shipped to Pittsfield. (I am sure there will be a couple of straggling boxes to send as we find things around the house and garage!) If you think you have done good work that was suppressed (as several pieces of mine were, under threats of lawsuits from Fredson Bowers)--suppressed for 20 years in one case--then it's understandable to try to put things out in sequence rather than the way they appeared. It's like having a child of 10 stolen from you and seeing her on the street 20 years later still 10 years old and unchanged, and bewildering everyone who sees her. A big important piece was finished while the Viet Nam war was going on. So much had changed when it was finally published, on another continent (such was the power of the Great Bibliographical Bully), it had no context. 

So I was looking at memory that might be retrieved, to make sense of my often-thwarted career in which I went from farm laborer; to railroad telegrapher and depot agent; to biographically minded textual editor; to textual critic and theorist; to metatextualist; banned from that, to biographer; to making a start of a career as a scholar of the Revolution in the South; and (not abandoning the Revolution) to end up posting here "'Goddamn Okies!' The Loss and Retrieval of Memory" and announcing it as the preface to a thick little book of GLIMPSES of ancestors from 1600s through the early 1900s, documented glimpses retrieved from the Southern archives and the ever more obliging Internet. I was a hard-worker. The problem with working hard is that you discover more rocks in the field than anyone knew of and turn them over to see if you can use them in a wall or a hut and then you find that nobody likes anyone who looks under a rock, The only time I have been welcomed for looking under rocks was by the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Let me see if I can put an image here. A few months ago on the beach of the Pacific Ocean I turned over a rock.

Here I go with 2 pictures.

Is that clear? Anxiety, it says. Now, my question is not who put it there but how many of you would have turned it over and found writing on the underside? Is this significant for understanding how I have worked? and how what I discover fades? and how much fun I have had and still have?