Writer Tom McCarthy’s desktop. First in the new Guardian series Writers’ Desktops, “where writers show us around their working lives by revealing what’s on their computer desktops.” Writes McCarthy;
I was a guest at Trinity College Dublin recently, and there was a talk, the night before my own, on Darwin’s influence on Joyce, given by a “genetic critic”. These guys look at progressive handwritten draft phases of literary texts, how they change from one stage to the next, and correlate these with correspondence and notebooks and so on. So you can see exactly when Joyce read Darwin, and then how phrases like “ouragan of spaces” find their way into the Wake manuscript. It’s very interesting. Afterwards I was chatting with the speaker and cockily asked him: “So what are you going to do with me, then?” ie with my generation, given that there’ll be little or no paper trail. He said: “Dude, we have software that can reconstruct every keystroke you made since the beginning of time – MacBook, floppy discs, the lot.”
Here’s the Journal of Genetic Joyce Studies (!).
Via The Morning News.
