It was a reasonable death. He was 90 and took the inevitable final turn in late March. “I think this is it,” my brother said from the nursing home. “They brought in the snack cart.”
I went to Baltimore and fished a ginger ale out of a bowl of melting ice and sat by the bed. My father, dying, came in and out of stillness. He couldn’t hear well, so my brother and I yelled a stream of non sequiturs: “Remember when you ran that marathon?” “Ivy is doing a ballet recital!” “We love you!” I reminded him that he had wanted me to put all his writing online. “I’m going to do that!” I said. He looked straight at me—a last moment of connection—and brightly lit up. “That’s great!” he said. (Or something along those lines. His teeth were in the bathroom.)
Dad wrote opaque, elliptical, experimental works of enormous profanity. One of his plays was produced with fanfare in the 1970s, and many poems were published here and there, but most of the manuscripts were returned with polite rejections. He came of age, though, in an era of great writers writing greatly. You stuck to your guns and waited for people to figure you out, and if they didn’t, even after decades—their effing loss, buddy. The upshot was 70 years of writing on crumbling yellow onionskin, dot-matrix prints with the tractor feeds still attached, and bright white laser output, along with more than 10,000 ancient WordPerfect files and blog entries, including many repeats. Now all mine to archive.
I thought, briefly, about just not doing it. What could he say? What could anyone say? It wasn’t as though the internet was clamoring for the papers of a little-known English professor who retired in the mid-1980s. But a friend who’s a classics scholar told me that this is exactly the stuff people should be digitizing. Vellums and parchments will survive another 1,000 years. We should save the ephemeral before it is lost. What was more ephemeral than this? Plus: A promise is a promise.
So one night I tore the tape off the boxes. I made a “Frank” folder on my computer’s desktop and got out my sheet-fed scanner, usually reserved for taxes. My father and I had spent maybe 10 days together in the previous two decades, funerals included. This would be the most we’d hung out in years.
There are good and correct ways to digitize an archive, according to the Library of Congress. The guidelines make for soothing reading: A diligent archivist might capture uncompressed 24-bit color TIFFs at 600 DPI, filling up disk space with every detail on every page, just in case some secret of the universe is scribbled in a margin. The goal is to be as lossless as possible. Preserve every pixel of that medieval manuscript.
But it is lossy compression that makes the world go round—Spotify songs and Netflix shows and JPEG images. The algorithms strip away some of the original file’s audio frequencies or color spectra, anything on the margins, and squeeze down what is left into a simulacrum good enough to get the job done.
I set my scanner for JPEGs at 70 percent compression, then assembled them into PDFs. Fast and cheap. I also took photos of various ephemera with my phone at god-knows-what resolution. Not every version of every poem would survive. But I’d do my best to preserve the words themselves.
I began to rip the hell out of his folders. Unbinding, yanking, feeding stacks through the scanner and watching some originals crumble as they came out the other side. It felt good being a bad librarian. A little destructive, drunken joy. (A large bottle of bourbon vanished over two weeks of night scans.) Ah well, Dad! What are you going to say now? I put many duplicate manuscripts in the recycling bin, at first relishing the idea that this heavy, heavy paper would go out of my life, and then, as I pulled the bag to the curb, well—lossy.
But that was just the atoms. Dad also left a lot of bits. There was his daily poetry blog, which I spidered and parsed into a many-thousand-page virtual book. That was easy enough, one night’s work. He also wrote flash poems for decades—a few lines a few times a day, one file per thought, yielding thousands of documents with names like POEM12A.WPD, inside of hundreds of folders with names like COPYAAA.199. I loaded them into a database and threw away all the duplicates. I converted the remainder into more modern, tractable LibreOffice files. That format would preserve all the tabs and spaces that were so important to my father. He was a devotee of white space.
I intended to organize the flash poems into one volume per year, but the time stamps were screwy after decades of moving files between computers. I loved my father, but not enough to undertake thousands of forensic poem investigations. So I fulfilled my filial duty through batch processing. I used all the wonder-tools at my disposal: text-chomping parsing code and Unix utilities galore; Pandoc, which can convert anything to text; SpaCy, a Python natural language library that can extract subjects and tags (“New Haven,” “God,” “Korea,” “Shakespeare,” “Republican,” “Democrat,” “America”). I decided that my father wrote two things—Poems, which are less than 300 words, and Longer Works, which are longer. I let the computer sort the rest.
My father’s last decade was one of relentless downsizing, from apartment to assisted living to nursing home, shedding belongings, throwing away clothes and furniture. And at the end: Two boxes and a tiny green urn. The ultimate zip file. After I parsed and processed and batched his digital legacy, it came to 7,382 files and around 7 gigabytes.
The sum of Frank took two days and nights to upload to the Internet Archive, at a rate of a few files per minute. I wonder what the universe will make of this bundle of information. Who will care? Scholars of short plays about the Korean War? Sociologists studying 1930s Irish childhoods? I am sure his words will be ingested, digested, and excreted as chat by untold bots and search engines. Perhaps they’ll be able to make sense of all the modernist imagery. At least he’ll have slowed them down a little. In time, we all end up in a folder somewhere, if we’re lucky. Frank belongs to the world now; I released the files under Creative Commons 0, No Rights Reserved. And I know he would have loved his archive.
The two boxes have become one, taped back up and placed in the attic. No one will worry about that box besides me, and one day my inner bad librarian may feel ready to throw it away. All the digital files are zipped up in one place too—partly because I don’t want his poems to show up every time I search my computer for something. Tomorrow I head to the interment, just my brother and I, and the green urn, too, will be filed away into the ground. I am glad this project is over, but I ended up welcoming the work, guiding these last phases of compression. My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.
