Writing without Surveillance
Samples from an archive before email, before the Internet, before AI; a content provider experiments in a time of catastrophe as if we still send SASEs.
After decades in digital humanities, I start my first blog-like platform.
I’m not a Luddite. In this century, I have organized and led some groups of very tech-savvy folks, and collaborated with various teams, mostly in textual studies about books published over a hundred years ago. Now I want to really pay attention to the changes measured in one lifetime in so many aspects of writing and reading and other everyday acts. I think everyone’s interested in memories about “extinct” things like rotary-dial landline telephones and the first experiences with, for example, Wite-Out. As I unearth old short stories and poems or write afresh about some keywords or key memories, some effects of religion, some effects of what happened in academia since the 1940s, I hope people will enjoy the multimodal anthology I offer here. This is politically driven but is not a place to get the latest news.
My Sabbatical Journey
I will be writing this modest serial out of some desperation, as I face almost the only unstructured weeks I have known since the 1980s. It is a late-career respite—one year—from administration, service, and teaching as an English professor. Help! Why should this privilege of time to pursue “research” feel like anything but a delight? Does anyone wonder that I have never been so distracted as I am now? Have I lost my appetite to read non-fiction books even by my friends for more than 10-minutes snatches or pdfs of chapters (unless writing a review or tenure evaluation)? What if I have unlearned how to think clearly, write creatively, resist productivity pressures, and this precious time before August 2026 will have nothing to show for it? I feel as if I were preparing to retire (not yet!) and that’s just a hop and a skip from dying. Instead, I have been digging in my English department office through the three-feet high piles of promotion and tenure review materials saved from the past twenty years, and actually rediscovering entire filing-cabinet drawers of letters of recommendation and typed short stories from 1981-1984.
Everyone knows we are coming into the real Worst of Times that seemed remote when we used to say, in Chicago circa 1962, “Never Again.” The “Jews will not replace us” chant in Charlottesville August 2017, where I have lived since 1986, was a shock, but should it have been surprising? I have learned so much, as many of us have, about the Ku Kux Klan and alt-right who rose up here as well as traveled from afar. Just this month I was in a meeting of Jewish faculty at my university, trying to craft a statement to the effect of Not in My Name: do not call an attack on academic freedom protection against anti-semitism. In 2025, I have felt the urgency again of the first months of COVID—a need to write poetry, to rethink religion, to write down anything I can think of about what I knew about race and when did I know it in the varied places I have lived with my white parents and siblings, my Israel-born husband and children born in Princeton (1985) and Charlottesville (1988).
Writing without Surveillance is not going to be a go-to substack for knowing the latest obscene news, even though my sense of urgency is heightened by such world issues. It will largely strive to be as well written and eclectic as a periodical essay before typewriters.
I hope for the kind of audience of equals (sharing) that I once enjoyed on academic Twitter and Facebook.
Do not insist on a foolish consistency here. Remember I need to do this writing, and I don’t want to keep it to myself—the need to share it is a reason to write. Ironically, I want to be honest and open because it is to be as below-surveillance, non-pretrained as possible in resistance to the grey goo that is generated by all the Large Language Models learning from each other (paraphrasing my friend and incoming colleague Matt Kirschenbaum). Also, I warmly appreciate the journalists who are professionally generating such exciting, influential material on Substack—I will recommend, subscribe, and amplify in earnest. I may share links to interesting articles from some interdisciplinary or unexpected corners of academic expertise. Certainly I will be discussing my longtime preoccupation with sites of public memory like museums and statues (and the National Garden of Heroes that is to substitute for “divisive” knowledge); my poems are often inspired by public places or political events.
My open-access plan:
I will post at least once a week for twelve months. I would not be sorry to have written something like the wonderful My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, but I don’t yet envision a plot. As I go forward, I will offer different kinds of posts that in turn become a series. As I write daily in my journal (which is not for any other eyes), I may find passages that come out here. I anticipate notes on novels that I am reading, or on TV series or films. I don’t expect to have any bonus material for a paid subscription. My continuing day job, a lot of interesting research projects about women’s biographies, about the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, about self-help and genealogy, will at times be the topic of a post.

Three realist figures are the first historic women in Central Park statuary; other females are legends or literary characters. This isn’t the first time three women have been grouped in a statue to try to interrupt an entire collection of great men: see the Hall of Satuary in the U.S. Capitol.