“Jake Balokowsky, my biographer/Has this page microfilmed”. So wrote Philip Larkin in a grouchy poem, “Posterity”, about being a famous poet. Many English literature academics know how it feels to have prying eyes on their work right now – only instead of a scholar with a book contract, it’s a journalist with a cynical freedom of information request.
I say cynical because the aim is not to obtain accurate information – which every academic would happily provide for free – but to legitimise yet another story about how campus recycling bins around the country are filling with the works of cancelled authors.
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