Thank You (Curse You!), Mr. Computer

We don't want to wax too grateful for our devices, you know? Not in this time of Equifax and election-meddling Russians and Internet trolls and ... you know ...

Still.

In the past couple of weeks my computer has saved me an enormous amount of research time.

I'll get to that in a moment. First ... a wee story, one that I've probably told before, but you know Old Guys?

Back in the mid-late 1990s when I was working on the books I published then about Jack London (check Amazon), I took a flight one week out to San Francisco, rented a car, drove up to Berkeley, where I used the Bancroft Library (their special-collections library), which holds quite a bit of material--including photographs--related to London.

I spent a day going through the photographs. Drove back to San Francisco. Turned in my rental. Flew back to Ohio. Paid my parking fee at Cleveland Hopkins. Drove home. Waited for the motel and rental bills to arrive.

By the time it was all over? $$$$$$$.

Now ... I could click on this link and find myriads of London-related photos ... No trip to Berkeley needed (darn!).

Okay, back to a more recent story. Visitors to this blog know that for the past couple of years I've been serializing a horrendously rough draft of a book I'm calling Frankenstein Sundae--a book about my ten-year pursuit of Mary Shelley and all things Frankensteinian. A couple of times a week I would post an excerpt.

Recently, I finished that horrendously rough draft, and I've begun editing & cutting/& rearranging & eliminating duplications (there were many). But very early on, I noticed something careless and clueless: I had neglected--at least in the initial months of the serialization--to include page references for the quotations I'd used.

Damn! The late Prof. Charles E. McKinley, who taught me in English 101 at Hiram College in the summer of 1962, is whirling in his grave (figuratively: He was cremated), and I can hear his stentorian voice right now: "Mr. Dyer, have you forgotten everything I taught you?")

ASIDE: In 1962 our professors called us "Mr." and "Miss." And we never addressed them by their given names. It was always "Dr. McKinley," "Dr. Ravitz," etc. Anything else was unthinkable.

Yes, Dr. McKinley, I seem to have forgotten ...

What to do? It would take me forever to go through all my notes and books looking for those specific phrases and sentences.

Enter the Internet.

And Salvation!

Here's just one wee example.

After Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died in 1797 (shortly after giving birth to daughter Mary, who would become Mary Shelley), her husband, William Godwin, wrote a memoir about her. In it, he wrote about how an earlier relationship had broken her heart: "No human creature," wrote Godwin, "ever suffered greater misery."

Well, I had read Godwin's book. I own it. I took thorough notes on it, and I could have just paged through them, I guess. But first I tried ... The Internet!

And there I found that the very book I read was fully available online via Project Gutenberg. I opened it. Searched on "human creature," found it instantly near the end of Chapter 7, checked my own copy, got the page number ... voila!  (Here's the book link if you wanna check for yourself.)

And so, I sang the praises of computers.

Until my damn Quicken program misbehaved, at which time I ... [deleted for the sake of family values].