To work on a scholarly project is to be obsessed; to be obsessed is to have one’s current project turn up everywhere. For some scholars, this ubiquity is a deceptively reassuring sign of the significance of one’s work, much as a lover locates numerological assurances in the digits of a crush’s phone number. For others, these “coincidences” of the “real” and the academic come to taste like cinders and bile: we would give so much to keep the past in the past. Although it is not the subject of my dissertation (which is about the idea of the “common man”), Read more