As I was following through on a couple of questions related to gone-noting this week, to my surprise I ended up looking at the Harris & Harris textbook, Digital Design and Computer Architecture (2021), chapter 8, “Memory Systems,” and even more closely, section 8.4.5, “Replacement Policies,” where I found a description of how programmers and computer engineers might name a vanishing edge of retrievable memory. Least Recently Used (LRU) policies provide a processing system with a cut-off, a threshold past which, well, the thing in question gets cached (i.e., reclassified from available to gone). Although less spiritually awe inspiring, it’s sort of like a sky burial for digital objects, where the algorithmic replacement policy is the buzzard and least recently used artifacts are ferried to the great elsewhere-beyond. I don’t anticipate clinging too tightly to computer architecture analogies for the research project I am working on—puzzling through, drafting—but LRUs have given me a lot to think about.
LRU analogs are everywhere. The obvious and most intuitive examples come from computer environments, such as when an iPhone autodiscards a too-long-unused apps. Suppose I last used the Zoom app on my iPhone two years ago; a least recently used policy “evicts” the unused app, frees the memory, and keeps the system fresh, nimble, less crowded and cluttered. It lightens the processing load, a modest sacrifice to efficiency gods. According to Harris & Harris, LRUs rely on a “principle of temporal locality,” which posits that, as in this iPhone example, the app most recently used is likelier to be used again sooner than an app gathering (hypothetical) dust or lagging forgettable toward oblivion. The LRU is gone-going: forgettable, archaic, disposable. Temporal locality reminds me of Jenny Odell’s books, especially where she writes about all we perceive to be accelerating, bustling, and compressing, which oftentimes leads us as mere mortals to feeling fogged, tired, and overextended shells of our best selves. In How to Do Nothing (2019), a chapter titled “Uselessness as Survival,” Odell writes about “Old Survivor,” the only old-growth Redwood in Oakland whose persistence owes to being unsuitable for logging. By extension, old growth forests, rarer and rarer as they are these days, hang back in the arena of least-recentlies, Least Recently Logged (LRL).
In the front shed, somewhere down deep among the tools lurks a Least Recently Purposed (LRP) jimmy jammy. Racked in the mud room are few pairs of shoes, and one of them is the Least Recently Worn (LRW). The refrigerator holds condiments Least Recently Sandwiched (LRS). The pets agitate and jockey for couch positions when they realize themselves to be Least Recently Petted (LRP). Somewhere an overzealous homeowners association president issues a fine to the neighbor whose lawn was Least Recently Mowed (LRM). You get the picture. Temporal locality splits the rhythms of everyday life until there is no slowness, only acceleration. Recentliness, a function of efficiency drive, acts as a winged chariot and speeds us, time doing its flying, us to the grave.

But LRUs also connect with questions of disciplinary epistemology and memory: What can (big, collective) WE claim to know? How does (big, collective) WE access it? In recent weeks, I have been sifting through old issues of Journal of Advanced Composition, like its inaugural issue, 1.1, from Spring 1980, forty-five years ago. The table of contents was printed on the gray-blue cover:
- Transferable and Local Writing Skills, W. Ross Winterowd
- Cassette Commentary, Alex Medlicott, Jr.
- A Reply to Medlicott, Karen Pelz
- Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, Richard Fulkerson
- The Subject is Writing, Richard Gebhardt
- Writing for the Pre-Professional Within the Liberal Arts Curriculum, Roberta M. Palumbo
- Advanced Composition: A Survey, Michael P. Hogan
- Review of Composition and Its Teaching, Richard Fulkerson
Listed in order of appearance in the issue, all eight contents are available as PDFs from JSTOR. The list invites questions. When was one of these last cited? Which item is Least Recently Cited (LRC)? Is citation the only meaningful (or relevant) index for use? Is Composition and Its Teaching still available after all these years? Some questions are easier, some harder. If we can agree to entertain use indices beyond citation, Which item is Least Recently Taught (LRT)? Which is Least Recently Read (LRR) by a human (not some AI agent)?
We should feather these questions out and ask them of our own work, our own collections, whether print or digital, partial or whole. Which PDF from the trove is Least Recently Read? An LRU policy might be tempted (or strictly rule-bound) to evict that PDF, to condemn it for having faded to the disappearing edge of attention’s long tail. I understand the impulse to evict what is longest-unused, the shoes with a split seam or broken lace, the pair of socks whose one mate is frayed, etc. Whether for material objects, or for digital archives of academic journals, an epistemological (and, therefore, existential) consequence looms over impending, inevitable eviction. The consequence, as I think of it, reunites for knowledge the far too commonly sequestered phenomena of repair and attention. That is, to read the Least Recently Read activates memory and patches epistemology; it invigorates a temporal bandwidth with a wider, not narrower, aperture. The least recently becomes most recently. Neither alchemical nor acrobatic nor special, this least-to-most contrapuntal might just be the practice any academic discipline needs to endure.