Like surfing the Web

Writing, like surfing the Web. You're reading a webpage and notice a link, in a sidebar, say, and you think you'll click on it when you finish what you're reading. But what you were reading has led to a different link. You click on that one, read that webpage, and click a link there to some other site, etc., until you end up someplace very different from that first link you noticed when your surfing started. But that link not followed is as much a part of your reading as the links followed. What's the difference between a link not taken and a link taken but mostly forgotten? The browser history won't show the link not taken, but it's in you, like a little black rock. Shakes loose and gets stuck in an interior nook of you, like a bit of dirt in your shoe. And so writing the writer is struck by an idea, or image, or series of words. An angle, a slant, a take. A nuance. Phrase mentally noted but not set down. Not yet. Not yet. Till not yet becomes never. But it's always there. Even if it's eventually forgotten on the surface. There in the authorial mind at least. A parenthetical of the unconscious mind. Less parenthetical (like this) than parenthetical like this.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
 

In Advance of the Broken Link

Blogging has really drawn me into the Web further than I ever thought I would get. It took my so long (well, 18 or 19 years) to get into books and reading, that I sort of naturally resisted many things Web. Though I was a fairly early user of Prodigy (around 1992 and 1993), and though I've spent the last six years working on a computer as a book compositor, my Internet experience remained basically email and message boards. But lately I've become more curious about this machine I'm spending so much time on. Digging around a little, I found this fascinating story. It seems to be common knowledge to propeller heads and technophiles, as excerpts appear frequently on the Web, but a scientist writing in the wake of the second World War issued a challenge to the scientific community to "turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge" (to quote his editor at The Atlantic Monthly). His name was Vannevar Bush, and his visionary essay was titled "As We May Think."

In his essay, Bush presages much of what now constitutes modern electronic computing in general and the World Wide Web in particular. From the hardware, such as scanning "machines" (which surprisingly already existed) and touch-screen monitors, to the all important technology of hyperlinking. At times Bush is so on the mark (um, unlike a certain other prominent Bush) that the intellectual/imaginative leap his vision must have required is practically transparent and easily overlooked. As when he writes that "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." A memex is basically a computer; here is Bush's definition: "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." In fact, Bush goes so far as to call the memex an "intimate supplement to [one's] memory." The emphasis is mine, just because I find that an extraordinary thought. No doubt, we're not quite there yet, virtual sex notwithstanding (though virtual sex seems like a dream of the late eighties that never quite came to fruition, or maybe it has and I missed the cruise ship, after all I seem to be one of the three or four men in the U.S. who hasn't seen the Paris Hilton video—who was in that with her? The Lawnmower Man?).

For anyone reading this who might want more supporting information, but doesn't have time to read the whole essay: the Computing Science department at Simon Fraser University has put up a neat little list of Web-related elements that Vannevar Bush anticipated.