The Jabberwock just awake Finnegan version using organic, optimistic search engine keywords, shade grown too - if you get the drift of my banter... talking big data, the world brain of H.G. Wells, an olla podrida, a rag bag of information, trivia and factoids. A hotch potch, a mélange, a damned farrago, a salmagundi, too hot to hoot... Knowledge is power. Truth is beauty. Need to know this (and much more) on earth. Hail that one silent human (in mocha brown) who will actually get it and reap the whirlwind. A coming world of leisure where time is spent in pursuit of knowledge and robots empty the waste paper basket. A dream of no work, all play and jack not a dull boy any more.
The oddest collection, passing strange, a saga, a fantasy, an unlocked roman a clef, with Captain Cuttle and the pedant Casaubon (a maligned man, Madam George). Keeping some sort of record, factoids, footnotes, ephemeroids, factbooks and essential trivia not lost but kept in a safe deposit box. An information bank, an interest bearing investment (they never saw that they needed it). An index of all knowledge, no less. Know more. In the flat box lay the lost monograph- A Proposal for an Information Sharing Galaxy.
An amazing expanding archive, beyond the algorithmic dream, post Mass Observation, many beautiful things no longer lost, bringing forth the one mind of the Gods, the all seeing eye - the library of Babel, Alexandria, far Antioch and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Universal access to all knowledge [A2K]. A vanished world recaptured. Notes and Queries honoured: New Encyclopaedists [Encyc2]. Nothing lost or forgotten. Time spent in research, curiosity and scholarship (the daring to be dull) the Renaissance ideal, the Victorian vicarage - just 4 hours a week of money yielding work. By Timothy! The answer is written on the wind, on the wall of the world. So much to know. Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus... "He had a tale to tell." Madam, I'm Adam. Exit, pursued by a bear.
Robert Burton takes the baton: "---shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion...Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps…
I get it, at least I think so but why the Victorian Vicarage!?
ReplyDeleteMany thanks -- it's the idea of the Victorian Gentleman scholar, sometimes a vicar, sort of guy who read Notes and Queries (which is a great influence) and spent much of his time in scholarly research and writing monographs and opuscula on such subjects as the old play Roister Doister or a new theory about will-o-the wisps...
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