Great (if long) piece in the NYT magazine about the implications of a digital universal library... this still seems very sci-fi to me, but the possibilities for reorganizing knowledge are amazing. What if all books were linked together in a web like the internet? I can imagine that it would be incredibly useful, but also a bit overwhelming. Sometimes, as it is, I get sidetracked from a journal article by the footnotes... imagine what would happen if you could link directly to the books/articles/pages that were referenced! Would I ever be able to finish a complete thought?
Robert Hass Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold rivers. They glance down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy-- it must look to them like featherless birds splashing in the spring puddle of a bed-- and then one woman, she is about to come, peels back the man's shut eyelids and says, look at me, and he does. Or is it the man tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater? Anyway, they do, they look at each other; two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious, startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet lubricious glue, stare at each other, and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically like lithographs of Victorian beggars with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags in the lewd alleys of the novel. All of creation is offended by this distress. It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes, ...
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