The Information - James Gleick [197]
What do you do when you have everything at last? Daniel Dennett imagined—in 1990, just before the Internet made this dream possible—that electronic networks could upend the economics of publishing poetry. Instead of slim books, elegant specialty items marketed to connoisseurs, what if poets could publish online, instantly reaching not hundreds but millions of readers, not for tens of dollars but for fractions of pennies? That same year, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, a publisher, conceived of the English Poetry Full-Text Database as he walked one day through the British Library, and four years later he had produced it—not the present or future of poetry, but the past, and not, at first, online but in four compact discs, 165,000 poems by 1,250 poets spanning thirteen centuries, priced at $51,000. Readers and critics had to figure out what to make of this. Not read it, surely, the way they would read a book. Read in it, perhaps. Search it, for a word or an epigraph or a fragment half remembered.
Anthony Lane, reviewing the database for The New Yorker, found himself swinging from elation to dismay and back. “You hunch like a pianist over the keys,” he wrote, “knowing what awaits you, thinking, Ah, the untold wealth of English literature! What hidden jewels I shall excavate from the deepest mines of human fancy!”♦ Then come the macaronics, the clunkers, the flood of bombast and mediocrity. The sheer unordered mass begins to wear you down. Not that Lane sounds at all weary. “What a steaming heap,” he cries, and he revels in it. “Never have I beheld such a magnificent tribute to the powers of human incompetence—and also, by the same token, to the blessings of human forgetfulness.” Where else would he have found the utterly forgotten Thomas Freeman (not in Wikipedia) and this lovely self-referential couplet:
Whoop, whoop, me thinkes I heare my Reader cry,
Here is rime doggrell: I confesse it I.
The CD-ROMs are already obsolete. All English poetry is in the network now—or if not all, some approximation thereof, and if not now, then soon.
The past folds accordion-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons—for the written word, three millennia; for recorded sound, a century and a half—and within their time frames the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of 50 Years Ago and 100 Years Ago, veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-play techniques, science, gossip, once out of print and now ready for use. Record companies rummage through their attics to release, or re-release, every scrap of music, rarities, B-sides, and bootlegs. For a certain time, collectors, scholars, or fans possessed their books and their records. There was a line between what they had and what they did not. For some, the music they owned (or the books, or the videos) became part of who they were. That line fades away. Most of Sophocles’ plays are lost, but those that survive are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach’s music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all—partitas, cantatas, and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or at light speed. It is a symptom of omniscience. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the Infinite Playlist, and he sees how mixed is the blessing: “anxiety in place of fulfillment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.
Strategies emerge for coping. There are many, but in essence they all