Continued...Mattew Paris: The Blog Bog
It gives a peculiar look to a map of what if anything is accessible. One can find almost nothing on the Gutenberg, the various pirate sites, Internet Archives and so on. One can't as easily ferret out more modern books under copyright. This means that the more realistic works of fiction or journalism that have been written about the history of the world since 1950 or so sometimes can't be obtained legitimately. Vivienne how dismal that history can be it is all to the advantage of those totalitarians among us and others autocratic quacks who would like to keep political reality clandestine.
One can see in this eccentric situation that there is an inevitable future waiting for us all if we don't blow ourselves up in which everything we think might be valuable and is copiable with digitization will be available to all of us in our homes whenever we want it. In the interim we have to content ourselves with what we have and be patient about what we don't have.
Once America took up an empire in the late 1940 and cemented its imperium in the 1950s there was a parallel push towards control and censorship in literature poetry that took diverse forms but aimed at the same intent. Imperia want controlled and sympathetic literature published in their territories.
One can't blame them for doing that. We sensibly don't want to make tigers into vegetarians either. A vegetarian tiger would be to itself inexplicably miserable. There is in the polemicist of any empire some underlying mechanical intelligence that tries to regulate, monitor and control everything. Like it or not it was the beginning of some dire times for poetry and literature. Even brilliant writers like Mailer, Burroughs and Kerouac couldn't get into print in the 50s easily. One might have read Kenneth Fearing if at all only in a few poems anthologized in paperbacks by Oscar Williams. Sadly, it has been more difficult since to reach one's audience for writers.
I've have hit hilariously that their smut be six decades of poetry and novels written from the 60s on rejected by the publishers of the day that may now find their way onto such sites. The lack of access to such books really impoverished the world. Without them we had to depend on rock music and some films for our mirrors of how we lived then and still occasionally in our ripeness and dotage do now.
The potential of the Internet, blogs, web sites, the Create Space of Amazon and some of its rivals to remedy those circumstances haven't as yet been a major influence on our culture. In fact, it's very likely that people at the borders of the English speaking world where the power of the Imperiums are weak will be the beneficiaries of some of the sites I've quoted here.
Yet maybe there are ways in one's internal life even in our capitals to make oneself as marginal as one needs to be to enjoy such fare. As we contemplate such measures of distancing ourselves from the implosive juggernauts that daily net the cozened, we have to be aware that one day there is going to be a generation for whom our struggles to have access to any form of Art or wisdom may not even be a memory.
It's typical in the history of inventions offered to a world whose institutions are only made for previous times to be the enemy of organized life that resists change. Institution aims to be static; they are always unhappy when they receive news that they may have to adapt to some new circumstance. As a consequence, the effect of inventions occurs first in Scythian frontier territories where institutions lack much oppressive power. We can already see the excesses of some of these direction in virtual reality programs that offer us a choice of perilous adventures we really don't have.
Yet both freedom and change are neutral. They are the variables in an inevitable motility that offers copiable materials that will be pig heaven for some if not all people: a lady and the tiger doorway to a novelty: a more knowledgeable and powerful if innovatively perilous life.
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