Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 189.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (28)
Subject: worms and bookworms
[2] From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu> (21)
Subject: Re: 15.185 SirCam: why Milton might have thought
differently
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 08:58:55 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: worms and bookworms
Julia Flanders' imagining, about a SirCam-like worm eating bits of Paradise
Lost, reminds me of the plot of a Kung-fu movie I saw once. In it an evil
landlord provokes the father of a young family into a fight-to-the-death.
The landlord', with superior kung-fu, kills the father, who leaves to his
young son his only valuable possession, a kung-fu manual showing the moves
of his form. Years pass, the son grows up, nurturing deadly hatred for the
landlord (who curiously seems not to age at all). When he has reached an
age to begin his preparations for the fight obviously to come, he opens up
the chest of his father's possessions, takes out the manual -- only to
discover that a worm has eaten large sections of the book, completely
obliterating some moves. Undeterred, the young man invents new moves to
supply the missing ones. In the great fight at the end of the movie, what
allows the youth to win over the landlord, a clearly superior opponent, is
the fact that the landlord cannot tell what move is coming next. He thinks
at various points in the fight he has understood the youth's form when POW!
he is hit by an unexpected blow in an unexpected way. (BTW, I have heard it
alleged that the Taiwanese secret service trains its people in a top-secret
form of kung-fu for precisely this reason....)
In reply to Julia, I suppose the question is whether we as readers could do
as well as the youth in the story. Surely an application for hypertext
poetry -- invent your own 17th-C dialogue between angel and man.
Yours,
W
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 08:59:16 +0100
From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: 15.185 SirCam: why Milton might have thought differently
On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Humanist Discussion Group wrote:
>
> One of the nice things about unlicensed printing of *books* is that they
> stay where you put them; if 17th-century pamphlets had had the capacity to
> reproduce themselves and crawl into your copy of Paradise Lost (and perhaps
> eat away the bit where Adam and the angel have dinner) perhaps Milton might
> have felt differently.
> Julia Flanders
Of course, even 16th-century pamphlets "had had the capacity to reproduce
themselves and crawl". . . .
Otherwise we would never have even heard of Martin Luther's 95 thesese,
which basically proliferated in the same manner, totally unbeknownst to
Luther. . .thanks to that invidious invention by Johannes Gutenberg. . .
which started the first "Information Age."
Thanks!
So nice to hear from you!
Michael S. Hart
<hart@pobox.com>
Project Gutenberg
"Ask Dr. Internet"
Executive Director
Internet User ~#100
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