10 Years After

Shazam!
I had an opportunity to look at my grade for the American Government test I toook Tuesday, 96%! I missed two multiple choice questions. Now, hopefully I did as well on my Spanish test. I have a quiz, that is to say a test, in British Lit tomorrow. I also have I bonafide quiz in Spanish- more adjectives, question words, and how to tell time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and studying.

bacterium Neisseria meningitidis
After World Civilization I'll be going to the student center to get a meningitis vaccine. $85. Inflammation of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord, yummy!

Late Night
To prepare for my British Lit "quiz" I picked up a couple of books to assist me in interpreting Rime of the Acient Mariner. While trying to resolve the symbollic signifigance of salvation coming to the Mariner by blessing the water-snakes, I obtained "The Road to Xanadu" from the university library. It is a fascinating book; a sort of a literary forensic scientist.

John Livingston Lowes wrote a book called "The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination" which was published by Houghton Mifflin (Boston) in 1927.
Lowes' book traces an amazing hypertext -- the reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- by starting from Purchas' book and any others which Coleridge mentions in his journals, letters, etc., and moving on from there to any books mentioned in the text or footnotes of these books, and so onwards through yet other books that Coleridge may well have consulted -- because we know he consulted others which recommended or mentioned them...

Along the way, Lowes discovered many instances of the workings of what Coleridge himself termed "the *hooks-and-eyes* of the memory" -- hyperlinks again: for this is Coleridge's own term for them.

It appears that Coleridge read very widely in the travel literature of his day, and did indeed tend to obtain many of the books referenced in books he was reading... and that as he went, his memory was saturated with the more striking phrases from these many books, and then *linked* them associatively...

And Lowes' book itself is a gigantic hypertext, linking sources in Coleridge's reading not only for "The Ancient Mariner" but also for "Kubla Khan" -- and along the way touching on an extraordinary variety of topics. Lowes' book is, when all is said and done, one of the greatest detective and scholarly hypertexts of all time.