Doing books online

I had a cool idea yesterday [yesteryear] but now I'm not quite able to recall how it went, I think because it was more to do with the form of how to arrange all the other ideas than being exactly a new idea itself. The seduction of ideas like this is that they tend to look much better in imagination than they ever are likely to in reality, for all the hard work it will take to bring them there, conveniently left out in thought. But more or less it was a better website or online journal where the various stages of the school and concepts relating to it--the work-study network, the student work pages, soccer community groups, theoretical balderdash like this--were neatly filed away, while on the home screen great images of the people and places really engaged in the school were appearing and disappearing as you scrolled over the different things.

What is maybe salvageable from all this is just the importance of presentation when it comes to real things--blocks of text won't bring the people in--and the curiosity as to how it all does fit together. Even what all of it is, if you were to make a list. Who knows? To even begin to make those divisions implies a sense of the overall form. So much editing that would have to happen, just to extract the useful ideas from the babble of morning writings, or again leaving the manuscript in the form just as it is, and starting fresh from a totally different perspective--that of the marketer, the organizer, rather than the theorist. Like what Faith was saying, starting with workshops--summer classes like they have here at St. John's--or to the scale of Professor Olsen's rolling out a little online university incorporating all kinds of media as well as the standard discussion board style. Could that be at least a part of the new school? No one would take it seriously if they knew anything about the internet and we didn't.

 For now is the great chance to read without much responsibility, but only responsible to read, where later it will be a chance pastime only; and there is some stress in knowing this, and rushing after knowing what it is these others knew in what they wrote. Dreaming again of huge correspondences, like libraries in structure, for online texts hyperlinked throughout to sources, allusions, posterior quotes and revisions of the facts. And yet also not sure this would be so helpful, whether there might not be something to be said for the hermetic approach to knowledge, at least metaphorically, as something that only takes on full powers in its sphere and privily, recondite not out of jealousy but of necessity for it to be what it is, not getting chewed over by too many mouths who need other sorts of knowledge anyhow, but proper for those only who would live on the words. If everyone can pronounce the words, still literacy is in moving among the meanings--no measure of literacy like this exists, but the conversation in person, a poor one for mass generalizations; but perhaps there is an analogy to centuries of conversations between people--a movement of cultural exchange on such a scale we could hardly follow it happening to judge. Still, on this theme of the life of the mind, there has to be some greater resources available online to explore, all rare texts and forgotten thinkers are again made accessible, so to bring some order to it, some culling and cultivation, could revive what is dynamic in the program, its return to classics for the purposes of forming human potential. Just to avoid getting complacent, when there is always so much more we could be doing here.