[lil thought] T.S. Eliot and why i like hyperlinks

I’ve realized through this blog that I very much enjoy adding unnecessary hyperlinks in all my posts. Why does this bring me so much glee? If I had to read into it (which, I mean, is all I do on this blog), I think it’s because I really like the idea of this vast connective tissue, this kind of massive network of information where everything is linked, and anyone can get to any endpoint from any starting point by taking surprising routes. (Cool science-fictional stuff, ey? but I mean that’s literally what the internet is, or what the dream of it was at any rate.) A longtime hobby of mine has been to go down Google/YouTube/Wikipedia (/Urbandictionary, which was somewhat traumatizing and all kinds of educational) rabbitholes where you just keep clicking the suggested/related links until you have no idea how you got there/why you’re watching a video of a guy who’s somehow learned to completely saran-wrap himself because it makes him feel like he’s returned to the womb… (like I said. Traumatizing, and educational).

Ahem. As a whole different kind of animal, look at this hypertext version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land! (Heheh see another link.) A fellow student shared this with our class, in another lovely instance of building that informational network. This hypertextual monster is both delightful and kind of horrifying, infuriating, and extra (like Eliot himself? Hm. Except that Eliot’s expectation that readers dig into all the stuff he’s referencing is definitely kind of elitist and annoying, even though I get the benefits of what he’s trying to do. But I really love sharing access to knowledge/tidbits that tickle my fancy—actually, I think that giving people little bits of cool info like that is an even more effective and embracing way to propel interest and independent research). There’s so many references in there that could be added still, but anyway there’s already enough in the poem/hypertext to lead you down any number of rabbitholes, as happened to me last year when I was writing a paper on this poem (which led me to some ideas that may inform my thesis project…).

Happy rabbitholing!

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i’m probably going to be interspersing my posts with more of these “lil thoughts” as an even more low-pressure form of writing as the semester gets busier.