Yesterday I was at university and someone had stencilled a huge
Greenpeace logo on the plaza in front of the library, where I was
heading to get a Coleridge biography. I thought: how come students are
so political, and do they actually do anything or are they just a
bunch of hippies?

And I remembered what I told someone several months ago, that if you
start complaining about hippies then you've got your priorities really
messed up. When you think of all the injustices in the world caused by
humans, the lackadaisicality of hippies is not near the top of the
list!

Coleridge is fascinating because, as Hazlitt said, he was the greatest
thinker of the day and yet he "achieved" so little. There was hardly
any resultant from the dude, but the vector is so big I'm having
trouble absorbing it. I didn't have that problem with the sufragettes
or Shakespeare or anyone else, but with Coleridge there's just so much
going on.

One interesting thing is that his most highly regarded works amongst
scholars now are his notebooks. There's an Oxford abridgement of his
notebooks that I was going to buy, but I thought I'd check it out, and
the original works, in the library first.

The Oxford abridgement is a centimetre thick and it costs £16 or so.
The original notebooks, edited by Kathleen Coburn over decades, take
up *feet* of shelf space. To buy the whole set second hand would cost
you about £300-500, and they're out of print of course. They're not
online, even to people with the ridiculous "scholarly" privileges of
Athens access, etc.

What does it say when we let so much accumulation of lore go to waste
moulding on a shelf in a library that's, I shit you not, guarded by an
optical card scanning gateway? As Marvin the Martian says, "this makes
me very angry!".

— Sent to William Loughborough, February 2008

William had recently written:

“In Critical Path Bucky Fuller made clear that:

* Our milieu (air/water/population) is responsive to our actions;
* Resources include gravity/light/metaphysics (the accumulation of lore);
* Humans seek to add to the latter through contributions to the Commons.”

— http://www.boobam.org/indexing.htm

I should note that I understand that the optical card scanning gateway
is in place to prevent theft, but as a symbol of the restricted access
to the valuable works that should be more widely available it is to me
a powerful one.

--sbp