Connections

Back in the late 90’s I encountered the song “Cicciolina” by Machines of Loving Grace. I looked into the song title and it turned out to be the name of an Italian porn star-turned politician, but I never looked into the name of the band.

About this same time I encountered the song “Twin Rocks, Oregon” by Shawn Mullins. In it there are the lines:

I met him on the cliffs
of Twin Rocks, Oregon
He was sittin’ on his bedroll
Lookin’ just like Richard Brautigan
I thought he was an old man
He wasn’t but 37

I dug the song, and I think I looked into who Richard Brautigan was but not very deeply as the only thing I remembered about him is that I didn’t know who he was.

Here we are almost 30 years later and I’m reading “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy and I come to a passage discussing Ted Nelson and Community Memory, whose parent company was Loving Grace. That name came from a poem by Richard Brautigan which ends with:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

I dig it when things connect like that.

Less direct, but still diggable, is the fact that this bit of the book concerns Ted Nelson, whose Project Xanadu is the precursor to HTML (and he coined the word “hypertext”). Around the same time as I was listening to the above two songs I discovered hypertext in the form of some long-forgotten freeware DOS or Windows implementation and I was excited by how it matched how I thought; so much so that I would write letters using this program, which meant I had to mail 3.5″ diskettes with the program and my letter to whoever I was corresponding with.

30 years on and I get to type it into this editor and publish it to the web – but the idea is still the same.