Books: A Beautifully Browsable Invention That Needs

Churchill Was A Brilliant And Inspiring Rhetorician, But One Of The First Things He Did As The Head Of The British Nation Was To Put German Jews In Jail. Tens Of Thousands Of Jews - Who Had Just Been Fortunate Enough To Get Out From Under Hitler Only A Few Years Before - Spent The Entire War In Jail.

Each Decision - To Kill, To Sign A Petition, To Write A Letter, To Make A Speech, To Attack, To Lie, To Surrender - Was Made At Some Point In Somebody's Day.

I Like Shelves Full Of Books In A Library, But If All Books Become Electronic, The Task Of Big Research Libraries Remains The Same - Keep What's Published In The Form In Which It Appeared.

So What Rhyming Poems Do Is They Take All These Nearby Sound Curves And Remind You That They First Existed That Way In Your Brain. Before They Meant Something Specific, They Had A Shape And A Way Of Being Said. And Now, Yes, Gloom And Broom Are Floating Fifty Miles Away From Each Other In You Mind Because They Refer To Different Notions, But They're Cheek-by-jowl As Far As Your Tongue Is Concerned. And That's What A Poem Does. Poems Match Sounds Up The Way You Matched Them When You Were A Tiny Kid, Using That Detachable Front Phoneme.

One's Head Is Finite. You Pour More And More Things Into It - Surnames, Chronologies, Affiliations - And It Packs Them Away In Its Tunnels, And Eventually You Find That You Have A Book About Something That You Publish.