Internet Ambivalence

The Internet can be annoying. No question. Especially if you're on social media (as I, sort of, am). Daily, I see Facebook posts that, shall we say, do somewhat less than charm me. (And, of course, my posts--which, I confess, are numerous--surely do less than charm myriads of my "friends.") Every now and then, in fact, I shut the damn thing down and sulk for a few days before, missing it--missing it!--I log back on and resume my rough ride down the rapids.

Email is a different kind of annoyance. It used to be a principal way for people to communicate--I still remember the excitement when Joyce and I exchanged our first emails back in, oh, 1990 or so. It was ... magical.

Then other messaging systems emerged, rose, dominated (some fell away): IMs, texts, etc. Now, about 95%+ of the email I get is junk. Ads. Whatever. Every now and then an actual note from someone--about as rare (though not as thoroughly so) as a snail-mail letter.

So, yes, the Internet is chockablock with junk and jive and lies and loopiness and vanity and vacuousness and sex and sadism (so I hear) and banality and boorishness and (you get the message).

But.

For my research and writing, it's priceless.

Just today, for example, I was entering changes in the manuscript--the endless manuscript--of Frankenstein Sundae, which I'm trying to get ready to publish on Kindle Direct (this will not be soon), and I was railing aloud and flailing myself because when I had been writing, I had not always put down page references for things I quoted.

And just today ... some good examples of how the Internet rescued me from my own carelessness. I hadn't written down some page numbers for quotations from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. No problem. The full text is online in a number of places, so I loaded one, searched on the words I used, found them, looked for the location (chapter, paragraph), checked my hard copy, found the same place, made the citation! Genius!

Then ... a more difficult one. Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, wrote an unfinished autobiography, and from it all kinds of folks have quoted a little passage about his boyhood: All my amusements were sedentary; I had scarcely any pleasure but in reading; ....

Cool. I wanted to use it. But where the hell could I find it?

Godwin's biographers merely cited one another--the famous as quoted in ...

And then I remembered. Back in the day, I had plunked down the plastic for the 8-volume set Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (Pickering and Chatto, 1992), and volume 1 of that set is Memoirs, and in that volume is the unfinished and previously unpublished "Autobiography."

I used the Internet to check a published biography of Godwin, a biography that mentions the point in his life that he was writing about; I then checked the "Autobiography," scanned the paragraphs about that period ... and--voila!--there it was on page 31, that sentence, that luscious chunk of chocolate in the thick cookie!

So ... what can I say? I love you, Internet.

Except when I hate you.