JUDGE WILLIAM EMERSON

Transcription

1 WALDO S RELATIVES Disambiguate the Reverend William Emerson ( ) of Concord from his son the Reverend William Emerson ( ) of Boston and from his grandson Judge William Emerson ( ) of New- York and Staten Island. NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Judge William Emerson

2 1801 July 31, Friday: In Athens, Lord Elgin began removing sculptures from the Parthenon for transport to London. Everything he put his hand on would be known, collectively, as the Elgin Marbles. William Emerson was born in Boston, a son of the Reverend William Emerson, Jr. and Ruth Haskins Emerson. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Judge William Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

3 1804 Mary Moody Emerson s essays began to appear anonymously in her brother William Emerson s Monthly Anthology. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Judge William Emerson

4 1833 December 3, Tuesday: The first Oberlin College classes met. By the end of this first year, there would be 11 families in residence in Oberlin, Ohio and 44 students in the college 15 of them would be women (in a later terminology, coeds ). This is what Oberlin would be looking like by the 1850s: At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, William Emerson got married with Susan Woodward Haven, who had been born on January 7, 1807 in that locale, daughter of John Haven and Ann Woodward Haven (she would die on February 6, 1868 in Concord, Massachusetts). THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Judge William Emerson

5 1834 July 3, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau was elected to the oldest debating fraternity at Harvard College, which was during that period known as The Institute of 1770 after having gone through several name changes. In consequence of all the immediate members of the Society being absent, a special meeting was called by Cushing, the last Junior President, for the purpose of choosing a Librarian, and Fresh[men] into the Society. The meeting being called to order Cushing was chosen President and Brooks Sec. pro tem The Society then proceeded to the choice of a Librarian, and chose Lyon. The nomination list of Freshmen left by the Sophomores was next taken up, and Hildreth, Richardson, Eustis, Thomas, Perry, Trull, Thoreau, were chosen from this list. Russell, Rice, Barnes, Wight, Phelps, Davis, Treat, Lane, Williams 1st and Wheeler were nominated to be chosen at the next meeting. This is the club which, after several more name changes, would become immortal as our Hasty Pudding Club. We note in passing that of the Emerson brothers, Judge William Emerson, Edward Bliss Emerson, and Charles Chauncy Emerson had been members, but for some unknown reason not Waldo Emerson. WALDO S RELATIVES THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Judge William Emerson

6 1836 March: At some point this month Waldo Emerson delivered the 4th lecture of his current series in Salem, but we don t know the exact date (perhaps it was on the 1st of the month). Waldo s brother Charles Chauncy Emerson, coming home to Concord from Boston, was obliged to ride on top of the stagecoach and caught a bad cold. He would go down to Staten Island and stay with his brother Judge William Emerson while seeking some relief from this lake of fire I am bearing about in my breast, and would collapse and die of tuberculosis after a walk on May 9th. The engagement of his brother Charles, who resided with Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, to Miss Elizabeth Sherman Hoar of Concord, had had much to do with their decision to purchase a home there. They had added new rooms to the house they purchased, expecting that he would soon bring his bride to live with them (the plan was for them to be wed during the month of September after an engagement of three years). Madam Ruth Haskins Emerson would then have had the joy of having two grown sons under the same roof with her, along with their wives, and potentially their children as well. But this was not to be. Of Charles his grieving brother would write: And here I am at home again. My brother, my friend, my ornament, my joy and pride has fallen by the wayside, or rather has risen out of this dust... Beautiful without any parallel in my experience of young men was his life; happiest his death. Miserable is my own prospect from whom my friend is taken... I read now his pages, I remember all his words and motives without any pang, so healthy and humane a life it was, and not like Edward s, a tragedy of poverty and sickness tearing genius... I have felt in him the inestimable advantage, when God allows it, of finding a brother and a friend in one. This grieving brother would write to his other brother William: Concord, May 15, At the church this morning, before the prayers, notes of the families were read [desiring the prayers of the congregation] and one from Dr. Ripley, and one, many young people, friends of the deceased, join in the same request. As it was unusual it was pleasing. Mr. Goodwin preached in the morning from the text, Who knoweth the time of his death? and made affectionate and sympathetic remembrance of Charles. Grandfather, [Dr. Ripley] in the afternoon, called him by name in his own rugged style of Indian eloquence. This event seems to me, he said, loud and piercing, like thunder and lightning. While many aged and burdensome are spared, this beloved youth is cut down in the morning. This grieving brother would write about Charles at the end of the chapter Discipline of NATURE.

7 1841 June/July: Elizabeth Sherman Hoar and Lidian Emerson, who was evidently pregnant again, visited the family of Judge Emerson at their Snuggery in Castleton on Staten Island. June 14, Monday: Representative Fornance of Pennsylvania made another motion that the US House of Representatives reconsider its refusal to renew its gag rule against any consideration of practices of human enslavement. This motion effectively in favor of re-implementing the gag rule carried. Professor Benedict Jaeger presented the library of the US National Museum in Washington DC with a copy of his ANALYTICAL TABLE OF A COURSE OF LECTURES ON ZOÖLOGY. For the following several years he would be residing in Alexandria, District of Columbia. Waldo Emerson wrote to Lidian Emerson, who was visiting the William Emerson family home The Snuggery at Castleton on Staten Island: Yesterday Mr. Saml Ripley preached the farewell sermon to the old church, which goes down, the spire at least, this week. But your sinful household were for the most part worshipping each in his or her separate oratory in the woodlands What is droll, Henry Thoreau was the one at church. This PM he carries Caroline [Sturgis?] to Fairhaven in his boat...

8 1843 May: It was during this month that Henry Thoreau s strange sleepiness was at its worst. Putting up with the stodgy William Emerson must have been a great trial for the clear Jones in Thoreau! We now know, by way of research by Dr. Jerome M. Siegel of the University of California Los Angeles, that the neural axions involved control not only sleep patterns but also motor functions. Which is to say, narcolepsy is degeneratively linked with cataplexy. Thus, the genetic mechanism of the Jones family which produced Thoreau s sleepiness during this Staten Island period may have been what would be involved in the spring of 1855 as well. In his efforts to counteract this innate Jones tendency he would even attempt making spare change by selling

9 magazine subscriptions door to door. WALDEN: That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? NARCOLEPSY WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Judge William Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

10 May: Went to [Judge William Emerson s home The Snuggery at Castleton on] Staten Island, June, 1843, and returned in December, 1843, or to Thanksgiving. 1 Immediately after arrival Henry Thoreau would come down with two and a half weeks of cold and bronchitis, then a month later he would have an attack of the family narcolepsy. Passing back and forth on the ferry between New-York and Staten Island, Thoreau would have repeatedly passed the immigration center at Castle Garden, a repurposed fortress structure which did not even as yet have a roof. 2 Thoreau would visit the picture gallery of the National Academy of Design, but his haunts on Manhattan Island would be the New York Society Library and the Mercantile Library, and his reading list has recently been investigated. W m Emerson During this month, or before the 8th of the following month, Thoreau visited Henry James, Sr. at 21 Washington Place, New-York. Please note that William James was one year old, and Henry James, Jr. an infant, for some commentators in their simplicity and great-manitis have assumed that the Henry James with whom Thoreau talked in 1843 was the novelist Henry James. If Thoreau did talk with the novelist Henry James on this occasion, the novelist Henry James did not respond in any sophisticated fashion and did not in later life remember having encountered this Transcendentalist writer. (Thoreau and James Sr. had a 3-hour conversation and, replaying their chat for the benefit of readers of a Boston newspaper many years later after having become a Swedenborgian mystic, this aristocat alleged that Thoreau had been literally the most childlike, unconscious, and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter. ) Professor Walter Harding s 1. Thanksgiving, in November, according to the Universal Traveller, was one of the occasions upon which traditionally apprentices who are not permitted to visit their parental and rural homes more than twice in a year were expected to travel home to renew the bonds of affinity and affection under the paternal roof. 2. Very little of what Henry Thoreau saw now remains, as the building has been demolished back to its 1811 appearance.

11 take on this meeting was that it transformed the city of New York for Thoreau: whereas previously he had been ashamed of [his] eyes that beh[e]ld it, the metropolis became by this visit to a cultivated gentleman s home naturalized and humanized. Later on in this year Henry James, Sr. took his family plus his wife s sister Catherine Walsh on an extended trip to London and Paris. It seems that Thoreau was reading in the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets (he would quote from the Reverend John Donne in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, using lines from Obsequies on the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Countess of Bedford, a line from The Second Anniversary, and lines from Second Letter to the Countess of Huntington ). 3 A WEEK: Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was. PEOPLE OF A WEEK REVEREND JOHN DONNE A WEEK: I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray. PEOPLE OF A WEEK REVEREND JOHN DONNE 3. Notice that since Staten Island is formed from the extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age, and that since Henry did not venture beyond Staten Island prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in fact prior to the publication of WALDEN Thoreau had not once ever departed from the Walden Pond ice age landscape of detritus and erratic boulders! That landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he had had any experience at all.

12 A WEEK: Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men. He that hath love and judgment too, Sees more than any other doe. PEOPLE OF A WEEK It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. And it is well said by another poet, Why love among the virtues is not known, Is that love is them all contract in one. REVEREND JOHN DONNE CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Judge William Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

13 May 6, Saturday: On the day that Ellery Channing s ill-fated POEMS BY WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING was with great fanfare being published, Henry Thoreau escorted Mrs. William Emerson, bound from Concord for Staten Island. POEMS (FIRST SERIES) Henry was to tutor Judge Emerson s son Haven, 7 years old, for wages of $ per year plus room and board, while seeking publishing contacts in New-York. They took a boat from New London, Connecticut to a wharf by Castle Garden Emigrant Depot in Battery Park on Manhattan Island, and then boarded the ferry to Staten Island. Immigrants disembarking at Castle Garden Emigrant Depot

14 Two more views of a place now forgotten that was important in the memories of a whole lot of people in the 19th Century

15 As Thoreau was departing for Staten Island, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar made him the present of an inkstand, which he

16 would use throughout his life. This is the one now on exhibit in the Concord Museum: WALDEN: Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy s pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, lifeeverlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads, because they once stood in their midst. PEOPLE OF WALDEN ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR

17 One can imagine this inkstand later, on the table in the mottled light under the pines. While Thoreau would be living on Staten Island and putting up with the stodgy William Emerson the clear Jones in him would be becoming so drowsy, or narcoleptic, that in his efforts to counteract this he would even attempt making spare change by selling magazine subscriptions door to door. WALDEN: That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? NARCOLEPSY

18 May 21, Sunday: We learn, from a letter that published author Ellery Channing wrote to Margaret Fuller on this date, that Emerson had taken, as a new amanuensis, the 20-year-old resident of Concord and graduate of Dartmouth College Benjamin West Ball, to make a genius out of now that oakum-brained Thoreau, Pick-character Thoreau, had been passed along to Emerson s brother Judge William Emerson on Staten Island. 4 THOREAU RESIDENCES On this same day, this Pick-character Thoreau was being written to by Waldo Emerson in a letter addressed to Henry D. Thoreau, care of Mr. Emerson, Esq., 64 Wall Street, New York : Concord, Sunday Eve, 21 May, My Dear Friend, Our Dial is already printing, and you must, if you can, send me something good by the 10th of June, certainly, if not before. If William E. can send by a private opportunity, you shall address it to Care of Miss Peabody, 13 West Street, or, to be left at Concord Stage Office. Otherwise send by Harnden, W.E. paying to Boston and charging to me. Let the pacquet bring letters also from you, and from [Giles] Waldo and Tappan, I entreat. You will not doubt that you are well remembered here, by young, older, and old people; and your letter to your mother was borrowed and read with great interest, pending the arrival of direct accounts and of later experiences, especially in the city. I am sure that you are under sacred protection, if I should not hear from you for years. Yet I shall wish to know what befalls you on your way. Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very agreeable to me. Young [Benjamin West] Ball has been to see me, and is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise, born, too, in the good town. Mr. Hawthorne is well, and Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of ninety acres. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson. 4. Would this Ball family have been residing on a farm in the vicinity of Ball s Hill (Gleason D9)? Would Benjamin be the son or the grandson of Nehemiah Ball?

19 CAPE COD: I used to see packs of half-wild dogs haunting the lonely beach on the south shore of Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of the carrion there cast up; and I remember that once, when for a long time I had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a little one which ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the little one was the first to bark at me. Under these circumstances I could not but remember the words of the poet: Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind As his ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot; Though thou the waters warp, Thy sting is not so sharp As friend remembered not. DOG Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of a horse or ox which lay on the beach there, where there was no living creature in sight, a dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of offal. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Judge William Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

20 December 3, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was written to by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Mr Thoreau, Will you be kind enough to take to New York the letter to Mr O Sullivan, & if it be convenient for you, to carry my letter to Boston? If you cannot call at West St, it is just as well to put it into the Boston Post Office. S A. Hawthorne. Dec. 3 d 1843 (John L. O Sullivan s magazine was currently at its December issue.) Thoreau was written to by Charles Lane in Boston. Boston Dec r 3/43 Dear friend As well as my wounded hands permit I have scribbled something for friend Hecker which if agreeable may be the opportunity for entering into closer relations with him; a course I think likely to be mutually encouraging, as well as beneficial to all men. But let it reach him in the manner most conformable to your own feelings. That from all perils of a false position you may shortly be relieved and landed in the position where you feel at home is the sincere wish of yours most friendly Charles Lane Henry Thoreau US MAG & DEM. REV. DEMOCRATIC REVIEW Thoreau presumably would not be receiving this letter promptly, as he departed on this day for Staten Island to gather together his belongings from the home of Judge William Emerson and, on the way, stopped in at Brook Farm in the middle of a snowstorm.

21 1847 March 7, Sunday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Judge William Emerson: I received your letter in reply to mine concerning money. And am glad you are not scared. I should not however have bought my land until another year, had I foreseen the inconveniences of it. I am not without a prospect that my woodlot by Walden Pond will get an increased value soon; as Mr. Tudor has invaded us with a gang of Irishmen & taken 10,000 tons of ice from the Pond in the last weeks. If this continues, he will spoil my lot for purposes for which I chiefly value it, & I shall be glad to sell it. FREDERIC TUDOR

22 1855 Fall: On Staten Island, in the afternoon, the long low brown-shingled building with grapevines on its piazza at 37 Douglas Road known to Judge William Emerson s family as their Snuggery burned, although this did not leave them without a nice home in which to lay their heads. The conflagration left standing a stone gate on Douglas Road near Richmond Road and at latest report that gate is still erect, although it is now unpleasingly close to the Staten Island Expressway Ask around for directions to Emerson Hill. The home was named, it goes without saying, after Washington Irving s remote snuggery cottage Sunnyside near Tarrytown, New York, now unpleasantly close to the Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River.

23 1857 December: Henry Thoreau surveyed woodlots in Concord and Lincoln for Waldo Emerson. He surveyed a lot by Walden Pond amounting to 13 acres 80 rods. This is the land on which Thoreau built a shanty and created a beanfield. Cyrus Hubbard had surveyed this land for Emerson on December 16, According to a letter written by Emerson to his brother William Emerson on October 4, 1844, he had bought the land from some men he met while walking in the woods. The next day he went back with some well beloved gossips and they persuaded him to buy about 3 more acres from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment. Thoreau also surveyed Ebenezer Hubbard s woodlot, between Walden Street and the Cambridge Turnpike, that would become part of Fairyland in The survey of Hubbard s woodlot showed the neighbors as Josh Jones, the Ministerial Lot, John Richardson, Francis Jarvis, Cyrus Warren, N.J., (?) Haywood, Abel Brooks, Reuben Rice, Brister [Brister Freeman] and the Poor Farm on Walden Street. On unspecified days, Thoreau surveyed woodlots for Abel Moore and John Hosmer, lotting off some of the land for firewood. He copied from Cyrus Hubbard s survey of His plan shows the Pond Hole, Darius Hubbard s land, Ephraim Wheeler s land, and Isaac Brook s land. Abel Moore s son John inherited the land.

24 Here is a portrait of the Waldo Emerson for whom Thoreau was doing so much surveying: Emerson by Rowse in 1857

25 1864 February 29, Monday: In New York, William Emerson had recently married and had been making plans to visit Minnesota for his health the locale being then supposed to be good for tuberculosis patients but on this day he died. His father Judge William Emerson wrote to Waldo Emerson, asking that preparations be made for the burial in Concord.

26 1868 September 13, Sunday: William Emerson died after having suffered over several months from a wasting disease. Probably he had tuberculosis, and perhaps in addition some form of cancer. Upon his death, the body was sealed immediately in lead and shipped overnight to Concord, Massachusetts for burial. MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Judge William Emerson

27 COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: October 6, 2014

28 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

29 Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.

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