THE KNOWLEDGE WEB

Back playing his theme music——the process by which new ideas emerge is serendipitous and interactive”—is the hugely entertaining Burke (The Pinball Effect, 1996, etc.). He’s off on another of his joyrides, following the often bizarre pathways that lead from one idea to another, following like a bloodhound the threads that link events and notions and personalities. And he doesn’t just list the things passing strange before his purview, he stops to examine them and deliver a smart little explication. He’s not just amused to learn that the Magnetico-Electrico Celestial Bed, wherein the administrations of shocks to the participants was said to “ensure immediate conception,” can be found on the road to the cornflake, he wants readers to know why. And it’s pure pleasure to read as he unravels the skein knotting the pugnacious father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to the equally pugnacious antivivisectionists, and “a thirty-three-year-old married Englishwoman with a hidden past and the habit of wearing no underwear” to, 211 pages later, the Elgin marbles. Burke again makes use of “gateways” in his narrative, a system of numeric codes that link distant strands within the text into a literary subspace, allowing readers to skip about throughout the book, as if Burke’s caperings aren’t entertainment enough, though it does drive home why Burke is so pleased that the word “web” has gained such currency. There are vague rumblings at the beginning of this book about a new system of knowledge gathering, sowing democracy and enfranchising the uneducated in its wake, that Burke will introduce, in which semi-intelligent computer software helps weed through the information glut unleashed by the Internet. That would suggest undermining the very serendipity and interactivity that enthralls him so, and he wisely doesn’t mention it again after the introduction. Burke is in a league alone when it comes to freewheeling intellectual curiosity and mapping nature’s strange designs.