Fans of William Gibson have created an aggregator of sorts that organizes searchable critical reception on his new novel, Spook Country, into a “cloud” of responses that record reading paths through the novel. The article’s author thinks this could be the future of literary criticism. I am getting sort of dizzy thinking about it.

If you asked me what are the two best-annotated texts available to scholar and student in canonical English Literature, I would say the Alistair Fowler edition of Paradise Lost and the Ann Thompson edition of Hamlet. Colleagues would probably come up with alternative contenders. But they would be the same kind of footnote / endnote enterprises. Old school.

What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based ‘everybody pitch in’ mess. He’s channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.

Interesting stuff. But what this has really opened my eyes to is the need for an army of highly-skilled fanatics to support my career. As far as I can tell, you lot are only mildly fanatical, or perhaps just OCD. And you can’t program things that don’t include the phrase “20 goto 10″. When was the last time you reinvented criticism for me? Pfft.