Day by day, the web reveals itself to me as that bottomless pit they're going to throw the beast in when Revelation finally comes true... I spent 3 hours in Wordsworth in Harvard Square, as I arrived for what I thought would be a 10am show of Buckaroo Banzai IMDB at the Brattle, only to find out when I arrived that the show's at 10pm. It's annoying when they don't differentiate morning times from night times like that. Like I should have known...

So I browsed through the stacks for three hours, picking up various books, starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of The Last Tycoon, his final, and unfinished novel about a movie mogul, based on Irving Thalberg. I got distracted tracking down books by Dover Publications, which has a whole line of cheap classics ("thrift" editions). I went through the entire fiction lineup looking for these books, which range in price from 90 cents to $1.80, including works like Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. About halfway through my search, I see that the store has collected the Dover paperbacks in a rotating display that I didn't notice until I just about bumped into it. I tried to convince myself that it was worth the trouble browsing the stacks, but I still have my doubts.

I was prepared to buy the Dover books, a collection of Hemingway's short stories, F. Scott's This Side of Paradise (Dover Thrift Edition), and Zadie Smith's White Teeth, of which I've heard so much about. But since I couldn't justify a $40 impulse buy, I dropped the Dover's except for F. Scott's, and bought the rest.

Spending three hours to browse the stacks was not a complete waste of time, as I had my Visor with me, on which I recorded a list of books I'd like to read. And the Last Tycoon's good. So far I've only read F. Scott's outline, and I'd like to learn more about Thalberg. He started running MGM at 25, and died at the age of 37.

Getting back to the bottomless pit of the Internet, curious about the fate of Scottie, the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda, I looked her up on the Internet, and the first link I find is for her gravestone. Her children are listed, so naturally, I search for them. This brings me to Princeton's memorial for Thomas Addison Lanahan (Timmy), who committed suicide in Hawaii on October 18, 1973. No mention is made of his famous grandparents. Next, I looked up Eleanor (Bobbie) Lanahan, the granddaughter of Zelda, who is now a writer, artist, and ardent promoter of her grandmother's work (incidentally, Bobbie was born in 1948, the same year her grandmother died). I didn't get a chance to find out about Samuel Jr. or Cecilia, Scottie's other children before I stumbled upon Jess Barron's Zelda page, which I instantly filed away as I checked out her root page, then followed links to her description of her meeting with Monica Lewinsky at the Lava Lounge in LA in 1999, pictures on her narcissism page, and numerous blog sites (f(r)iction, nostalgia for the present, and instant messages). Her multi-faceted page drew me in, causing me to abandon my prior search through F. Scott & Zelda's lineage. So I thought about blogging my train of thought, and wondered how long the links would stay current, which brings me to my next paragraph.

With the transient nature of the web, all these places I refer to can be gone tomorrow, or converted to pay sites, where you have to pay to view the content, or just as bad, register. Imagine if Amazon or IMDB did this -- you'd have to use your registered name before you could look anything up, thus invalidating all my links. Apple Computer has already done this with their knowledge base. A couple years ago, anyone could download software patches for their old emates, now you have to register and log on to do it. So my dilemna is, do I copy and host all web pages I refer to from now on? Or do I let this stand as a transient page, soon to be expired when all the links do? I'll leave the answer to when I have the time/motivation to do something about it. By the way, is anyone "backing up" the Internet? Wouldn't want to lose all of these beautiful connections.

Some final thoughts I couldn't include in the overlong blog above:

• You can probably can get many of the texts in the Dover Thrift Edition paperbacks from Project Gutenberg.
  
• Mary Shelley's middle name is Wollstonecraft.
  
• Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan attended Vassar, as did Jess Barron.