Encounter at Farpoint

Our library has a number of interesting patrons, but I've finally encountered one I've been curious about for a long time. (He remarked that I'm "new" here, so I guess I didn't make such a big impression on him!) His name is Aethelred Eldridge, and he may be the only person I know who has a real-life, non-vanity Wikipedia entry. He definitely is a character, and if you Google him you can find out all about him, so I won't go into all that, except to say that not everybody people label as crazy actually is crazy (and not everyone people label as sane is actually sane, either).

What I do want to do is to tell the story of the first time I heard of him. One of the assignments I was given when I first started working here was to work on our index to the campus newspaper, The Post. To say we were significantly behind was an understatement-- I started working on 1993! (The index will finally be going online any day now, and we're all very excited about it.) At any rate, one of the articles one day was written by Aethelred Eldridge, and was called "The God Particle Has Landed." (You can see a transcription of it here.) I couldn't make head or tail out of how to index it or what it meant, and I finally decided to give it the subject heading "Language." But now, having read some other things that he's written, and having a few more years of experience under my belt, I guess, at least parts of it are beginning to make sense to me. It's also reminding me of something another artistic friend wrote lately called The God Virus.

I'm not sure exactly what to say here except that I've known a lot of artistic types on the bleeding edge over the years, and when they're with you, it's wonderful, but if they turn against you, it can be quite frightening. Which is to say that I hope I stay on Aethelred's good side!