I joined up with Orkut
and have been having a nice time there. It has a lot in
common with Friendster,
but is faster and has more functionality. (It also seems
to have more of my friends.) Perhaps most
amusing is to see the pictures people choose for Orkut
communities. (At dinner recently, some of us suggested that
Orkut's communities aren't really communities. I don't
remember what we thought they should be called instead.)
I'm about to leave for Los Angeles to hear oral argument
in MGM v. Grokster.
I went with Kieran and Duncan to the San Francisco Antiquarian
Book, Print, and Paper Fair (not to be confused with the California
International Antiquarian Book Fair, which is in Los Angeles this
year and which I'll be attending on Friday). We looked briefly at
a lot of books, and also at many old maps of San Francisco.
Although it was fairly evident there, I didn't actually think about
the saying habent sua fata libelli so much at the fair as I
did the day before the fair. I never imagined that I would write a
letter and send it across the country and that, four years later, a
separate copy of the letter and I would make our ways simultaneously
right across the street from the letter's destination
where, having largely forgotten about it, I would unexpectedly
read it over again.
When I first wrote there, "2000 Florida Avenue, NW" was as
random and meaningless to me as it could possibly have been.
(For all I could imagine it, it might as well have been in
Florida.) But on Friday I discovered, to my very great
astonishment, that my letter had found its way there a second
time by another route and for another reason, so that
I felt, perhaps more than ever before, that "books have their
own destinies".
