So maybe one more thing since it's late.
So I was asked to do something for the Harvard Design
Magazine.
It was to talk about the relationships
between reading and sort of generic architectural spaces.
So I wrote seven or eight entries.
And this is the first one.
And I had really gotten into this category of literature
known as grey literature.
Grey literature are things that are published by corporations.
You know, they often sort of mark scientific disciplines
where you sort of collect data and the data eventually
goes into the publication of an article,
but this is all the pre-publication material.
So it's memorandums, brochures, all that sort of stuff.
And I was reading about grey literature because, I mean,
there seems to be a sort of correlation now between sort
of literary practice and information management.
So I was really interested in, oh,
well what kinds of information today
could pass as a kind of literary product.
And so I look up Wikipedia, and there's a subset under a grey
literature, and it's called Malin - grey literature.
And Malin - grey literature is material that's deliberately
designed to destroy itself over time.
It's printed on fugitive materials
that thwarts citationality.
You can't locate it.
You can't order it.
It's just hard to get track of.
So it's a librarian's nightmare.
So when I look up this Malin - grey,
I do a Google search on Malin - grey,
and there are only two other references to it.
And both of them claim that Malin - grey is a fraud,
that someone has gotten into the Wikipedia entry and actually
created this fake category known as Malin - grey.
Anyway, this is sort of on grey literature.
This is called "Plus Minus Carrot Sign Themes."
"In a time of surplus information,
reading renders itself a pictorial subset,
of data mining, of bibliographic control
end of dynamic visualization technologies.
Just as English novels by Difo and Richardson
mind the diaristic and epistolary for new narrative
circuits, the edges of the new literary field
emulate information management or communications systems.
What is a reading?
An indolent time based operation on data,
in short a medium, a corollary.
The medium requires markup.
What the Greeks rendered via polises,
we do with information processing.
Like love, the oldest medium of human communications,
reading a book becomes visible via the delays it creates,
hence the diverse and lovely deliriums of non reading,
saving a book for later, saying one
has read a book when one hasn't, carelessly fanning the pages,
skimming and index lightly with a forefinger,
perfuming some pages with the rose.
As the librarian in Robert Musil's Man
Without Qualities understands, all reading
is really just a potential form of non reading,
and the most beautiful histories of reading
are those in which no books actually appear.
What is the trajectory of the thing called attention?
Something that reminds me of a few summers or autumns,
or in this case, a few books that carried around
when I went to Athens High School in the mid-seventies
but never read until after my mother died in August 2013.
Chief among these books was a blue and white covered book
entitled Fortran IV and The IBM 360
and Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America.
I still have both these books.
On the fly page of my copy of trout fishing,
there are no photos of trout fishing or America.
Someone has written my name and the date
with a fat black felt tip pen followed by the year, 1977.
The hand that wrote that name was probably mine.
Nearly every day, every school day, during high school,
I carried that copy of trout fishing around
in a yellow JanSport backpack.
When I sat at study hall, or at lunch, it was there.
The first thing I took out and laid on the tables
next to the Fortran book, my backpack or my lunch.
And so it was, as far as I remember,
carrying a book that I had not read,
that came closest in my mind to approximating a real life
experience I had not yet had.
I thought if I carried that book around, I would fall in love,
or someone would fall in love with me
within the next few min--
months-- sorry.
And if you looked, you can see that my copy has
had its salmon colored cover ripped off,
making it what Hans Christian Andersen deemed a picture
book without pictures.
And it is true.
This coverless copying now gives me
a partial memory, like an image traced
in recto of my mother sitting in her rocking chair
reading Agatha Christie's The Affair at the Bungalow
or her favorite version of The Tale of Genji,
translated Edward G. Seidensticker, Knopf, 1978.
And sometimes, when the weather is a little damp,
the coverless version of trout fishing
offers up an image of my sister and me with our twin bamboo
fishing poles sitting by a lake in front
of the Athens Lake Motel, the only motel
that I remember existing, and probably the only motel that
existed in Athens, Ohio, during the long years
between high school and college, that time and place where
most of the fairy tales of an adult's life come to rest
and are prohibited from ever leaving."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]