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aeroglyphics :: 9/29/00
When the subway enters light it becomes the elevated. And this is Chicago: rooftops and skylights, wires and poles, an occasional billboard fit into the jumble. There are places in the layout for information. The word Budweiser has been inserted into his horizon. Looking down, over the edge of the L tracks, he sees alleys and dumpsters and people doing things, morning work, people extending their own narratives, adding events to those already accumulated and arranged in their brains. Jakob tilts his head, crooks his index finger, and runs it slowly up the back rim of his ear. Two Hispanic men unload a mattress from the back of a truck. The infamous Other? The reason that the daily chronicle of the newspaper is so shocking, and at the same time so fascinating, to the average reader is because the average reader knows so little about the life of which the newspaper is the record. Chicago School, 1915. Not that anything’s changed. To truly know a city, all cities, a world — what a goal. He wants to be a scholar of human ecology. That’s what he should have told that girl at the party. Maybe he’ll try it out if Freya asks. He is in a metal box with fifteen other people and he looks out the window and thinks about science fiction. The browns and oranges of Dune. “A scholar of human ecology” — no, that sounds too pretentious. The L tracks pass over train tracks which, in turn, pass over a street. An asterisk formed by lines of transportation. The train tracks below curve through the city on the top of a wall. He doesn’t even know where those tracks go. Ours is not a world that we can know completely. A concrete strip between the tracks is painted with names and elaborate patterns. A communicative field: a matrix of codes and decorative signs. An entire history set in fonts that he cannot read, right there in the concrete. Oh girls just want to have fun. He rises from his seat and moves between people and thinks. Global telepathic war.
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Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::
A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.
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