Extraordinary Discourse 088
Shape-Shifting Samizdat Inner Highlighter I read Lewis Thomas's adventure with the essays of Montaigne. Thomas said he would fold over the corner of the page if there was something on it he was sure to want to come back to-- after a while the book was much thicker with all the folded page-corners. All readers have an "inner highlighter." I have had occasion to wonder how many actually do get back to those yellow-highlighted lines of text, and what they do with them if they do get back to them. At least text is somewhat stable, it's dry land, you can find your way back to it. As for electronic media, what you don't record is gone, around the bend down the river. And yet the spoken word is human, nuanced, ensouled, grounded in a body, closer to us, you and I, as we sit here with warm breath in our nostrils. For many years I hunted (aggressive receptivity) and electrically gathered an eclectic harvest, clipped out the highlighted utterances, burned t...