“In Praise of Copying” is not an investigation of the ethical dilemmas of copying but a Stein-like affirmation of the mimesis that happens everywhere and everyday. Boon sees copying as fundamental to existence, part of “how the universe functions and manifests.” Even on a molecular level, he writes on his blog, “all objects are made up of other objects.” We cannot learn without mimicking (whether it’s learning to write a paper or learning how to catch a football)—but the way copying is defined in legal terms obscures this fact. Boon encourages us to rethink terms like “subject,” “object,” “different,” and “the other,” in order to “account for our fear of and fascination with copying.”
Boon vividly demonstrated these principles at the recent launch of “In Praise of Copying” at the Brooklyn bookstore Spoonbill and Sugartown. Instead of reading from his book, he read from a slew of books selected at random from Spoonbill’s shelves. From these texts, seemingly unrelated to his own, he was able to reconstruct his general thesis in patchwork (and the theses of these books could themselves be reconstructed in other texts, and so on). A book, he demonstrated, is really a kind of Borgesian library—a mirrored, labyrinthine entity that communicates and shares despite our best efforts to wall it in.
Ideas We Like: Books Without Walls By Jenny Hendrix, The New Yorker, October 5, 2010
I shared the above quotation on my previous blog in a post dedicated to one of my all-time favourite books, Reality Hunger in a post called, How Should Reality Be? As the title also suggests, this particular post was also inspired by Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be:
There are two ways of writing a diary. In the first, you note where you went and with whom. You detail people’s conversation, clothes and jokes. You say who you slept with, and who all your friends slept with. The second way is more inward-looking: long lists of anxieties, hopes, dreams, feelings, worries, pledges to become more spiritual, cut down on unhealthy substances and take more exercise. Of course we all know that the more inward-looking we are, the duller we become, especially as most of us have similar anxieties, hopes and dreams.
Parts of this post are copies of that particular post because this post is about copying. But this post is also about autofiction and bibliomancy.
But for much of the last year I have been thinking about memoir and autofiction, specifically through the lense of Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody Is Talking About This and J. M. Coetzee’s Scenes From Provincial Life, thoughts born from the Shipman classes I taught in 2023. I had been interested in the idea of a third person memoir ever since meeting Salman Rushdie at the launch for his Joseph Anton, a third person memoir of his life under the fatwa. When I met Deborah Levy at an event she did with my friend Daniel Schreiber here in London last month, her idea of a living autobiography, as she has called her most recent books, stippled my imagination too. The dream of writing out of the present, in a kind of diarist’s pose but in the third person.
The above quotation is from the 2023 post, Bibliomancy For The Living Autobiography In The Third Person by Alexander Chee. It was brought to my attention by Shannon Mattern who shared it on Bluesky because it contains a bibliomancy exercise that she thinks could be “a great way to encourage exploration of the library, to help students appreciate the value of curiosity and magic of serendipity”.
I also am interested in bibliomancy. It is a practice that I engaged on and off, some years ago:
Here is Alexander’s bibliomancy exercise:
The bibliomancy exercise goes like this:
- Take a notebook and pen and go to a library, to the fiction stacks, poetry, autobiography, literary criticism, literary journals… maybe even choose a different genre for each selection.
- Ask, “What should I be writing about?” And for 60 minutes—set a timer even—wander the stacks, flipping open books at random. Pause before the shelf, and if you want it to be more like a Tarot card reading, close your eyes, reach out with your non-dominant hand and see if there’s a book that feels like it is pulling at you, maybe even warmer than the others. Flip it open and if you like, run your finger down the page, or, just read the two facing pages for a passage that speaks to you. Write it down along with the title and author, even the page number if you want to find it again.
- Do this 6 more times.
- Read the list of quotes and look for a common theme or themes. Write them down. Are there any images or ideas that repeat or images or ideas that speak to your own ideas? Is there even just a line you like particularly?
The idea behind the exercise is to use the quotes as a way to begin to make connections first to what you are thinking about as the themes emerge are typically unconscious to the querent, giving shape to something they’ve been thinking about, not necessarily because of any mystical element, but because of synchronicity. The arrangement of unfamiliar elements allows the ideas to surprise us, to dress in a costume that allows them to be heard.
Let’s start 2025 with this exercise. I’ll start.
Rather than spend an hour in the library stacks, I will be drawing from the two shelves of my work-related books in my office. Using a random number generator to select each book’s relative position, I will choose 3 books from the top shelf, 3 from the bottom, and one randomly picked from one of either shelves.
These are my personally selected quotations and their sources.
A Self-Portrait/Self-Portent, January 2025
one.
With the appearance of online systems, however, in which text is stored permanently within the system and never appears on external storage media, serious competition to the punch card has arisen.
Levy, David M. Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age. Second edition. New York, [New York]: Arcade Publishing, 2016, p. 33.
two.
Conceived as a coast-to-cost experimental community and harbouring the dream of a liberated territory within the geographical confines of the United States, Truckstop Network was a multifaceted project for a mobile community that would be equipped with nomadic shelters and high-tech equipment, along with a computer-controlled network of communication interfaces, in order to inhabit America differently.
Scott, Felicity D. “Networks and Apparatuses, circa 1971: Or, Hippies Meet Computers.” In Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, edited by Andrew Blauvelt, First edition. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015, p. 26.
three.
With each event, Marshall became a bit more of a prisoner of the wiring and plumbing of his head. Biology is not destiny, but it sure sets some boundaries.
Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan. Extraordinary Canadians. Toronto: Penguin Group (Canada), 2009, p. 179.
four.
A rare example of a well-defined, useful, but noncomputable problem is the halting problem. Imagine that I want to write a computer program and determine whether or not that program will eventually stop. If the program being examined has no loops or recursive subroutine calls, it is bound to finish eventually, but if it does have such constructs the program may well go on forever. It turns out that there is no algorithm for examining a program and determining whether or not it is fatally infected with an endless loop. Moreover, it’s not that no one has yet discovered such an algorithm; rather, no such algorithm is possible. The halting problem is noncomputable.
Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. 1st ed. Science Masters. New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 68.
five.
Documents not only serve to make information but also to warrant it — to give it validity. Here again, the material side of documents plays a useful part. For information has trouble, as we all do, testifying on its own behalf. Its only recourse in the fact of doubt is to add more information. Yet people do not add much to their credibility by insisting “I’m telling the truth.” Nor does it help much to write “good” on the face of a check. Piling up information from the same source doesn’t increase reliability.
In general, people look beyond information to triangulate reliability.Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002, p. 187.
six.
One of my colleagues, Seth Korch, at UNC likes to say, “The dirty little secret about oral history is no one actually listens to the interviews.” I think we really tried to make that not true in the past few years by putting an emphasis on the audio, doing things like the podcasts and having these different clip playlists where the audio is so much more accessible. This way we’re going into the collection and saying, “Here’s this amazing interview from the ’80’s about some sort of university history or labor movement in the South, and it’s still relevant and still really interesting to people today, but you might not have listened to it because it’s so deep in the archives.” So we’ll bring it to the surface. We’ll put it in a podcast and connect it to what we’ve doing now, or to a current event that’s happening in North Carolina or on a national scale. That’s the bigger goal, to show people that this really matters, and history didn’t just happen in a little box isolated from everything else. These things are all connected, and it still has a lot of relevance today, and you can still learn from it.
Morrone, Melissa. Human Operators: A Critical Oral History on Technology in Libraries and Archives. Sacramento CA: Library Juice Press, 2017, p. 239.
seven.
What came of Bob’s invitation changed my life and much to do with my book Savage Dreams, the first half of which is about the Test Site and the strands of its history wrapped around the world, and before there was the book there was an essay version of what the Test Site and Bob taught me that appeared in a magazine with circulation of about half a million. A few years ago I went back to the Test site for another spring action, and there I met several students from Evergreen College in Washington who had decided to come down because they had been reading Savage Dreams in class. If you are lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf’s, and if you’re really lucky you’ll sometimes see to whom you have pass it, as I did on that day (and if you’re polite, you’ll remember who handed it to you). I don’t know if the Evergreen kids have become great activists or died in a car crash on the way home, but I know that for them I was a leopard prompting a word or two of the poem of their own lives, as Bob was for me. Borge’s parable continues.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Third edition with a new foreword and Afterword. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016, p. 69.