She said, “These are the kinds of things people do in real life.” She said, “And yet you have a hollow leg. I can call you John, no?” She said, “The love density effect is interesting because all the actions here proposed come from art.” She said, “Have you ever met them, John? We’ll let anyone come for a while. I know they were in the Bahamas, on the deck again.”

Philology as a branch of epidemiology: His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an infection. Blame translation for the spillover. The rumor is that parody inoculates, but that might be a ruse to spread contagion. In the ward, the afflicted silently mouth found phrases.

Online conversion: We mightily scrub the bridge to the twenty-first century. Measured and signed on. They sabotage our stubble. Our faces reflected in magazines—clear-skinned, gender-neutral, architecturally sound. Chinese pleather? Yes, speak the unthinkable. They make a language for that. And who is placed in whose center, who is within whom.

The promise of fact evaporates in the weird light of the subjunctive. The focus is on events transpiring on the page, on “events” “transpiring” “on” “the page.” The -actual of our counterfactual is often only handwriting; a typo, a footnote, a facsimile; caps lock, scare quote, underscore.

My name is. My name is. My name is. That was my given name. He was changing people’s names to suit their personalities. Gave myself another name and gave myself another chance, I’d be happier. Believe me. There’s something to the name. If the name rings a bell to you and makes you feel well, then take the name.

Most of the photographs found online were shot digitally and uploaded to the Internet without any consideration of printing them in a physical form. Their material condition is not an issue. What we’re concerned with is photographs whose materiality is at stake, for which an online presentation is disruptive, and therefore worth examining.

Surveying the ground and that which surveys it from above. Drawing a line of force and following it. Trading violence for puppetry. Confusing major and minor aspects. Reckoning with the originality of credit. Randomizing dystopia. Accounting for innumerable other conjunctions and oppositions.

Charting the history of new-media publishing, from flip books to cassette tapes to Dynabooks. Unplaced Movements emerged from a series of public programs investigating our own underlying assumptions about online publishing by examining the undercurrents that have defined and enriched each successive “new” medium.

Creation myths, shore stories, bestiaries: Every animal is in the world is like water in water. The desert of Arabia is America’s last frontier. Isn’t it the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Avoid blue in mixtures because of its imbecile atmospheric tendency. Thus the moving image of the world would be established.

The first of two issues examining our urban situation and what lies beyond it: the city’s past and future; the suburban, the exurban, the frontier. The realization of elaborate fictions; the accretion of what is designed and improvised, what is chosen and received, what is imagined and experienced.

Journeys far and wide, remote and digitally delivered, between deities and degenerates, deliverance and circulation. Virtual prayer, analog dance; the smelling-ghost, the possessed Porky; deaths mistaken for jokes, catheters mistaken for obstructions; headbanger folkways, authenticity in crisis.

The pleasures of negative capability, weapons in space, petty riches, ephemeral luxuries, conjuring machines, killer mustaches. The horrors of that strange chimpanzee, ancient Greece in OS 9, unnatural embraces. The slight discomfort of not knowing that it fiddles, and not knowing that Rome burns.

Literature as a dangerous occupation, or an unoriginal vocation, or an observational exercise, or an engineering endeavor. The language of the Web: voices lost and found, photographs in search of an author, the Global Village Idiot awaiting a friend request. In other words: “There is always an angle toward the sun.”

Orbiting an absent program, making it visible in time. For now: the freedom to read too fast, the freedom to be unreadable. The disciplined freedom of form. The freedom to be excessive and recessive, polemical and lapidary, lucid and obdurate; to assume a name both overgrown and underdetermined.