This is too cool. Here’s a picture of some graffiti that appeared by the Humber Bay Arch bridge looking over Lake Ontario:
That tag, ISBN 486-28495-6, is the International Standard Book Number for the Dover paperback edition of Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist meditation, Walden.
Beautiful juxtaposition, the pristine landscape of the Walden woods with the artificially assured wranglings of our will to utility. Also the tagger’s use of what amounts to a serial number instead of more direct means (a quote or a picture) evokes yet another level of irony, the manner in which what was considered, more than a hundred years ago, to be socially provocative and mildly anarchic – what Thoreau himself would term ‘Civil Disobedience’ – is now categorized and codified, dulling the edges of any bite it might have once possessed. C. introduced me to the term ‘negative intellectualism’, which I think might apply here, albeit in more amorphous ways. Using a reference instead of the thing referenced also points to itself as a symptom of our hyperlink times, when more often than not the chain of interconnection outweighs the content being linked.
My hats and shoes are off to you, tagger! May you find more juicy buttons to press.
