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This is really interesting...and maybe this excerpt sets up something for us to look at: the consequences, if you will, of a playful realtionship to text (or urban grid). But I reject the easy diad she creates, between a juvenile tearing down of authors and a wholly unfettered flow between signifier and signified, and the fiction of a communion between an Author, her fixed meaning, and the connected consciousness of the reader. I should read the whole essay, because her description of "stumbling toward meaning simultaneously, together" strikes me as a richer and less diagrammatic way of articulating the reading experience.

Think about what she's saying in relation to our fantasy(ies) of urban play. There is more to it than, on the one hand, a riot/chaos in the street/carnival backstreet craziness, and, on the other, the city grid staidly laid out beneath the watchful gaze of the erected founder perched atop city hall to oversee the meaning of his plan. The city is wilder than that--and books are, too. City Hall itself is a 19th century "play" on the Original Grid, covereing over the Center Square. (That a part of this square is currently excavated delights me btw.) Even the grid is a slightly playful attempt to insert civic meaning between the two rivers, which are themselves an ecocentric "grid" of an irregular system. All the civic attempts to organize and regulate meaning in the city are subverted daily by the needs/desires/habits of actual people. And part of the majesty of the cityspace is its absolute resistance to efforts to fix its meaning--but also its reluctance to turn into complete chaos.

I am reminded of something I saw aftet the Phillies won the world series and I walked from Clark Park to 30th Street to meet my friend Tim who came in from New York for the parade. The grid of Public Transit could not come close to containing the (literally) millions of people who were in the street. We walked from 30th Street to  the stadiums, where we sat and hailed the victorious heroes. Walking back north, we came upon a park not far from the stadiums. Although the city had put out trashcans and portable toilets, there simply weren't enough to accommodate the large number of (mostly orderly) revelers. And in this park, planted nicely with scores of trees in a randomixed pattern approximating nature, I noticed that each of the trees was wet from waist-height down. They were all painted with beer-ish urine. In this image, I see literal and metaphoric signs that go back and forth between the city's capacity and impulse to order and the human urge to tweak that order and between the inevitable imperfection of the grid and the human need for some kind of order. (Why we pee on trees remains a mystery to me, and in this case, when I say we, I mean, naturally, other men, not me.)