"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

realization that the body of literature had its
obscene parts in need of covering.
By the early eighties—just before I fell in
with Todd and, through him, Ressler—the
Quote Board was clearly fighting a losing
cause against creeping nihilism. It filled with
the work of junior Dadaists: random
passages from sports magazines or cereal
boxes, meaningless but too inoffensive to
suppress in good faith. Disenfranchised
blind mouths, wanting nothing better than
to deface any suggestion of need. One
morning the whole wall sprouted Day-Glo,
spray-painted genitalia. After that, the
project shrank from its first, ambitious
conception to a square of plate glass around
a single, daily quote selected by a librarian.
As a sop to the old belief in public speech, I
attached a locked submissions box with the
condescending invitation, "If you have any
suggestions for quote of the day...." The
project kept its old name through force of
habit.
Not that the public abandoned the Quote
Board entirely. Over the years, it's had the
periodic inspired submission. Much of my
original intention felt paid by one
doubtlessly quarantined high school girl
who, from an astonishingly broad reading,
conscientiously culled the best of everything
she came across. Last year she sent me an
aerogramme from Eritrea reading:

Even a proverb is no proverb to
you till your life has illustrated it. Keats

I let that one run two days. This girl and a
few others have kept up a steady
submissions trickle. A few hundred other
contributors give once or twice, usually that
private byword they've taken to heart: the St.
Francis prayer or the Desiderata. Otherwise,
the box bulges with teenage death or torch
lyrics, proper names artlessly altered. Of tens
of thousands who finance the branch, only a
fraction of card-carriers make a point of
reading the quote of the day, and fewer still
ever go out on a limb and contribute. Still,
the Quote Board provides its service.
Recognition, learning a thing by heart: life