Writing gives the impresson of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.
In my opinion, this sentence sums up 6 pages of superflous writing.
Within the matrices of the body, the chemical basis of life is fixed for reading through a kind of hypertext markup language—A, C, G, and T.[...]Meteorology and genetic science are able to produce typographies of the unseeable that enable us to read backwards into the past a history of the planet and of the body.
I found the analogy of DNA information storage to html information storage very interesting within the context of this class, since we've been using html the whole time. I think it's an interesting concept to visualize DNA as similar to web pages—in the way that we structure the text within them using basic html, although I am still a little confused by the quote. Maybe I don't quite fully understand what defines html as a system, but I understood the concept of links to be quintessential to html. Does the author suggest that each instance of A, C, G, or T can function as a sort of link to another piece of information? Or rather that clusters of A, C, G and T form links? Either way, this comparison made me visualize DNA as a 2-dimensional cluster of letters that connects to other 2-dimensional clusters through links, intead of one large 3-dimensional stack.
Such a collection of ephemeral treasure is an example of how we find the things that tell us who we are, even if it gives instead the impression that a parallel universe of KM's own work has found him—by casually infiltrating the most ordinary places: the local newspaper, or the fold of a carton of milk, or the back of a parking ticket.
I just really like this imagery of an alternate world. I thought it was a great way to think of a collection, and it really reminded me of my experience building my own collection and feeling like I was being bombarded with all these different symbols that I felt hadn't been there before (although obviously they had).
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