Copyright © 1998. All rights reserved. No part of this paragraph may be reporoduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechnaical, oral, or telephathic, including photocopy, recording, transcription, tracing, hot type, cold type, mimeograph, ditto (in school, the copies, made between classes, would be handed to us while they were still warm and moist, their ink bearing a thick, intoxicating fragrance that would compel us to raise the sheets to our faces and think, so this is what blue smells like), teletype, telfax, telephone, semaphore, skywriting, whisper, séance, confession, FTD, floppy disk, hard drive, RAM, careful longhand on rare vellum, silk screen, or any information-storage-and-retrieval system without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles, reviews, profiles, commentaries, biographies, musical comedies, halftime shows, and literary-prize announcements. Requests for permission to make copies of any substantive part of this paragraph should be sent to the author (who really does have this happy memory of ditto ink's alcoholic vapor, which, when inhaled deeply, as if we were sampling the air of a lush field, would induce a wicked giddiness, among the other exalted effects of printed matter), who, quite frankly, would be flattered to get mail of this sort and would consider such requests in a favorable light as, the above sentence notwithstanding, he seeks to have this paragraph comunicated in all languages and by all technologies, not for personal or proprietary reasons but to bring another facet of the whole that exists to general awaremenss. Just drop me a note. [Use the e-mail address for Essential Strategies on the web site that linked to this one.] Except in cases of obvious satirical intent (an exception that applies to this entire paragraph, which resembles the device that provides copyright protection but is without that protection itself), all the characters in this paragraph are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, including the author, is purely coincidental, or at least unpredictable. Between what we describe and the truth lies a poorly marked border, and in a writer's desperate wanderings he will occasionally cross that border and then, unawares, meander back. (I'm not quite satisfied with the above description of ditto ink. There are other details: the paper soaked up in the blue, plumping and softening the letters, as if it too were slightly intoxicated by the ink. This lightened the color of the letters, slightly empurpling them, a transformation that defied simile until I witnessed the rush of twilight one summer morning a few years later. I never saw the ditto machine but imagined it as a handpowered, gracefully constructed device with a few large levers. The sight of thirty adolescents pressing warm inky sheets of paper againest their faces as if engaged in some cultish ceremony never seemed remarkable; a girl I had known since kindergarten, traveling with her on frequently intersecting paths without ever quite having a conversation, might pull the paper away with a sigh of such explosiveness that I would be momentarily exccited and a little in love, and then frightened, reminded of her inscrutability. In our suburban and earnestly innocent school we dared fate with jokes about needing our narcotic "fix" of the ink, and in April and May we crumpled tests and assignments from October and November, months that seemed like a much earlier, more promising, forever lost part of childhood. After a couple of seasons the bottom of my locker bore a faded, uninspiring scent, which was mostly a function of memory. The memory still resists full description. After such failure, of what use is a copyright?) This paragraph contains the complete text of the hardcover edition. Not one word has been omitted. |