I'm getting out of the boredom business, friends. I recently embarked upon my latest project, a piece that would completely turn my entire practice on its ear. I wanted to work with extraordinary language, dramatic language; language drenched with emotion. Excitement is what I'm after now. After thinking about what I could do for some months, I hit upon the perfect project. I would redo my New York Times piece, only instead of retyping a "normal" news day, I would retype the issue of the New York Times published on the morning of September 11th, using the exact same method I did for Day.

 I've now just finished the first section of the paper and I can tell you that it's doing everything that I want it to. I've embarked on an epic unboring boring work. It's been a highly emotional experience retyping this paper, full of events that never happened: sales that were cancelled, listings for events that were indefinitely postponed, stories deemed to be big news one day were swept off the pages of the paper of record forever, stock prices that took a huge dive the next day, and so forth. I think you get the idea. I love the idea of doing something so exciting in the most boring way possible or vice versa.

 At a reading I gave recently -- and I do do short readings occasionally -- the other reader came up to me after my reading and said incredulously, "You didn't write a word of what you read." I thought for a moment and, sure, in one sense -- the traditional sense -- he was right; but in the expanded field of appropriation, uncreativity, sampling, and language management in which we all habit today, he couldn't have been more wrong. Each and every word was "written" by me: sometimes mediated by a machine, sometimes transcribed, and sometimes copied; but without my intervention, slight as it may be, these works would never have found their way into the world. When retyping a book, I often stop and ask myself if what I am doing is really writing. As I sit there, in front of the computer screen, punching keys, the answer is invariably yes.
 
Kenneth Goldsmith