…if the reader’s expression of his freedom through the text is tolerated among intellectuals (clercs) (only someone like Barthes can take this liberty), it is on the other hand denied students (who are scornfully driven or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning ‘accepted’ by their teachers) or the public (who are carefully told ‘what is to be thought’ and whose inventions are considered negligible and quickly silenced).

–Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching” from The Practice of Everyday Life

While I should–officially–frown upon the destruction of university property, I have to admit that upon entering the Writers House this week for the first time since the fall semester, I was amused to see that someone had presumably taken the creative impulse from the safety of the page to the signage of the building. With the removal of a few letters, the noun “WRITERS HOUSE” was transformed into the verb (perhaps an imperative?) “REHOUSE.” Certainly this act of poaching was in the spirit of the unit on textual appropriation, bricolage, and erasure that I taught last semester in my creative writing workshops.  (One of my students had brilliantly whited out sections of Ellison’s Invisible Man–creating a striking alternate text as well as effectively playing with the theme of in/visibility.) This act of poaching also made me think of a syllabus that I recently drafted called “Poetry, Literary Recycling, and ‘Open Source’ Culture.” Looking at the sign again, I had thought that we could also remove “HO” to make “REUSE.” And out of the missing letters–wherever they may be–we could make “THIS ROW.”