237.365

by David Fieni

When some snow-bound lit professor’s meditations on the novel were fed into the ‪#‎Lullaby365‬ algorithm, the project itself became infused with the plasticity and dynamic structure of this genre. A text was seen projected by a drone (at least this was the surmise of one WNYC reporter) onto the mirror-clad side of One World Trade Center, turning this monolithic, monological hymn to defeat and domination into an enormous disco ball and the the surrounding buildings into a disco where passers-by could read refracted, dancing fragments of light that compared the novel — as a voraciously open-ended form, a genre whose rules involved breaking the rules — to syntax — as an ostensibly more constrained set of operations that allowed for an infinite number of variations on that object we call the sentence. The mobile, pulsing sparks of purple and blue and red and green addressed the viewer, saying that surely she’d argue that professional linguists had the answer, although others would likely think themselves quite clever for pointing out that “syntax” in such a formulation functioned primarily as a metaphor for flexible structure itself. And the man on the corner looking up with rapt attention was nonetheless too shy to vocalize the point he wanted to make: that the very idea of the novel was little more than a metaphor, a container containing metamorphosis.