Well it would be an act of engagement, uh, with the book in a way that reading is actually very passive.  You know I learned... I was once at Princeton lecturing, and uh, creative writing students were studying with one of America's best known novelists and they were complaining because of her lack of imagination.  That a creative writing assignment that she had given them, an assignment to write in the style of Jack Kerouac.  Now that's quite impossible to do, uh, you know, 60 years later, you know, in an electric age, and they went home the night before and they struggled to understand the assignment and tried to dash off something that seemed like Kerouac.  And I thought to myself, well wouldn't it be better if they simply retyped a good chunk of On the Road.  Wouldn't they have learned much more about the style of Kerouac than trying to be original, and my mind goes to the painters at the Metropolitan of Art who set up their easel in front of the Rembrandt in order to learn how to paint.  Why can't writers do that as well? Somehow we've got to always be original. --Kenneth Goldsmith