It’s startling sometimes how strangely the texts in your life can intersect with each other. My project has brought me to some pretty weird places. Last week I found myself alternating between John Seabrook’s book Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention (2008) and Gregory L. Ulmer’s book Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994). Sure, they both have invention in the title, but these books belong to different worlds: the first to the world of intellectual pop writing — the New Yorker, St. Martin’s Griffin, and human interest stories — and the second to the world of critical theory — where the term electracy isn’t new and Derrida and Kristeva are our old friends. Ulmer’s book isn’t typical academic fare in some ways, interweaving as it does the creative and the critical, the personal and the popular, but it’s characteristically dense, at home at Johns Hopkins UP.

So, I’m reading these two books, Seabrook offering a break of sorts from the tougher read, and they unexpectedly begin to merge. What’s especially interesting is that Ulmer is theorizing an aleatory model of invention, one that helps him connect Montana to Paris, himself to Gary Cooper, Columbus to everything. And maybe that model of invention, which I’ve been contemplating for a couple years now, silently took hold of me and directed these strange interconnections, but…

Suddenly, Seabrook’s prospecting for gold in Nevada, Ulmer’s remarking on the relationship between prospecting and the “flash of genius” or eureka moment while wandering the frontiers of Montana, the Old West, and new-world conquests; Seabrook’s meeting with one of the structural engineers who designed the World Trade Center, I’ve just spent September 10 and 11 cramming my brain full of 9/11 videos, articles, and even audio, and now I’m sitting in the Cathedral of Learning, itself an architectural tower-wonder, thinking, “Who would ever think about the engineers, architects, contractors, and inventors behind the Twin Towers?” (I’m constantly wondering about the figure of the individual inventor, the lone genius, the writer in the garret [and why is it a garret?].) A couple days prior, my impromptu 9/11-tribute weekend had had me watching a series of videos originally designed for 4Cs remarking on the Twin Towers, invention, and chora, mashing together bits of interviews with Derrida and Ulmer himself. Back in Heuretics, Ulmer’s scrutinizing Twin Peaks, and during a break with my guilty-pleasure HelloGiggles, I read a post about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (which I’ve never actually seen).

Sometimes I can sort of almost understand why some people think invention is guided by a supernatural force.