days

Emily Dickinson has a NYT name-check in the arts section today. Not a work of art inspired by Dickinson, per se, though her words are doubtless in the “vast collective [memory] that is stocked and ordered every day (and these days, every minute)” at the New York Times: “Moveable Type” is an installation in the lobby of the New York Times Building. The work consists of “two high walls [with] 560 small screens, 280 a wall, suspended in a grid pattern that looks at first glance like some kind of minimalist sculpture.” Across these screens flash words, phrases, and sentences culled from the NYT’s vast archives of 156 years worth of stories.

During the day, the machine delivers mostly snippets of news, including feeds from The NYT’s impressive offerings of web-only content. But at night, “the artwork, like the paper, will be mostly asleep but ‘dreaming’ — rummaging, ‘Finnegans Wake’-style, through articles and captions and headlines going back generations.”

It’s during those dreaming hours that snippets that have to do with Ms. Dickinson might flit past on the vacuum fluorescent displays. In recent years, the NYT has covered conservative Christians’ annoyance that she is not as edifying as they’d like; the passing of Richard Sewall, an influential Dickinson biographer; the scandalous affair of her brother Austin; and a 1986 tribute to which Joyce Carol Oats, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov were invited. And that’s just what’s in the on-line database. No doubt “Moveable Type” has richer resources from which to draw to churn up snippets of Dickinson’s verse.