So, Too, Is This Subtitle.
Right out of college, the first place I interviewed was the Hollywood office of International Business Machines, makers of the market-crushing Selectric typewriter.
“It’s something you can sell into a studio without a lick of experience,” explained the hiring manager. “Your resume tells me you know your way around writers. And printing. That should come in handy.”
Possessing not even half a lick of experience, to say nothing of the prospect of tearing hard-won cash from the very bosom of a fellow soul, was not something I had spent the last four years preparing to give my life to. A few years later, however, after working up the disposition to offer to the world something more useful than a machine whose pressed-and-held key hammered out an entire page of X’s in nothing flat, I found myself on a regular basis blearily staring at IBM’s unofficial motto:
[This page intentionally left blank.]
Why, at a company so buttoned-down they demanded its employees dress exclusively in full-length skirts or white shirts and ties, some would-be Hofstadterian would be allowed to write a sentence like This page intentionally left blank? just because they couldn’t think of what to write next. For all its coherence, the same page might as well have screamed, ‘This statement is false!’ Are they certain it wasn’t inadvertently left blank? That it wasn’t just a printer malfunction? A mad Selectric spewing out random letters that somehow collided to launch its readers into an infinite self-referential loop?
Google “This page intentionally left blank,” and you’ll learn that in the days before digital characters flowed unbroken past what used to be page breaks, certain documents—first legal, then medical, and eventually publications of any stripe—occasionally stated the self-referentially dis-obvious to reassure readers that the publisher did indeed know even before the reader wrote back to complain about the anomaly that there were truly no words on duly specified pages.
This page intentionally left blank falls into a linguistic twister called metadata, sometimes defined as data about data. (If you’re [still] reading this, it won’t surprise you to learn I secretly pine for the advent of a concept sure to be called meta-meta-metadata. For a psychological thrill, if not a bad thriller, pick up Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment: or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers. At one progressively longer run-on sentence per chapter, the 24-sentence novella manages to creep you out while shovel-feeding information to your cerebral cortex in a form the originators of This page intentionally left blank only dreamt of.)
When I began it, the working title for this post was The Water and the Well. I can trace its genesis to an important, if regrettably not life-changing enough, conversation on a beach in Santa Barbara, California, in 1994. Nicholas Vitalari and I had been setting the coming year’s research agenda for our boutique think tank and were on a head-clearing stroll along the sand, wingtips and all, when Nick paused to share an idea that by its very nature—or shall I say by my very nature—we were to never speak of again. A mile or so around the bay, the truth-seeking lobe of my brain involuntarily begins transposing each of Nick’s pronouns from ‘we’ to ‘[you],’ ‘our’ to ‘[your],’ and ‘us’ to ‘[me].’ He might have begun by transposing Edison’s nonintuitive pronouncement that Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration into something like [Innovation is nothing but dime-a-dozen thinking followed up by muscle-tearing work]. Or, In the same way that a goal not written can never be more than a wish is always another way of saying [Will you just send me your development plan already?] But the only scrap of pronoun transposition my memory has preserved thirty years on sounded like something closer to the following:
“In our research, the next time [you’re] struck with one of [your] big ideas, I want [you] to commit that if [you] don’t put it to the test in, say, two-weeks’ time, [you’re] not allowed to speak of it again.
“Um, I think I can manage that,” I might have said. “Can we start walking again?” I hopefully did not say.
“Besides,”—he wasn’t finished—”as awesome as wells are, wouldn’t you (there it was; sans brackets) like to try your hand at water?”
The thing about a well—and I still see this as an important distinction when comparing ideas to the work required to hatch them—is that it only takes a good soaking to revive a dry well. But fill it with sand, pottery shards, and dried bones, and you’ll never drink another ounce. Depending on which side of the well you happen to be standing on (or in), The Water and the Well analogy informs a career planning strategy better than it does an innovation one.
‘This Mind Intentionally Left Blank,’ on the other hand, would make at least a provocative title. It is, after (or beneath) it all, the message I’m trying to print [embroider] here. When IBM moved Kari and me to Cambridge, I had a ball cap custom-sewn with that idiomatic phrase. It was part homage—I was still reading software manuals—part forward nod to Nick, whom I wouldn’t meet for another seven years. But, like almost everything about Douglas Hofstadter, not many elate when encountering self-reference (like this/that one) in the wild. Because of their relative size, hatspeak takes more time to process than a t-shirt deciphered from a distance (not to mention the relative awkwardness of staring at someone’s forehead compared to their tummy), let alone solving such a message.
“Who is that guy and what was that nonsense on his hat?”
Yikes, I’ve hit my word limit, and LinkedIn won’t let me hit NEXT without a title.
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