This a collection of fifteen screenshots I took on my iPhone while reading a .pdf of Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Theory. In physical form, Theory is a 500 page unbound ream of paper. Read as a scroll on one’s phone, however, it becomes a different reading experiment altogether. I am in the habit of taking pictures of pages when I get to something that resonates with me in a physical book; my camera roll is studded with hundreds of these pages (and someday I’d like to make a collage of them all—some have attribution; though some have, with the passage of time, been rendered unfamiliar to me, and indeed I don’t even know why I took the photo in the first place!)—but this was a different feeling. I chose to include the entire screen in these images, because—as Goldsmith himself might point out—there’s also a story being told in the artifacts left onscreen, a methodology of reading that makes itself available to the witness after I’ve passed through. I found it fascinating to note the frequency between pages of each of the fifteen screenshots:
40 pages
12 pages
7 pages
2 pages
20 pages
6 pages
20 pages
58 pages
33 pages
9 pages
81 pages
126 pages
16 pages
As well as the minutes between them:
6 minutes
2 minutes
1 minute
0 minutes
2 minutes
1 minute
3 minutes
3 minutes
2 minutes
2 minutes
11 minutes
16 minutes
1 minute
This does not account for the few times that my eyes closed and I drifted off for a few minutes before waking up and continuing to scroll, another interesting artifact to mention given that page 336 of Theory (not pictured) includes the text: “Trolling books glassy-eyed, head nodding, starting to fall asleep when some chunk of text jumps out of the page, shocking you into awakeness.”
There are other differences in these images, as well. In six of the fifteen screenshots, the address bar of the internet browser I was using (Chrome) to read is larger, contained in a gray ellipse, and the “taskbar” can be seen at the bottom of the screen. This signifies that, while I was scrolling down, I had scrolled past the page in question and then, after having read it, decided to scroll back up to take the screenshot, resulting in an unintentional hierarchy of reaction: those where the address bar is hidden were more “immediate” screenshots, whereas the other six were more of an “afterthought,” or a “delayed” response.
Most of the pages in question are centered in the image, though there can be seen blank spaces where the preceding or following pages are represented in the browser, beyond a black “page break” that functions something like the boundaries of a single film cel in a strip—though since we use the term “window” to describe interacting with apps, perhaps the word “mullion” or “muntin” would be more appropriate. There are no instances in which the top or bottom mullions are aligned in a perfect, unbroken line, and in one screenshot (the thirteenth), a small piece of the following page’s text can be seen. This text ends mid-sentence, in the middle of a list, as if the item following the word “publishers” has leapt off a cliff (perhaps to get away from “publishers,” though I can only speculate,
In five of the fifteen screenshots, there also appears a small gray arrow to the immediate right of the clock. This indicates that “location services” had been activated, the internal GPS of my iPhone accessed by apps working in the “background.” The specifics of these apps cannot be derived from examination of these images alone, though I surmise it was weather-related.
I’ll also note that I read through the 500 pages from 7:55am on Sunday July 5th, 2026. When I began, I was connected to WiFi with three bars of service. By the time I reached page 162, my service inexplicably decreased to two bars. I used approximately 5% of my battery during the time I read Theory, which was spent entirely scrolling through the pages and not on any other activity—though there may have been the aforementioned background activity of which I was unaware. It took me just shy of an hour to read, which means I was probably skimming, though many of the pages only include a single line. This also means that I read approximately 8 1/3 pages per minute, or about 7.2 seconds to read a single page.
The entirety of Theory is available to read at the originalcopy library, along with some of Goldsmith’s other work—including Uncreative Writing, which I highly recommend.
