I probably wouldn’t reach for the term “literature” the way Ballard did to frame that connection but it’s one of the great subjects in my life and I’m quite defiant about it. You know, I grew up in a world of overlapping languages and texts. When you read Fortress of Solitude, one of the things it’s about is growing up in a city where the walls were written upon.

Between graffiti and advertising, there was language everywhere; you could read the city, the city was a grammar. Also, I come along late enough that the languages of commerce—the text on the cereal box, the secret comic book inside the chewing-gum wrapper—seemed to me to be really alive and meaningful and part of this continuum. I was reading comic books and I was reading the letters columns [in them] and I was reading the advertising. People refer to it, but I don’t think anyone ever really thinks about the implications of the advertisements in comic books—“The Insult That Made A Man Out Of ‘Mac,’” or the one about learning to play the piano, or the sea monkeys; they were as mysterious and allegorical and charged as anything. And there were also these voices creeping around the edges of things, the ‘zine culture, the early fan magazines, the letters columns.

What’s weird is that, like a lot of things, it’s very hard to explain to my students what it was like to hear about a song and not be able to hear it. You know, like, there were movies and songs that I read about, read critical paraphrases of, that haunted my imagination, and then it would take a decade before I’d find them. All we have to do now is hit the links at the bottom of the obscure articles on Wikipedia to be plunged into this realm of invisible literature, these paratexts, these endless discourses that are so immersive. I mean, last night, I was following a link on the anarchist Bob Black and I staggered my way into a corner of the Internet where there was this compilation of anarchist papers, where they read papers to one another at a conference, and it’s such an inside discourse, it’s so rich with impossibly gnarled-up references to ancient disputes among three or four anarchist sub-philosophers of 1983. This stuff is just there, everywhere, we can all dabble in this stuff endlessly; it’s always threatening to erupt, now—it’s not hard to find invisible literature, anymore.

«The Ecstasist: A Conversation with the Novelist Jonathan Lethem»
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