Angie Keefer, 2011, wax crayon on paper, 77.5 x 102.5 cm

There’s a line from a Tom Stoppard play engraved on a plaque in the sidewalk on 41st Street, near 5th Avenue, right across from the main branch of the New York Public Library. I stumbled over it one afternoon this summer, on my way to the library to check out books about octopuses’ brains. The plaque is part of one of those public art campaigns I distrust, as a rule ... But on a rainy afternoon, walking down a forgettable block, on the south side, facing west, watching a forgettable stretch of concrete pass under my feet, the message on this plaque landed in front of me with the force of an air conditioning unit dropped out of a third-floor window. It was a high-impact non sequitur: “Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”

—“An Octopus in Plan View,” Angie Keefer, Bulletins of The Serving Library #1, 2011