The Echo Speaker

Readers and writers who have considered (or are devotees of) speech-recognition software will want to peek at Richard Powers’s essay “How to Speak a Book,” in this Sunday’s New York Times. My fingers twitch unhappily at the very idea of getting taken out of the circuit of thought and gesture my body knows as writing. But Powers suggests that after undergoing a “huge cognitive readjustment,” he now feels himself to have been liberated from “straitjacketing keyboards,” able to “live above the level of the phrase.” I find myself wondering whether I’ll be able to tell that he’s a book-speaker, when I finally get to The Echo Maker in a few days.