Deconstructing the Plan File

You are about to read the shortest senior thesis ever written at Harvard. I am submitting it to the English Department, quite unsolicited, with the hope that some famous literary scholar will take the time to read it. But I suppose there's no harm in your having a sneak peek too.

In this paper, I examine one of Harvard's tiniest but most socially significant genres of literature: the plan file. To those of you unfamiliar with this academic field, please allow me to explain. When someone fingers your account on the Harvard UNIX server, the screen displays the last time and place that you logged on, as well as an optional message--the plan--that greets whoever is fingering you. Most often, these plan files are either blank or filled with a brief witty saying. It's not uncommon, however, to see plan files that push the very envelope of the genre. One person I know is serializing a soft-porn novel. Another has cut-and-pasted a 90-page academic paper. There is no real limit to what you can do with a plan file, so long as it doesn't crash the server.

Literary theorists are fond of saying that every text has its own ideal reader, the person for whom the text is most relevant and evocative. Who is the plan file's ideal reader? It's often hard to say--the very concept of a plan file is so steeped in irony, so full of wink-wink suggestion, that its purpose can be easily obscured. In one sense, a plan file is like a calling card, announcing your position and social status to whoever wants to call on you. Since anyone can finger your account, a plan file is theoretically written for everyone to read. But at the same time, the text establishes an intimate bond between author and reader. To finger someone's account means expressing interest in that person, however benign, and the plan file must by its very nature take that attraction into account.

When executed skillfully, plan files present a snapshot of the author's values and intellectual preoccupations. Some people, however, seem to think that a plan file is the e-mail equivalent of a high school yearbook. They abuse our patience by writing 10-screen long plan files, filled with every obscure reference, movie line and aphorism they've collected over the past year. Such hodgepodge plan files are universally condemned by the critics. If you're about to put down 40 or so witty saying please keep the following maxim mind: Unless you're Voltaire, I really don't care.

Not all plan files are upbeat. Filled with pleas for pity ("I can't get over her" or "Thesis is killing me"), some plan files are tiny cries for help into the void of cyberspace. But by their design, these messages must go unanswered. Their authors don't really expect consolation over e-mail. Fishing for actual sympathy over the Internet would betray a great deal of weakness; on the other side of things, nobody wants to admit to e-mail stalking other people ("Dear X: I was fingering your account at 4:30 a.m. and noticed your distressing plan file.") If these authors never expect a response, whom are they writing to? Perhaps they are writing to God. It would be comforting to think He reads ours plan files like slips of paper tucked inside the cracks of the Wailing Wall.

Occasionally, one comes across a plan file that was clearly written with a specific person in mind. It's like opening a letter that was misdelivered to your house--you know you really shouldn't be reading it, but it's just too absorbing to put down. When the intended audience is a tight group of friends, the plan file is characterized by cryptic in-jokes, humorous anecdotes and such. In other cases, the author knows he or she is being stalked by a particular person (usually some jilted romantic flame), and tailors the text accordingly. These plan files are addressed to a mysterious "you," and contain accounts of the exciting/depressing life the author is leading without said person.

The majority of plan files, however, are written to be read by anyone who is interested enough to finger you in the first place. These kinds of plan files are intended to make their authors look aloof, mysterious and witty. They must tantalize the reader's curiosity but not give too much away. We find the ancient Greeks so fascinating because we only possess fragments of their work. A plan file is like a fragment of a personality, a shard from a giant amphora. It tempts us to put all the pieces together and reconstruct the person from the parts.

No scholarly account of the plan file is complete without a few critical suggestions. In order for the plan file to survive as a genre, it must continually reinvent itself both in terms of form and content. What makes for a successful plan file? The trick is either to be fascinatingly banal or else ambitiously epic. For example, keep a list of everything you've eaten, item by item, in the last week: "Two Snickers bars, eight cups of soup, one serving of baked scrod...".Update us on your nightly dreams. Transcribe your internal monologue in the most minute detail: "Itchy feeling in neck. Where did I put the keys? Damned aerosol." Rank the hottest people in your house. Tell us what you're wearing, right now.

Or just leave your plan file blank. Every writer knows that sometimes silence is most eloquent.

Joshua Derman '99 is a philosophy concentrator in Quincy House.