I spin Roland Barthes's 1979 collection of essays The Eiffel Tower. Like his 1957 Mythologies, Barthes's text treats the everyday as source of critique. Objects, Barthes teaches us, are rich subjects that stir our imaginations and provoke response. The Eiffel Tower, Dining Cars, Musical Halls, and even Martians become language blocks from which we construct a complex discourse. Barthes teaches me that popular objects serve writing as subjects of intellectual inquiry and knowledge production. They also provide the basis for contemporary writing style. As Barthes writes of the Eiffel Tower in the collection's first essay: "This pure—virtually empty—sign is ineluctible because it means everything. The Tower is an object which sees, a glance which is seen; it is a complete verb, both active and passive, in which no function, no voice (as we say in grammar, with a piquant ambiguity) is defective" (4).