pages

“So the notion of a book needs defining. The concept employed here is simply this: a book is something that unfolds itself. It is always offering portions of its self, withdrawing others, suggesting still others. Emerging, present, receding: there is how a book is. It is a manufactured thing. It works in certain ways; it cannot work in others. It has pages. There is the embarrassingly primitive essence of it.

We do not do nearly enough with what we have invented. Our sense of event, of plot, ought to be keyed to that, to the simple fact that a book is a thing of pages, and to the fact that a page will turn.

The turning of a page is an aesthetic event; or at any rate, it should be. Anyone who writes will know how oddly crucial it can be that a certain page end with a certain word, that the next one begin with a certain other.”

(Eugene Wildman, afterward to Anthology of Concretism (1969), pp. 161–162)

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