“This morning, Charles [Alexander] was talking about how the poem as it was written seems to be somehow a little separate from and even replaced by the poem as it is then typeset and presented. I think I’m quoting you correctly. And what has happened there, is that there’s been a fusion of horizons between Charles and the typographer that he works with and the typographer has taken the original horizon and left it fused in a new form. And what we now see is this compound horizon, (what we receive,) and we look through the typographic one to an imagined version of Charles’s poem, but we don’t really know what Charles’s poem looked like in its manuscript form. We know that some of the words were even changed when it was typeset, but we look through it to the implied horizon, and we have this compound horizon which is what we actually experience. And this experience is what I feel when I go to a good Fluxus performance, a good art performance, or any of the other ones where they really work and where I find myself at a loss to verbalize why they work if I don’t use some methodology like this. So I offer this to you as a tool (not original with me) for approaching these kinds of things, in order that we be able to work towards a common critical vocabulary for evaluating these things over the years.”

(from Dick Higgins, “Hermeneutics and the Book Arts”, pp. 17–18 in Talking the Boundless Book: art, language, and the book arts.)

“In the idea of the faceless Imperson, technology conceals a powerful dream, the dream of not being like anything, of being nothing created. Natural forms all suggest comparison, but technical ones usually do not, so a device like a typewriter has a very decided identity but an unplaceable one. Like higher organisms, machines cover complexity with simplicity, and we forget what is inside a handpump or how typewriter linkage works, even forget that anything is there. They no longer have insides; their work is invisible and they are simply ideas, functions, powers.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, p. 39.)

“Like many books, it is working itself free of its material. The goal of learning and of this book as an act is that the critic feel himself a participant, that the describer become the doer. The end is not an actual building but the writing by which the writer becomes as every learner will the exemplar of culture himself. A book is a thought too big and various to be seen all at once, sturdy but unencompassable ideation, and the intimate excuse for a new one after all the other books is this of giving the mind an existence outside itself.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, from the “Forward”.)

“The six large Victorian stations in London were built from 1852 to 1902 but the alterations and additions frequently made to them in that period homogenized the group considerably. It is difficult to describe railroad stations as architecture because they are experienced less deliberately than other buildings. One of Ruskin’s clearest failings is his treatment of them as so much iron and glass, for no one ever sees a railroad station empty in the architect’s model state he is talking about, and even the idle visitor is soon agitated by the hurry around him, in the middle of arrivers and leavers catches the construction of the building only out of the corner of his eye.”

(Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, p. 39)

“entièrement revue par l’auteur, a la même valeur d’authenticité que le texte tchèque“

(Notice affixed to the French editions of Milan Kundera’s books since 1987, noted by Peter Bilak here.)

“In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action to the audience. ‘Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,’ he would declaim. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!’

It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography (as in Méliès’s films), the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality of what we saw.”

(Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, p. 32–33.)