Nicholson Baker
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The Book is a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
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The Book has a kind of brute persistence. They tend to outlive the bookstores and the publishers who bought them out; sitting around, demanding nothing, for decades.
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Carpe diem is wrongly thought to mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. It means pluck the day. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.
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Conscription is a symbolic projection of the assumption that the individual citizen is but a pawn in the hands of unlimited State power.
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Conscription is a way for dictators to suppress the conscience of a people and to indoctrinate them with the notion that brute force was superior to ideals.
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The Footnote is able to offer a reader digression; a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument, which is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters.
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The Footnote is like a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels.
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The Footnote is a pleasurable choice, for one to decide as one reads whether to read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre, or not at all.
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The Footnote is in tiny type to enhance the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.
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The Footnote is marked by the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as one turns the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom.
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The Footnote is the finer-suckered surface that allows tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
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The Novel 1s 2ob is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
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A Poem is always recognizible by the fact that it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
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A Protest song is wonderful because it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.