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Tables of contents, indexes, glosses, footnotes, and even the size of a book emerged and evolved as the codex’s interface: tools for finding, checking, and arguing over ideas and their sources. This is a history of the book’s apparatus, its paratexts, and the page as an interface — one the web permits but rarely supplies, and still leaves to optional tools and institutions.
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A poem written to answer half of a question, “What are the essential conditions that make community possible, whose absence or removal makes community impossible?” The answers come from medieval monastic sources, as recovered and elaborated by Ivan Illich.
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Only when a person will not do some things are they capable of doing great things.
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Gerald Weinberg’s paradoxes of software systems, a Vermeer with a bare wall behind it, and Tomas Tranströmer revising his way toward an ending. What joins them is the work intentionally withdrawn or left undone, and the space that decision opens.
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“Three ships hove to, three whales flayed on ice.” A poem about a painting of the early modern Dutch Arctic fishery in the Svalbard archipelago, by Abraham Storck (1654–1708). Three mountain peaks there are named for the Norse Fates — the Norns who determine the past, present, and future.