Had however this friction really existed, in the many centuries that these heavens have revolved they would have been consumed by their own immense speed of every day . . . we arrive therefore at the conclusion that the friction would have rubbed away the boundaries of each heaven, and in proportion as its movement is swifter towards the center than toward the poles it would be more consumed in the center than at the poles, and then there would not be friction anymore, and the sound would cease, and the dancers would stop . . . -Leonardo Da Vinci, The Notebooks, F 56 V

(Chapter 2)

One Monday morning, one of my customers had their WIN NT 3.51 server hard drive crash. It was a head crash, you could hear the heads riding the platter. An awful noise . . . I spent 16 hours pulling data from that hard drive, and once I was done (I had pulled as much data as I could) we opened up the drive to discover that the head on the bottom platter had fallen down, and had been riding there over the weekend. It had etched away at the platter for so long that the platter had actually fallen down and was sitting in a pile of . . . shavings at the bottom of the drive. -Posted to slashdot.org by jrhelgeson, Monday October 06, 2003 @12:58pm

(Chapter 2)

"People" who never existed did things that never took place, upon a stage of fragmented software that currently sits on a hundred thousand disks in dusty boxes, chroniding [sic] events that happened only by mutual wish-fulfillment. -Patrick K. Kroupa, aka "Lord Digital," on 1980s BBS culture

(Chapter 3)

Like old bones to the forensic scientist, prints give up their secrets if you know where and how to look. -Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, "An Inquiry into Blake's Method of Color Printing"

(Chapter 3)

The bibliographer must always start with the postulate of normality. -Fredson Bowers, Bibliography and Textual Criticism

(Chapter 3)

At any rate, after someone asked me to inventory the choices again and decided to browse, [Charles] Bernstein, characteristically and quite wonderfully, asked the woman to click "that icon up there on the right of the screen with the picture of the apple."

When I offered my admiration for his choice and suggested that he had unerringly found the choice outside (inside, actually) the system, the margin and boundary of the text, I took over the mouse and dropped the menu for him. "Fine," I said, what would you like?"

"Can we see your private correspondence or something?" he asked. -Michael Joyce, commenting on a public reading of afternoon at SUNY Buffalo, in private correspondence dated February 16, 1991, now available in the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

(Chapter 4)

The question must be put: What will remain of the electronic age concerning the realm of art? It is evident that the first two cycles have not found a place in our storehouses for cultural goods, the museums, and even less have they found continuing cultivation, research and communication. -Jürgen Claus, "Expansion of Media Art: What will remain of the Electronic Age?" (1984)

(Chapter 4)

[T]he historian does not remain inside of his historiographic language. He does not get outside it, however, merely by producing discourse about documents and artifacts; in doing that he is still inside his discourse. Rather, he gets outside of it just as any scientist gets outside of his discourse: he predicts. But his predictions can scarcely be about events which no longer exist. Rather, he predicts about where he is going to find documents and artifacts and what their attributes are going to be. Thus the proper object of the historian's investigations is not, as he usually imagines, the events of the past, but rather documents and other artifacts whose existence is concurrent with his own. -Morse Peckham, "Reflections on the Foundation of Modern Textual Editing"

(Chapter 5)

The struggle for tne text is the text. -Randall McLeod

(Chapter 5)

the failure of a property
that has been changed
by an external agent
to return
to its original value
when the cause
of the change
has been removed:
i.e., hysteresis.
the laws of physics assign
proximity
no more meaning
than absence.
yet one word
follows another
-Michael Joyce, afternoon

(Coda)

The copper-jacketed slug
recovered
from the bathroom's cardbord
cylinder of
Morton's salt
was undeformed
save for the faint bright marks of
lands
and grooves
so hot, stilled energy,
it blistered my hand.
-William Gibson, "Agrippa"

(Coda)

The realm of the dead has the same dimensions as the storage and emission capacities of its culture. Media . . . are always already flight apparatuses into the other world. -Friedrich Kittler

(Coda)