‘It makes no sense to ask what entropy ‘is’, as though it was possible to find in this protean signifier a transcendent signification. Instead we must ask what it meant to whom, for what reasons, in what context, and with what consequences.’
N. Katherine Hayles (1990), Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
‘The minute you start saying something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to the view of a person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider as photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.’
Italo Calvino (1952), The Adventure of a Photographer, cited by Luigi Ghirri (1987) in Thoughts on Jacques-Henri Lartigue.
‘Most London business occurred in plain view. Chaucer’s London is a very public city, a place where people mingle together in crowded thoroughfare’s, where they post and publish their inner thoughts and broadcast them aloud, where different forms of street theater flourish, and where public presentation of the self far overwhelms any gestures toward privacy or inwardness. Whether in small lanes and byways, or in processional and ceremonial places like Cheap, in places of assembly like St Paul’s Cross or in taverns and bakeshops, Londoners rub elbows with one another. More to the present point, they socialize’
Paul Strohm (2014), Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, New York: Viking, p.73.
