You could walk around behind the typist and read the text, which was about hearing, and what you heard was the sound of the typewriter. Of course, this was a pre-electric typewriter, a typewriter that made noise.
Vito AcconciWhen a building is so complete within itself, I always think, "Why do I even have to go inside it?" I would love to do architecture that people can have a free hand in the making of it. We've done spaces where things are hinged and they can go out or in, but that's not freedom. That's supermarket freedom, or the notion that you can have anything you want as long as the supermarket carries it. We would love to do a space where you go inside and there's nothing there. You might have a seat and when you don't need it anymore you get up and it disappears.
Vito AcconciEven though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
Vito AcconciIf something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.
Vito AcconciI was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I'm making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I'd driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don't have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it.
Vito Acconci