Craig Dworkin · 2013 · EPUB · Calibre ID 4416
Resurfaced in Nothing, Reviewed (2026-10-17).
Role in the triad
Empirical counterweight: real blank works read closely; denies any true blank
Why this book
Where Lem invents his blank book, Dworkin catalogues real ones (Nudisme, Saroyan, Rauschenberg, Friedman’s erased centerfold, silent records). His ‘Further Listening’ reviews empty records in a consumer-guide voice, Lem’s form inverted. Thesis: ‘there are no real absences, only replacements’; media are social acts of reading.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “the difference between the sophistication of getting the joke and the greater sophistication of refusing to get the joke depends on how closely one reads a work that seems to ask only that it not be read.” (ch. 1)
- “Media—if there are such things—are only recognizable as collectives.” (ch. 1)
- “to resist falling back on the sensational metaphysics of either a reified nothingness or the poststructural apotheosis of absence and lack” (ch. 1)
- “there are no real absences, only replacements” (ch. 2, Cenography)
- “Those blank pages linked with the cosmos: space before creation.” (Little Review reader, quoted ch. 1)
- “The other five tracks are inconsequential, and the title track performance of 4’33” reveals the conductor doesn’t take the tempi as marked; it clocks in a full 18 seconds too slow” (ch. 8, Further Listening)
Themes
4’33” · blank page · Cage · Cocteau · discography · erasure · Little Review · medium · Nudisme · Orphée · Rauschenberg · Saroyan · silent records · Sterne’s blank page · substrate · Tom Friedman · White Paintings