As both poets and programmers have realized, for different reasons, the reader's mind works most actively on sparse materials....or...Charles O. Hartman, Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (31),
as quoted in C.T. Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry (56)
In the language of Adorno – perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all – density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking.Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (xiii)
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Huh.
Maybe the mind is like a goldfish in a goldfish bowl. The fish can naturally swim around a lot more freely and swiftly in a bowl that has one tiny little porcelain castle and a sprig of plastic foliage at the bottom. But if you put a whole bunch of other junk in there, like little fishy Habitrail-like mazes and dead ends and such, the fish will either die from claustrophobic paralysis or figure out a way to negotiate it all. And if it does the latter, then it's really swimmin'.