Something I read..
It's unusually warm, -the air is clear and sound moves cleanly through it
and I can hear the dim racket of other type writers in use all along the street.
A street of writers, gathered about the newspaper district like bees about a hive. Each letter we press into paper adds to the message telegraphed into the open air, and sometimes I imagine I can pick out coded signatures of men whose work I know.
A cuckold theater critic
A dime novelist at play
A shut in literary essayist
A freelance advertising writer.
I think of where these words will find purchase in several weeks time, reproduced a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand times.
Who will read them?
What effect will they have?
An ad for cigars appears in 100, 000 papers, sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter.
A new play recieves a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; The playwright shoots himself.
Who's the better writer?
I imagine the daily output of the entire newspaper district. It makes me think of drowning, but I want to be able to see it another way.
Instead: human history as a river, finding its course along the lowest points in the landscape, and each page as a stone. Tossed in without purpose, just to see the splash, thousands of them might raise the water level until it escapes the confines of the riverbed.
The water spreads out, the force of the river diminishes; before long, a marsh. But if each stone is placed carefully and with purpose, perhaps something can be built. Not to dam the current but to divert its course.
By Jason Lutes
and I can hear the dim racket of other type writers in use all along the street.
A street of writers, gathered about the newspaper district like bees about a hive. Each letter we press into paper adds to the message telegraphed into the open air, and sometimes I imagine I can pick out coded signatures of men whose work I know.
A cuckold theater critic
A dime novelist at play
A shut in literary essayist
A freelance advertising writer.
I think of where these words will find purchase in several weeks time, reproduced a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand times.
Who will read them?
What effect will they have?
An ad for cigars appears in 100, 000 papers, sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter.
A new play recieves a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; The playwright shoots himself.
Who's the better writer?
I imagine the daily output of the entire newspaper district. It makes me think of drowning, but I want to be able to see it another way.
Instead: human history as a river, finding its course along the lowest points in the landscape, and each page as a stone. Tossed in without purpose, just to see the splash, thousands of them might raise the water level until it escapes the confines of the riverbed.
The water spreads out, the force of the river diminishes; before long, a marsh. But if each stone is placed carefully and with purpose, perhaps something can be built. Not to dam the current but to divert its course.
By Jason Lutes
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