A kind, generous, regular said that to me when I came in on my day off.
I was the typesetter. I hid my head and laughed.
Three years ago I was dumb enough to think that the small percentage of the public that still read creative fiction didn’t care terribly about the typesetting of a book. I thought they cared about the thoughts that carried epiphanies into the finish lines of their hearts.
I thought about the bent corners of scuffed envelopes that carried divorce papers, the love letters written on broken typewriters.
I was wrong.
I was a real Peter Pan, full of stupid amounts of foolish.
I still am.
I think often about presentation. I think about marketing and demographics, and I don’t care for it, not in the very least.
This is most likely one of my most known flaws.
I understand the practice of marketing, it plays to the hand of a larger audience. However, when capitalism studies other peoples wants and desires it feels to me selfish and somber and cold and sterile and commanding and lonely, among other things.
I'm not ready to integrate my thoughts of art with those greedy strategies, though it is, as all of these things are, inevitable.
Then there are these modern abstract paintings, they bend and distort their canvas for the heart and soul of their undying truths. There are songs that are layered with sample tracks of cardiograms. I would never assume my writing to hold the sharp beautiful urgency of these pieces, but I want to write letters that discount typesetters and the MLA as a whole.
I want my writing to transcend the MLA with the urgency of honest gasping emotion. It never does and it never will, but setting impossible goals is what being a writer is all about.
There must be broken lithographs somewhere that are currently being studied without the currency or implication of formality, if only for their absolute truths. If they are the free running horses of literature, I can only strive for the eyes that stare unconditionally upon them.