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Not A Story
Jun. 27th, 2009 08:37 amI just heard a deeply stupid writer on NPR. I'm not going to bother looking up his name because he and his magazine does not deserve whatever little bit of fame they might get from their stunt of printing a short story covered with ink in such a way that it cannot be read for thousands of years. Each word being slowly uncovered by fading. He said that it was an interesting idea to have a story that outlives the teller.
What bunk! This story is unliving. It is stillborn. Stories live through being read and remembered, by creating images in a person's head. It is the induction and resonance of words and ideas. This is no story since the first word won't even be available to readers, without bypassing the ink intended to keep the rest of it secret, for centuries. And given the way that most things written are forgotten even when the artist has not made it hard to access I expect this will be lost and completely forgotten. And probably with good reason since the writer sounded like over pretentious idiot who could not write a good story to save his life.
What this person is trying to do is bypass his lack of talent to make one of his stories 'immortal' like the works of Homer or something. And it is all the more pathetic since he thinks even if it were physically possible to keep a copy of this magazine intact for thousands of years that anyone would bother to do it. Shame on NPR for bringing us this non-story.
What bunk! This story is unliving. It is stillborn. Stories live through being read and remembered, by creating images in a person's head. It is the induction and resonance of words and ideas. This is no story since the first word won't even be available to readers, without bypassing the ink intended to keep the rest of it secret, for centuries. And given the way that most things written are forgotten even when the artist has not made it hard to access I expect this will be lost and completely forgotten. And probably with good reason since the writer sounded like over pretentious idiot who could not write a good story to save his life.
What this person is trying to do is bypass his lack of talent to make one of his stories 'immortal' like the works of Homer or something. And it is all the more pathetic since he thinks even if it were physically possible to keep a copy of this magazine intact for thousands of years that anyone would bother to do it. Shame on NPR for bringing us this non-story.