Or consider how increasingly aggressive chart utilization could make largely ignored aspects of the contemporary magazine, such as the short story, more reader-friendly. In the July issue of Esquire, literary Edison David Foster Wallace points toward a possible future with a short piece of fiction entitled "Adult World." While the story's first three sections are presented in a static, deliberately repetitious, fairly traditional manner, the fourth assumes the form of an outline: "2b(1) Tone of F. L.'s confessions tremndsly moving & high affect, & J. (even though traumatized w/r/t (1b) & (1c)'s epiphany) never once doubts the truth of what he says," reads one pivotal passage. But even it seems unnecessarily prolix - that "never once doubts the truth of what he says" could easily be condensed to "never doubts him," for example. The unforgiving spatial constraints of a chart would have forced Wallace to give his prose the sense of extreme, tight abstraction he appears to be seeking; the headings of each column and row would have provided him with the opportunity to convey his writerly intentions with an even greater degree of bold-faced clarity than he manages via his last-minute preconstruction. Literary purists may resent such progress, but the audience that authors really write for - the movie studio piss boys charged with wading through every new copy of The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Outside in search of the next Matt Damon vehicle - will no doubt rejoice.

words
St. Huck

pictures
Terry Colon