He is fond of a remark by the poet John Hall Wheelock that writing involves the imposition of a line of words on a line of feeling.
Although many sections of such collections contain only the texts of songs, certain pieces among them parallel the line of words with numbers representing strings on the koto or finger positions on the samisen, names of stereotyped koto patterns, or mnemonics for the particular instrument with which the piece is learned.
Simply put, the more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth – redefining "text" from what fills the hundreds of pages of a novel, to a line of words and emoticons on a phone's screen – the less likely and able we are to care.
Nov. 4, 1973 Hot and Cold For the past 127 years, The New York Times's type has been hot, set like this paragraph, with each letter summoned to align itself beside the next until a whole line of words could be cast in molten lead.
But honestly, the conversation is so fast and its repartee so stinging that the running line of words on screen ensures nothing is missed.
The benefits to their bottom line are several, including employee retention, the ability to attract top talent and the fact that an employee force that knows what their company stands for also serves as their first line of word-of-mouth advertising.
Had they looked at the pages of our colour-graded reading books and seen, instead of regulated lines of words, undulating chains of indecipherable runes?
Instead, these women, like all the exes, are summed up in only a few skeletal lines of words and ink and thus have no persona, no life, beyond their severe self-doubt, anxieties and paranoia over their relationships.
Anyone who's dutifully struggled through the bit in Dylan's Visions of Sin where he spends four pages dissecting the lyrics of All the Tired Horses, which consist in their entirety of "two lines of words followed by a musing hmmm sound that might be one line or two", will concur.
And for that to happen, we need to rediscover our commitment to staring at lines of words on pages until first the lines, and subsequently the pages, run out – and keeping our opinions to ourselves until we know what they are.
