FOR SEVERAL YEARS I tried to be a journalist. But I didn’t like the constraints of the medium: the ledes, the nut grafs, the quotes, the obligation to tell the truth. What I really wanted to be was a 19th-century journalist, which is to say, hardly a journalist at all—just someone who wanders around a city recording trivial observations and inventing lies.
I can’t find it now, but in an old Irish newspaper that a friend once showed me, there was a seven-sentence-long story about abandoned dogs fighting on Chicago’s Clark Street Bridge. Most of the article is a description of the snow on the bridge and the river barges passing underneath. The article had a lovely atmosphere and concluded with a sober warning to readers: “Best to stay away from that bridge.” Now this was the kind of thing I had wanted to write.
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