“In the beginning was the Word,” the writer declared. That, of course, was referring to an entirely different kind of word. But the lower-case-w kind have power, too — power that I have encountered in the form of editing and writing for about twenty-five years (in newspapers, and now elsewhere) as well as in reading for about … well, more years than I’ll bother to specify at the moment.
I once was talking with one of my aunts, an artist of considerably more talent than myself, and she asked: Does the idea of putting your opinions out there bother you? The thought had never even occurred to me. (What? How could anybody not want to know what I think? Wink-wink.)
So now we have a new forum in which we can walk and talk. In the words of the comic-strip characters Calvin and Hobbes (Tom Hanks was wrong in You’ve Got Mail — the Source of All Wisdom is not The Godfather but rather a mischievous boy and his stuffed tiger), it’s a clean, fresh start, a big sheet of white paper. So let’s get on the bobsled and go exploring.
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