Reading & Writing by Jason Jagel

Autumnal Tuesday greetings, my collector friends! I'm actually sitting at my desk at JBP HQ, which is a rare treat indeed as of late. Being able to IM from midair (and everywhere else) means that we're never out of touch for long, but it sure is nice to be hanging out in-person with our fantastic crew. We're all feeling pretty energized by the gorgeous weather and the months ahead, which are full of art and promise.

Today's art — Reading & Writing — well... it's rather full itself! Positively bursting, in fact, with complexity, narrative, detail, color and inspiration. Read on for my take, and a bit of background on its talented creator, Jason Jagel.

Jason describes Reading & Writing as a manifestation of his "desire to make a novel-length work", correlating his relationship between artist and viewer with that of the writer and reader. His description brings to mind the conversation about the future of books and publishing that I had on Twitter over the weekend. Disjointed by Twitter's nature, thoughts and links were traded, plumbing a variety of perspectives: publisher, bookseller, writer and reader. Bob Stein's statement in his thoughtful post on the if:book blog succinctly summarized the challenge and potential of our reading future. "A book", he wrote, "is a place (where readers, sometimes with authors, congregate)."

Jason's composition, chaotic yet contained, also brings to mind my all-time favorite short story, James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues — introduced to me by my high school writing teacher Frank McCourt. It's a brilliant piece of writing and my favorite passage describes the musician's struggle between playing and listening in similar terms.

I'll end today's newsletter with where the excerpt starts. I urge you to read the entire passage and get your hands on the full story — it's totally amazing! Hopefully you'll enjoy piecing together the words and pictures and music described here, there and elsewhere as much as I have.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.