A painter creates a huge mountainous landscape but nobody wants it.
(from All Over)
Well, nobody wants the paintings on the artist’s terms, and it’s kind of sad but also it’s kind of what did you expect you would do with a nine-mile-long canvas? Just because it took you 34 years doesn’t mean it’s worth anybody else’s time. It would be nice if it did, of course. Hey look, I’m direct-addressing a character, haven’t done that in a while. Anyway, “Scroll” is a melancholy but kinda fun little number. Great ideas have been known to beget other great ideas and I would suspect a copy of Banvard’s Folly by Paul S. Collins is sitting on a Kesey shelf somewhere. That book, which practically spits sparks of literary inspiration on every page, features, among others things, the a chapter on a real-life long form painter named Banvard who, in the pre-motion picture age, actually found an audience for a while.
Maybe SEPTA can find an empty 9 mile stretch for the canvas. Ya know, blow Jane Golden’s mind.