What Is Literature?
He crawled slowly to the dungeon of Xerox pain and suffering. His feeble hands,
torn to destruction by the infamous Repetive Stress Syndrome, faintly grasping
onto the one-hundred and forty-three page document he had been given to clone.
A document which was soon to become a metaphor for the degeneration of human
society through the psychological neurosis created by a media thriving on
the blandness of exact similarity. Xerox machines don't create. They churn
out replicate after replicate of whatever you put in them. Exact photostats with
no semblance of creativity. Xerox machines don't change words to see which
words is more artistically pleasing. They don't switch sentences around to
see if the point is better gotten across with the main clause at the end rather
than the beginning. They don't subliminally misspell words to create new
associations and new meanings out of old re-used cliches. And they're not
very interesting to talk to.
Nonetheless, every once in a while Alex tried talking to them. He asks them
how their day has been. If they've copied any juicy material that he could
perhaps sell to the tabloids for enough money to buy a whole carton of
cigarettes. When they're broken, he opens them up and plays with their parts
to make them feel better. But they never answer him. Never even give a
semblance that they even recognise his existence, except on some days when he
feels they are out to get him. When every copy of that one hundred and
forty-three page copy that was supposed to be stapled and sorted comes out
stapled on the wrong side, the pages in random order. On these days he often
vents his frustration by giving the machine a good kick. This does not much
for the machine's disposition however.
So by now he's standing in front of the Xerox machine. Actually it's a Kodak
XR-2000. He remembers that Eastman Kodak stock fell two points yesterday. The
one hundred and forty-three page document has by this point made its way into
the document feeder. Alex is frantically pushing buttons, navigating through
a maze of CRT screens that keep appearing on the little eight inch television
screen, which, though somehow is supposed to make the machine simpler to use,
only succeeds in wasted paper as the copied makes five hundred copies of the
Wall Street Journal article left under the glass.
He finally manages to figure out how to stop the 500 copies of the article and
with only another ten screens, which he now navigates with ease, the one hundred
and forty-three page document begins to cycle through the document feeder. He
listens to the repetitive swish as the page just copied is thrown back into the
bin and a new page is taken. The rhythmic swishing soon lulls him into a state
of trace as he watches each page spat into the bin, then slowly drawn up again as
the next copy of the hundred and forty-three page document rambles through the
machine. He begins to think of Tetris, that game he was so addicted to in his
late teenage years. Wondering now as he had then, if they were putting
subliminal messages on all of this. He used to be scared of those Russians,
creating subconsciously addictive games that would ultimately brainwash you into
thinking communism was good and right and just, and that all forms of democracy
must be abolished at all costs. Now it was Eastman Kodak, so carefully
programming their photocopy machines to create just the right rhythm to throw
the user into a trance state from which messages could then be flashed upon
the CRT which was supposed to make the copier easier to use, but which was
instead simply another device to penetrate your thoughts and control your mind.
Of course, when you were done making the copies, you would remember none of this.
Just that you dallied with the paper clips and peeled the tape off the counter
(Why was the tape on the counter anyway? Who is the person who incessantly
tapes pieces of tape to the counters of all photocopy rooms).
Nonetheless, he never made it to that trance state, because almost as soon as
the machine started, it jammed and decided to stop.