Using the process of “literary collage”, Comitta was able to X. He was limited and directed by what the source material provided. His process, both artistic and scientific, doubles as both narrative art and data analysis.

In writing this piece I wanted to examine the production of prestige fiction as well as the editorial character of The New Yorker fiction section, its idiosyncrasies, biases and imaginative limits. As with any fully sampled text, the source material directed the kind of stories I could tell. Some sections almost wrote themselves given the abundance of a particular pattern. Some sections blended two or more related patterns into one narrative. Some came together under the constraint of scarcity (e.g. a majority of these sentences were written from a male point of view; I could tell the story of a man’s life, but only a fragment of a woman’s). In these ways each vignette of “First Impressions” doubles as narrative and archive, microfiction and data analysis. —TC (View Highlight)