what I have in the end is an artifact and not a theory

10:53 | 08-11-2011 | Culturology, Lifeform, Literature | 5 Comments

очень хорошее интервью, кстати:

INTERVIEWER: How do you begin a novel?
WILLIAM GIBSON: I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

эдакое потаенное окно, being William Gibson — in a way. он говорит о том, как ведут себя его герои,

E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.

и о том, как он пишет:

When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.

об эволюции времени:

In 1981, most people were still writing on typewriters. There were five large businesses in Vancouver that did nothing but repair and sell typewriters. Soon there were computers, too, and it was a case of the past and the future mutually coexisting. And then the past just goes away.

и о том, как скоро мы теряем былое — полное тайн и загадок:

It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

о влиянии технологий:

I can remember my father bringing home our first set—this ornate wooden cabinet that was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube and wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furniture, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcast—a baseball game or a variety show or something. And then it would go back to a mandala that was called a test pattern, or nothing—static.

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We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the sameю

и о том, во что превращала окружающий его мир литература:

My mother got me an omnibus Sherlock Holmes for a tenth-birthday present and I loved it. I remember casting one particular brick building that I walked by every day as a building in Sherlock Holmes’s London. That could be in London, that building, I thought. I developed this special relationship with the facade of this building, and when I was in front of it I could imagine that there was an infinite number of similar buildings in every direction and I was in Sherlock Holmes’s London.

о том, то происходит на границе между вымыслом и реальностью.

That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.

из чего состоит эта пограничная зона:

But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps—just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life—it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.

и куда она может завести:

When I was going to start writing All Tomorrow’s Parties, John Clute suggested to me that all of my books had become Cornell boxes. The Bridge in Virtual Light, he said, was my biggest Cornell box. It really spooked me. I think that’s why I wound up burning the Bridge.

куда именно:

In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were steering technology. Today, we’re more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it’s out of control. Technology was previously seen as linear and progressive—evolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred to misunderstand Darwin.

да, цитат сверх всякой меры[1] — но и это лишь часть, интервью действительно стоит прочесть целиком, даже если фантастика as is и не интересует вас вовсе.


[1] — просто слишком много заметок по ходу чтения, mea culpa.

  

5 Responses to “what I have in the end is an artifact and not a theory”

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