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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
CR: What does "no pre-formatting" mean? RM: Means pretty much what it looks like it means. I don't ask who the reader is, I don't ask what he or she wants. I don't ask whether she is Chilean or he is wheelchair-bound. I don't ask whether the reader's dream gets broken if I use footnotes, although I might ask whether I can use them differently from David Wallace. But that's an aesthetic question, not focus group sort of a question. I like Don DeLillo's answer to this line of inquiry: "I don't have an ideal reader, I have a set of standards." I want to do better at what I do, for my own satisfaction and self-respect. I'm conscious of not wanting to completely eliminate the reader from the equation, in the way that some abstract "experimental" fiction seems to do, but by the same token, I just don't worry about them most of the time. Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. And they are never in sight, unless I'm doing a reading someplace. CR: Blake (who revived the illuminated manuscript in the 1700s) believed that "the Satanic Mills" of the industrial revolution had denigrated art into a mass commodity. The jarring experience of modern readers as they read more on screens and less on paper is similar to the transition made in the 1400s from reading illuminated texts — quite personal and revealing — to generic printing press texts. What's been your experience reading electronically? RM: I like your metaphor. My experience of reading electronically has been confined to Web-related reading, excepting a few CD-ROM artifacts. As I said before, I find the experience really trying and not satisfying, but I don't think it has to do with the "mass commodity" aspect of the Web. Books, after all, are already mass commodities (as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, among others). My problem has to do with LCD screens, etc., and whether they are effective in the matter of text retrieval. My surmise is that they are, but only in amounts up to about 500 words. After that, I get bored immediately. Since I imagine that civilization as a whole is terrified of the long-range stability of writing, this is not a surprise: that the collectivity of the Web would favor ephemera and instantaneity over deep, prolonged investigation. CR: When reading electronically, are you conscious of any disconnect between yourself and the manuscript/ author? RM: I feel a little more distant from the author somehow. That's merely an intuitive response, however. CR: My favorite story in Demonology reminds me a bit of hypertext — maybe that's why I've reread it so many times. "The Drawer" uses inchworm phrasing to build and build the story, in a manner both cyclical and seductive in its cryptic style. Where did this story come from? |
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