hib bs ©R ich ard P
Andrei Codrescu
(continued)
now via the Internet. It’s a mystery to me how anyone (publishers, writers) will make money in the future. What is the future of the written word? How do you see us reading in 2033? The written word is in great shape and soon almost everyone will be skillfully making interesting sentences on the Internet. The true rare commodity will be the readers, who will most surely demand to get paid to read. The future is the age of the Reader-for-Pay. The best read writers will be the ones capable of paying the largest number of readers to tend their words. Businesses will also hire writers to embellish on a product (see, The Devil Wears Prada) which will be the only way word-producers will earn more than wordconsumers. The only true currency in 2033 will be Imagination: the ID (Imagination Dollar) will trade in both virtual and real worlds alongside every other currency. Trees can relax. We’ll be reading words on screens that will show up whenever we call them. What three books would you pass on to your great-grandchildren? Don’t Hate Your Grandparents, they Inherited a Screwed-Up World, Too. What Your Grandparents Really Did: A Guide to Useless Sentiment.
I’ve also seen the almost complete indifference of two Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, during the early years of the epidemic, when it was primarily afflicting gay men. Any gay man who started out 25 years ago imagining that he was considered the equal of all other American citizens can’t possibly have ended the last two and a half decades with the same illusion. Nothing has been remotely the same for me since then.
What three books would you pass on to your great-grandchildren? I trust my great-grandchildren to choose their own books.
random house
house
24 | Miami Book Fair International : 25th Anniversary: 1984-2008
What is the future of the written word? How do you see us reading in 2033? What’s fabulous and terrible about the future is, we really and truly have no idea. I’m old enough to have expected, as a child, a future that would involve shopping malls on the ocean floor, climate-controlled cities, and routine interplanetary travel. The word will survive, I’m sure about that, as will storytelling. I believe that just as certainly as I do in the survival of eating, sleeping, love, and sex. Whether it will be written, or manifested in some other way… we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?
random
What are you reading now? You will of course want to smack me, but the truth is, Proust. Swann’s Way. This summer in Provincetown I was part of a small group of truly remarkable people who read Joyce’s Ulysses together, and it was so
illuminating and enlivening and just generally great that we’ve agreed to tackle Proust, the whole thing, over the winter. I’m not so grand or rarified as the above may imply. If you’d asked me the question a month ago, I’d have said, Lush Life by Richard Price. Which was fantastic – I adore Richard Price. For the rest of the winter, though, it’s me and Marcel P.
Courtesy
These books haven’t yet been written, but then those grandchildren have not, for the most part, been born.
What event do you feel has been the most important in the past 25 years and why? Interpret the question as you wish. I suppose it’s indicative of our era that a question about the “most important event of the last twenty-five years” not only conjures dozens of possibilities, but the further question, most important to whom? For me, it was the AIDS epidemic. Surviving the epidemic, so far at least, has been more than a little like surviving a war. Like someone who’s been through a war, I’ve seen acts of heroism, cowardice, self-sacrifice, betrayal, and truly remarkable courage, the likes of which are not so abundantly on display during peacetime. The experience has expanded my sense of what it is to be human, and of what humans are capable of when pushed to extremes.
Courtesy
Try to Be Against the Future: the Past Was Bad Enough; a Manual.
Michael Cunningham