iLydia

Mest misundelig jeg har været på ihændehavelsen af en smartphone:

Fyren, jeg den anden morgen ca. 8:33 stod skulder ved skulder med i stopfyldt S-tog og som saligt opslugt læste i Lydia Davis' Collected Stories (jeg nåede lige at genkende forsiden (men ikke den lidt længere historie han et et meget ordknapt skærmbillede ad gangen læste)) -

- fandt lige et TLS-interview med Lydia, hvor hun svarer på 20 spørgsmål, her er 3 af dem:

"What will your field look like twenty-five years from now? 
This is another difficult one. How does one predict anything in the future, especially now, when things change so fast? The temptation is always to take present trends and project them forward, though that can be completely wrong. If I were to do that, I’d say – there will be more and more self-publishing, less and less concern for correctness of grammar, usage, accurate meanings of words, a more casual approach altogether to the task of editing. More spontaneous creation of personal narrative, and more blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, or reality and fiction. I’m thinking also, for some reason, of 3-D holograms, and imagining the creation of holographic fictional situations in which we walk into something that mingles our reality and our daydreams. Here, I’m trying hard to project something I can barely imagine. On the other hand, the traditional novel, for instance, has continued to thrive, even in print form, despite all the changes going on around it. Traditional printed books may simply continue to find an enthusiastic readership.

 (...)

Let’s play Humiliation (see David Lodge’s Changing Places): What’s the most famous book you haven’t read?/play you haven’t seen?/album you haven’t listened to?/film you haven’t watched?
Are you asking about all of these categories? Well, I won’t admit publicly to the very most embarrassing of the famous books I haven’t read, but I will admit to Don Quixote. But I have on my bookshelf at least three translations of it, as well as the whole immense thing in Spanish, so clearly I’m working up to reading it. (It has a lot of competition.) I’ll attempt the other genres. Play: a lot of Shakespeare, though I’ve probably read them all. And Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – though now I’m discovering that, far from being famous, Ibsen isn’t someone that literate younger people have even heard of. Album: I’ve never listened to more than individual songs by Bob Dylan. Film? Probably Tarkovsky, but most of the famous films one simply sooner or later ends up seeing.

Do you have any hidden talents?
This is another tough one – I simply sit here thinking of all the things I don’t do very well. I ski, but not very well; play the piano, but not very well; for a while played the violin in a string quartet, though we, in the quartet, were the only ones who enjoyed hearing what we played; once earned $40 playing the violin in The Messiah. I cook, but only occasionally with any flair. I’m a patient gardener, and the plants don’t usually die. I can darn a sock, if I have to. I once made a dress that I could actually wear. The first time I fired a rifle, I shot the bottle off the wall."