Monday
Sep032007
Cronenberg meets Rushdie (1995)
Monday 3 September, 2007
RUSHDIE: Actually, I think you can't do it. There's just this book, there's just this object, and what you can do technically inside the format of just writing it down is almost infinite. It's just inexhaustibly infinite. I'm more interested in that than in these more physical foolings around with the book. I'm not interested in, for instance, one of these writers of what's called cyberpunk fiction who had written a book which was available only on a floppy disc. [William Gibson's story, Agrippa, was published on diskette.]
CRONENBERG: Right.
RUSHDIE: And had built into the program a thing which meant that each time you scrolled through, read a page, the previous page would be deleted. So that by the time you finished the book, you didn't have the book anymore. I don't know if this was a device to prevent replication or what. It seemed to be completely futile, because the great pleasure of a book is re-reading.
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CRONENBERG: Right.
RUSHDIE: And had built into the program a thing which meant that each time you scrolled through, read a page, the previous page would be deleted. So that by the time you finished the book, you didn't have the book anymore. I don't know if this was a device to prevent replication or what. It seemed to be completely futile, because the great pleasure of a book is re-reading.
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