Skaff deg eit liv!

Neste uke på Litteratur på Blå kan du få oppleve Stephen J. Walton og Knut Olav Åmås i samtale med meg som ordstyrer. Walton gir i disse dager ut den flotte essaysamlingen Skaff deg eit liv!, en samling tekster om biografisjangeren over to tiår. Den er nok noe av det mest sympatiske og interessante som har blitt skrevet om den sjangeren på norsk siden, vel, Knut Olav Åmås' massive Mitt liv var draum, en biografi over Olav H. Hauge med et 60 sider langt biografiteoretisk etterord som senere var grunnlag for Åmås' doktorgrad i medievitenskap.

Jeg regner med at samtalen mellom disse to - og ikke minst boken! - blir et mer faglig interessant bidrag til biografidebatten enn vinterens debatt rundt Gryttens forelesning (selv om den var moro, den også, særlig de musikalske innslagene). Kom kom! Tirsdag den 26. kl. 19⁰⁰ på Blå!

Til konklusjon gir jeg dere Skaff deg eit liv!s motto, et sitat fra Alan Bennetts sakprosasamling Writing Home:

Shot of a dead whale being slowly winched up a ramp. Men with satchels of knives move in and slit it open. Titles come up: "The Art of Biography".

Potter's Last Interview

That interview with Dennis Potter I was ranting and raving about back in September is on YouTube now. That's fantastic. I hope the BBC isn't a dick about this and removes the video, because this one is important and should be publicly available. Here's the first part:



As I said back in September, I think this may be the most moving thing I have ever seen on television. You should go and see it. It's split up into quite a few parts, which should appear in the sidebar when you go to the YouTube page.

Big thanks to HPL for telling me about it! And to Matt7333 for posting it.

boiling water with the lid off

I just finished William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. As always, Gibson describes big chunks of the times we live in better than anyone (in fact, I can't help thinking that he is literally the only author I've read who looks at some of the things he looks at) and its worth reading for those observations, as well as a well-plotted, easy read. The funny thing is, I recognized huge chunks of the plot from my internet reading. I kept thinking "oh yeah, that's that thing, and that's that news story run through a blender and cut up with this other story over here", etc.

Today, as I was googling my way across the blogosphere per usual, I happened to stumble across a link - in Jill's blog, though now I've lost the post itself - to a post on Gibson's blog just when he started blogging again after a lengthy hiatus. This was in October 2004, in the run-up to the re-election of the Dauphin. I recognised the story he told from the novel. Then I looked at the October archive and realised that I got all those stories and ideas mostly from links Gibson blogged. So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times.

I can't help but think that blogs are just huge assets for the biographical writers of the future. Also, the blog is a lot of fun to read. I remember the following paragraph vividly. And as always, Gibson was right on the money:

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.