Julian Gough’s four-day visit to Vienna started on November 12th, with a reading at Lane & Merriman’s Irish Pub. The Pub features pictures of Samuel Beckett and pint glasses with Oscar Wilde on them, as well as the latter’s appropriate quotation for such an establishment: “Everything in moderation, including moderation” on the wall. The Pub also provided the perfect setting for a lively reading and a long and engaging Q & A session that touched on a number of important current issues—ra(n)ging from 21st century technology to the pros and cons of a return to a gift economy.
The reading was co-hosted by write:now, the Association of English-Language Writers in Austria, the Irish Embassy in Vienna and the English Department at the University of Vienna, each of whom managed to blackmail bring a fair amount of people to the event—the room was packed and the “antici… pation” was palpable. After I had introduced Julian, he took the imaginary stage.
His energetic and entertaining reading of “I’m the Guy who Wrote the Wild Bunch” (which you can read for free here, because Grey Magazine are a fantastic wild bunch themselves) immediately captivated the whole room. The second piece that Julian read was his short story “The iHole” (shortlisted for the 2012 BBC Short Story Award), a gritty satire set in the Apple headquarters of a non-identifiable multinational corporation that bears no resemblance to Apple whatsoever. The company in the story develops the “iHole”, a black hole that not only only disposes of, but completely annihilates any kind of waste in the blink of an eye. Of course, people use it responsibly all the time; nothing goes wrong (how could it possibly?).
This story, a comment on today’s culture of consumerism (soon, the iHole 2 and later 3 are released; customers queue in front of stores to get them as soon as possible), provided a good basis for the first topic raised in the Q & A session, regarding the increasingly blurry line between human beings and technology. Julian, owner of a brand new iPhone 6s Plus, produced by an altogether different company than the one the story is modelled on, and “a bit obsessed with technology” in general, spoke about the ambivalence of relishing such devices, with which we basically build personal relationships over the years, despite their occasionally problematic implications for human communication.
His most recent novel, Connect (to be published in 2016 by Picador in the UK and Doubleday in the US) addresses this issue at some length. Another issue we addressed was the way the incessant onslaught of ever-newer technical gadgets has fundamentally changed the way economy works. One of the problems of 21st-century capitalism, according to hobby economist Julian Gough (he is also “a bit obsessed with economics,”) is that our economic system is still built on an 18th-century notion of “supply and demand,” even though supply has greatly exceeded demand in recent times. In the words of the story: “Eventually somebody said ‘…But what does it do?’ Thierry scratched the back of his neck. ‘Uh, it kind of doesn’t matter what it does. Everyone will want one. Look at it.’ They looked at it. It was beautiful.”
However, technology can also help us feel “less alone, even though we might still be lonely”—nowadays, it is possible to reach out to a whole number of people whom we have never actually met—IRL—but can nevertheless form connections with. A brilliant example of the undoubtedly positive aspects of technological advancement today was Julian’s Kickstarter campaign for his new novel. When the author had to take a research trip to Las Vegas to finish his most recent novel, he made readers an offer few could refuse: to fund his trip to Las Vegas (and the time he spent there), he offered handwritten postcards to pledgers, along with a pdf of his most recent short story, “Harvest” (shortlisted for the 2014 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award).
This project sprung from the idea that it should become possible for passionate fans to help artists create more art by making a direct contribution, which is not possible in the current economic system. The essential dissatisfaction with traditional notions of disseminating art and ways in which a more direct exchange between artist and audience can be facilitated have become hotly debated topics in recent years (Amanda Palmer’s TED talk and recent book, The Art of Asking, tackles this issue; patreon.com offers fans the possibility of contributing a certain amount of money either per month or “per thing” produced).
As many different approaches to an essentially similar problem show, a wider discussion of this topic and a rethinking of existent models beyond individual cases has proved necessary. Part of the considerations behind The Las Vegas Postcards was precisely such a “remodelling of the economics of reading” in an attempt to create a “Litcoin” currency equivalent to Bitcoin for others to follow. By tapping into the already-existent market of writers’ ephemera (as Julian pointed out in discussion, James Joyce died a relatively poor man, while a letter of his recently sold for almost 450,000 dollars at an auction), the author hoped to create a mutually satisfying solution that leaves both the artist happy and well-fed and the fan with a “very personal, physical asset” that may well be worth something once the author reaches a certain celebrity status (after all, Serge Gainsbourg’s cigarette butts were recently estimated at 500-700€ apiece).
In times of an increasingly virtual reality, handwritten postcards already seem to have achieved a special status in terms of their scarcity (in this case however, as the Kickstarter campaign reached seven times its initial goal, demand did in a sense exceed supply, as the author was suddenly faced with having to write 250 postcards in addition to completing a novel). As Julian remarked, the one thing that machines cannot genuinely emulate is real-time physical connection between humans—after all, “you can’t truly experience a Rolling Stones concert without being there and sharing that moment with other fans. You can’t put Michael Jagger’s sweat in a bottle,”—at least not yet.
The whole room was still buzzing with excitement after almost an hour of discussion about these and connected issues (Is it possible to still write something new in times of a “literature of exhaustion,” a condition which John Barth already diagnosed back in 1967? How does the shortening attention span of readers, brought about by what Douglas Rushkoff calls “digiphrenia,” affect narrative form?). The evening was so inspiring it made us want to immediately get out pens, keyboards, paint brushes, ukuleles, harpsichords, megaphones and dancing shoes and start creating art. Until the blood, sweat, and tears of such events do become available for download, you will have to take my word for it—at least you can experience the effects of a shortening attention span by clicking on all the hyperlinks at once…
*****
Tamara Radak is a PhD student at the University of Vienna. Her academic work (No(n)sense of an Ending: Aporias of Closure in Modernist Fiction) deals with the work of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and other authors of the “Lost Generation,” exploring the manifold ways in which their texts transgress traditional closure. In 2009, she co-wrote a play, Schrilles Herz, which was staged at “dschungel Wien”. She also writes fiction on an irregular basis, usually precipitated by late-night, coffee-fuelled bouts of creativity.
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