"The Faulkner of Boerum Hill"

FROM March 25, 2007

Q&A with Jonathan Lethem: Yay
He talks on his forthcoming novel, and making certain aspects of its fiction bleed into reality - making a phone number that works, having a band record songs from the book, etc - becoming "multimedia platforms" as it were - A fine impulse from a true-blue sci-fi nerd:

"You can now call the number in the book and reach a complaint line, and I’ve read that a band is going to perform some of the songs in the book. Why did you want to turn the imaginary world of the novel into real performances (or happenings)?

The real reason the phone number works is because I just didn’t want to put a 555-prefixed phone number into my book. It always jars my pleasure in dwelling in a fictional world when I encounter one of those. But in order to get the Doubleday lawyers to approve a real Los Angeles phone number, I had to have one. So, with the help of a friend, I got one. And then there it was, with nothing on it if anyone did call—which is the fear that prompts the use of 555 numbers in the first place, right? So I put an outgoing message on the line. "

Lethem's essay advocating plagiarism, typically rooted in the concept of samples:

"Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first."