Paul La Farge: Luminous Airplanes
Bookworm
KCRW
4.5 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Paul La Farge on his innovation of the novel form. His new novel, though it is published between covers, only represents one third of the book. The other two-thirds...
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:04.1 | Boots! |
| 0:09.1 | Where would we be without boos? |
| 0:12.9 | Where would we be without good? |
| 0:15.1 | No, Tenderberg. |
| 0:16.6 | It's a rhetorical question, sir. |
| 0:20.0 | But where would we need without books? |
| 0:23.6 | From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:30.0 | Today, my guest is the writer Paul Lafarge. |
| 0:34.2 | He's someone I've wanted to talk to for a long time. |
| 0:36.8 | He's written four books, and each of |
| 0:38.5 | them fascinates me. The most recent is luminous airplanes, which, although I'll talk about it |
| 0:44.9 | as a book, I would like to say that listeners should know that it's a book with a website attached. And at that website is an immersive text which contains the book itself. |
| 1:00.7 | Now tell me, Paul LaFarge, what is an immersive text? |
| 1:04.4 | An immersive text is what people called a hypertext back in the 1990s. It's a fictional story which contains multiple |
| 1:16.3 | branches and there are links within the text which you can follow to explore the different |
| 1:22.9 | branches of the story. So as you say, the text of the book is in the immersive text. Actually, right now, |
| 1:31.5 | about half of the book is on the website in this immersive text. And then there are stories |
| 1:37.9 | which branch outwards from the book, from the story that's told in the book. And there are also stories which |
| 1:45.2 | continue the events of the book, past the place where the book ends, and let you know what's |
| 1:50.9 | happened. Now, when the reader gets to the very final page of luminous airplanes, he finds |
| 1:58.2 | the words, ten years later, entrance to cave, you are standing at the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave, |
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