Zachary Mason Has Some Unprompted Thoughts About Courtney Love Which He Would Like to Share with You
The author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason went to college at 14 and started his Ph.D. while still a teenager. During grad school he spent half his time studying artificial intelligence and half his time reading. After graduating, he worked for Amazon.com for awhile; he would like to take this opportunity to specifically deny that he made subtle changes to Amazon's recommendation system to favor his own books. Of course, if he *had* rigged their system, the foregoing is exactly what he would say.
Now he works for a Silicon Valley start-up and is writing two new books.
For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what's the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
It’s a difficult book to synopsize, but this quotation from Ben
Ehrenreich's review in the LA Times does pretty well:
"Mason un-grounds the Odyssey, often gorgeously, turning Homer's twisting tale into a sermon on indeterminacy. He allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths."What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?
Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians". A formal music of great power and purity.
Steve Aylett's Bigot Hall. Unclassifiable and brilliant; as though Borges had written about Monty Python moving into Castle Gormenghast.
Anthony Smith's Blind White Fish in Persia. Youth, a road trip through post World War II Europe, ancient irrigation systems and micro-evolution!
Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn't look at you screwy)?
The thing along these lines I would most like to read is a sequel to Cintra Wilson's A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. She disparages first the idea of celebrity, then celebrities in particular. Courtney Love, for example, is a "vain sociopath who venally choked enough money out of the world to transform herself into a 'pretty lady'".
That said, it must be admitted that Courtney Love is rather magnificent in her venality. It would have been a violation of her essential nature (defiance, emptiness, white-knuckle ambition) if upon obtaining wealth and fame she had, say, devoted herself to making family planning available to third world women instead of getting a whacking great lot of plastic surgery, doing jail time and sleazing around Hollywood with vacant-eyed models.
Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Not really; in a parallel life I'm a computer scientist, so, except for the first year or two of grad school, I have had few opportunities to live in a garret and waste picturesquely away from tuberculosis. I worry that my lack of exposure to respiratory ailments has cut into my literary productivity.
What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
My usual reaction when approached by an enthusiastic reader could be described as "fish-eyed blankness". Writing the book entailed sitting in a room alone for six years or so; this has not really prepared me to talk about it with other human beings. So perhaps the ideal interaction is one in which I have been drinking.
Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
Every last word I've published under my non-literary pseudonym "Dan Brown".
