Interview w/ Zoran Zivkovic
Another interview! Thanks to Zoran for taking the time out of his day to answer my questions. Enjoy! SD: Could you please introduce yourself to the audience and talk a little about your history in the writing/publishing world? ZZ: I was born in Belgrade, the form Yugoslavia, in 1948. In 1973 I graduated from the Department of General Literature with the theory of literature. I received my master’s degree in 1979 and my doctorate in 1982. I am now professor of creative writing at Belgrade University.I started to write prose in 1993, when I was 45. In the next decade and a half I wrote sixteen books of fiction: The Fourth Circle (1993), Time Gifts (1997), The Writer (1998), The Book (1999), Impossible Encounters (2000), Seven Touches of Music (2001), The Library (2002), Steps Through the Mist (2003), Hidden Camera (2003), Compartments (2004), The Bridge (2006), Miss Tamara, the Reader (2006), Amarcord (2007), and The Last Book (2007).I am about to finish my new novel Escher’s Loops. SD: What are you currently reading, what do you plan to read, and what have you just finished reading? ZZ: I am currently re-reading Erasmus Roterdamus’ masterpiece In Praise of Folly. Prior to that I read with great pleasure Peter Woit’s excellent study Not Even Wrong. In early February I always read the same book: Jaroslaw Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, one of the greatest novels of all times. SD: What are some of your writing influences? Who is your favorite author and/or what is your favorite book? ZZ: Any book by Mikhail Bulgakov, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Tamar Yellin, Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhan Pamuk, Haruku Murakami… SD: What were some hurdles you faced when you first began taking your writing seriously? ZZ: I wrote extensively about my initial hurdles in the afterward of the US edition of my first novel The Fourth Circle (The Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2004). Here is an excerpt: When apparently there were no more publishers to whom my agent could submit The Fourth Circle, he stepped forward with an ingenious proposal. I should change my name. What do you mean, I asked incredulously. He meant I should choose a pen name, preferably something that would sound English. Like what? Well, we could try to find an analogous version of your original name. What would that be? After a brief etymological consideration, he boldly suggested: Donald Livingston. Why would I be Donal Livingston instead of Zoran Zivkovic? Can you really imagine, he asked, that anyone called Zoran Zivkovic would ever be able to publish anything in the USA? I could. He couldn’t. So, inevitably, we went our separate ways. SD: Do you have any strange writing habits? ZZ: My only writing habit is that I am a morning writer. I write only between 9 AM and about noon. SD: Since you write both science fiction and fantasy, what do you like about both genres? What do you think are some problems, if any, within each genre, given that you write and presumably read SF and fantasy? Did you have any difficulty crossing over? ZZ: I write neither science fiction nor fantasy. These are mere labels invented by the publishing industry. I consider myself a writer without any prefixes. Quite simply, a writer. A humble practitioner of the ancient and noble art of prose. SD: You write what would be called by a lot of people ‘magical realism’. This is very clear in “Seven Touches of Music” as many of the stories ‘flirt’ with the lines between the real and the imagined. What about this type of fantasy writing is appealing to you and why do you write such stories? ZZ: The term ‘magical realism’ was invented to gather under a single umbrella a number of Hispano-American authors active mostly in the second part of the 20th century. Although I have the greatest possible admiration for their invaluable contribution to world literature, I don’t consider myself a part of that tradition. My literary roots are predominantly Middle-European. I am an unworthy successor of such prose giants as Hoffmann, Kafka, and Bulgakov. SD: “Seven Touches of Music” is a collection of short stories that each use music as a common theme. When you began this collection did you intend for every story to use music in some way or did it just happen that way? Basically, how did this collection come together? ZZ: It came together basically just as any other book of mine. I woke up one sunny April morning back in 2001 and it was there, in my head. The entire book. All I had to do was to sit down at my desk and start typing. As simple as that. In my prose writing there are never any preparations. That would be fundamentally wrong in my case. SD: Tiffany, of Aio, told me in an email that she envisioned “The Violinist” as a story about Albert Einstein in his last days. After I thought about that idea it occurred to me that there could actually be some validity to such a thought. Is there any truth to Tiffany’s idea or is it intended to be somewhat mysterious? ZZ: There are plenty of clues for an attentive reader. The “Violinist” opens in a Princeton hospital. Einstein died in a Princeton hospital on April 18, 1955. His last physician was Dr. Dean, mentioned in my story. There is also his last nurse, Mrs. Roszel. I only left the dying professor unnamed. With a good reason… SD: This novel is an English translation from Serbian. As a literature student I have an interest in translated works and the world of translation. Since you speak both English and Serbian, could you talk a little about some complications of translating your work? ZZ: I was extremely fortunate to have on my side Mrs. Alice Copple-Tosic, an excellent translator. She has translated from my native Serbian to English all but two books of mine. So far she has received nothing but
Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 4)–Dropping Nuclear Options
The concern over nuclear weaponry and nuclear power plants (or nuclear anything really) has been strong ever since we bombed Japan in WW2. As Edelman says: Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.) Let’s face it, nuclear ‘anything’ has been a source of concern not only in our society (U.S.A.), but in the world in general. Nuclear power plants were thought to be the wave of the future of energy production, and in some ways they are. But in order to get to that point we had to pay a terrible price, and that price was of our international security. Other countries paid the same price, such as Russia, who, when they were the U.S.S.R., tried desperately to beat the U.S. in a deadly arms race and eventually in a space race that, while enormously beneficial, created even more problems for the world at large. While the U.S. space program has and will be the marker of great discoveries on our planet, in our solar system, and in the universe, it has also helped develop new ways to destroy other people and was built, in some respects, with the intention of doing so. ICBMs are, by nature, useful only in destroying targets far away and while the technology that created them did eventually spark a very promising space program that continues to be of value today, it also showed the world that the U.S. wasn’t playing games anymore. “We can hit you anyplace, anywhere, and any time.” What happened to this idiotic arms race was that we all came to realize how dangerous the world had become and how stupid it would be for any nation, organization, or individual to drop a nuclear weapon of any kind on anyone else, especially someone who has the means to retaliate with the same firepower. If the U.S.S.R. had at any time bombed the U.S. or an ally, who knows if the world would still be here, or if any of us would be alive (this is, of course, assuming that the U.S.S.R. actually had the financial means to deliver a payload of nuclear weaponry to any location outside of their sphere of influence, which, historically speaking, may have been nearly impossible at the time of the Cold War). This, I’m sure, sounds like a purely negative argument on the part of nuclear creations, but there are some very good benefits of what was a frightening time in the world. Nuclear power, despite its faults, is efficient and, generally speaking, easy to use. Chernobyl and other such incidents were not markers of a failed network of power facilities, but an indicator of how stupid human beings can be when they try to mess with things they don’t yet understand (this is not a bash on Russia, as there were events in other locations where nuclear facilities became an issue, including the U.S., but Chernobyl is a prime example that everyone knows about). But there are benefits to the use of nuclear energy. Nuclear plants often use a large man made canal as a natural coolant. Such plants rarely, if ever, pollute these canals, but because the water is warmed up by the heat of the reactor, it provides a wonderful environment for a lot of little critters that otherwise would be hard pressed to find homes due to human expansion. This is prevalent in Florida where human encroachment has displaced a lot of gators and such. The downside of power plants, obviously, is nuclear waste and the risk of leaks and explosions. That’s not to say we can’t find a use for nuclear energy. There is a use, at the moment, but the inevitable is that we are going to have to go with better sources that don’t have a downside (i.e. solar, wind, currents, etc.). Edelman is right that we have to wean ourselves off of this notion of keeping nuclear facilities and weaponry for protection or out of necessity.Of course, nuclear power plants aren’t Edelman’s primary concern. He’s concerned with nuclear weaponry, and I have to agree with him on that. First off, there are huge consequences with the use of nuclear weapons: massive destruction, nuclear fallout, nuclear winter, radiation, and severe environmental consequences when wind blows radioactive particles around. We can’t use nuclear weapons without screwing things up. There’s no magic radiation-eating machine. This means that when we use a nuclear weapon on a target, nobody can live there again for a very long time. There aren’t any people living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, unless something has changed that I don’t know about, although people were living around the area where Chernobyl is for quite some time before being evacuated. Second, nuclear weapons create fear and clearly we live in a time when such weapons may or may not be used. There are concerns that extremist groups may use nuclear weapons (suitcase bombs) on U.S. cities, and I’m not naive enough to say that such things are impossible. They are possible. That’s the problem. Nuclear disarmament is a must for EVERYONE, not just the U.S. It is idiotic for any nation to claim that the U.S. should be the one nation to disarm simply because we have used the