Second Half of the Interview

INTERVIEWER

That’s when you went back to school.

GIBSON

Those days it was fantastically easy to get a degree at UBC. I discovered very quickly that they were in effect paying me for studying things I was already interested in. I could cool it for four years, and I wouldn’t have to worry about what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

But my wife started to talk about having a child. She already had a job, a real job at the university. Everyone I had known during that four-year period was also trying to get a job. It startled me. They hadn’t really been talking about getting jobs before. But some part of me I had never heard from before sat me down and said, You’ve been bullshitting about this art thing since you were fifteen years old, you’ve never done anything about any of it, you’re about to be shoved into the adult world, so if you’re going to do anything about the art thing, you’ve got to do it right now, or shut up and get a job.

First Half of the Interview

William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211

Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells

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Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which enclose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. There are periods in the year when it’ll rain for forty days, William Gibson tells me one mucky day there this winter, and when visibility drops so low you can’t see what’s coming at you from the nearest street corner. But large parts of Vancouver are traversed by trolley cars, and on clear nights you can gaze up at the wide expanse of Pacific sky through the haphazard grid of their electric wires.

Where to start?

In order to break down this interview effectively we will need to split each other into smaller groups.We will need at least two people working on vocab presented in the interview, at least two working on quotes, and the rest working on concepts derived from the William Gibson Interview(at least 10). Five people will work on the first half he other five will work on the second half. The Interview has been divided into separate post on the blog. Remember your job you choose or got stuck with during class today 12/09/11.
There has been a separate page added for vocab and quotes. You can get to it by clicking the top tab at the top of the page labeled Vocab.

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