The dating game, redux

[desperance]

Hee. I mentioned before how this book I'm checking dates itself, or particularly how its tech dates it. Anyone who knows me could date it another way, into my personal chronology. I've just found the bit where the narrator is lamenting DOS and all at sea in loathsome Windows: which is exactly how I was feeling, back in the mid-nineties, before I discovered Linux. Making a deliberate dinosaur of myself, I used to say: which is an expression I find word for word right here in the text. All art is autobiographical - I have said this before, that we give ourselves away with every word - but sometimes I do the Antony Gormley thing, apparently, cast my own body right there and call it art. All writers appropriate, that's what we do, it's in the job description: but we use ourselves as much as we use our friends, rather more probably than we use strangers, and we do it harshly.

Reading this book fifteen years on, I'm not sure I like the guy very much, the narrator: he's pompous, and he's a coward, and - yeah. Uncomfortably a self-portrait. Also, a blinking idiot.