Vieuchanger 2.x
Fatima Michelle Vieuchanger: Settled out of court to share the movie
rights to her 1991 Gulf
War series with her publisher, L'Express Marrakech (with stipulation that the
purchaser's identity remain
secret, though the Hollywood grapevine had it that Naked Lunch, Crash, and eXistenZ director David Cronenberg had optioned
the episodic story). Her portion allowed her to resettle comfortably in Morocco and regain joint custody of her
son Mohammed, who turned 15 in 2000 — a subject she still avoided in print, somewhat like the way the
Clintons
shielded Chelsea from publicity, a fellow journalist noted wryly. Vieuchanger continued the travel-research
required for her layered project of resuscitating for 21st century readers her 20th century narrative
reconstruction of an 18th century automaton and its 19th century imitator. To what extent could the process (composition, the chase)
be coded or embedded in
the product (pig/text)?
interviewer Alan Richardson asked her for a Newsweek feature on postmodernism.
There's a powerful tendency at
the dawn of the new millennium, Vieuchanger replied zen-mysteriously, for processed food products to begin to
taste like their imitators once a similar brand is introduced. In non-answer to another theoretical question,
she suggested that the world would be better off, digestively as well as hydrologically, with Moroccan-style
floor-hole squatter toilets; do high-tech Western low-flow
toilets really save water, she
asked rhetorically, if you have to flush them twice? Vieuchanger used her short-lived celebrity to promote
“Wireless Africa,” a consortium of public interest groups working on information infrastructure for the
least-wired continent, while her small cadre of readers installed the latest browser plug-ins in
anticipation of
a web version of Masquerading at Shower-Lourdes and Other Stories.
View Lexia Map
View Global Map
