So far all our other interviews have been about conventional printed books. We’ve talked to Lev Grossman about the development of the internet, and he gave us some conventional print books about that. What we haven’t talked about, yet, is books that are either written directly for the internet and are authored by it, or are affected profoundly by the internet. Is that what we are going to do?

We’re talking about digital textuality and what happens to literature when it interfaces with the prospect of the digital – of digital technology and digital culture. And we’re talking about readers who are becoming literate, and perhaps even more literate, on the screen rather than on the page.

When you say ‘literate’, do you mean ‘literary’, or that they’re actually learning how to read on the net?

That is, I think, the question that I’m interested in…the division between those faculties is really interesting. I’ve been invited to talk on panels about ‘new literacies’, and certainly literacy is quite different from ‘literariness’, because people are just reading in different ways online. Rather than engaging with a single book and a single author for a sustained amount of time, people are reading in the kind of Web 2.0 social networking ways that I think Lev’s interview was bringing up: they’re reading hypertextually across web pages, and they’re also producing their own content. But the question of the literary is really the question that I’m most interested in, because I’m approaching this from a literature background first, rather than, say, a computer programming background.

I’m looking at the recommendations that you’ve made here, and you’ve divided them into categories – that which is born digital and that which is influenced by digital technology. Shall we talk about the digital literature first? Why are people tempted to write in this way rather than writing on paper?

Born digital describes works that are created with a computer and are meant to be read on the computer. They’re not works that you print out. The computational aspect of the work is part of its aesthetic and its reception. So born digital, as you can see, can encompass a wide variety of genres and works. And then, on the question of why now, why people are writing digital literature now… Actually, the field has origins beyond the current moment. Unsurprisingly, when humans create a new technology, any kind of reading or writing technology, they find ways to use it for artistic purposes. Electronic literature is generally acknowledged as having a 20-year or so history, going back to Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story [1987], but its origins can be pushed further back to ASCII art, early chatbots like ELIZA, and other computer-mediated forms of art.

And obviously, in order for something to take off, as a sort of literary phenomenon, it has to be recognised as a literary phenomenon. And who really is the audience for this sort of literature so far?

Well, there’s an interesting situation going on wherein literary critics are intimately involved in producing the literary phenomenon that is the field of digital literature.

And beyond the academy – is it variegating at all, the audience? I mean are there different sorts of people being drawn into this?

There are. It’s certainly not located in the academy. And neither are the artists. And neither is it located in one place in the world. It’s an international phenomenon, happening in different languages, as you can imagine. It’s the internet, so anyone who has access can create and publish their stuff. And works go viral, in terms of what people are reading and who becomes popular. Moreover, the question of genre becomes more complicated, because some of these works are considered film or art more than literature. For example Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’ work. Their website contains a lot of different works, and all of them, I think, are wonderful. That’s the site that I go to when I need to show people what I mean by digital literature.

I spent some time on that site. And it is amazing. In fact I was just reading ‘North Korean Cunnilingus’, which is hilarious. As you say, it’s kind of a misnomer, really, to call it ‘writing’, because it combines several different media. So it’s very internet-specific, and more than that, it’s incredibly exciting. So, can you describe briefly what it’s doing?

Well, first, it’s collaboration between two writers. And that’s something that is perhaps not internet-specific but certainly supported by the web. Collaboration is now more understood as being associated with the internet than with print-based conceptions of a single author. But what’s wonderful about their work is that it’s both sophisticated and simple. It’s both shocking and completely approachable. It’s fun and, as you spend time with it, also really elevated in terms of its intertextuality and the kinds of political and aesthetic statements it’s making. So what it’s doing is creating this multi-modal literary artwork in which text cannot be separated from the image of text, or from sound, or from movement. It creates a performance – a textual performance – online that challenges the ways in which we describe and understand what we mean by ‘literature’.

As a result it’s, in a way, quite hard to talk about in terms of content.

I think that that’s true, because you can describe – and I’m sure you can imagine, this is my conundrum – you can try to describe digital literature, and Young-hae Chang’s work in particular, using thousands of words. But it becomes so much clearer when you just look at it for three seconds. You understand the implications such work has for thinking about literature and certainly for reading it, writing about it, or teaching it.

Before we look at your book selection, could you tell us what slang is?

Slang is difficult because everything about it defies simple classification. Nobody knows the etymology of the word slang. If you take slang to a linguist they try to define it within the boundaries of what they know as linguists, and very soon they discover they can’t find a specific register into which it falls.

I see slang as the counter-language. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It seems to me that slang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative. It’s very thematic, which means it’s basically a lexicon of synonyms. There are 1,500 synonyms for having sex, 1,000 penises, 1,000 vaginas and 2,000 drunkards and drink-related words… and so on.

I see slang as Freud would see the Id. In other words, the unrestrained side of ourselves. Slang is the pleasure principle. It evokes it in language, lets us get it out there. It has no morals, it has no party, it has no religion, it’s just in it for the kicks. What I love most about it is that it is ourselves at our most human – not at our best, but at our most real. There’s a nice line in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds about someone moving from conventional speech to rough, truthful language. That’s what I think slang is – rough, truthful language.

You started your professional life writing for the underground press, and then books on the counterculture in the 1960s. How did you end up specialising in slang?

I had always enjoyed looking at slang dictionaries and books that had slang in them. In 1981, when my first slang dictionary was commissioned, I saw that not only did this subject interest me but that there was also a gap in the market. The great slang lexicographer Eric Partridge had died a couple of years earlier. In 1937 he had written the hugely influential Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and that had gone through a number of editions. But when Partridge talked about English, he meant English English and not American. By the late 1970s, when it was still being published, it was absurd that it did not include any American slang. Partridge also just didn’t get the 20th century. He certainly didn’t get teenagers, drugs and the counterculture. I thought: I know about that stuff, I’m younger, I shall have a try.

What is your working life like as a slang lexicographer? What are the tools of your trade?

The tools of my trade are the books that sit on my shelves and those that I research elsewhere. There are the many works of my predecessors, who started off in 1530. I have books on slang from Britain, I have shelves of Australia-related slang as well as American stuff and black American slang. It is impossible to be a lexicographer without a degree of plagiarism. However, to steal from one book is plagiarism; to steal from many – and I steal from many – is research. But I don’t see it as stealing. The point is that language is not fresh and new, and this is as true for the Oxford English Dictionary or for Dr Johnson as it is for me. Language does not pop up all shiny and new each time a lexicographer signs a contract to write a dictionary. You have to make sure you include everything that has come before you.

Last year’s Super Bowl netted nearly 163 million viewers. Has football taken the place of baseball as America’s favorite pastime?

There’s no question. The interest is greater and the sport fits the personality of the United States better than the lazy pastoral aspect of baseball. TV has embraced the brutal elegance of football. The replay and slow motion effects make the game mesmerising to watch. So I’d say, “Absolutely!” It’s replaced every other sport as America’s favourite pastime – soccer never came close; boxing used to be a big deal, and basketball remains important, but it’s nothing like football.

You played college football and you’ve written about the sport for nearly 40 years. How, specifically, does the sport suit the personality of the United States?

Football entails being aggressive, being independent and taking what you want within the rules. The United States was formed by intrepid individuals who came to stake a claim. They didn’t wait for a land grant. And, like football, there’s a lot of violence in the United States. We have more guns than anywhere in the world and a huge part of the reason why is that we don’t want to be controllable, certainly not by government. Americans like to live right up to the edge of our laws. It’s the same with football – a lot of violence is within every person on the field, playing up to the edge of the rules.

In football, beauty, violence and sex are mixed. The game is beautiful to watch in replay – there is violence in almost every play and then they cut to half-naked dancing girls shaking pom-poms. It’s a uniquely American television spectacle.

Some of our readers won’t be initiated in the pleasures of football – can you just brief us on them? What is the essence of the game, what makes it so interesting to so many people?

It’s all about aggression – that’s the essence of football. If there were no rules these guys would just kill each other. Two teams face each other on the line of scrimmage and try to move into their opponents’ territory. It’s like a battlefront – trench warfare without weapons. All the rules – offside, penalties, motion rules and passing rules – make it complex, but the essence of it is very simple: We’re going to go as far as we can toward a goal and you’re trying to stop us. It’s about taking the ball or territory however it has to be done and making it yours as you move up and down the field. In soccer and hockey the line of scrimmage is less precise. In football you can score at any time, through an interception or fumble. I don’t think there’s another sport like it.

American football has been compared to chess on a playing field. Please clarify the comparison.

Chess is a board game, but it’s clearly one of aggression like football. Dumb aggression doesn’t work in chess and it doesn’t work in football. In chess many moves invite mistakes from opponents and in football many plays are based on anticipating an overly aggressive response from the other team. In both the game and the sport, you plot 10 plays ahead and wait for one false move to open up a king for checkmate or the field for a deep long pass. In both games you’re always looking to take someone out, whether it’s your opponent’s knight or your opposing team’s running back. They are extremely analogous, except in football the violence is real and in chess it’s make-believe.