The William Gibson Blog January to September 2003

Transcription

The William Gibson Blog
January to September 2003
January
Monday, January 06, 2003
posted 11:21 AM
The thread about the bridge in Virtual Light had me remembering where that all came from: a random glance
out a window in The Clift, where I was staying during the tour for the previous book. Up early, on one of the
upper floors, I happened to look out into thick, classic San Francisco fog and see, magically, just the top of
that first cable-tower, suspended/isolated there in a field of gray. I suppose it became for me, at that point, a
place.
But if you wanted it to be a place where you could be, where you could sleep, you’d need a floor and walls and
a roof… Tree-houses, the forts that children build, secret places of childhood… Somehow, before I’d turned
away from that window, I had the floor: it was made of two-by-fours, set on edge, making the deck a
comfortingly solid four inches thick.
So, really, the world below, the bridge and its culture, all grew down from that, called into literary being to
support what would become Skinner’s room, Chevette’s home, and the core of three novels.
***
My friend John Clute, the only critical historian of science fiction I pay any attention to, thought that the
bridge was the ultimate elaboration of the Cornell boxes in Count Zero. I started understanding that he saw
these environments throughout my work, and that he regarded them as claustrophobic, or rather
agoraphobic. I didn’t like that, but gradually, at some deeper level, I guess I started to agree with him. Which
is ultimately why I wound up torching the bridge in All Tomorrow’s Parties, and perhaps why Laney dies alone
in his cardboard box at the end of that book.
In Pattern Recognition, the only physical environments I can think of that evoke Cornell boxes are the
basement arcade off Portobello Road, where Cayce sees the book’s first Michelin Man, and Boone’s exgirlfriend’s rather too perfect apartment in Hongo, and, possibly, Baranov’s fetid caravan. None of these are
felt as sympatico environments for Cayce.
But there may be another sort of Cornell box there, in the form of F:F:F, the website where Cayce and her
friends have been discussing the footage, in the months before the book begins. I think that’s an
improvement, though, as a website can become a Cornell box full of friends. Having seen that happen
elsewhere, and been a part of it myself, my best hope for this site would be that, for some of you at least,
that will happen for you here. (If it does, it won’t have much to do with me, and everything to do with you.)
So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who arrived early and started colonizing the place before it
was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I’m moving into
an empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There is already some human space here, the start of
that sense of duration and habitation, and soon there’ll be, I hope, more.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or
word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
posted 12:12 PM
Someone posts to complain of the wealth of grammatical errors in my fiction… I would have to say that some
are errata, some are nonstandard grammatical choices on the part of a character (and these can be part of
the text, as interior monologue or an aspect of “POV”) and the rest are, for the most part, conscious and
deliberate stylistic choices involving nonstandard usage.
I suppose the idea that a writer would deliberately choose to “break the rules” would puzzle some people, and
annoy others, though it’s a bit of a stretch for me to imagine what it would feel like to be in that particular
relationship to prose fiction.
There may well be people who abandon Neuromancer on the grounds that it’s riddled with sentencefragments, but, in a sense, the sentence-fragments are there to scare off readers who aren’t ready for that,
and to encourage those who want to see the envelope of language pushed even further, the pedal taken even
closer to the metal… I do know how to write formal standard English without making a great many mistakes.
But a character like Rydell doesn’t think in formal standard English, so when I’m interfacing with the narrative
through the lens of that character, you don’t get formal standard English. Though that shouldn’t lead you to
assume that the more general narrative voice of a given book is “me”. If I’m doing my job, it never is.
But this brings up a much more important point, re those advance reading copies (ARCs) of Pattern
Recognition that have been popping up on eBay for the last little while.
Those are “uncorrected proof copies”, which means that they are (1) absolutely riddled with errata, and (2) in
the case of this book, to some extent a variant text. There is, in particular, a completely annoying failure on
the typesetter’s part to keep the email sections in the font allotted to email. This has (I hope) been thoroughly
corrected in the actual book, though too late to impress any of the reviewers who had to struggle through the
ARC. Why does this happen? Well, novels, these days, have to be scheduled long in advance, as to production
and date of initial sale, and you could say that it all springs from that. Publishing today encourages a certain
lamentable “hurry up and wait” factor. The ARC’s were gotten out before I would have wanted them to, before
I’d had sufficient time to “sit with” the manuscript, and then I was able to make another pass (actually two
more) taking whatever time I needed. I won’t go into the changes, else I enter spoiler territory, but you can
take my word for it that the ARC is not at all the finished text.
Actually I had hoped to have the final corrected galley sheets independently proofread by my friend John
Berry, but, to my disappointment, scheduling did not allow. One day I will manage to do that, and then there
will be no errata, and no non-deliberate grammatical errors whatever, but he won’t mess with my sentence
fragments at all.
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
posted 1:26 PM
Someone else wonders what I think of pirated copies of my work available as free downloads on the net.
Downloading a novel from the net is not something I’d ever likely do myself, but mainly because reading
novels on the screen of a PDA is something I might get into only if I were incarcerated, with no alternative.
And I’m sufficiently (and with good reason) aware of the book > royalty > author chain to want to feed those
authors whose work feeds me creatively. I make it a point to buy the books of writers whose work and
presence I value.
As for other people downloading pirated copies, that’s their business. The business part of my business,
currently, is about publishers producing legitimate editions of my work, which they then distribute for sale, a
certain predetermined portion of the price returning to me as royalties (against the publisher’s cash advance).
But I think that that has to be looked at in a broader context, today, so I suggest you read this piece by Tim
O'Reilly, recommended to me yesterday by Kevin KellY:
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA’s. Hardcover
books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I’d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA’s.
I was in a bar in Barcelona, on the Rambla, with Alberto Manguel, just before Christmas, talking, as it
happened, about why books, the paper kind, are such a good thing. Neither of us suggested building beds
from them, but Alberto did say that he thought the book, like the wheel and the knife, was one of those
perfectly and completely evolved inventions, an idea what wasn’t really going to be improved upon.
Alberto, who was once Jorge Luis Borges' personal secretary, is among other things a great anthologist, and,
by virtue of that, a sort of meta-librarian, which is a very Borgesian thing to be.
Afterward, walking back to my hotel along one of the safer thoroughfares crossing the heroin-drifted maze of
the Barrio Chino (you can tell them because they have lights, Christmas decorations, and policemen) I wished
that I had been able to more clearly describe, for Alberto, the level of technology that this
book/PDA/download business has always conjured up for me.
The Borgesian meta-library contains a copy of every book ever written, but my dream-artifact is already, and
always, every book every written, on demand -- yet feels, looks, and even smells exactly like an ordinary
hardcover book. Only the content is protean. That simple. The end of the world as we know it, and a good
read every single night.
Shelve the PDA, thanks. I’m holding out for Borges’ library of Babel in one volume, Strindberg or Spillane as
the heart desires.
And even a rather bland and limited sort of nanotech, on par with the “paint” now being developed for
American combat vehicles, gets us closer…
posted 8:48 AM
Someone wonders whether or not Pattern Recognition might be the start of a new “trilogy”… Someone else
allows as how I don’t so much write trilogies as explore the same territory and characters, from different
directions, over the course of several books.
There’s an essay entitled “Termite Art”, in Manny Farber’s Negative Space, a book of film criticism. I
discovered this essay around the time I was starting to write short fiction, and, though Farber was talking
about film, and particularly about films by a certain kind of American director, I found it hugely encouraging.
The following, please note, is not Farber’s theory, but what I’ve always remembered it to be. Which is all you
need to know for present purposes, as I’m trying to explain something about how I write, and why.
Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) that European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed
to be like a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on it. In
“termite art”, though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in
the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place
in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.
That encouraged me, in 1977, because that felt to me like what I actually did when I attempted fiction. And
my slabs were truly pathetic, particularly my earliest tries, but I could bore a mean and twisty wormhole from
the very start. In another sense, Farber provided an crucial angle of attack, a working attitude: I’d called my
slab “science fiction”, but the art I’d cultivate would be the art of interstice, burrowing from surface to
previously unconnected surface, through the waiting wealth of weirdness I sensed between those surfaces.
But your true trilogy is the epitome of monumental slab: a classical triune form, each third in perfect balance.
(As to whether anyone other the Tolkien ever actually managed one, I don’t know; my own favorite threebook fantasy sequence, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, is as termitically gnawed a creation as you could
hope to find.)
A secret: that line toward the end of Neuromancer, “He never saw Molly again,” forever sundering Case from
the razorgirl, was added very last thing, in a deliberate attempt to prevent myself from ever writing a sequel.
And was, I think, a well-intentioned but ultimately pointless gesture, because I must have somehow been
under the false assumption, then, that Neuromancer was a slab.
The next book I planned, at that point, would have been, believe it or not, a species of space opera. That was
not to be, but not, as some might imagine, because Neuromancer won a bunch of prizes. In real time, that
was mighty slow to happen. What really happened was that I started burrowing into the world of
Neuromancer from a surface inhabited by a nasty little character who liked to call himself Count Zero. I was
discovering my own literary nature: termite. I couldn’t help myself.
The same thing happened with Virtual Light: no intention to write a trilogy, thank you.
Oops.
With Pattern Recognition… Well, I hope not. Not that I don’t like it. (Though actually, if you want to get into
that, my attitude to every book I’ve written was probably best expressed by Vaughan Williams when someone
asked him if he liked the symphony he’d just completed; he said that he wasn’t sure, but that it was what he’d
intended it to be.) The thing I liked most, and hated most, about writing Pattern Recognition, was the extent
to which it required me to stretch.
Were I to bore back into it, tunneling after Win’s childhood in Virginia, say, or Voytek’s life as an artist, or…
Well, the stretch factor wouldn’t be quite the same. I seem to have arrived at a place where the one-off standalone novel, something I aspired to from the very beginning, is the no-net wire-walk required to keep me
entirely (if sometimes resentfully) awake.
Thursday, January 09, 2003
posted 7:17 AM
NEUROMANCER AND DRUGS
Yes, I did, rather textually obviously, take some of those, most notably LSD of the old (and I gather rather
different) variety, though that now seems a lifetime prior to the writing of Neuromancer. My drug of choice
during the composition of Neuromancer, for the record, was O’Keefe’s Extra Old Stock Lager, a central
nervous system depressant, employed primarily to manage the anxiety of composition, and not a practice I’d
particularly recommend to anyone considering taking up writing. In retrospect, I’m of the opinion that writers
who imagine they “use drugs to write” really only manage to write in spite of the drugs they use. There may
be a few truly remarkable exceptions to this. Naked Lunch comes to mind (but not, for me, that much of its
author’s later output).
The most extraordinary thing, for me, about reading William Burroughs’ LAST WORDS, was seeing that WSB
apparently never considered himself to be an addict. Rather he seemed to suppose that he was repeatedly
invaded by one individual “habit” after another, in the face of all evidence that this had in fact been a single
lifelong ride.
Today I am of the opinion, experientially, that the supposedly visionary aspects of any drug experience,
regardless of how marvelous-seeming at the time (or how cocktail-lounge banal) represent no more than a
tweaking of incoming stimuli. “But you’re drowning in the waters the mystics walked on,” said a saddened
theologian to Leary and Alpert, early on, when they had explained the import of Dr. Hoffman’s benison. When
I first read that, I assumed that this guy was just some sour-faced killjoy. In long retrospect, now, I think he
may actually have been trying to tell them something.
MANNY FARBER AND DIVINE BIT-ROT
Someone posts that, just as I imagined I might be doing, I’ve recalled Farber’s idea completely incorrectly.
There, you see: that is the wonderful thing that is higher education! I have been navigating all these years, in
part, on the basis of my own distortion of Farber’s idea. But I do know that when I first read it, I must have
done so with at least a degree of comprehension, and that I felt both enlightened and emboldened. Perhaps I
had it right, then, but it’s become encrusted in memory, overgrown with jewels and barnacles…
If I can do that with Manny Farber’s theory of film, what mightn’t I have done to my own past?
EVER FEEL THE NEED
to peer at me through pinhole video surveillance cameras while I smoke way too many cigarettes and muse
cryptically on my past, the future of technology, or just about anything else you can think of?
If you find yourself sitting bolt upright in bed, at three in the morning, bug-eyed and trembling with the
desire for exactly that, then you need the DVD that one London critic likened to a very long ride with a
loquacious but highly peculiar cabbie: NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES. Someone brought it up in the fora
yesterday, so I feel I should weigh in now with my seal of approval.
Directed by Mark Neale, who had to think very laterally indeed to get around my innate sloth, bashfulness,
and an ingrained distaste for cameras, NO MAPS is, among other things, probably as close to autobiography
as you’re likely get from this particular writer. Mark kept me gaffer-taped into the back of his Lexus Q45 until
Stockholm Syndrome set in, endlessly cruising downtown LA and the quasi-industrial fringes of Greater
Vancouver, and I started talking. And talking.
You couldn’t pay me to sit through it again, mind you, but I have watched it, eyes wide open, in its rather
lengthy entirety. Aside from the fact that I don’t like looking at myself at all, or hearing the sound of my own
voice, I signed off on it 100%. And as no portion of its perhaps largely theoretical and entirely indie-prod
cash-flow heads this way, ever, I feel my hands are clean in recommending it to you:
http://www.nomaps.com/indexmain.html
Aside, I mean, from the fact that it’s about me, which, being me, I find sort of embarrassing in the first place.
But I regard my being me, ultimately, as a sort of cosmic accident.
Friday, January 10, 2003
posted 7:16 AM
CHOCOLATE DOGS
Got up at 4AM today to try to squirt utterly black liquid charcoal into our geriatric dog, which at midnight had
sneakily devoured three-quarters of a bar of Belgian chocolate. Eating chocolate, at least in terms of heart
rate, is the doggie equivalent of eating a golf-ball made of crack, so my wife and daughter had to take her off
to the 24-hour emergency vet, where your credit card makes that $150 sound as you open the door. Last time
I was there, one of our cats had Kitty Ebola, but they pulled her through for roughly the cost of a new iBook.
Strange, how differently substances affect different mammals. The physiology of catnip, though only in cats, is
such that if it worked that way on humans it would be one of the most widely abused substances in the world.
The concentrated essence of one particularly potent Japanese species will cause classic nipped-out kitty-cat
reactions in wild, fully-grown African lions. Something I’d love to see.
At the animal emergency clinic, they speak of Chocolate Dogs, and there was already another one there when
ours arrived.
WHAT TO DO IF YOU MEET ME
Someone was wondering about this.
Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of “William Gibson” we’re both, in
our different ways, complicit in, there’s a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying
rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.
Every once in a while, at a signing, someone will come through who’s so anxious, at the prospect of actually
meeting “the author”, that they’re visibly trembling. This is always deeply weird for me, as my self-image is
such that I am myself the one who’s supposed to be nervous at the prospect of meeting heavily-mediated
humans.
But when I read a post by someone who first read Neuromancer at age nine (and is older now, one supposes,
than, say, twelve) I start worriedly backing into the perception that for some people I’ve had the sort of
impact that my own early favorite authors had on me, and that they can be as unnerved at the prospect of
meeting me as I used to be, as a reader, in that same situation.
What I now believe, though, and what has largely eased this anxiety for me, at the prospect of meeting a
favorite writer, is that it’s never really possible to meet “the author”. You meet, as it were, the personality
through which the entity you’ve enjoyed interfacing with is sometimes, and usually only at a keyboard, able to
manifest. If you haven’t figured this out, you generally set yourself up for disappointment. (The great
exception to this, for me, was William Burroughs, who actually did seem, in every way, to be “the author” -perhaps, paradoxically, because of the consciously mediumistic nature of his work.)
I myself am lucky to greet my own “author” on anything like a regular basis, and my fear (to touch on another
recent thread) is mainly that the feckless, procrastinating, profoundly unreliable bastard will one day fail
permanently to show up, leaving me having to pretend that I know how to write fiction.
1/10/03
Saturday, January 11, 2003
posted 8:20 AM
FROM MY BEDSIDE TABLE
ALBION by Peter Ackroyd
“The Origins of the English Imagination”. I’m a fan.
THE GREAT DISMAL by Bland Simpson
When I was a very small boy we lived for a couple of years not far from the Great Dismal Swamp. A wonderful
book. A gift from my wife.
HOKKAIDO POPSICLE by Isaac Adamson
Recommended, along with its precursor, TOKYO SUCKERPUNCH, by the alarmingly hip French guys at my
local Franco-Japanese bookstore. Faux-Chandleresque pomo-picaresque and sort of engagingly, stubbornly
goofy, these are novels written by someone young enough to never have thought in terms of “genre” in the
first place.
THE TURK by Tom Standage
“The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-century Chess-playing Machine”. Another good one from the
author of the excellent THE VICTORIAN INTERNET.
THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Robert Buderi
Radar. History of. Amazing. A gift from Bruce Sterling.
FOLLIES & GROTTOES by Barbara Jones
A Christmas gift from my daughter, and currently, for me, The Book. 1979 revised edition of the 1953 classic.
Really, really difficult to discribe. Ostensibly a survey of those oddball large-scale British garden-decorations,
but there’s something else coded here, some urgent subcutaneous message about landscape and genius loci;
a vision akin to Arthur Machen’s. Still reading it, but so far I’ve discovered one of the three or four spookiest
passages of English prose I’ve ever read (a description of a garden I’m not sure I’d be willing to visit) and
much else besides. Copiously illustrated, both with photographs and the author’s wonderful drawings.
A STORE CAYCE WOULD BE ENTIRELY COMFORTABLE IN
Huf, 808 Sutter Street, at Jones, San Francisco
One of those places where skate culture has gone so far into design that the skate part vanishes in a stinging
mist of Milano-Japanese minimalism, leaving you in a cool white Cornell box with an array of pharmaceutically
perfect sneakers.
1/11/03
Sunday, January 12, 2003
posted 2:42 PM
WHEN THE TWEAKING HAD TO STOP
In case you’re wondering, it’s alive and well,
That little habit that you left with me,
Here in the suburbs where it’s hard to tell,
If I got bear, or the bear got me.
--Walter Becker, “Down In The Bottom”
Timothy Leary was indeed fond of NEUROMANCER, and I never felt it necessary to point out to him that drugs
in my books didn’t do what drugs in his books did.
In my entire corpus there is never a moment, as far as I can recall, in which a character actually gets
anything out of taking a drug other than being on that particular drug at that particular moment. At no point
do I imply, for instance, that the Rastafarians of Zion Cluster are any wiser, or more perceptive, for all that
ganja they smoke. I think a survey (students take note) would reveal that drug use, in my fiction, is usually
depicted as being somewhat problematic, however much it might be a part of a given culture. (Mimesis, of
course, is in the eye of the beholder.}
One exception to this might seem to be Case’s Beta-P experience in Freeside, but isn’t. Beta-P is actually a
substance our brains secrete when we fall in love. Make of that what you will, but I’d argue that that is not a
drug experience, at least not as intended in the context of the narrative and Case’s character.
Leary once told me that he thought that the best single piece of advice he could give to a writer was to either
write stoned and edit sober, or vice versa. For me, functionally and organically, composition and revision are
aspects of one process, territories on a continuum. The need to chemically define two individual states seems
anything but a shortcut. The journey out from baseline and back seems a waste of time, when, if you accept
that one cannot step twice into the same Heracletian river, simply waiting a while will have the same effect.
The Heracletian “you” that returns to the task is not the “you” that put it down earlier. That, to me, is the
easier shortcut. Of course, if one were really inducing that state only because one enjoyed it, and wished to
repeat it, that would be something else.
And then there is the matter of “state-specific learning”, wherein skills acquired in an altered state prove
difficult, even impossible, to import to an unaltered state. This can be a problem, should one find oneself for
some reason unable (or perhaps, eventually, unwilling) to alter state. I suspect that this, more than anything
else, accounts for much of the (Western) mythology of drugs and creativity. If you learn to write on drugs,
you might find that you feel you need drugs in order to write.
As to drugs facilitating creativity, I think I’ve seen a lot of paintings, most often stacked along the walls of
thrift shops, that argue against this. (Amphetamines, however, can definitely facilitate macramé.) Where are
our great novels of the Sixties drug experience? Somehow, it seems, they didn’t get written, in spite of all that
major facilitation. (Is my Boomer cohort holding out on us? Are they writing them even now? Scary.)
Leary and I had a few telephone conversations, during his final month, that I won’t easily forget. In one of
these, he told me that the experience of accepting that he was dying had brought him an appreciation of the
life he had lived, and the people he had lived it with, that otherwise would have been unattainable. I’m not
sure he said “appreciation”, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t say “understanding”. Whatever words he used, I
think he meant he’d been able to apprehend something, finally, in a way he couldn’t have, otherwise.
His very last call consisted of him inviting me to his wake, and assuring me that I’d be “on the A-list”. I told
him I’d be there, though I knew I wouldn’t. I had an abscessed tooth, was scheduled for a root canal, and,
besides, I knew he wasn’t going to be there. He wouldn’t miss me, and I didn’t want to go all the way down
there just to miss him even more.
1/12/03
posted 5:28 PM
PHILIP K. DICK
I usually skip the “influence” questions, on grounds that if you know your own influences, your digestion’s
pretty sluggish. I’ll make an exception, though, when someone suggests an influence I know I haven’t had,
and PKD is definitely one of those.
I read THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE when I was twelve or so, and a proud new member of the Science
Fiction Book Club. The concept of American vintage collectibles in a Japanese universe stuck with me, and not
much else. Thereafter, I read virtually no PKD. Why? My guess is that my MDR of paranoia was satisfied by
reading Pynchon instead, and my regular nature-of-reality workout provided by the ever-limber Jorge Luis
Borges. Dick just never found a niche in my ecology of favorite writers.
While I’m at this, I’ve never read much Chandler either, another frequently supposed influence. The real deal,
in that particular rainslick modality, for me, is Dashiell Hammett. Invented the vehicle, as far as I know,
though Chandler brought a classier chassis to it.
JOSEPH CORNELL
Deborah Solomon’s wonderful life of Cornell, UTOPIA PARKWAY, hadn’t been written when I wrote COUNT
ZERO, so at that point I knew almost nothing about the man himself. I didn’t actually see a Cornell box in
person until years after CZ, but I had been fascinated, since 1969, with the small black and white photographs
of his boxes that I’d find in histories of Surrealism.
He was believed, in the New York art world of the Forties, to possess complete and perfect recall of the entire
contents of certain Manhattan junk-shops, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer. I came to the conclusion, after
reading Solomon, that, whatever else he had going on, he may well have been autistic.
ALIEN III SCRIPT
I did indeed write that, my first foray into screenwriting, though most net versions seem to have been
condensed. Mine was about 130 pages. It was written under the ludicrous disadvantage of having to write
Ripley out of the story, as Sigourney Weaver at that point seemed not to be getting along with the producers.
(For a remarkably detailed and accurate account of how ALIEN III came to be the film you saw, see THE
ALIEN QUARTET by David Thompson.)
1/12/03
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
posted 7:40 AM
RETURN OF THE REFORGOTTEN
That’s a phrase that pops up in the work of Iain Sinclair, my favorite writer of the past decade or so. I think it
was originally the title of a poetry series at the Royal Albert Hall. I have no idea what it means but I like it a
lot, and felt like seeing it again this morning.
I owe Iain Sinclair an apology. His publisher sent his last novel, LANDOR’S TOWER, for comment (a blurb, in
the trade). I started reading it, and couldn’t stop. I think I read it for four months straight: forward,
backward, then chapters in random order -- then, finally, individual pages randomly. Hobbs Baranov, the
defrocked NSA mathematician in PATTERN RECOGNITION, is related to that experience in some way. But
LANDOR’S TOWER was so intensely peculiar (in all of the best ways) that I never got around to writing the
blurb. It's like that, sometimes.
I was in John Clute’s living room, one morning, toward the start of a book tour, looking out at Camden High
Street, when Clute pointed to a passing figure on the pavement opposite, and said that that was Iain Sinclair,
the poet and bookseller. Clute took down a slim volume titled LUD HEAT. I read the first two pages, broke into
a sweat, and immediately went up the street to Compendium and bought my own copy.
There’ s a new Iain Sinclair novel, but I’m going to hold off for the pleasure of reading it in England, in April,
on the UK tour (no dates yet). You don’t need to be in England to read Sinclair, but it does crank the intensity
in interesting ways. Genuis loci.
READYMADES
Someone used this wonderfully apt expression in asking about the “industrial” candy described toward the end
of ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES: did I make it up, or did I find it somewhere and import it into the text? I found
it, or rather a description of something very like it, I think in GIANT ROBOT, one of my favorite magazines.
It’s a Japanese candy, of course. I looked for it in Tokyo last year, but couldn’t find it. Fashions in candy
change very quickly, in Japan.
Fashions in Japan… I gave my daughter the latest issue of GOTHIC & LOLITA BIBLE for Christmas. Until you’ve
had a leaf through that, you have no idea where cognitive dissonance can take you.
FAVORITE MAGAZINE?
GIANT ROBOT is wonderful, but the one magazine I still buy with keen and absolute regularity, and read
almost immediately, literally cover to cover, is FORTEAN TIMES. Nothing like it.
Another, very different sort of British magazine I’m starting to like a lot is TATE, the magazines of the Tate
Modern. Art magazines generally give me hives, but TATE, recently under new editorship, has become the
exception. I recently published an essay there on those eerie little spheres of exquisitely polished mud that
Japanese pre-schoolers generate.
posted 9:12 AM
DO WHAT THY, LIKE, WILT
Else I be any further mistaken for the Pyschotropic Temperance League, let me stress that I’m not telling
anyone not to do drugs. I’ve only said that I don't believe that drugs actually make you more creative. I
believe that if drugs seem to you to make you more creative, you’re already creative, and might want to look
at why you believe you need to pay someone in order to access it. (In that light, you might also want to
consider the agenda of whoever is telling you that you need to buy a ticket first.)
Those pygmy Grays, though, the ones who keep trying to lasso you with piano-wire whenever you do
ketamine? Those little guys are bad mojo.
THAT NEUROMANCER SCRIPT
I did not write that. (I’m assuming there is still only the one, which as far as I know is by Chuck Russell.) I
had absolutely nothing to do with that. The problem is that shabby Dickensian script-floggers throw away the
original title-page, forge one with my name on it, then charge more. This is an item I refuse to sign. (Though I
have signed a few, bleeding heart that I am, when some poor sucker has stood in line for an hour or more; I
sign them “I didn’t write a word of this – WG.”)
The only other screenplay of mine you are likely to run across is JOHNNY MNEMONIC, which has been
published in its entirety in both hard and soft covers. And which differs substantially, I still like to point out,
from the film as released.
CHOCOLATE DOG REPORT
She’s fine now. (Someone asked.)
SOON, COPENHAGEN
On Monday I’m off to launch the Danish translation of PATTERN RECOGNITION, which is in effect a world first.
(I make it a point to publish each of my books in a Scandinavian translation first. The language chosen for
each one, prior to composition, is the single most crucial factor in my creative process. Had I chosen to first
publish PATTERN RECOGNITION in Norwegian, for instance, it would have become a very different book
indeed.)
Not really. It just worked out that way, this time.
Civilian mission in Copenhagen: a new pair of G-Star shrink-to-fit jeans. It furthers morale to have one nonbook-related goal, for these flying visits. Designed in Holland, made in Tunisia from Japanese denim, a pair of
classic five-pocket G-Star’s is the Buzz Rickman’s of 21st-century blue jeans. Stiff as Formica, reeking of raw
indigo, dark as a moonless night, they are the two-legged equivalent of Proust’s madelaine. Their other great
draw is that, apparently because every fifth Dutchman is now at least as tall as I am, they make them in my
size.
posted 11:51 AM
ANY POST TO THE DISCUSSIONS ATTRIBUTED TO ME, EVER, IS FAKE
I won’t be posting to the discussions. Neither will I post there under any assumed persona(e).
OH WELL, WHILE I’M HERE: BLADERUNNER
BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the
manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was
sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film.
But that didn’t happen. Mainly I think because BLADERUNNER seriously bombed in theatrical release, and
films didn’t pop right back out on DVD in those days. The general audience didn’t seem to get it, relatively few
people saw it, and it simply vanished, leaving nary a ripple. Where it went, though, was straight through the
collective membrane to Memetown, where it silently went nova, irradiating everything from clothing-design to
serious architecture. What other movie has left actual office-buildings in its stylistic wake? Some of this was
alrteady starting to happen in the gap between my submission of the manuscript and the novel’s eventual
publication; I noted with interest, for instance, the fact of a London club called Replicants.
Years later I had lunch with Ridley Scott at The Ivy and we discussed mutual influences. French comics,
bigtime! METAL HURLANT.
posted 7:19 AM
THE HEARTBREAK OF MEMESIS
Psoriasis, that was, in those small ads in the back of POPULAR MECHANICS, next to “Men! Why Wear A
Truss?” (Or, as one Texas wag later had it, “Boys! Raise Giant Sperm In Your Rain-Gutters!”.)
Literary memisis, the imitation of reality, always holds the potential for authorial heartbreak. You always get
something wrong, no matter how hard you try. Yesterday, I was sent this (rather brilliant) link:
http://www.streetsensation.co.uk/camden/hs1_west.htm
And instantly saw, to my amazed chagrin, that, throughout PATTERN RECOGNITION, I have called Inverness
Street, Camden Town, “Aberdeen Street”.
Sometimes one can only say “Arrrrgh!”.
O well. When people ask you where the science fiction is, in PATTERN RECOGNITION, lower your voice and
explain that it’s set in an alternate reality in which Inverness Street is called Aberdeen Street.
WHY I DON’T WRITE SHORT STORIES
Good ones are to novels as bonsai are to trees.
Might as well go ahead and grow the tree.
It’s easier to pay the rent with trees.
posted 10:24 AM
HORSES, BANANAS, AND THE SUPERIOR STRANGENESS OF THE REAL
In NEUROMANCER, a single passing comment about a moth-eaten stuffed horse clues the reader that horses
are extinct (the victims, apparently, of some unspecified equine pandemic).
I can’t remember whether there are any bananas in NEUROMANCER, but it now looks as though bananas
rather than horses are more likely to become extinct, and possibly within a decade of this writing. Bananas
are sterile mutants, clones as it were of the one original, and as such are unable to evolve, making them
sitting ducks for a black fungal rot that evolves like a house on fire, mutating its way around every next
generation of pesticides we throw at it.
“SERIOUS” ARCHITECTURE INFLUENCED BY BLADERUNNER
“Serious”, put next to “architecture”, is probably never a good idea. The part of me (the majority of me,
probably) that wallows in vernacular imprecision likes to speak of, for instance, “a serious hamburger”. I
meant serious in that sense. There’s a fair bit of decidedly non-serious (i.e. not Famous Name) Eighties
architecture around that feels almost comically Bladerunnerish to me. Though the most extreme examples are
all in Japan, which for some people probably doesn’t count.
In the other sense? Well, how about the work of the LA-based team Morphosis? I met those guys. I think they
even gleefully declared that Bladerunner had been a big influence. I liked them.
INFLUENCES GENERALLY
Influences are things to have, and then to get over. The latter being a lot harder than the former. (I, for
example, couldn’t even begin to write until I got over J.G. Ballard.)
But influential impact often has little to do with how well a writer or book might be known. Phil Dick’s entire
corpus has had almost no impact on me, but a single reading of Thomas M. Disch’s ON WINGS OF SONG, I
know for a fact, influenced me mightly.
Has ON WINGS OF SONG turned up here in anyone’s list of “other books”? If not, let me add it. Stunningly
original.
VOICE OF THE FIRE
While I’m recommending fiction you may not have read: VOICE OF THE FIRE by Alan Moore, 1996.
You probably know Alan Moore, but most people seemed to miss this. I know I did. Probably because it would likely
have been reviewed (in the US at least) as “fantasy”. Actually it’s some kind of psychogeographical Magickal
Operation (about which, I suspect, the less we know the better) and a lot like repeatedly sticking your head into a
shoebox full of sharp, cunningly-wrought instruments.
posted 6:00 PM
THE HERMITAGE AT HAWKSTONE
“Hermits were obtained by advertisement, and it never seems to have been difficult to get one; indeed one
young man, Mr. Laurence from Plymouth, did not merely answer advertisements but himself advertised in
1810 that he wished to retire as a hermit (to a convenient spot) and was willing to engage (for a gratuity) to
any nobleman or gentleman who was desirous of having one. One advertisement demanded a hermit who
would live underground invisible, silent, unshaven and unclipped for seven years, in a comfortable room with
books, an organ and delicious food. The reward was to be a pension for life of fifty pounds a year, and a
hermit accepted, but lasted for only four years. Mr. Hamilton’s terms at Pain’s Hill were similar, again the
mystic seven years, again no cutting of hair, nails or beard, again food from the house and no speech. But he
could walk in the grounds, and was provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat, a hassock, and an hourglass.
The recompense was to be seven hundred pounds, but the chosen hermit was caught at the end of three
weeks going down to the pub.
So what with hermits who were invisible, and hermits who gave notice, and doubtless hermits who were rude
to visitors, or posed badly, we must commend the gentleman said to have used a clockwork hermit and also
Sir Richard Hill, who built at Hawkstone a very dimly-lit hermitage and solved all employment problems by
having his hermit stuffed.”
--Barbara Jones, FOLLIES & GROTTOES
CANADIAN SIGNINGS
There will definitely be some. Dates to be posted soon.
The UK tour (England, Scotland, Ireland) will be in April.
OFF TO DENMARK
“Things are much different here than Norway:
Not so cold.”
–-John Cale
If I post from Copenhagen, expect me to be unable to spell, and to complain tediously about non-Mac Eurokeyboards.
posted 10:48 PM
MØNSTER GENKENDELSE
That's PATTERN RECOGNITION in Danish, apparently! "Pattern" is "mønster"? If "poison" is "gift" in German, I
suppose it could be...
I'm posting this from the decidedly odd business center of my hotel. I say decidedly odd because it has an
articulated human skeleton (real, I think). Why? These are the mysteries of soul-delay and transit...
I'll be signing tomorrow, Thursday, at Politikens bookstore. Henrik Palle will interview me from 5-6pm, then I'll sign
from 6-7pm. Y'all come.
posted 5:42 AM
SOUL-DELAY CENTRAL
Mine’s only now being tugged out of the holding-pattern over Frankfurt airport, I think.
Four in the morning, the faithful Italian oil-filled electric heater in my basement office making quizzical ticking
sounds at being turned on at such an odd hour.
Close my eyes and I see wide, cobbled squares in a sort of bluish-gray light, cyclists dressed for the office
pedaling along in their own lane, a different disposition of electric light and candles (candles everywhere,
relatively). It was a lot of fun. My thanks to Karsten, my publisher, and Adelaide, my publicist, and everyone
else at People’s Press!
Here, kindly translated by Adelaide, are a few bits of the Danish press response (I wouldn’t ordinarily quote
my own reviews here, but I usually don’t have any opportunity to read the non-English ones):
This is the book one needs when introducing the genre of science fiction to women.
--Børsen
A sensitive cultural and technological seismograph.
--Information
A sort of literary counterpart to Naomi Kleins’ NO LOGO, without the moral hangovers.
--Ekstrabladet
So: Are is his books neo-crap? Nope!
Are we not meeting the sarcastic and irreplaceable person that has always been behind the brand: William
Gibson.
--Berlingske
I'd like stickers for the English-language editions, please, that say "NEO-CRAP? NOPE!"
Actually I can't have a NO LOGO hangover because I haven't read NO LOGO. This is indicative of my method,
though: I saw the title NO LOGO, and literalized it into Cayce's logo-allergy. High-speed low-drag minimalism
of sourcing, or sheer ideological laziness? ("Just say nope!")
My sensitive cultural and technological seismograph is telling me that it's time for breakfast, but it's still two
hours 'til the good places open.
There really was an articulated human skeleton in the Business Center of the hotel in Copenhagen. Though I
was made more uneasy by the Olivetti PC I was using. Somehow its drive was connected in some very nasty
way to the speakers, which must have been set for max volume, so that the room was constantly filled with
sounds of the drive doing its business. When I entered the room, in the dark, it was doing that, loudly, and it
was doing that when I left.
I do, as someone pointed out, keep an eye on the discussions, and enjoy them, but there's already enough
going on there that I can't hope to keep up with everything, at least in terms of responding to individual
queries.
I'm particularly enjoying the thread on obscure cyberpunkoid cinema. In light of that, does anyone know the
name of that wonderfully low-budget Italian effort about the superstar game-designer who gets dramatically
involved with the sad-ass SuperMario-like character in the game he's designed? The game segments are like
Pixelvision, and look to have had an even lower budget than the film itself. I had a copy of this a few years
ago and loved it. Moments of wonderfully unpretentious brilliance, particularly in the throwaway bits of
comically ultraviolent street-culture.
My favorite moments of c-punkish filmmaking tend to be exactly that, moments, and often to be isolated in
really exceptionally bad films.
My goal for JOHNNY MNEMONIC, from the start, was that it should feel something like that but consist of
nothing but those moments. A tricky act to pull it off, it turns out, but one sees these things so much more
clearly in retrospect. (Among the many things I find charming about the Danes is that, uniquely among all the
peoples of the world, they seem to have viewed JOHNNY MNEMONIC as having been made with a certain
sense of broad irony. Which it was, though Sony's final cut did everything it could to cancel that.)
GUTTER HISTORY OF LONDON
Someone asked for a good one. Kellow Chesney's THE VICTORIAN UNDERWORLD (1970) is my bible there, and one
of my all-time favorite books. I went back to it repeatedly for THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, but before that it was the
major influence on the criminal milleau of NEUROMANCER and the sequels, which I always saw as being quite
Victorian (my other source for that having been the original GANGS OF NEW YORK, which I'd read at about the
same time).
posted 7:06 AM
YEP, IT’S NIRVANA
Starring Christopher Lambert and a cast of dozens. And I suppose it is a bad film, in the ordinary sense of “a
bad film”, but I would value it over innumerable conventionally better films on the basis of a mere handful of
“moments”. Or perhaps because it somehow suggests a better film, perhaps even a better, or more purely
“cyberpunk” film than we’ve yet seen. Or because, watching it repeatedly, I actually felt my own imagination
come alive, something that seldom happens as I watch a really “good” film.
I wasn’t entirely alone in my reaction to NIRVANA, but don’t go to it expecting BLADERUNNER. You’ll either
find it a very bad film indeed or a somewhat magical (if minor) experience. For me the really interesting ones
are always like that.
STEPPIN’ LOCUST WRITES
“By stacking his cyberspace atop the oldest VR in the Book, readers recognize that we have always been living
and operating in multiple virtual worlds simultaneously. When Mamoru Oshii takes hold of this trope, and
torques its compounded strata to implicate the slightly more broad-band 'literacy' of the cinema, we recoil,
stunned, that indubitably there are agencies of affect molding our layered presumptions as to the
contemporaniety of reality.”
Well, shit, yes. What she/he said. I could actually recognize something like my best guess, in that post, at
what it might be that I actually do when I write. Or part of what I do, anyway. But the closest I ever get to
knowing that is when someone says something like this (and it’s truly remarkable, how seldom academics
ever do). However, it’s probably best for me to avoid thinking in these terms, else I become self-conscious
about torqueing my tropes in public.
WITH BORGES IN BARCELONA
Several weeks ago I attended Kosmopolis, a new literary festival in Barcelona, and explored, with Pat
Cadigan, an extraordinary exhibition of Borgesiana entitled Borges And Buenos Aires. The most memorable
(and disturbing) aspect of this exhibition was the technology employed in the display of manuscripts,
photographs and first editions: they were arranged beneath glass treated in such a way that the viewer’s
experience of the object duplicated the condition of Borges’ encroaching blindness. The field of vision
narrowed radically; each artifact was visually available in utmost clarity, but tightly framed in a pale and
featureless fog, each visitor becoming “the blind librarian”.
I had forgotten Borges, though one never does, really. As the English gloss of the exhibition’s program has it,
“There is a place we all know, no less, which we will never reach, and there is a place that tends to be
forgotten, where we always are.”
Honk if you love Borges.
posted 6:40 PM
A NOVEL OF THE RECENT PAST
PATTERN RECOGNITION is set in the summer of 2002.
Please remember that those are uncorrected proofs you’re reading, and that that is not just a matter of
typographical errors. The text of the ARC is the text of the manuscript I turned in last year, in the first week
of April. It has since been quite substantially revised, top to bottom, twice; Material has been added, material
has been subtracted, and much busy tweaking undertaken generally.
The text of the ARC should not be regarded as the text of the novel. Ever. Some of the current discussions
hinge on details that have since been removed, or altered.
THE YAWNING OF THE TUPPERWARE
Douglas Coupland likens the touring novelist to what was once a rather nice salad, but has now been shut up
too long in Tupperware.
Maybe it’s just the Danish jetlag, but today I feel the Tupperware yawn wide.
WHERE TO GET FORTEAN TIMES IN VANCOUVER
Actually, there aren’t that many places.
Magpie, on Commercial.
The magazine store at the T-intersection of McKenzie and West Broadway, more or less opposite the
Starbuck’s.
The magazine store on Granville, just north of Broadway, east side of the street, opposite the galleries.
Does Your Mother Know? on West Fourth.
Those are the only four places in town that carry it, as far as I know. (BIZARRE, which I don’t often buy, is
more widely distributed.)
posted 10:29 PM
IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH)
As the Tupperware yawns wider still, and PATTERN RECOGNITION's "pub date" looms (which sounds like
having a pint or two down the Hog And Grommet with that nice girl from Accounting, but isn't) I find myself
starting to have that I Don't Have A Life feeling. Pre-tour angst. As of next Monday I will be on tour. So, in an
effort to cut myself some slack from the few precious civilian days remaining, I 'm opting to post the following
talk, which I gave last year at the Vancouver Art Gallery. VAG had mounted an ambitious if oddly titled (The
Uncanny) show around the theme of "the cyborg". Since this seemed to be "the cyborg" as academics
understand "the cyborg", and not just a cyborg, or cyborgs, as you or I might understand cyborg(s) I took it
upon myself to lower the tone of the proceedings with the following. I really couldn't get much of a read on
how it was recieved, but I figured these people were used to keeping their cards pretty close to their chests.
Meeting some of them did help me, though, later, with the character of Dorotea.
It's long, as blog-entries go, and is probably way too basic for most of you, but maybe someone will find it of
some interest. This is the first time it's appeared anywhere (and very likely the last). Meanwhile, I'll have a
little extra time to pretend I don't have to go on a book tour. (Don't worry. Once I'm out there, I get all too
into it.)
MY TALK ABOUT "THE CYBORG":
The first intimations of the cyborg, for me, were the robots in a 1940 Republic serial called THE MYSTERIOUS
DR. SATAN. These robots had been recycled from the earlier UNDERSEA KINGDOM, 1936, and would appear
again in the brilliantly-titled ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE, 1952. I have those dates and titles not
because I’m any sort of expert on Republic serials, or even on science fiction in general, but because I’ve
bookmarked Google. But we’ll get back to Google later.
THE MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN was among my earliest cinematic experiences. I probably saw it in 1952, and I
definitely saw it on a television whose cabinet was made out of actual wood, something that strikes me today
as wholly fantastic. These Republic cliffhangers, made originally for theatrical release, one episode at a time,
were recycled in the Fifties for local broadcast in the after-school slot, after half an hour of black and white
Hollywood cartoons.
I can remember being utterly terrified by Dr. Satan’s robots, which had massive tubular bodies, no shoulders,
hands like giant Visegrip pliers, and limbs made of some sort of flexible metal tubing. They had been on the
job since 1936, which contributed strongly to the weirdness of their design-language, but I had no way of
knowing that. I just knew that they were the scariest thing I’d ever seen, ever, and I could barely stand to
watch them menace the hero or his girlfriend.
I wonder now what I knew about robots. That they were called “robots”, and were “mechanical men”. That
these particular robots were the servants of Dr. Satan. Did I believe that they were autonomous, or that Dr.
Satan controlled them? Probably the latter, as menacing-robot scenes in serials of this sort often involved a
sort of telepresence, and the suggest of remote control. Cut from robot, menacing, to evil scientist in his lab,
watching robot menace on television screen. Evil scientist closes giant knife-switch, which causes robot to
menace even harder.
Given that I was watching this material in the early Fifties, I would shortly become familiar with the
expression “electronic brain”, which like “rocket ship” was there as a marker of something anticipated but not
yet here. Actually, it already was here, and had been since World War II, but most people didn’t know it yet.
And that is where postwar science fiction, in retrospect, got it most broadly wrong: all eyes were on the rocket
ship, relatively few on the electronic brain. We all know, today, which one’s had the greater impact.
An electronic brain. What would you do with one of those, if you had one? In 1940, you’d probably stick it in a
machine of some kind. Not one of Dr. Satan’s recycled Atlantean robots, but something practical. Say a
machine that could weld leaf-springs in a Milwaukee tractor factory.
This, really, is about what science fiction writers call “Steam Engine Time”. The observable fact that steam,
contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient
Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine
Time.
What you wouldn’t do, in 1940, with an electronic brain, would be to stick it on your desk, connect it somehow
to a typewriter, and, if you, had one, a television of the sort demonstrated at the 1939 Worlds fair in New
York. At which point it would start to resemble… But it’s not Steam Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that.
Although you would, or anyway you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll come
back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented what we now think of as the militaryindustrial complex. He did that for Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for.
I can’t remember a robot ever scaring me that much, after DR. SATAN’s robots. They continued to be part of
the cultural baggage of sf, but generally seemed rather neutral, at least to me. Good or bad depending on
who was employing them in a given narrative. Isaac Asimov wrote a whole shelf of novels working out a set of
hard-wired ethics for intelligent robots, but I never got into them. The tin guys didn’t, by the Sixties, seem to
me to be what was interesting in science fiction, and neither did space ships. It was what made Asimov’s
robots intelligent in the first place that would have interested me, had I thought of it, but I didn’t.
What interested me most in the sf of the 60s was the investigation of the politics of perception, some of
which, I imagine, could now be seen in retrospect as having been approached through various and variously
evolving ideas of the cyborg. Stories about intelligent rocket ships and how humans might interact with them,
or stories of humans forced through circumstances to become the non-electronic brain in an otherwise
traditional robot. A sort of projection was underway, an exploration of boundaries. And meanwhile, out in the
world, the cyborg was arriving. Or continuing to arrive.
Though not in science fiction’s sense of the cyborg, which was that of a literal and specific human-machine
hybrid. There’s a species of literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as well: it’s easier to
depict the union of human and machine literally, close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true
and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace
The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched DR. SATAN
on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We
all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of growing itself an extended communal
nervous system, then, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a
distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words.
What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and
amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly
we took it all for granted.
Science fiction’s cyborg was a literal chimera of meat and machine. The world’s cyborg was an extended
human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe
we’re yet to understand it. Watching television, we each became aspects of an electronic brain. We became
augmented. In the Eighties, when Virtual Reality was the buzzword, we were presented with images
of…television! If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don’t need wraparound deep-immersion
goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see,
you see nothing else.
The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact
for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still
employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which
of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television
are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic
nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are
implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot
touch it.
We are it. We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.
Steam Engine Time. Somewhere in the late Seventies. In garages, in California. Putting the electronic brain on
the table. Doing an end run around Dr. Asimov’s ethical robots. The arms and legs, should you require them,
are mere peripherals. To any informed contemporary child, a robot is simply a computer being carried around
by its peripherals. Actually I think this accounts for the generally poor sales of several recent generations of
commercial humanoid robots; they’re all more than a little embarrassing, at some level. Sony’s Aibo, a robot
dog, does slightly better in the market. Who today wouldn’t simply prefer to have a faster and more powerful
computer, faster internet access? That’s where the action is. That augmentation. Of the user. Of us.
Actually the return of those humanoid robots has disappointed me. I’d thought that everyone had gotten it:
that you don’t need to go anthropocentric in order to get work done. That in fact you get less work done, far
less bang for your buck, if you do. My idea of an efficient robot today would be an American Predator drone
with Hellfire missiles, or one of the fly-sized equivalents allegedly on Pentagon CAD-CAM screens if not
already in the field. Though actually those are both cyborgs, or borg-aspects, as they are capable both of
autonomous actions and actions via telepresent control. When the human operator uplinks, operator and
Predator constitute a cyborg. Bruce Sterling wrote a short story, in the early Eighties, in which the
protagonists were the Soviet equivalents of Predator drones, but literal cyborgs: small fighter aircraft
controlled by brain-in-bottle on-board pilots, with very little left in the way of bodies. But why, today, bother
building those (unless of course to provide the thrill of piloting to someone who might otherwise not
experience it, which would be a worthy goal in my view). But for purely military purposes, without that live
meat on board, aircraft are capable of executing maneuvers at speeds that would kill a human being. The next
generation of US fighter aircraft, for this and other tactical reasons, will almost certainly be physically
unmanned.
Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a
comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to
experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red
Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.
This is the sort of thing that science fiction, traditionally, is neither good at predicting, nor, should we predict
it, at describing.
Vannever Bush, who I mentioned earlier, was not a science fiction writer. In World War II he was chief
scientific adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development,
where he supervised the work that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He more or less invented the
military-industrial complex, as we call it today. In 1945 he published an article in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY
titled “As We May Think”. In this article he imagined a system he called the “memex”, short for “memory
extender”. If there was a more eerily prescient piece of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the
20th Century, I don’t know it.
This article is remembered most often, today, for having first envisioned what we call the principle of
“hyperlinking”, a means of connecting disparate but conceptually involved units of data. But I’ve never read it
that way, myself. I think Vannevar Bush envisioned the cyborg, in the sense I’ve been suggesting we most
valuably use that word.
One remarkable thing about this is that he seemed to have no particular idea that electronics would have
anything to do with it. He begins by imagining an engineer, a technocrat figure, equipped with a “walnutsized” (his phrase) camera, which is strapped to the center of his forehead, it’s shutter operated by a handheld remote. The technocrat’s glasses are engraved with crosshairs. If he can see it, he can photograph it.
Bush imagines this as a sort of pre-Polaroid microfilm device, “dry photography” he calls it, and he imagines
his technocrat snapping away at project-sites, blueprints, documents, as he works.
He then imagines the memex itself, a desk (oak, he actually suggests, reminding me of my television set in
1952) with frosted glass screens inset in its top, on which the user can call up those images previously
snapped with that forehead-walnut. Also in the desk are all of the user’s papers, business records, etc., all
stored as instantly retrievable microfiche, plus the contents of whole specialized libraries.
At this point, Bush introduces the idea which earns him his place in conventional histories of computing: the
idea of somehow marking “trails” through the data, a way of navigating, of being able to backtrack. The
hyperlink idea.
But what I see, when I look at Bush’s engineer, with his Polaroid walnut and his frosted-glass, oak-framed
desktop, is the cyborg. In both senses. A creature of Augmented rather than Virtual Reality. He is…us! As
close to the reality of being us, today, as anyone in 1945 (or perhaps in 1965, for that matter) ever managed
to get! Bush didn’t have the technology to put beneath the desktop, so he made do with what he knew, but
he’s describing the personal computer. He’s describing, with an accuracy of prediction that still gives me
goose-bumps, how these devices with be used. How the user’s memory with be augmented, and connected to
whole Borgesian libraries, searchable and waiting. Google! The memex, awaiting the engineer’s search-string!
But in our future, awaiting the interconnectedness of desktops. Awaiting the net. Bush didn’t see that, that
we’d link memex’s, and create libraries in common. Steam Engine Time: he couldn’t go there, though he got
closer than anyone else, in his day, to getting it.
There’s my cybernetic organism: the internet. If you accept that “physical” isn’t only the things we can touch,
it’s the largest man-made object on the planet, or will be, soon: it’s outstripping the telephone system, or
ingesting it, as I speak. And we who participate in it are physically a part of it. The Borg we are becoming.
So for me the sci-fi cyborg, the meat/metal hybrid, is already another of those symbols, somewhat in the way
that Dr. Satan’s robots had their origin, as symbols, in a Czech satirist’s view of alienated labor. The real deal
is that which we already participate in daily, meld with, grow into.
The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we’ve stopped evolving, in the biological sense.
I’ll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush
never dreamed of, and neither, I’m sure, have I.
Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives,
prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the
neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the
global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval. They fascinate, much as
torture instruments do, or reveal erotic possibilities to the adventurous, or beckon as stages or canvasses for
the artist, but I doubt that very many of us will ever go there. The real cyborg will be deeper and more subtle
and exist increasingly at the particle level, in a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a
hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine -- as we might try, today,
to imagine a world without electronic media.
posted 6:28 AM
THE MATRIX: FAIR COP
I was, as you can probably imagine, prepared not to like THE MATRIX. A friend finally dragged me to see it in
Santa Monica, when I was taping NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES.
I liked it a lot. I even went back to see it a second time in theatrical release, which is unusual for me.
I thought it was more like Dick’s work than mine, though more coherent, saner, than I generally take Dick to
have been. A Dickian universe with fewer moving parts (for Dick, I suspect, all of the parts were, always,
moving parts). A Dickian universe with a solid bottom (or for the one film at least, as there’s no way of
knowing yet where the franchise is headed). It’s thematically gnostic, something NEUROMANCER isn’t.
Whatever of my work may be there, it seems to me to have gotten there by exactly the kind of creative
cultural osmosis I’ve always depended on myself. If there’s NEUROMANCER in THE MATRIX, there’s THE
STARS MY DESTINATION and DHALGREN in NEUROMANCER, and much else besides, down to and including
actual bits of embarrassingly undigested gristle. And while I was drawing directly from those originals, and
many others, the makers of THE MATRIX were drawing through a pre-existing “cyberpunk” esthetic, which
constituted as much of a found object, for them, as “science fiction” did for me. From where they were, they
had the added luxury of choosing bits from, say, Billy Idol’s “Neuromancer” as well.
When I began to write NEUROMANCER, there was no “cyberpunk”. THE MATRIX is arguably the ultimate
“cyberpunk” artifact. Or will be, if the sequels don’t blow. I hope they don’t, and somehow have a hunch they
won’t, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to worry about it.
The other thing I’m glad of is that a film of NEUROMANCER, whatever else I might want it to be, definitely
doesn’t, now, have to be THE MATRIX, or even anything very much like it.
AN END TO CYBERPUNK?
Someone asks if I might please put an end to it.
Would that I could, but it just doesn't work that way. "Cyberpunk", which you'll note I put in quotes or not, as the
irony level in my bloodstream fluctuates, has a life of its own. Has in fact been possessed of a stubborn vitality since
it first hove into view circa 1981. At this late stage of the game, though, my belief is that, outside of a certain
narrow discourse in literary history, its best use today is as an indicator of a particular generic flavor in pop culture.
In the way that "cowboy" functions in "cowboy boots", which generally has nothing to do with anyone, particularly
the wearer of the boots in question, being any kind of cowboy. "That's kind of a cyberpunk video." We all know what
the speaker means.
posted 10:30 AM
ERRATA: SIGNAL TO NOISE
There was a copy of the actual Putnam hardcover waiting, when I returned from Denmark. I haven't looked at
it. The tour-readings are, in some very serious way, both the first and the last time I get to access the text, so
I prefer to come to each reading (always a "new" part of the book) as if I were seeing it for the first time
(which in a way I am).
Be that as it may: lots of people, not least myself, have tried very hard to reduce the noise for you, the
reader. We've all done the best we could, under our particular circumstances, but there will still be some
noise. With the fable of the princess and the pea in mind, I advise you to concentrate on the signal.
IT'S NEW ZEALAND DAY HERE IN THE BASEMENT...
I'm waiting for at least one interview call. Tomorrow is Canada.
So I will fob another piece of old speechifying off on you. Actually this isn't a speech but it sure reads like one.
My syntax must have twisted, as I got out of bed, the day I wrote this. This originally appeared in FORBES
ASAP, which (I think) is a sort of glossy hi-corporate giveaway. Funny how I work things out, in pieces like
this, often written for publication where I figure relatively few people will see them.
This was was published as DEAD MAN SPEAKS:
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
I sometimes think that nothing really is new; that the first pixels were particles of ochre clay, the bison
rendered in just the resolution required. The bison still function perfectly, all these millennia later, and what
screen in the world today shall we say that of in a decade? And yet the bison will be there for us, on whatever
screens we have, carried out of the primal dark on some impulse we each have felt, as children, drawing. But
carried nonetheless on this thing we have always been creating, this vast unlikely mechanism that carries
memory in its interstices; this global, communal, prosthetic memory that we have been building since before
we learned to build.
We live in, have lived through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetting
was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because
there was once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not
run as the living run. Because the world’s attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the mountain
valleys of my Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.
When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel”, we are seldom
struck by the peculiarity of our situation: that a dead man sings.
In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a moment ago. It is
something new, and I sometimes feel that, yes, everything has changed. (This perpetual toggling between
nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the
central driving tension of my work.)
Our “now” has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecidently elastic. The half-life of mediaproduct grows shorter still, ‘til it threatens to vanish altogether, everting into some weird quantum logic of its
own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quark-like blink. Yet once admitted to the culture’s consensuspantheon, certain things seem destined to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large
part, of the rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation.
And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even
more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of
time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all
these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge?
The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital Now.
But then, again, perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting
for us.
posted 2:38 PM
“A SMALL MESH ZIP POCKET STORES ANYTHING WET"
Yakuza fingers? Tissue samples? A margarita in freefall?
Forget THE NEW YORKER; this is fame.
http://www.athleta.com/product_detail.cfm?product_id=1338
“New from Victoria’s Sprawl, these classic five-pocket jeans in traditional burgundy calfskin sport double-thick
knees, plus slender 9” pockets on either thigh, just right for a balisong and a spring-steel cosh…”
MY FAVORITE “WILLIAM GIBSON” NOVELS…
Well, not that I’ve gone back and re-read them recently (or, really, ever) but I seem to be fonder of COUNT
ZERO, from the first set, and IDORU from the second. COUNT ZERO because the ace cyberspace cowboy turns
out to be, initially at least, a completely hapless teenage dork, and IDORU because I love the idea of a little
girl from a Seattle suburb getting on the plane to Tokyo, having crazy adventures there, and coming back
without anyone even having noticed.
But THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE is the only book with my name on it that I ever go back to and deliberately read
for pleasure. Probably because it feels to me like neither Bruce nor I wrote it, and our Third Man proved to be
such a singularly weird dude. There actually are a few (very few) people who shyly confess to never having
liked a word I’ve written, aside from TDE, which they love. They tend to be computer scientists or professors
of evolutionary theory.
WILL PATTERN RECOGNITION BE PUBLISHED IN SPAIN?
Actually, I don’t know. Ask Minotauro, who currently have my backlist there.
When I was in Barcelona it was explained to me how excruciatingly difficult the job of translation is, not only
because of the texts themselves, but because the resulting translation must be able to work simultaneously in
Spain, Argentina, Chile, Mexico – all slightly different in terms of certain usages.
PAPA LEGBA
The Archangel Gabriel might possibly cut some ice, but I personally would not want to have either Saint
Isadore of Seville or Saint Clare of Assisi standing in for the Lord of the Crossroads.
As my friend Johan says, he's the business.
February
Saturday, February 01, 2003
posted 9:22 AM
COLUMBIA SADNESS
When I was a little boy I believed passionately in space travel. I had a book by Willy Ley, with illustrations by
Chesley Bonestell. The hard covers were slick and glossy, and if you ran your fingernail over them, hard, the
cardboard beneath the glossy coating dented. Eventually the coating broke, and started to peel off, and the
glossy night behind the stars was dull, and sticky as tar, collecting lint.
The grown son of my mother’s best friend was a pilot in the Air Force. He came to visit us, in uniform, and I
showed him my Willy Ley book and told him about rockets, missiles and space travel. He said it wasn’t
possible. Would never happen. That Willy Ley was wrong. That you couldn’t do that with rockets. I argued
with him. It was the first time in my life, probably, that I openly disagreed with an adult.
Later on, I built kits like these:
http://www.strangenewworlds.com/issues/feature-14-monogram.html
The Monogram Space Taxi was a particular favorite, and I kept the space-suited figures long after the taxi
itself had broken up and vanished.
Broken up and vanished. In the sky over Nacogdoches County. And I’m sad all the way back to the little boy
with his stiff black book and his Bonestell rockets.
But Willy was right, and nobody ever said it would be risk-free.
If it were, it wouldn’t be glorious.
And it’s only with these losses that we best know that it really is.
Sunday, February 02, 2003
posted 1:24 PM
MEMORY PALACE
The irony here is that I myself don’t have a copy of this. The phrase “No maps for these territories” comes
from the Memory Palace text, though I didn’t recognize it when the maker of the film first suggested it as a
title.
I’ve seen a video of the piece, as performed by La Fura dels Baus, the Barcelona street-performance group
who were a sort of cross between Survival Research Labs and Panther Modern (Dance). Mind-boggling, as
indeed were the other La Fura performances I was lucky enough to see in person. (The outbreak of the Gulf
War caused me to miss La Fura’s one actual collaboration with SRL, in Barcelona; security issues around the
show’s planned portside venue caused a delay, and we had to fly home before a new venue was arranged.
Hanging with La Fura and SRL as they prepped, though, was as real-life cyberpunk as it ever got, for me.)
There's now a permanent link to the NO MAPS site on the Source Code page.
ONE-DAY LAYDOWN
That’s what publishers shoot for: the new book in every store on the same day, and not sooner. Tomorrow’s
that day, for PATTERN RECOGNITION. I get up way too early, fly to Seattle in a funny little Air Canada prop
effort, and it begins. The first signing of the tour will be:
Monday, February 3, 2003
University Bookstore
Kane Hall
4326 University Way N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105
7:00 PM
Reading, Signing and Q&A
Turn up and see a fresh, pristine, pre-Tupperware author read (probably) the novel’s opening scene.
Thereafter, check in here to chart the steady decline into interview-fried zombiehood.
FAVORITE BOOK-TOUR GADGET
Fold-and-compress packing units.
Ever wonder how flight-attendants get much at all into those dinky little wheel-on bags? They’re using foldand-compress units. With a little practice, you can learn to fold a freshly-pressed shirt (or just about anything
else, up to and including a suit) around a thin plastic guide, remove the guide, then use Velcro and nylon
mesh to precision-squash your folded shirt flatter than a pancake -- and keep it that way ‘til you need it, at
which point it unfolds, relatively wrinkle-free. These units easily double the amount of clothing you can carry
(in wearable shape) in a given bag.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SHERATON, DR. JEEP PLAYS ON AND ON AND ON...
Bruce Sterling introduced me to Sisters of Mercy on our DIFFERENCE ENGINE tour, and "Vision Thing" became
our official tour anthem; so, no, I wasn't listening to them when I wrote NEUROMANCER. I was listening to
what Andrew Eldritch listened to in order to write those songs, I intuit.
He's one fine lyricist, is Andrew Eldritch.
As is Nick Cave. I'd like to write a novel as good as THE BOATMAN'S CALL.
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
posted 5:23 PM
OUT AND ABOUT, WITHOUT A LAPTOP
Day two, still not very far from home but starting to see that blogging on the fly and in internet cafes is
probably not the best way to keep this updated. Though on the other hand I suspect I get to see more things
because I don't travel with a camera. In the peculiar mobile fishbowl of a book tour, the only time I'd have to
use a laptop would be the time I have to sit alone, staring blankly into space. I suspect that those moments
serve some vital function.
THE GOLLANCZ NEUROMANCER GAME THAT ONLY I GET TO PLAY
The real "hardcover first" of NEUROMANCER was published in England by Victor Gollancz Ltd. With its
distinctive yellow jacket and relatively miniscule print-run, this has become the most valuable book with my
name on it. Actually I'm not sure what they go for, today, but I'd guess well over $1000 in fine condition. A
tour of this scale will usually bring about half a dozen of these out of the woodwork. Saw the first one last
night, at Kane Hall
TONIGHT'S READING
Tuesday, Feb 4, Eliott Bay Books. You know the drill.
Tomorrow, San Francisco.
Friday, February 07, 2003
posted 10:50 PM
Still Friday, but doubt I'll have time to blog tomorrow. Back from Booksmith, in the Haight. Another nice
crowd. Met the translator of that odd Sterling-Gibson Italian anthology (our mutually collected non-fiction, I
think) that has no equivalent in English.
"They have recently hosted authors such as Chuck Barris and Mariel Hemingway," advised Putnam publicity.
Right. Gotcha.
Tomorrow it's M Is For Mystery in San Mateo. Fair enough: it's a book about a mystery.
Sunday, a counter-intuitive jog back up the coast, to Portland, before heading south again to LA.
This is all (or, anyway, mostly) pretty enjoyable. The dread Tupperware phenomenon hasn't set in yet at all -perhaps the result of Dave, my media-escort for the Bay area, having indoctrinated me into the world of
Extreme Polka (bands with names like The Polkaholics, and Polkacide). Big cherry-colored Lincoln towncar,
Polkacide at full volume. Maybe not what the fans expect but you do what it takes to keep the Tupperware off,
right?
posted 8:37 AM
Friday. San Francisco. Have located net node in side lobby of small but perfectly-formed hotel. Not much use,
though, as I spend all my time either out signing stock, in my room doing phone interviews, at
readings/signings, or travelling between same.
Numerous crossings of the Bay Bridge, which really would be an interesting place to walk around and buy a
hotdog.
Cody's was great, last night; the very funny woman who introduced me had made up "NEO-CRAP? NOPE!"
stickers, some customers availing themselves of these when it came time to have their books signed.
Sorry I'm not able to post more frequently, but I seem to be just too 20th-century an entity to simultaneously
maintain virtual presence and be on the road meeting live humans.
Will try to get back later and add a little more.
Thanks to the extremely pleasant woman at Book Passage in Corte Madera, yesterday!
Off to the 9:30 phoner. Lunch later with LOCUS, the hometown paper of science fiction.
Tonight, the Haight. See ya.
posted 9:42 AM
FORCE MAJEUR
In a cybercafe on Spring Street. Outside, New Yorkers are looking increasingingly Dickensian as the
temperature plummets further still, their faces turning interesting colors.
This is one of those Dancing Lessons From God moments, as I was supposed to be getting to DC about now,
but it's snowing there. Actually it's *really* snowing, there, unless the Weather Channel folks are just waxing
Ballardian.
My friend's Russian wife can't understand why Americans get all worked up over snow. Well, I can get worked
up over it being this *cold*, something I mercifully haven't experienced in years, living in the Rain Shadow. It
wasn't this cold in Copenhagen, even.
Worth it, though, to be back here. I haven't, not since before 9-11, and I've been loving every minute of it.
One odd moment, sitting in the lower lobby of the SoHo Grand, Cayce's entrance suddenly unspooled and I
looked up, almost expecting her to walk in. And simultaneously reminded I don't know what she looks like;
she's written "from inside".
No time to even begin checking out all the posts, but thanks to everyone, as usual.
Ands see you. I hope, in DC.
Probably a good idea to check that the DC-area signings aren't snowed out, if you were planning to attend.
They probably aren't, but it's worth checking.
PRE-SIGNED COPIES
Someone was worrying about these. Yep, they're real. I signed (ouch) a couple of thousand "tipsheets", to be
bound in at the factory. Mainly, I assumed, they were to go to places I physically can't, on this tour.
posted 7:32 AM
ONE BIG-ASS BLIZZARD
Just walked up Broadway to Spring, *middle* of the street. Reminds me of Cayce's memories of London in the
snow (which are of course mine, from another book-tour, long ago). I was poised, literally, to train up to Penn
Station, when the call came through that the Virginia bookstore is closed, and may well be closed tonight as
well. State of emergency, records being broken... In any case, I won't be there, so stay home, stay warm, and
maybe I can cover DC later. Me, I've checked back into the hotel and plan on catching up on some more
sleep. (Even though I always describe the life of the touring author as "rock and roll without the party", sleepdeprivation does set in; you get back to the hotel around eleven, then get up around five to catch the next
plane.)
THE ROSETTA DOTS
Yes, there's a message, a crucial one, but you need *ten* copies of the book (plus some duct tape) in order to
decypher it.
No, wait: that's a *joke*. I haven't seen the dots in question, but I can assure you they are just splodges:
some random, utterly meaningless artifact of production.
What this is about, actually, is *real* apophenia. A perfect example. Want to see the Virgin Mary on a tortilla?
Look long enough.
CAYCE'S "WILD TALENT"
Exactly. The universe of PR is a Fortean universe, as, indeed, I, personally, assume this one (or however
many there might be) to be. I actually *am* a Fortean, were you to pin me down philosophically. (And I've
got the new issue of FT, with that hot Anomalous Big Cat update, waiting for me baqck in the room. Perfect
blizzard reading!)
"WELCOM TO CYBER SPACE"
That's what it says on the mag-card they rent you when you check into this place. My sentiments exactly!
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
posted 3:38 AM
HEADING OUT OF LOGAN
Planes leaving on time. Looks good for Twin Cities signing.
This is *the worst* public Internet access-point I've ever used. Hard to imagine it being any worse-designed.
Mouse-pad action requires three hands.
Nice crowd in Cambridge last night. Looking forward to Minneapolis.
Saturday, February 22, 2003
posted 6:54 AM
BACK IN THE BASEMENT
I did find an even worse method of public Internet access: LodgeNet, an in-room system at my hotel in
Chicago. You surf on tv, using a wireless keyboard that has no cursor. Just the arrow-keys and Enter. Almost
comically awkward. It couldn't talk to Blogger, though.
The night before, in contrast, playing with my friend Alan's new Samsung photo phone. If even one of Cayce's
friends had had one of those, PR would have been way more postgeographical. Actually, this little gizmo
induced serious techno-vertigo. This'll change things, I suspect. Until you see one, it sounds like just another
bell or whistle, but it's one click for image-capture, another to email the jpeg to preselected addresses. People
tend already (and has this ever changed, since the last time I toured in the US) to have phones in their hands
most of the time. If each of those phones were an email-ready digital camera...
Thanks to everyone who posted reports and photos. Interesting, to have digitally-augmented memory of these
events, which tend otherwise to slide past, on tour, and blur into a tunnel of planes, hotel rooms, book stores,
people.
Sorry the weather conspired to make me miss DC.
Otherwise, it was my most pleasant US book-tour. (Well, I've never run a marathon, but I imagine that the
people who do, enjoy them; not sure they'd say one was "pleasant", though; satisfying, more like it.)
NICENESS AND DISAPPOINTMENT
While "surfing" the site on LodgeNet, in that Chicago hotel room, I fumbled past a post from a reader
declaring that PR sucks, and very badly indeed. He had had a brief moment of hope when Cayce headbutted
the guy in Tokyo, but then, alas, he had found that it all (as he read it) went back to nice people doing nice
things to one another. Actually I had expected more of this, as I know that a certain part of my readership will
always (literature being magically atemporal) be looking for the deep-fried anomie of NEUROMANCER. There's
nothing really to be done for this either way, except to recommend, for those of you needing a hit of deepfried anomie, Robert Stone's DOG SOLDIERS. This is a book I always forget to mention when people ask about
NEURO influences. But it definitely was one. I remember finishing it and wondering what it might have been
like if it had been reframed as science fiction. Absolute zero niceness; fine book.
CANADIAN SIGNINGS
Will try to get this info sorted and posted Monday morning.
BOONVILLE
That novel I kept recommending, on the tour, is Robert Mailer Anderson's BOONEVILLE.
I can only hope that Rydell and Chevette, after the close of ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, make their way up
the coast to Boonville. He, at least, would be very happy there. (Thanks to RMA for seeing that I got a copy of
this in San Francisco. It was very much enjoyed.)
posted 8:49 AM
THE MYSTERY WOMAN AT THE SEATTLE SIGNING
Is a complete mystery to me. No idea. I don't even remember her. Probably just someone bold enough to dart
to the head of the line, make an excuse, and bolt. This happens. Most often with someone who is having the
book signed as a gift for someone else.
Some other odds and ends that turned up in various threads:
501 BUTTONS
Probably correct that this is a goof in memesis. They are stamped metal, today. However, it may well have
been a Senior Moment, as I seem to recall that, thirty or so years ago, they were still cast, as opposed to
stamped. But I could be wrong there as well. Scarily, there are Levi's otaku who would definitely know.
Someone remarks on how *tight* 501's are, today. I specified Cayce's as oversized, thinking maybe three
waist-sizes too big, but on reflection I doubt she'd wear Levi's, which are, increasingly, the poorest simulacra
of a once-iconic product. This was brought home to me in their Union Square store in San Francisco, on the
tour. Pathetic, really. They've been messing with the cut of 501's, attempting to hit a fresh demographic.
Cayce would more likely wear Lee or Wrangler. Or, like her author, she'd wear (when she can get them) R.W.
Williams moleskin five-pockets from Australia, "moleskin" being a thick, very dense sueded cotton. Hard to
find but definitely in the CPU ballpark. I bought a black pair in Copenhagen, hope to find more in London.
THE BOTTOMLESS POT OF SOUP
Definitely not symbolic as far I was concerned, but, hey, you're the reader: have fun. I suspect it popped up a
couple of times because my friend Howard had retained such an intense gastronomic memory from Hong
Kong.
posted 7:09 AM
PETAL-FALL SOURCECODE, 9.20.01
Wrote following for THE NATIONAL POST, September 20, 2001, where it was published as "Mr. Buk's
Window":
All that terrible week I would think of the very small display window of E. Buk, a marvelously idiosyncratic
antiques dealer in SoHo. E. Buk is never open. There is no shop directly behind the little window in a side
street. A locked door, and, one assumes, stairs. A tarnished brass plaque suggests that you may be able to
make an appointment. I never have, but when I happen on Mr. Buk’s window (somehow I can never
remember exactly where it is) I invariably stop, to gaze with amazement and admiration at the extraordinary
things, never more than three, that he’s dredged from time and collective memory. It’s my favorite shop
window in all of Manhattan, and not even London can equal it in its glorious peculiarity and Borgesian potency.
Gazing into E. Buk’s window, for me, has been like gazing into the back reaches of some cave where
Manhattan stores its dreams. There is no knowing what might appear there. Once, a stove-sized, florally
ornate cast-iron fragment that might have been a leftover part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Once, a lovinglycrafted plywood box containing exquisitely painted models of every ballistic missile in the arsenals of the US
and the USSR at the time of its making. This last, redolent of both the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis,
had particularly held my attention. It was obviously a military learning-aid, and I wondered what sort of
lectures it had illustrated. It seemed, then, a relic from a dark and terrible time that I remembered
increasingly as a dream, a very bad dream, of childhood.
But the image that kept coming to me, last week, was of the dust that must be settling on the ledge of E.
Buk’s window, more or less between Houston and Canal Streets. And in that dust, surely, the stuff of the
atomized dead.
The stuff of pyre and blasted dreams.
So many.
The fall of their dust requiring everything to be back-read in its context, and each of Buk’s chosen objects,
whatever they may have been, that Tuesday: the dust a final collage-element, the shadow-box made
mortuary.
And that was a gift, I think, because it gave me something to start to hang my hurt on, a hurt I still scarcely
understand or recognize; to adjust one of my own favorite and secret few square yards of Manhattan, of the
world, to such an unthinkable fate.
They speak of certain areas in Manhattan now as “frozen zones”, and surely we all have those in our hearts
today, areas of disconnect, sheer defensive dissociation, awaiting the thaw. But how soon can one expect the
thaw to come, in wartime?
I have no idea.
Last year I took each of my children for a first visit to New York. I’m grateful now for them both to have seen
it, for the first time, before the meaning of the text was altered, in such a way, forever. I think of my son’s
delight in the aged eccentricities of a Village bagel restaurant, of my daughter’s first breathless solo walk
through SoHo. I feel as though they saw London as it was before the Blitz.
New York is a great city, and as such central to the history of civilization. Great cities can and invariably do
bear such wounds. They suffer their vast agonies and they go on -- carrying us, and civilization, and windows
like Mr. Buk’s, however fragile and peculiar, with them.
THIS EVENING: THROUGH THE TWEED CURTAIN
Monday, February 24, 7 pm, at Bolen Books in Hillside Centre, 111-1644 Hillside Ave, Victoria BC, 250 595
4232
"The Tweed Curtain" is a Couplandism. See DC's Vancouver city-book, CITY OF GLASS, for the brief
psychogeographic survey of Victoria in which the phrase appears. (Did you know that Victoria BC is the
headquarters of global Satanism? No? You don't remember MICHELLE REMEMBERS?)
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
posted 8:57 PM
WHITE DWARF / TOUR CLOSURE
Just back from White Dwarf, where I've signed, on publication, every book I've ever published, from the
original Ace NEUROMANCER on. No other bookstore you can say that about. Always has a nice sense of
homecoming for me. Whatever I'm doing in Toronto, next month, won't feel like part of the tour.
Tour is a wrap. My thanks to everyone, in all those cities, who came out for it! It was, really, a pleasure.
ELDRITCH VICTORIA
The Victoria signing was nice too, but I was reminded once again that the e-word always comes up for me
when I visit Victoria. Not because of the signing, but because of the place itself.
For me it's not the socioeconomic divide discussed in today's thread (though that's certainly real) so much as
the contrast between radical Disneylanding and some sort of Lovecraftian underreality (in the way that HPL
obviously found the adjective "antique" to be provocative, almost sexy). The Victorian underlay of Strangely
Old Stuff, in this very young province, always reminds me of Lovecraft's descriptions of Providence.
Though there's also a remarkable overlay-of-similacra going on: Victoria and Wellington, NZ, bear a weird
twin-sisterly similarity, and the first similacrum is more apparent in Wellington, which is a Little Bit of England
meticulously terraformed from an alien landscape that would make a good set for JURASSIC PARK. In Victoria,
at about the same time, the same "company" was doing exactly the same thing, using the same standard
colonial kit. So Victoria begins, like Wellington, as a deliberate similacrum of England. About a century later,
the second layer was applied: the Disneylanding, the heavy coat of Ye Olde to attract American tourism.
It really is, as the thread repeatedly states, one of those uniquely peculiar places.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
posted 6:18 PM
PATTERN RECOGNITION AS...NEUROMANCER
[Edited to remove spoiler. Sorry. I'm completely unused to thinking about that.]
This idea, which I'd never myself thought of, turned up in a recent thread: PR is really NEUROMANCER all over
again.
This is really a wildly appropriate supposition for a set of fora in which apophenia keeps turning up (both as a
concept and, I would hazard, as a behavior).
Long ago, I somewhere (T.S. Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS?) read of an experiment
in which the subjects were shown a rapid series of standard playing-cards, which they were required to
verbally identify. Unbeknownst to the subjects, a few these cards were *anomalous*, for instance an all-black
ace of hearts. The result (expected) was that the anomalous cards were identified as their nearest nonanomalous equivalents: the all-black ace of hearts for instance as simply an ace of hearts. The unexpected
result was that when reshown the anomalous cards, the subjects continued to ignore the anomaly, even on
longer viewing, and became visibly pissed-off with the experimenters. This behavior is, I would guess, relates
to apophenia, or to the more garden-variety psychological concept of "projection".
Likewise, I suspect, is the perception that PR and NEUROMANCER have much (or indeed anything) in
common. (Could this also be behind the interest in Case/Cayce?)
Consider: The reviewer for The New York Times Review of Books, who on contextual evidence is very
conscious of Thomas Pynchon, saw PR as to some extent a "remake" of Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49.
This startled me, when I first read the review, but I could see it, although I knew that I hadn't consciously
been rewriting Pynchon's first novel. I had, however, thought of LOT 49, somewhere toward the close of the
book, but mainly in the light of knowing I needed to *end* my novel. (THE CRYING OF LOT 49 has, as I recall,
no actual ending in any conventional sense; the equivalent version of PR could be created by ripping out all of
the pages following Cayce stepping through that on particular door; you would never see what was on the
other side, or learn what's been going on.)
But my point here is that if PR so closely resembles THE CRYING OF LOT 49, does NEUROMANCER also closely
resemble THE CRYING OF LOT 49? Not that I can see. Nor, as far as I know (which I suppose isn't very far)
has this been suggested. What is going on here, in my opinion, is that the reviewer has a Pynchon thing going
on, and the posters seeing NEUROMANCER in PR have a Gibson thing going on.
And that's the a-word, all over.
Thursday, February 27, 2003
posted 5:50 AM
"THE HUNT FOR THE WORLD'S COOLEST SNEAKERS..."
Someone asks about this phrase of mine, describing the book before it was completed. Well, *way* before it
was completed, and intended mainly to make the questioner leave me alone. But, note, this was pre-9-11, so
it refers, to the extent that it refers to anything, to a narrative and world other than the ones you're reading
and living in.
The sneakers on the back of the book are black leather Pro-Keds, purchased at Barney's in Seattle on my way
to Karen Moskowitz's studio to take dustjacket pictures. Evidently the editorial minds at Putnam liked that
particular shot because of the sneakers. I like the way the sneakers look, but think the expression on my face
probably reflects my awareness that going to Seattle to have my picture taken is the first step toward actual
publication, touring, etc. A "here we go again" expression.
Caycewise, I assumed these Pro-Keds to be a response to the recently born-again Converse All-Stars, which
are also available in leather.
In any case, and again re apophenia, a great deal of the detail around publishing a book is accidental. Indeed,
a great deal of the detail in any book (or any book of mine, anyway) is more or less accidental as well, as I
like to work with "readymades", things I encounter either during or before the period of composition. This
means that some of the detail will be accidental, in that it came along with the found object, and wasn't
invented. I have a sort of half-conscious theory that this furthers an experience of mimetic texture, for the
reader, that differs from the one that would result in my simply having made up some "random" detail. It also
has something to do with my fondness for Cornell boxes, which consist entirely of found objects, framed, as it
were, by a device akin to narrative.
WTC MEMORIAL DESIGNS
Toward the end of the tour I declined to write an essay for TIME on the various proposed designs. Had I been
willing to do so, I would have had to say that this is the only one that I'd be entirely, joyfully, satisfied with:
http://24.46.42.210:1818/Sinehead/Gaudi2.html
NAME "PAVLOV" RING A BELL?
No? Never mind.
But "Bigend", like "Wintermute", is a strange-looking but actual surname, though I hasten to add that I had
no real individual in mind in either case. My hunch was that Bigend is a Belgian surname, or possibly French
(hence the nationality of the character) and would be pronounced, perhaps, something like "BAY-shend".
Friday, February 28, 2003
posted 10:48 PM
.
posted 12:28 PM
THE BAGHDAD BATTERIES
It's my day off, it feels like, but here's a BBC article about some wonderful Fortean gizmos that have
fascinated me since I first read about them at age twelve or so.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2804257.stm
The special-effects-in-the-temple hypothesis is new to me, and I like it.
March
Saturday, March 01, 2003
posted 12:19 PM
CONTENTS OF MONSOON CARTRIDGE, 3.1.03
THE BEST OF ROKY ERICKSON
Chances are, I was actually listening to some of this stuff while I was writing NEUROMANCER. I'd bought
various Roky output as 45's and EP's in '77, when they were being released, enigmatically, by French microlabels that had their own idea of what constituted punk. Later, visiting Sterling in the heyday of cyperpunk
Austin, such as it was, he played me more, and regaled me with tales of seeing the man himself in the local 711.
SAINT ETIENNE -- Finisterre
My friends Rodney and Shannon like this band. My friend Johan gave me this CD when I was in New York, and
I listened to it in my hotel room, watching the blizzard.
JOHNNY CASH -- American IV: The Man Comes Around
Hard to grow up where I did, when I did, and not think of Johnny Cash as the voice of God. So far, with this
one, I just keep listening to the cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt", as stunning a recording as I've heard in quite a
while.
KINO -- Noch (home-burned by my son)
Back in the USSR, when it still was. The late Victor Tsoi was something like a cross between Bob Marley and
Bruce Lee, but that scarcely covers it. Astounding, if you can get it into it.
WALTER BECKER -- 11 Tracks of Whack
Hard to find '94 solo album. Brilliant.
NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS -- Nocturama
I love this guy, though I paid no attention whatever until MURDER BALLADS, and have never subsequently
found much in the backlist to get as excited about. THE BOATMAN'S CALL is a masterpiece. Just getting into
this one.
WHY CAYCE ISN'T ALLERGIC TO STARBUCK'S
I cheated. I cheated when she has the Tommy attack, because I gave her my own reasons for disliking
Tommy product, when, on the basis of the rest of the book, her specific logo-phobias seem random.
Brian Eno defines culture as everything we do that we don't absolutely need to do. We don't really need to
wear pants, say, when a kilt will do as well, or drink coffee, or have global chains in which to drink coffee...
But Starbuck's first "product", even before coffee, is the "Third Place" (not home, not work) it offers, in
environments where a safe, reasonably conversation-friendly, multi-gender Third Place could previously not so
easily be found. Then there's the coffee. Younger readers don't remember when most coffee in the US (not to
mention the UK) was tragic swill. Pre-Starbuck's, really good coffee in the US was limited to New York, San
Francisco, and ethnic or bohemian enclaves in other places, but generally was very thin on the ground.
And Starbuck's coffee is *strong*, relatively speaking. I had the experience, in December, of running on about
a dozen Catalan latte-equivalents a day, for three days, and not really *getting there*, then breaking down
and going into the only Starbuck's in Barcelona for a tall Coffee Of The Day. An hour later, I was kicking
myself for not having bought a thermos.
There's at least one chain in London that has better coffee than Starbuck's, but I'm still deeply grateful, in
London, for Starbuck's. You literally cannot imagine how poor most coffee was, in London, twenty years ago.
Cayce's reaction to Starbuck's is pretty much my own: a slightly ambivalent comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
Favorite London Starbuck's: Kensington High Street, morning rush hour; pay a little extra and you can go
down a few stairs to a small back room, where you can sit and watch local civilians headed for work. (The
ones who order the quintuple lattes are generally Glaswegian.)
Sunday, March 02, 2003
posted 8:03 AM
CAFE ELECTRIQUE
That's espresso with a tot of crystal meth, said to have been the bevvie of choice among the local equivalent
of rickshaw boys in 'Nam-era Saigon. Now that would've made for a different sort of Third Place...
"Third Place" comes from THE THIRD PLACE, a book I'm too lazy to google for you this morning. It was
published, I seem to recall, slightly pre-Starbuck's, and may even have provided inspiration.
In any case, as several people have now remarked, it's really not about the coffee. And it's evidently a
generational issue, largely, as to how much Starbuck's sucks or doesn't. Those old enough to remember the
world of North American coffee (or, God help us, UK coffee) prior to Starbuck's are inclined to forgive a great
many faux-Murano lampshades.
Number me among them. Aside from making it possible to readily ingest really pretty damn good coffee just
about anywhere, Starbuck's also deserves some credit for having inadvertently birthed a back-market of AntiStarbuck's, everything from hole-in-wall-with-thrift-shop-sofa operations to the indie-coffee equivalents of The
Tattered Cover. If Starbuck's wasn't there, these guys wouldn't be either. (And a lot of them don't make as
good drinks as Starbuck's, if you get right down to it.)
Starbuck's culture note: On the east side of Vancouver, where fewer rich folks traditionally live, and freak
flags are traditionally flown a bit higher, I know of two Starbuck's where the dress code for staff has either
been abandoned entirely or so willfully subverted that the home office might be thought to wish it had been.
I'm curious: Does this happen elsewhere? When did you last see a Starbuck's barista wearing neither black,
khaki, nor green, and where? "Alternative" neighborhood? Could this actually be *policy*?
Monday, March 03, 2003
posted 8:06 AM
ALL-CAPS BOOK TITLES
Someone asks why I put the titles of books (and, as it happens, feature films and recordings) in all-caps.
(They also point out that Starbucks is spelled sans apostrophe. Thank you.)
Mechanical typewriters were generally limited to a single, fixed font, which meant that unless you were using
an italic typewriter (these existed, though I’ve no idea what for, but were very rare) you were unable to
render book-titles as they would conventionally be set in type.
The convention, therefore, as backed up by every academic stylesheet, was that titles of major works (books,
feature films) were to be underlined, while lesser works (poems, short stories) would be put in quotes.
[Dead Tech backgrounder, for extra points: In the decade or so prior to the advent of personal computers,
IBM produced an electric typewriter called the Selectric; this had a “type-ball”, a metal sphere about the size
of a golf ball, which held an entire font; you could switch fonts, which at the time was little short of
miraculous; you could also, even more amazingly, power-correct mistakes with a built-in paper-colored
ribbon. The IBM Selectric, when I started writing for publication, was the most shit-hot professional writing
machine on the planet; by the time I could have afforded one, they were propping up broken barbecue grills
in Value Village. The Finn’s shop probably has at least one box of Selectric type-balls, somewhere; they are
beautiful sculptural objects, these balls, and won’t be easily thrown away.]
While underlining was the academic convention, it required the typist to backspace for the length of a given
title, then underline. Just that added little bit of work. Just that little bit more tedious.
Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of
reproduction once fairly universal in the world’s offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper “stencil”, clipped
this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or
silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of
the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken
line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.
Some people who liked books, and frequently wrote letters, on typewriters, to other people who liked books,
tended, free from the constraints of an academic stylesheet, to render titles in all-caps. (It required fewer
case shifts than capping each required word in the title, you see.) People who wrote about books for
publication in amateur journals (mimeo was an authentic medium of the American samisdat) rendered titles in
all-caps in order to avoid stencil-tears.
At various times, I was both.
So it’s a techno-generational thing: a cultural artifact of two dead media platforms.
Though I suppose it may seem, to someone raised on the Internet, as though I SHOUT the title of each book…
But don’t let these foibles frighten you off. I’m quite harmless really.
(Cue Waylon Jennings’ “Man From Another Time”, which, since it isn’t the title of the album, CHILL FACTOR,
on which it appears, doesn’t need to be in all-caps.)
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
posted 7:12 AM
UNDER TOKYO
Here's a "readymade" for you, as fine a one as I've seen in a while. You can start building your own novel,
around one like this.
AKIRA-inflected secret city beneath Tokyo; retired construction workers whispering about the diamond-cutter
required to tunnel existing concrete, when the maps show nothing but soil should have been there...
Subway fantasy is a genre unto itself. Delighted to see it's taken root in Tokyo.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20030301a1.htm
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
posted 9:03 AM
TINY LITTLE BIKE LOCK DETERS BLACK GHOSTS
It's a good thing I know Bruce Sterling. Otherwise I'd never hear about things like this.
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http://www.sandia.gov/media/hacker.htm
'World's smallest combination lock' promises to foil even the best computer
hacker, say Sandia developers
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The "world's smallest combination lock," a minuscule
mechanical device developed at Sandia National Laboratories, promises to
build a virtually impenetrable computer firewall that even the best hacker
can't beat.
The Recodable Locking Device, which uses microelectromechanical system
(MEMS) technology so small that it takes a microscope to see it, is a
series
of tiny notched gears that move to the unlocked position only when the
right
code is entered. It's the first known mechanical hardware designed to keep
unwanted guests from breaking codes and illegally entering computer and
other secure systems.
Thursday, March 06, 2003
posted 9:21 AM
WILD EAST WHEELS
Fab Soviet & Eastern Bloc rides. Don't miss the experimental models of the Gaz and the Tatra:
http://digilander.libero.it/cuoccimix/main-english.htm
Legend of the Yugo:
"What is the function of the rear glass defroster on the Yugo?"
"To warm the hands of the person that pushes the car, when the weather is bad!"
Canada had much more of a mirror-world thing going on, when I first came here, the finest frissons of
cognitive dissonance being provided, for your American boy, by trade with the USSR and China. Adventurous
camera-shops, for instance, sold Russian cameras. They looked exactly like older German cameras, but
weighed four times as much. Certain consumers, perhaps of a determinedly leftist bent, availed themselves of
East Bloc auto dealerships, driving Lada's and Yugo's. Not very many, but you did see them. They were said to
be relatively inexpensive, and certainly looked it.
VICTOR TSOI
Someone asked about Victor Tsoi, of Kino. I was at some point introduced to Rashid Nugmanov, a young
Kazakh director who had made IGLA (The Needle) with Victor Tsoi, a dramatic feature shot (I believe) in
Rashid's hometown of Alma Ata, and in the Aral Sea (or what used to be the Aral Sea -- source of the dead
zone Cayce walks through in PATTERN RECOGNITION). Rashid gave me a tape of IGLA and another, for my
Walkman, of Kino, Tsoi's band. I became an immediate fan of the music, and was impressed by Tsoi's film
presence. He was Russian-Korean, extremely handsome, and evidently as serious about martial arts as we
was about his music. Intensely charismatic. An American producer expressed interest in a Soviet-American
co-production, to star Tsoi, and Rashid and I began working on a storyline of his. But when the time came to
get down to it, and actually go to Russia to write the script, I was busy with a novel. Unable to go, but
unwilling to drop this wonderfully odd project, I recruited my friend Jack Womack. Jack went off to Russia in
my stead. (See his wonderful LET'S PUT THE FUTURE BEHIND US for some idea of what he found there.)
Victor's tragic death in an automobile accident (nothing rockstar about it; he was a non-drinker who never did
drugs) killed the project as well, but by then Kino had become a permanent part of my musical landscape. I
sometimes wonder where Victor mightn't have gone, if he'd lived. He was extraordinarily talented. The world
of the squat, in PATTERN RECOGNITION, that endless party, the element of some kind of spirituality, I owe to
Rashid's memories, Kino's music, and Jack's experiences.
Rashid's story, for the film we never made, involved ritualistic gang-warfare in some sort of sideways-future
Leningrad. I thought of it when I saw the opening battle in GANGS OF NEW YORK. Very similar! I remember
Rashid describing large-scale combat in a snowy, midnight park, one gang armed with sharpened spades, the
other with Cossack sabres. We were also trying to work in a six-wheeled tank, equipped with a water-cannon,
which he'd picked up for a song in Alma Ata.
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/9962/biagrophy.htm
[Tip of the bloghat to Eileen, for showing me how to make the links clickable.]
THE PARKA IN THE COPENHAGEN STREET FOOTAGE...
USAF N-3B, 1953. Coyote-ruff trim, dead these many decades now. Close to NOS. eBay.
Friday, March 07, 2003
posted 7:28 AM
MATTERS OF TASTE
Someone finds BOONVILLE lacking in the depth of its depiction of women. It didn't strike me that way. I
thought the author was trying pretty hard, in that direction. I would have liked the book to be about three
times as long, though. It does, as the reader points out, just sort of end.
Book-recommendations are, by their very nature, ever dodgy .
I myself am currently enjoying THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE, by Fr. Rolfe, AKA Baron Corvo:
http://www.newcompanion.com/contents/cont00/001222corvo.html
That page doesn't even come close to suggesting how amazingly, hilariously and deeply sadly peculiar this
author is, but there certainly aren't all that many people I'd actively recommend him to. (Though the fact that
everyone I would recommend him to is already a very close friend may say something.)
Fashionpolice [actually it was Fashionista, sorry] asks various questions about, ahem, attire. I would say that
Sean Stussy (designer of the label of the same name, though sadly not for the past several years) and I would
probably be attracted to many of the same items, were we to find ourselves in Value Village at the same time.
Though I doubt we'd come to blows over anything but the real scores.
As my favorite maker of leather jackets has it, "Never In Fashion, Always In Style". Garments of a certainly
timeless utility do do it best for me.
posted 9:10 AM
THE KINGDOM
Fashionpolice mentions "Lars Von Trier's TV mini-series, 'The Kingdom'". This keeps coming up. for me, but
I've never seen it. Is there a DVD that'll work in a North American player? I've always imagined it as a
Scandinavian second-cousin to WILD PALMS (not the mini-series, but the much more interesting Wagnerpenned open-ended graphic novel that ran in Details).
If I'd known that that Danish interview would wind up as streaming video on my own website, I'd've been a
lot more nervous about it. (Of course everyone else in the studio was stark naked the whole time, except for
whatever techie fannybag stuff they needed to be wearing. Where does this fit in with the "melancholy"
thing?)
FROOGLE
Kevin Kelly just recommended this to me. A variant Google that only pulls up sites where the thing you're
looking for is actually offered for sale. Simple but brilliant: no need to winnow through sites where the object
of your desire is merely being discussed:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle
ANY OTHER BABELFISHERS OUT THERE?
Every so often, I just have to dredge up something like this:
"SORRY! SORRY! The home unexpectedly company collects the simulation gun also is the grave offense?
That calculated, oh! Really is has heavy responsibilities! Looks like only immigrates to North America,
good envies North America the compatriot, France but actually may buy the gun, but immigrates
difficultly! Does not know has not only is for buy the gun only then immigrates, ha-ha, if does not have,
please from Âêæ beginning. heh heh"
Heh heh indeed.
posted 6:27 PM
THIS SITE AS A MIRROR OF F:F:F
Someone suggests this (it's been suggested before) in a recent post, along with the suggestion that I might
have set it up that way, as some sort of mirror of the situation in the book.
The situation in the book [I'll try to avoid spoilers] involves an author (of sorts) who is an utterly unknown
quantity. About whom nothing whatever is known. Who is in fact (though this never comes up on F:F:F,
because it would have complicated things for me) a hypothetical entity. (Why couldn't the footage be the
result of some sort of collaborative, community process? Why does Cayce and everyone else automatically
assume that there must be a lone maker, a solo auteur?) The fifty-four-year-old man (as Fashionpolice keeps
reminding me) typing this into a window on blogger.com is no hypothetical entity, but someone who's just
braved a coast-to-coast gauntlet of bookstores (not to mention the Great President's Day Snowstorm) to
demonstrate his physical presence.
I'm a guy in a basement in Vancouver, pecking away at the same coffee-stained keyboard I wrote PATTERN
RECOGNITION on, and am here, in fact, as part of some vague personal process of deliberate
dePynchonization.
If there's a mystery here, it's that some aspect of the rather ordinary person I know myself to be (and whom
you would certainly know me to be as well, were we both to stay here long enough) is somehow able to write
novels. I am not the Man Behind The Curtain. The mystery is that I do, apparently, somehow contain one.
And that's the mystery we all live with when we know writers, as indeed it's the mystery we live with when we
*are* writers.
When the publisher suggested having this site (there had been a site for ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, but I'd
had nothing to do with it) I suggested, somewhat to my own amazement, that I should have some sort of
personal presence here. I hadn't had much contact with my readers, for the past decade or so, and had
started to worry, vaguely, about the sort of legends that grow up around excessively reclusive writers. (It had
begun to bug me, for instance, that I continued to meet people who believed that I still wrote on a manual
typewriter.) And in the course of writing PATTERN RECOGNITION I'd experienced (anonymously -- ah bliss)
enough of the world of online fora to have some idea of what the experience of being here would be like. So I
did it, and here I am.
But I certainly didn't do it to further confound any mystery. I am personally not all that impressed with the
mysterious creativity of my Man Behind The Curtain. Probably because I've had to clean up after him for
decades now (as indeed, and even more constantly, have my wife and family and friends). And I, I'm proud to
say, turn up for work a lot more regularly than he does -- most of the time, anyway.
posted 10:14 PM
CBC, NORTH BY NORTHWEST
Went off to CBC to tape two hours for North By Northwest (radio, airs this Saturday morning, here) with a
large, very keen and brainy audience, all of whom had had to qualify by submitting short essays (!). Excellent
co-hosts, thoughtful questions, very enjoyable.
Drains off whatever it is that blogging requires, though.
posted 1:03 PM
SOMEONE WONDERS...
Why I said it bothered me that I met people who assumed I still wrote on a manual typewriter. Does this
make me, for instance, feel old? Well, no, not particularly. What bothers me about it is the gap between self
and mediated persona. A mediated persona just sort of accumulates, of its own accord, the way balls of dust
build up under a bed. It isn't as though there's any entity ("the media") controlling this process; it just
happens. If there was something, no matter what, that you didn't do, and you kept meeting strangers who
were convinced you did do that, because they had received, from the dust-ball of your mediated persona, the
idea that you did, it might eventually start to bug you too.
It's usually some sort of "hook", the result of journalism's need for shorthand, for sub-heads: "Cyberspace
guru uses manual typewriter"... With "Cyberspace guru" being by far the more dubious construction on display
there, but *it isn't even true that I use a manual typewriter*. (For the record, once again, it was two and one
third novels on manual, Apple ever since.)
While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for
me, anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to fora) represents the democratization of the
mediated persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several. I am an exception to this, because I have
mine via the printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and this website is maintained by a
publishing company that belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by shapeshifting reptiles from
Beta Reticuli, but the rest of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own personae. Which was formerly,
hugely, not the case. Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.
posted 9:34 AM
LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST
That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described how it feels to be a novelist between books. No
place to take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating his own condition, he said, by writing a horror
sorry about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is*
scary).
No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for
instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge, something no magpie would ever be satisfied with
doing.
This is, in some way, the first time I've ever had the recognition that I've become someone who needs to be
writing a book, to some extent, in order to feel content. Interesting how we "catch" recognitions from others - in this case requiring, for me, someone whose recognition emerges from what I can take to be a very similar
ecology of mind.
SOMEONE EXPRESSES SURPRISE
At my having remarked yesterday (with an evident sense of discovery) on something (the mediated persona)
that I dealt with, extensively, as far back as IDORU.
Keep in mind that anyone who's read a novel of mine has read it much more recently than I have. I can't
recall ever having reread anything of my own, in its entirety, after publication.
But, also, now I think about it, IDORU was the last of my full-on I-don't-do-the-Internet freestyle
extrapolations. When I wrote IDORU, I was still faxing my daily pages to friends for comment, and probably
wasn't at all sure what websites *were*. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES was the first book I wrote as an emailusing, web-searching, spam-accreting human. So I suspect that my unlikely-seeming wonderment at the
democratization of mediated personae is about that awareness arriving, for me (as opposed to my Man Behind
The Curtain) only just now.
SPEAKING OF FREESTYLE
The point-form notes on the CBC Radio taping, posted today, I find quite wonderful. Dreamlike. If I could get
away with it, I'd be that gnomic in all of my public utterances, and could feel sort of like that back-alley
fireplug that the Finn winds up getting downloaded to. (I *hope* that was the Finn. It's literally been so long
since I've read that book that I'm no longer certain. And I'm perversely proud of the fact, too.)
posted 8:24 AM
I SENT A FAX TODAY
I’d forgotten what it was like. That weird, ugly, green abduction-scenario glare from inside, the sheer
slowness of it (this is, mind you, a Sanyo close to a decade old, an antique in its own right). The various
sounds it makes, once so familiar. I keep it around for those odd times when I absolutely need to send a fax,
when there’s no other way, and I did, today.
Then I remembered the first time I ever saw a fax machine.
I can remember when we got our first television, in the Fifties. It had a wooden cabinet. I’m not entirely
certain it was the first one I ever saw, though. I can remember receiving my first-ever transistor radio, and
my first-ever stereophonic phonograph, but I’d probably seen others before I got my own. I do remember
seeing, and instantly buying, my first-ever Sony Walkman; until I saw it, in the spring of 1981, I had had no
idea such a thing existed. (And shortly thereafter, I saw my first personal computer, a Sinclair ZX like the
ones Voytek is after in PATTERN RECOGNITION, though probably it was the Timex version. It was hooked up
to a black-and-white tv purchased for this express purpose from the Salvation Army. It was as unexciting, to
me, as the Walkman had been exciting.)
I saw my first fax machine in the Tokyo home of Katsuhiro Otomo, who was completing (I think) AKIRA at the
time. He had at least two of these things, and from them were scrolling what may have been in-betweens. I’m
not even sure what year that was, now, but I remember that he was quietly proud of this new technology, and
that he told me (perhaps through a translator) that they loved these machines, in Japan, because, for the first
time, it was possible to send hand-written notes. And, of course, images.
I was impressed, though not as impressed as I was by the images on those scrolls. I think I had heard,
vaguely, about these things, in some business context, in Canada, but I’m sure I never imagined I’d live with
one for a decade or so, and go through, probably, several miles of that horrible slippery paper.
I don’t remember whether Otomo had a PC. If he did, he didn’t show it to me. Somehow I doubt he did. The
home computer I remember hearing most about in Japan, that trip, was the Nintendo Famicom, and those
didn’t sound particularly exciting either. (Famicon: "family computer". ) I’d written NEUROMANCER, it had
been translated and published in Japan, and here I was in Tokyo: seeing my very first…fax machine.
At some point on that trip I also saw half a dozen really boring checked sports-jackets, in a department-store
window, in front of a large banner that said “CYBER-SUMMER!”.
Damn, I thought, this is getting weird.
And of course it continued to.
WHAT 3JANE “SAYS”
Someone asks about this, having been puzzled for years: at the end of NEUROMANCER (p. 252, current Ace
trade paper) 3Janes says “Take you word, thief.” Case then does whatever it is he does (you tell me) to
penetrate the final membrane of…whatever:
And his voice the cry of a bird
Unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Anyone daydreaming of a feature film of NEUROMANCER might want to pause to ponder just how the hell one
might go about depicting this climax (and it is the climax) on the screen.
As to what the word is, well, I never considered it to be a word, really, though 3Jane, teasingly, calls it one. It
is in fact three “notes”, something akin to birdcall. The key to the cipher, that is, is revealed as being purely
tonal, musical, rather than linguistic. Case’s “cry”, a species of primal scream, the voicing of the emotionality
he’s been walled off from throughout the narrative (and his life), torn finally from the core of his being, is
what actually forces 3Jane to give up the key. Call and response, of some kind. Hearing him, she can’t help
herself. When she taunts him (“Take your word, thief.”) she’s in fact daring him, and assuming he can’t -- just
as she was, a moment before, daring Molly to kill her.
MELBOURNE MIRROR-WORLD
Re the new thread about Australia, I’m certainly not alone among North Americans in my awareness of that
part of the world. Very much a mirror-world, for us, and for residents of Canada there seems to be another
mirroring as well, with Australia seeming to reflect the US while New Zealand reflects Canada. As no doubt
many have said, these are places I’d visit more frequently if they weren’t so far away! I’ve only been twice,
and very briefly: to Wellington for a literary festival and Melbourne for a science fiction convention. But
Vancouver has visible pockets of Australians in a way that one probably doesn’t encounter in the States. One
of my local anti-Starbucks, for instance, seems to be staffed exclusively by what I take to be Australian
exchange students. (Australia and Canada share consular facilities now, in many countries, out of old
friendship and common needs.)
As to why I don’t (“The Winter Market” is the one exception so far) set fiction in Vancouver… That’s
complicated. Something like: because I need a place in which I’m not doing that with my immediate
surroundings, in order to continue doing it with other places. If I were to incorporate Vancouver into my fictive
universe, I fear that in some sense I’d be “writing” all the time. As it is, in Vancouver, I get to be a civilian,
that way. I just live here. I don't have to write fiction about it.
Friday, March 14, 2003
posted 4:57 PM
HIGH STRANGENESS AT THE GERMAN BORDER
The Department of Special Effects drops a 21,000-lb. bomb in Florida, New Orleans prepares to rename its
most famous neighborhood the Freedom Quarter...and what doe it take to get me to comment on current
affairs?
Don Johnson.
Word has only recently (Wednesday) emerged that the former MIAMI VICE star, crossing into Germany from
Switzerland in November, was found by German customs authorities to be accompanied by a cool $8 billion
USD in credit notes, etc., contained in a black leather suitcase. (I think that if it had been a Louis Vuitton
suitcase, they would have told us. Too nice a detail to pass up.)
"They're all legitimate papers and stuff from a passenger that was in the car. It has nothing to do with me."
I only mention this now in case any of you were puzzled, day before yesterday, by a mysterious recurring
sound. That was the sound of many (though surely not 8 billion) writers of genre fiction. What you heard was
their eyes rolling. Writers of the sort of fiction in which very large sums of money (or equivalents thereof) are
transported across borders in suitcases are generally not advised to go much higher than a billion, else the
Kazillion Factor set in:
"But why are Mr. X and his army of henchmen so determined to find this suitcase? Do we even know what it
might contain?"
"It contains...a kazillion dollars."
I myself, having always wanted to have a suitcase full of the cold hard change fictive hands, recently forced
myself to make do with an attache case and mere pocket-change.
posted 8:49 AM
CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE THREADS OF WAR
I knew this would happen, if I mentioned Don Johnson...
BLUE ANT AS THE NAME FOR A START-UP
I have a long-standing policy on this. I neither give nor deny anyone permission to do this, ever. But I would
point out that 99.99% of start-ups with names lifted from my fiction have tanked utterly. And there have been
quite a few, over the years (though not 8 billion).
CBC RADIO BOOK CLUB INTERVIEW
I've just been told, is going on their website today. Don't have the URL.
posted 11:19 PM
EBAY AS BABELIAN OBJECT-LIBRARY
I too use Google as a spell-checker, and also as a general mnemonic prosthetic, but I use eBay to induce
crucially lateral dream-states, one of which produced Cayce’s “Stasi envelope” (about which someone asked,
yesterday).
I’m fairly sure that the Stasi envelope is imaginary, or semi-imaginary, though similar things likely do exist.
If you go to eBay.de (that’s German eBay) and search “NVA”, you’ll get over 1,500 (I just checked) auctions
of various things East German. The Stasi envelope was the result of my having opened similar auctions (I
don’t speak German, so can’t read the titles) simply to look at pictures of East German artifacts. This is
something I do a lot of while “writing” (or while “stuck”, depending on how you look at it). EBay as shamanic
induction device.
I very briefly visited East Berlin, when the Wall was not so long down, and eBay.de has subsequently allowed
me to view an utterly random cross-section of the stuff they produced there.
What a ludicrous, terrifying, tragic and absurd society they briefly created, there, and every so often eBay.de
offers an object that says it all, in a simple digital snapshot.
They made, for instance, light-fixtures out of recycled plastics; the plastic was chopped up, melted and
molded, but the various chopped bits retained their original color, resulting in a translucent solid that looks
exactly like joke-shop vomit.
Quite a lot of the infrastructural detail of East Germany, you see, looked as though it was made of solidified
puke. The cruelty extended to the esthetic. Or perhaps it began there. Ugly. Unimaginably ugly.
posted 12:03 AM
CPU SHOES
Tired of a war that hasn’t even started yet? Can’t bear to think that there are CNN employees who already
have MP3’s of the new war’s theme music?
Then join me, as I get seriously into choosing a new pair of shoes for the heroine of my most recent novel:
Those Harajuku schoolgirl shoes Cayce starts out with aren’t GOTHIC LOLITA BIBLE perv gear, but your
regular traditional Japanese schoolgirl shoes. My wife got a pair, our first time in Japan. You wouldn’t have to
go to Harajuku to get them, but I doubt you could find them outside of Japan.
However, having recently become obsessed with old school Adidas, I have rediscovered a shoe that is as
utterly Cayce as a shoe can be.
If I had remembered these, I wouldn’t have made do with Japanese schoolgirl shoes. Cayce would’ve been
wearing this special black version of the Stan Smith, the Official:
http://store.yahoo.com/harputsadidas/adof.html
These are, in your smaller, “girly” sizes, seriously cute as buttons, but nonetheless downright spookily
minimalist.
Not to mention sort of perkily dominatrixy as well.
PICTURES OF CAYCE
Mention of Jane Birkin may have been, um, intended to bring to mind her role in BLOW UP. The fact that that
ex had projected Jane Birkin, though, probably has as much to do with what she actually looks like as…Milla’s
lips. (If Cayce had lips like Milla Jovovitch, she probably wouldn’t need to be vetting logos for Blue Ant. Those
are some seriously marketable posthuman supermodel lips our Milla has.)
The fact is, I myself do not know what Cayce looks like.
Because I built her, you see, from the inside out.
To the extent that the reader “knows”, the reader must therefore be projecting.
But projecting…what?
posted 7:51 AM
THANKS
For your St. Patrick's Day greetings and virtual gifts!
THE CREASE: A FOUND NARRATIVE
British. Er, existential. Wonderful.
http://sport.guardian.co.uk/cricketworldcup2003/overbyover/story/0,12864,914033,00.html
posted 11:30 AM
MEDIATED PERSONA OR PUBLIC SELF?
Someone asks whether there’s any point to the new-fangled formulation “mediated persona”, when the
concept of “public self” is readily available?
The public self (or persona) has, arguably, been around as long as we’ve had selves and groups, but media
are technologies. Monuments or other symbolic representations of rulers look to me like the earliest mediation
of individual humans, and, while a ruler would have a public (as well as a private) self, this technological
“broadcasting” of the individual constitutes something else, something fundamentally different.
Prior to the past century or so, with the exception of print, no mass media existed. When we listen today to
the earliest recorded music, we are listening to musicians who themselves had never heard recorded music. I
would argue that the experience of life in a world in which there was no recorded music was a fundamentally
different (and, for us, perhaps literally unimaginable) experience. In such a world, a minimum of daily lifeexperience would be mediated.
Consider Madonna.
Madonna’s public self is nothing at all like your public self, though you definitely do have a public self. And it
isn’t simply that hers is “larger”. That which exists in the human infosphere as “Madonna” is of a different
order entirely. (I chose Madonna because her mediation seems to have surpassed any need for specific
product; she’s in some sort of later stage, in which what she does, to the extent she does anything, is be
Madonna.) There is woman who calls herself Madonna, who has a private self, and who may even be said (this
gets tricky) to have a public self separate from her mediated persona, but “Madonna” is a mediated persona.
“Madonna” will survive the woman called Madonna in ways our ancestors would have regarded as purely
supernatural.
HOW EVERYTHING DOESN'T WORK
"i wonder how things would have been if w.g. had been born 10 years later... with the tech, the music, the
supermodels, everything."
"PHARMACOM" IN BOTH PR AND JM
Pharmacom is the Big Sinister Corporation lurking in the background of the plot of the film (though not in the
short story). Weirdly, while studying detailed web-listings of shops on the Moscow streets Cayce was
traversing, I ran across...Pharmacom! And giggled.
posted 12:41 PM
"WHEN ARE WE GOING TO SEE THE INVISIBLE PLANES?"
I couldn't tell you, but...Salam Pax is still blogging. I just checked. It takes a long black-screen wait.
Salam's blog may be old hat to the bloggy, but I just found it this morning:
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
MSNBC backgrounder on the blog:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/809307.asp
BUSINESS, NORTH
From the London Times:
A BRITISH commander told his men last night that not all of them would come home alive. He instructed his
soldiers to wrap their fallen comrades in a sleeping bag, fight on and grieve for them after the heat of the
battle.
Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, the man leading the battle group of the 1st Battalion of The Royal Irish, told
his troops: “It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive, but there may be people
among us who will not see the end of this campaign.
“We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.”
In an emotionally charged address that reduced many of Britain’s toughest infantry troops to tears, the
commanding officer told his men that he would tolerate neither cowardice nor a killing spree but that they
should show no mercy to forces who remained loyal to President Saddam Hussein. He also declared that any
Iraqi troops who declared a truce in the face of the advancing Allies would be embraced by the coalition and
permitted to fight for regime change in their own nation.
He said: “The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his
rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking
the fires of Hell for Saddam. He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. As
they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.”
Wearing his kukri, the Gurkha blade that he is entitled to carry as a Gurkha commander, Colonel Collins spoke
to his 800 men, an arm of Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade, at Fort Blair Mayne, their desert camp 20 miles
from the Iraqi border.
He said: “We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to
free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.
There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on
that journey, we will not send.
“As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are
ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory.
“It is a big step to take another human life. It is not to be done lightly.
“I know of men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. I can assure you they live with the mark of
Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law and
ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.”
As the men listened in silence, the dying minutes of a day-long dust storm giving added drama to his address,
Colonel Collins reminded them that they were a band of brothers. He said: “If you harm the regiment or its
history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer. You will be
shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will
bring shame on neither our uniform nor our nation.”
He said they would certainly face Saddam’s chemical and biological arsenal. “It is not a question of if, it’s a
question of when. We know he has already devolved the decision to his lower commanders, and that means
he has already taken the decision himself. If we survive the first strike, we will survive the attack.”
The commander said he expected the conflict to last between ten days and three weeks and that it was vital if
the West was to curb the threat of Muslim fundamentalists. But he made it clear that his men were to respect
Iraqi culture and religion and not to confuse it with the international terrorism that Saddam had cultivated
within his borders.
He said: “Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace
of Abraham. Tread lightly there.
“You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent,
generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they
have nothing.
“Don’t treat them as refugees for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor. In years to come
they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you. If there are casualties of war, then
remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow
them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.”
His closing words were resolute: “As for ourselves, let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for
us having been there. Our business now is north.”
posted 11:14 PM
ISLAND
Went away. No internet, no tv. Re-hung pictures, last step after re-painting. Pacific thirty yards away.
Windows lightly crusted with windblown salt.
Read a book of interviews with a man, 95, who lived on this same island in the 1920's.
They scarcely had the wheel, those people: one Ford, stripped to its chassis, one two-wheeled horse-cart.
Otherwise they walked, rode horses, used the horses to pull "sleds", crude platforms with two plank runners,
dragging them along dirt roads that were little more than trails. No electricity.
Rain blowing over from Orcas Island.
The simple awesome depth of a mere eighty years.
BERRY RYDELL
My hapless would-be policeman, protagonist of VIRTUAL LIGHT and to some extent of ALL TOMORROW'S
PARTIES. Anyone curious as to where the Lieutenant-Colonel's address to the troops might fit, vis-a-vis my
work, should probably consider Rydell.
As incapable of irony as he is of cynicism, Rydell. Doomed thereby, of course. (Though there are, I intuit,
worse dooms by far.)
posted 8:17 AM
OUR MAN IN BAGHDAD
Has earned his own page on the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2881491.stm
The idea of Salam Pax as Tokyo Rose is an interesting one, though not because I think he's an Iraqi ruse.
Rather because the people who immediately suspect he is often seem to have been previously unfamiliar with
the concept of weblogging. One of those techno-cultural divides.
Myself, I think that if Iraqi intelligence were capable of cross-cultural emulation at the level required to spoof
the likes of a Salam Pax, they'd be about as good as it gets. Their reputation in the international community of
intelligence-watchers, however, is not that. In fact distinctly the opposite.
I doubt that simple totalitarian dictatorships often mount intelligence operations manifesting great imagination
and creativity. Probably because most of the local creatives are already dead, or pretending to be stupid. More
complex states generate intelligence burearocracies in which there are interstices for creatives. Mere ruthless
cunning will get you somewhere, but I doubt it could produce as baroque a figure as a fake Salam Pax.
Nonetheless, I'm quite convinced that intelligence organizations the world over have duly noted Salam Pax,
and the potential usefulness of such a figure. Next time around, it'll be harder to make the call.
I HAD NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH THIS
Except the obvious, I guess.
http://www.historypreservation.com/BuzzRickson.html
Seriously weird: a case of product placement in reverse, sort of.
Am at least equally boggled at FORTEAN TIMES putting my "I am a Fortean" quote on their cover. You can't
mess around with this stuff, can you? (However, I actually do consider myself a Fortean, and FT really is my
favorite magazine.
posted 9:00 AM
CAYCE AND BUZZ
Someone expresses horror at the cost of the "Pattern Recognition" Rickson's. I think the novel remarks that
the Rickson's is by far the most expensive garment Cayce owns. They're definitely pricey, and pricier still on
this American niche-marketer's website, but that's the way with otaku tackle. (You should check out the prices
on "garage" model-building kits. Amazing. Or those limited-edition non-action figures in GIANT ROBOT.)
How Cayce got her Rickson's: I have a Korean friend in Seoul who has serious otaku tendencies of his own. He
got the Rickson's repro of the WWII U.S. Navy deck jacket and showed me a picture. (He has a friend, an
office-mate, who collects only the zippers from WWII military outerwear. These were mostly by a firm called
Conmar, and are huge, pure bronze, sort of the Jungian archetype of a zipper, and the idea of someone
passionately assembling a collection of them still amazes me. Salvaging them from utterly wrecked examples
of garments, I guess. So that, in a briefcase, you'd have a sort of symbolic ghost-wardrobe of American
military wear. Or...something. )
It surprises me that these "PR" MA-1's are being made available at all (albeit in tiny quantities, which I trust is
appropriate for potential demand). One reason I gave Cayce the jacket was my having heard that Rickson's
were virtually impossible to get, even in Japan, the purchase of one requiring placing your order at least a
year in advance. When Cayce asks Blue Ant Tokyo to find her one, I was assuming that she knows she's
making an impossible request, but that she also knows that Blue Ant may well be able to meet it, and they do.
On the other hand, micro-niche-webmarketing is in my opinion a fine thing. Previously, the experience of
ultra-narrow-bandwidth retail esoterica was something limited to a very few very large cities, or specialist
catalogs.
WE CALL THEM FREEDOM CUFFS, NOW
The tricky purchase being the shirt, not the links. Plenty of cool cufflinks, almost no cool shirts that require
them.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR-BLOG
This guy sits home accessing umpteen different media-sources and logging them as brief factoids on a simple
time-line. The scary thing is that I can understand why he does it, but the amazing thing is that, well, he does
do it.
http://agonist.got.net/
BTW, last night when I went out, around midnight, I turned on my car radio to hear a brief news spot
about...Salam Pax! They didn't name the site or give the URL, though.
posted 8:45 AM
LINGUA FREEDOMA ALERT
A studio executive explains the need to make sure Chris Rock utters no anti-Bush statements when his new
movie is released:
"We are confident Chris knows this is not the appropriate time to make jokes about war and the president,"
said one top studio source. "We don't want to get Dixie-Chicked, or anything like that, out of the gate."
HEARD ON SKY NEWS
"Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton", UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons
yesterday. "He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr", said one British
soldier, informed of this while on patrol in Umm Qasr. Another added: "There's no beer, no prostitutes, and
people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth."
posted 6:23 PM
VIRGINIA WOOLF ON INFO-SURFING
From THREE GUINEAS (1938):
'Let us then begin by summoning, if only from the world of imagination, some daughter of an educated man
who has enough to live upon and can read and write for her own pleasure and, taking her to be the
representative of what may in fact be no class at all, let us ask her to examine the products of that reading
and writing which lie upon her own table. "Look, Madam," we might begin, "at the newspapers on your table.
Why, may we ask, do you take in three dailies, and three weeklies?" "Because," she replies, "I am interested
in politics, and wish to know the facts." "An admirable desire, Madam. But why three? Do they differ then
about facts, and if so, why?" To which she replies, with some irony, "You call yourself an educated man's
daughter, and yet pretend not to know the facts -- roughly that each paper is financed by a board; that each
board has a policy; that each board employs writers to expound that policy, and if the writers do not agree
with that policy, the writers, as you may remember after a moment's reflection, find themselves unemployed
in the street. Therefore if you want to know any fact about politics you must read at least three different
papers, compare at least three different version of the same fact, and come in the end to your own
conclusion. Hence the three daily papers on my table." Now that we have discussed, very briefly, what may be
called the literature of fact, let us turn to what may be called the literature of fiction. "There are such things,
Madam," we may remind her, "as pictures, plays, music and books. Do you pursue the same rather
extravagant policy there--glance at three daily papers and three weekly papers if you want to know the facts
about pictures, palys, music and books, because those who write about art are in the pay of an editor, who is
in the pay of a board, which has a policy to pursue, so that each paper takes a different view, so that it is only
by comparing three different views that you can come to your own conclusion--what pictures to see, what play
or concert to go to, which book to order from the library?" And to that she replies, "Since I am an educated
man's daughter, with a smattering of culture picked up from reading, I should no more dream, given the
conditions of journalism at present, of taking my opinions of pictures, plays, music or books from the
newspapers than I would take my opinion of politics from the newspapers. Compare the views, make
allowance for the distortions, and then judge for yourself. That is the only way. Hence the many newpapers on
my table."
Hence also the increasingly lengthy list of bookmarks on my browser, the most valuable of which seem to be
multi-source indie synthesizing operations on the order of The Agonist.
FEARFUL SYMMETRY?
Message in a bottle, found on the Internet:
" Initiating preflight check..."
1. Cabal of oldsters who won't listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. National boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakable faith in our superior technology? Check.
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we'll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Rightists unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with our own chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. Infighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Local conflicts since before the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won't raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don't go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.
"Vietnam II, you are cleared to taxi."
posted 4:48 PM
JONESIN'
Glad to learn that M-7 war dolphin Tacoma, 48 hours AWOL in the waters off Umm Qasr, has returned to
base:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6213096%5E25777,00.html
Wasn't there a story where they gave these guys opiates to keep them on task?
http://www.fxsmith.com/ptp32.html
VERY STALE PRESS RELEASE FROM ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY
But still news to me:
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/chiba/press/release_nov1999.html
Flattering, I guess, but I can't help but think of the confusion this must have caused visiting Japanese
scientists. It would be as though the Japanese had insisted on calling their own scalable Linux test bed
"Newark".
posted 7:15 PM
BEDREST, PLENTY OF FLUIDS, AND TWO PREVIOUSLY UNREAD NOVELS BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
That's the prescription here, I'm sorry to say.
Can't make Harbourfront in Toronto.
I'm down with something.
I deeply dislike having to cancel a scheduled appearance, particularly at the last minute. I think I may have
done it three times in around twenty years, or four if you count getting snowed out of DC, on the recent tour.
But I know from hard experience exactly what two five-hour sessions of cabin-pressurization, plus a few days
of dry hotel air, would do to this thing I've got going on in my sinuses.
I won't try to convince you that SARS-paranoia doesn't factor in at all, but I think I'd definitely be feeling
considerably more bullish if I weren't already ill. My biggest semi-irrational fear re SARS and T-o, in fact, is
that they wouldn't believe, when I'd try to board the return flight at Malton, that I'm only sweating and
coughing because of this little old ordinary virus I'd brought along from Vancouver.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, though. Sorry indeed. I know that some regular posters, in particular, were
planning on turning up, and I've started looking forward to putting faces to the icons.
You can, I trust, get your money back from Harbourfront. (For the non-Torontonians, Harbourfront is a vast
annual literary festival that charges admission to readings and signings as if they were concerts. I've never
seen anything quite like it, though to be honest the only events I've attended that were even remotely similar
have been the Wellington [NZ] Literary Festival, the Vancouver International Writers Festival, and the Paris
Book Fair.)
Now I'm getting into bed.
With Haruki. And the latest GIANT ROBOT. And the new issue of THE NEW YORKER with soldiers trampling
over anti-war protest signs. And a liter of Apollonaris water, the only mineral water with actual analgesic
qualities. ("A Johnny and a Polly", forgotten drink of the 1920s, Johnny Walker and Apollonaris water. I
wonder if there's anywhere in the world today that you could order one of those and they'd just bring it? I
doubt it.)
Goodnight, all.
April
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
posted 9:05 AM
WHILE I REST UP, A FACTOID:
Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems. [The following found, of course, on the Internet.]
The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, so half of that is in each spermatozoa -1,560,000,000 base pairs . Each side of these base pairs can either be an adenine -thymine or a guanine cytosine bond, and they can be aligned either direction, so there are four choices. Four possibilities for a value
means it can be fully represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine, and so forth.
The figures that I've read state the number of sperm in a human ejaculation to be anywhere from 50 to 500
million. I'm going to go with the number 200,000,000 sperm cells , but if anyone knows differently, please tell
me.
Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^
8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison,
were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about
20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds , you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s .
In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet ) can move
.005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that .
If you consider signal to noise , though, the figures come out much differently. If only the single sperm cell
that fertilizes the egg counts as signal , you get (1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits) / 5 s = 6.24*10^ 8bits/s, or
somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 Mb/s . Still a great deal more bandwidth than your average cable
modem , but not nearly the 5,000,000 Mb/s of the OC-96 .
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
posted 9:58 PM
EJACULATORY BANDWIDTH
You found it strange, that I'd post that?
I wouldn't even rate that as "high weirdness".
It had been sitting around my desktop for weeks. Just another little reminder of the complexity of Mother
Nature. If it had turned up while I was writing PR, it might have found its way into Cayce's sense of the world.
KYLA THE TRANSPLANTED TEXAN
is absolutely right, about Hub and Hube.
MURAKAMI'S UNDERGROUND
is...somber. A collection of Terkelesque interviews with people who were affected when Aum released sarin in
the Tokyo subway. Just started it.
THANKS
for get-well wishes. I'm feeling better.
Thursday, April 03, 2003
posted 5:47 AM
DRAGON EYE
Didn't you imagine having one of these when you were a kid, playing soldiers? Why does it take so long for
some things to become reality?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54068-2003Mar6.html
LITTLE MAGAZINE
I wish there were more of these. Maybe there are. If you know of one, start a thread.
http://www.pulp.net/
Friday, April 04, 2003
posted 2:55 PM
BBC BLOG EXPRESSES QUINTESSENTIAL BEEB ATTITUDE
BBC Monitoring, Caversham :: John Andrew :: 1501GMT
The Iraqi media is not as detailed today. We saw the
Information minister a few minutes ago. He was extremely
tetchy.
Sunday, April 06, 2003
posted 10:17 PM
GOOGLING THE DIG
"I knew they'd turn up on the net eventually,' writes my friend the Searchstring Sensei.
This is as close as anyone is ever going to get to finding footage. Really quite weird to see, for me in
particular.
[Spoiler alert: If you haven't read PATTERN RECOGNITION, I suppose the images at the following link may
constitute a spoiler. Albeit a deeply cryptic one. Personally, if I hadn't read PR, and saw these images, I'd
probably decide to go ahead and read PR.]
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&safe=off&q=+site:klad.hobby.ru+Focke+Wulf+
I recall someone here asking, recently, whether anything like The Dig actually exists. Searchstring Sensei
provides the definitive answer.
Monday, April 07, 2003
posted 9:24 AM
BALLARDIAN
The descriptive genius of J.G. Ballard could find an entire novel, here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2924697.stm
CONCRETE BOMB
The more things change: Primate throws rock, primate throws great big laser-guided rock...
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/10/991007-iraq.htm
posted 8:41 AM
A JETTA
Someone posts the burning question: what kind of car do I drive?
A Jetta. A globalist Jetta, a German car assembled in Mexico for sale in Canada. Actually I think these may
only be for sale in Canada; they are the best deal you can get, anywhere, on a new Jetta, and the dealer
makes you sign an agreement that you won't turn around and re-sell the car to someone in the United States
(for a tidy profit).
The Jetta is actually a very good car in terms of leg and headroom, but the latter only if the sun-roof is
lacking. In order to build the sun-roof in, they have to lower the header by about three inches, which
definitely doesn't work if you're over six feet.
If someone offered me my choice of a free new car, I would probably choose the nearest Audi equivalent to
the Jetta. Same thing, just that much better. I don't know what that is. Some kind of "stealth car" impulse.
Would definitely prefer a fully-loaded Passat to any Mercedes or BMW. Have never wanted to drive a car that
anyone would have any very strong opinion of. The Jetta's good that way, and has the advantage of being fun
to drive.
Talk about a "slow news day", blogging!
"UNCLE BILL"?
Spare me, please. That poster's idea of me sounds more like Hunter Thompson, or some kind of Deadhead
fantasy writer.
And people have forgotten that "yuppification" has its roots in Young Upwardly Mobile Professional. I'm
showing clean on two of those three, anyway, as I'm neither young nor (at least in the traditional sense) "a
professional". (Used to mean doctors, lawyers, and, just barely, dentists, members of "the professions".) Not
sure about upwardly mobile. At this point I'd settle for stasis. But working novelists are generally about as un"professional", in that sense, as you can get.
Shoes. Elmore Leonard would have a hard time figuring me out on the basis of shoes, I think. I have a lot of
shoes. Though not like that supposed Raymond Chandler line about having to write because he had a butler
and two dozen pairs of shoes to support.
WORSE THAN WAR?
The following, from todays New York Times, seems to me to pretty much constitute a "reality spoiler":
'Hong Kong reported 45 new cases today, including the infections of 18 health care workers, as well as the
deaths of two elderly men who were infected with SARS but had other health problems as well. Figures for
new cases over the last several days have included 30 cases at the Ngau Tau Kok apartment complex, which
had not previously been affected, Dr. Leung said.
The disease has already infected close to 300 people in the nearby Amoy Gardens apartment complex, and it
appears that people from the Ngau Tau Kok complex had been visiting Amoy Gardens, Dr. Leung added.
Until today, Hong Kong health officials had discouraged the everyday use of face masks, saying that regular
hand washing was more important. But Dr. Leung endorsed the use of face masks tonight.
He did not draw a distinction between cloth surgical masks of the sort that doctors have worn for decades and
the newer, cupped respirators that doctors wear in some of the most hazardous rooms.
Some doctors here have expressed concern that while the respirators filter more out of the air, they may be
less effective for the lay user than a surgical mask because the respirators are so uncomfortable that they
prompt wearers to touch their faces to adjust them. This can spread the virus to the eyes, nose or mouth and
then into the body, causing an infection.
In one of the more unusual health tips here lately, government officials also said it might help if people were
to close toilet lids when flushing, and to clean the underside of the lid and the toilet seat with a bleach solution
later. Preliminary analyses of the outbreak at Amoy Gardens suggest that it was spread by sewage, partly
from toilets that backed up into neighbors' apartments and partly from cockroaches that tracked tiny amounts
of virus-tainted sewage through homes, they added.'
RE "In Memorium of a Matyr" (sp)
Watching those ugly-ass statues topple, to the cheers of huge crowds, I imagine that some poor sucker who
blew himself up to prevent this happening was exactly that.
posted 6:48 PM
.
posted 8:14 AM
I CAN"T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO THANK CHRIS STEIN
I hate putting together the "thanks" page at the back of a novel. I hate it because I know I'll forget to thank
someone who provided something absolutely essential. I know I'll forget because I have to put that page
together when I'm still reeling from having completed the manuscript, and am in full and quite headless flight
from the very process of writing.
Well, I did it again. I did it bigtime, this time. Came to me in the middle of the night, last night, when I
happened to wake and find myself thinking about that thread about the Russian "military archaeology" site
that Searchstring Sensei recently Googled the stills from. How people were wondering whether Damien's Dig,
in PR, has any basis in reality. "Silly people," I thought, sleepily, "What do they think I thanked Chris Stein
for?"
Eyes shooting open in horror. *Did* I thank Chris Stein. Toss. Turn.
And, of course, I didn't. That's Chris Stein of Blondie, or so he's best known. Also Chris Stein the Japanese
model-building otaku, ultra-specialist Japanese magazine afficionado and custom knife maven. Very high
otaku-DNA factor, Chris has.
About the time I was starting what would become PR, Chris sent me an email describing, pretty much as
you've come to know it, Damien's dig. The scene with the pilot of the excavated plane is imaginary, but the
rest of it is worked up quite directly from Chris's brilliant description of this scene he'd discovered. A friend of
his had been there, and seen it, and Chris was corresponding with him. Chris mentioned to me, in passing,
how cool it would be to go there and shoot documentary video. His email made my ears ring, though in my
non-linear way it took months to occur to me that the film I had absented Damien for was in fact Chris Stein's
documentary.
Now I can only groan, and apologize. But this is *exactly* why I hate having to do the "thanks" page. Not
only will I manage to leave someone out, but I'll manage to leave out the person whose passion, enthusiasm
and descriptive powers managed in a single email to affect the entire course and meaning of the book!
Dang.
Though it makes me appreciate yet another advantage of having this website, as I can instantly go public with
my apology and this citation.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chris Stein: Aside from all that great music, he's given us...The Dig!
As to how I can manage to do these things... Remember that long early thread about drugs and creativity?
Well, I really do write in an altered state. It's an altered state called "writing a book", and, let me tell you, it's
seriously *chronic*.
THE UBER-JETTA
Wish I knew how to do an umlaut.
I saw the Uber-Jetta in Barcelona, this past December, when I walked past a Volkswagen showroom. It's
called the Phaeton, and they build it in the Glass Factory.
The Glass Factory is a purpose-built Phaeton-factory with glass walls, in a German city, the entire assemblyline visible constantly to passers-by. The Phaeton itself, retailing in Canada for about three times the list on
my Jetta, struck me as looking like a Jetta on steroids. I would have expected it to look more like a Passat
(but more so, somehow). But it doesn't have that Passat roofline thing going on.
The ultimate in a German stealth car: I've probably seen a few in traffic, even here, but have read them as
Jetta's. Like it's a Jetta, but it must be *closer* than I think it is, because it's somehow a little too *big*.
I PROMISE TO LIGHTEN UP ON THIS SARS STUFF
But, meanwhile, The Agonist has this remarkable indie material from the epicenter of the outbreak. I
recommend this particularly for anyone prone to imagine that SARS is the result some sort of biotech. My best
guess, as a sci-fi guy, is that SARS is the result of millions of people living in all too cosy proximity with a
whole petting zoo of billions of farm critters, *in a tropical climate*. Epidemiology teaches that no more than
that classic recipe is required to produce outbreaks of even the most fearsomely novel diseases.
http://www.agonist.org/archives/001212.html#001212
CONSPIRACY THEORIES DON'T DO IT FOR ME, USUALLY
But still...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=42881408
EXTREME ATHELETE
Thanks to Kevin Kelly for pointing this one out.
http://www.bikesportmichigan.com/editorials/0000023.shtml
AND IF YOU'RE WONDERING WHY...
That reminded you so strongly of the general vibe of STARSHIP TROOPERS...
http://www.insidetri.com/news/fea/1465.0.html
Thursday, April 10, 2003
posted 11:42 AM
"WHERE IS THE DISNEYLAND?"
We got your Disneyland right here, pal:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/37148/1/.html
LAST EXIT: THE TOKEN-SUCKERS OF NEW YORK
Glad someone started a thread on this, the most disgusting non-assaultive crime formerly practiced in the
New York subway system. Like I'm always telling you, technology is the primary driver of social change. Those
magstrips come in, the suckers of tokens, that tiny, weirdly Dickensian tribe, go out.
FLORIDA
The only state shaped like a handgun.
posted 4:07 PM
HEART OF THE DRAKKAR NOIR
"Watching the current action in Baghdad is extremely strange," writes a friend. "First of all, those palaces of
Sadaam's, all of which look like Atlantic City casinos -- plastic washbasins with gold faucets and hollowcore
doors. Then, the sight of burned out tanks and bodies in the road, both in the middle of what appears to be
the more distant stretches of, say, La Cienega just above the intersection of I-5...."
What grabs me most are the accounts (lists, really) of the regime's more personal gomi. Drakkar Noir
definitely the cologne of choice. They all seem to have been avid readers of VANITY FAIR (which makes a
horrid kind of sense). Well-thumbed Danielle Steele paperbacks seem to turn up pretty frequently as well. One
of Saddam's sons had a pretty cool collection of personal firearms, but nothing really that a Montana dentist
and heavy contributor to the NRA couldn't assemble, with a little help from his friends. Saddam's yacht
managed a little of the old Austin Powers super-villain flash, though, boasting a secret underwater escapehatch (though the mini-sub, my Plot Device noted, is *missing*) and a private operating theater with a black
leather operating table (maybe this was for tweaking the doubles into more Saddamoid parameters?).
Personally I think he's in that mini-sub. Reading Danielle Steele.
THE GREAT AND GLOWING WEN
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030411.html
Where I will soon be going.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
posted 6:43 AM
UK TOUR LOOMS
http://www.fashionpolice.dk/wgb/monkey.htm
I am indeed a tired little publicity monkey, as Fashionpolice's spoof of the Penguin site states, but nonetheless
will shortly depart for Dublin, where I hope to sleep off the worst of the soul-delay over the Easter weekend.
The signing there, I'm informed, has been cancelled, due to some difficulty with the intended co-sponsor of
the event. Will do some press interviews there on Tuesday morning, then on to England.
I don't know why, as someone asked here, back when we started, the UK edition is coming out so much later
than the US edition. Prior to the advent of internet bookselling, cunning British publishers sought to be first,
thereby ensuring a certain tiny foreign market of people intent on owning "hardcover first". This has gradually
changed, although PR has the biggest gap, so far, between US and UK publication. I imagine that it has
nothing to do with PR per se, but rather is the result of the internal scheduling issues of both publishers.
Publishers bring books out constantly, as do their competitors, and schedule, to what extent they can, to
garner the maximum amount of attention for a given title.
I'm looking forward to the UK tour, as indeed I always do, though this really does seem to have been an
unsually long promotional interlude. It started back in January, in Copenhagen, went to half-speed after the
US leg, and now is about to finish out in London. After which... After which, I'll toggle to non-promo mode and
start to approach the writing of a next book.
TOGGLING TO NON-PROMO MODE
Will necessarily involve that which Fashionpolice already seeks to avoid experiencing: the complete and utter
cessation of blogging.
One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can
coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same
bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth).
But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me. It would be
like trying to boil water without a lid. Or, more like it, trying to run a steam engine without a lid. (I wonder if
that would be the case for a native of the blogosphere -- for whom, as Lou Reed once said of heroin addicts,
"the needle is a toothbrush"? Maybe not.)
So, fair warning: I will indeed stop doing this at some point, though not until I return from England.
And not until I've told the true story of the "I Want Room Service" scene in JOHNNY MNEMONIC, discussed in
a recent thread. Coming soon.
Best wishes to Fashionpolice for her continuing recovery. It's been very nice, having you addicted!
Monday, April 14, 2003
posted 7:07 AM
SHAGDAD LOVE PAD
For those intimate moments, the dictator favored faux-Vallejo kitsch purchased by his agents from the art
shows of American fantasy conventions:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6281353%255E26277,00.html
A *VERY* DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE WAR
From The Moscow Times. Interesting.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/04/10/009.html
"HOW LONG?"
The contract, thought not yet signed, specifies three years. I would hope, given that new ground had to be
broken for PR, that for once I could bring it in ahead of contract. But like they say, don't jinx it
posted 7:39 PM
BODACIOUS BODACION: SPOCK IS FOR SPOOKS
Man, it is getting *so* hard to dream up anything that will feel even remotely outrageous, against background
radiation like this:
For Immediate Release:
>
> NSA's SPOCK Program Selects Bodacion's HYDRA Web Server
>
> National Security Agency Deploys Bodacion's Secure Web Technology to
> Deflect Hackers, Shorten Training Time and Reduce Maintenance Costs
>
> BARRINGTON, ILLINOIS (April 2, 2003) — The Security Proof of Concept
> Keystone (SPOCK), a Department of Defense consortium of corporate and
> government organizations sponsored by the National Security Agency
> (NSA), has selected Bodacion Technologies' HYDRA secure Web Services
> appliance as its primary Web server. The NSA cited HYDRA's extreme
> resistance to all known hacking attacks, as well as the appliance's
> simplicity and reliability, as reasons for choosing Bodacion's > product.
>
> "After SPOCK demonstrations showed HYDRA's improved security and
> maintainability over current solutions, the NSA saw a clear fit for
> their own needs," said Eric Ridvan Uner, Co-Founder of Bodacion
> Technologies, Co-Inventor of HYDRA and his company's chief liaison to
> government agencies. "The NSA, of course, has a vested interest in
> making sure that hackers stay out of any NSA Web site, and so the
> SPOCK program selected HYDRA for its high level of resistance to
> hacking attacks of all kinds."
>
> Compatibility and maintenance were also primary SPOCK concerns,
> according to Uner. HYDRA was a simple drop-in replacement for the
> legacy solution, he said, which required minimal deployment effort.
> HYDRA also will require less maintenance and training than the legacy
> system, he added.
>
> Last year, SPOCK conducted a demonstration of HYDRA consisting of
> security claims by Bodacion Technologies and tests jointly agreed to
> by the participants. The results were that all Bodacion’s claims were
> verified. More than 350 technologists from civil and defense entities
>
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are involved in the SPOCK program; currently there are 65
security-related corporations and 19 government agencies participating
in the program.
Bodacion’s appliance is designed specifically for secure Web Services
computing and has captured the attention of senior authorities at
national intelligence and Department of Defense organizations because
it does not suffer from common vulnerabilities of general purpose
computers/servers that run general purpose operating systems. For
example, HYDRA is the only Web server known to prevent “tunneling,” a
technique malicious system users apply to observe the activities of
other network users. Such protection is vital for federal agencies
with multiple levels of security interests.
Major General (retired) Michael Davidson, a former assistant to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and an advisor to Bodacion executives,
facilitates the company's relationships with government organizations.
“For federal agencies continually assaulted by hackers and other
malicious cyber-criminals, HYDRA represents a critical Internet
security technology,” Davidson said.
About Bodacion Technologies
Bodacion Technologies, LLC, creates revolutionary Web Services
products for Internet-intensive enterprises that are seeking secure,
reliable, high-performance systems to minimize the Internet's risks
and maximize its rewards. The company’s flagship product, HYDRA,
combines the security of complex mathematics with the reliability of
embedded systems to create a Web Services appliance that cannot be
hacked, will virtually never crash and can handle thousands of
concurrent users. Based in Barrington, Illinois, Bodacion
Technologies’ serves an international clientele of government
agencies, financial institutions and other e-Business enterprises.
For more information, visit http://www.bodacion.com/spock/
posted 8:54 AM
"STEPS WILL BE TAKEN TO HEIGHTEN AWARENESS..."
Enforced meditation in the tatami room, no doubt.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2951859.stm
MORE RUSSIAN MILITARY REACTION
Re the thread on whether or not Soviet technology was any good... That's not really the question, here, I
think. Rather, it's the recognition that, in terms of the paradigm-shift the US military has brought about,
previous paradigms are increasingly unlikely to be able to prevail.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0416/p06s01-woiq.html
Perhaps there's a cultural angle here as well. Recent US military successes are not entirely dependant on
smart weaponry, advanced telepresence, etc., but also on a radically new, relatively counter-hierarchical
Special Ops doctrine, in which small, highly trained, remarkably autonomous units, in the field, select their
own targets and make their own decisions. This requires that those who field such units trust them. It may be
that societies with a certain trust-deficit are, by their very nature, functionally unable to do this. What dictator
would be able to trust his own Delta Force? Is it possible that this new paradigm of warfare might prove to
only be workable for relatively democratic societies?
WEIRD TRUE AUSTRALIAN unCRIME
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/04/16/australia.hideaway.reut/index.html
posted 8:58 AM
UK TOUR
Off to Dublin via Heathrow, this evening. Will use Easter weekend to wait out the worst of the soul-delay.
There is, alas, no Dublin signing scheduled. For complex, non-author-related reasons, this one just didn't
come together. Will do some interviews on Tuesday, then on to London in the evening.
The British events are all 100% on, though, and here they are:
April 23rd, Nottingham
7.30pm
Waterstone's
1-5 Bridlesmith Gate.
April 24th, London
7pm
with Foyles, in the Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell, St WC1B 3LS
£5.
£2 off the book.
www.folyes.co.uk
April 25th, Birmingham
7pm
Waterstone's, 128 New Street, .
£3 redeemable.
Booking no: 0121 631 4333.
April 26th, London
1pm
Forbidden Planet
The foreign British habit of charging entrance to signings is still, well, foreign, but the cost of the ticket can
almost always be deducted from purchase of the book, plus attendees are given a certain amount of free wine
beforehand, encouraging a congenial pre-event milling about and talking that can be very pleasant. (There
may well be laws prohibiting this in large American chain bookstores.)
That may not look like a particularly daunting work week, but it doesn't show the media activity, which is, as
we say. "full".
Still, it's London, and peaceful Dublin before that, and those are both places I'm extremely fond of. Looking
forward to it. See you there.
SOMETHING ALL NOVELISTS KNOW
In a work of fiction, you can name a character Pollard, but you probably wouldn't name her Sobers unless you
had some very good reason for it.
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?Category=18&ID=94594&r=0
Saturday, April 26, 2003
posted 12:48 PM
IT'S A GOOD THING I'M NOT ALLERGIC TO BRANDING
Otherwise, I'd be rough shape, here in Seven Dials, smack in the middle of Covent Garden hyper-branded
retail-fever. On the other hand, though, it wouldn't be Tommy Hilfiger I'd have to worry about; more Duffer of
St. George and Offspring.
I hadn't realised that the end-point of Cayce's hypothetical process of sneaker-evolution, starting with
observation of the hooves of the Camden Children's Crusade, would be these few blocks of Neal Street
(around the corner, it turns out, from our heroine's Pilates studio).
And around another couple of corners from New Oxford Street and Forbidden Planet, where I did the very last
PR signing-session today.
It's a wrap.
DUBLIN
was as perfect a place to wait out soul-delay as I'd expected it would be.
It even has its own branch of Wagamama, the world's coolest noodle restaurant.
Though even all that fine soba wasn't enough to keep me from winding up where I always eventually do if I'm
jetlagged in Dublin: peering throughy the fence at the tiny, deeply strange Huguenot Cemetary on Merrion
Row, c. 1693. Grave-markers like Shaker tables carved from stone. Bluebells growing up through boxwood.
Litter-spillage from the Merrion Row bus-stop: tall tinnies of Guiness and Linden Village Strong Cider. Deja-vu
of soul-delay.
Deja.
Vu.
May
Thursday, May 01, 2003
posted 5:20 AM
EXIT PR PROMO TUNNEL
Back in Vancouver, where it's 4:11am. So somebody must have reverse soul-delay (though I never find it as
interestingly altered a state, coming this way). My absence, blogwise, probably had more to do with a sense
of returning to civilian life than it did with access. Both hotels had 24-hour hot-and-cold running access, but I
found myself more interested in going out and experiencing sense of place than coming back to report same.
The hotel in London actually had a Dell laptop leashed to an easychair in the lobby, always on; best
arrangement of its kind I've seen.
The PR tour is now officially over, though I still hope to make up the missed date in Toronto at some point.
THAT CBC ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
Yep, that is indeed me, though nothing I'm saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine.
They were offering $500 for someone to monologue about the summer of lurve, etc., and I was (1) somewhat
articulate, and (2) wanted desperately to get my ass out of Yorkville (the local Haight equivalent, then, though
if you look at the place today you'd have a hard time imagining it). In a universe where a furnished bedsit on
Isabella Street (comfortably far from the site of this taping) rented for $25 per week, $500 was serious
money. That isn't my girlfriend, by the way, but another media-opportunist, someone who smelled CBC
money and welded her unshowered hip to mine as soon as she saw the cameras. They paid her, too, though
not as much, as she didn't have a speaking part. So there are multiple layers of irony, in this ancient footage.
I'm not, in spite of what they say, from Vancouver; I'm from Virginia and rightly anxious not to be recognized
as such. I'm thoroughly fed up with the particular Children's Crusade being examined here, and want nothing
more than a ticket out of it. My love-beaded sweetheart is someone I only know well enough to cordially
dislike.
What this experience did for me, I recall, other than provide a fresh bankroll for my Excellent Adventure, was
to instill a basic distrust of television news: you could go on CBC television and lie through your teeth, and
badly. I hadn't known that. Somehow I'd assumed that they'd have someone checking for veracity.
Historical CBC fashion note: The guys who shot this were actually *in uniform*. The producers wore carefullypressed gray flannel slacks, navy blazers with gold buttons and scrambled-egg CBC *crests* on their breastpockets, white shirts, ties (probably the CBC Old School stripe) while the cameramen and technicians wore
crisp khakis and CBC-logo golf jackets. The technicians would probably have gotten in trouble if they'd worn
bluejeans instead of khakis, and the producers would never even have thought of doing it.
If the subculture depicted (or quasi-depicted) in this footage seems utterly silly to you, you might consider
that CBC television crews, today, probably don't have dress-codes. The Sixties, so called, did change a few
things, and sometimes, definitely, for the better.
As to whether I could have imagined some future technology dredging this up and stapling it to my public
persona, yes, indeed, I probably could have, and I suspect I may have vaguely dreaded exactly that. I do
know that I was slightly uneasy, years later, when they re-ran this footage and a friend recognized me, and
uneasier still, further on, post-authorhood, when someone at CBC figured out that that was in fact me. In the
meantime, though, I guess I've gotten used to it. And all things considered, I'd say it was definitely the right
thing to do, as it paid for the luxury of my very own bed, a bare lightbulb, and second-hand Pan SF
paperbacks. Things a boy needed.
SADIE DOING MOLLY
Diehard Molly-casters might take a look at Paul Anderson's first film, SHOPPING, which features an
interestingly Mollyesque turn by Sadie Frost. Anderson told me, when he gave me a cassette of the film, that
he'd been thinking of Molly as he developed this character, and that he'd sent Frost off to a movement
instructor, in Paris, to be taught "to walk like a man". (SHOPPING, mind you, isn't a film you'd be likely to rent
otherwise. A micro-budget first feature about ram-raiding teenagers, the best thing it has going for it is this
one odd but definitely special effect -- Sadie Frost walking like a man you wouldn't want to meet in a dark
alley). I haven't seen it for years, now, but I remember thinking at the time that Frost was easily the closest
thing I'd seen to my own idea of Molly. Sad to say, she's likely a little too old for the part now. Sadder still,
Anderson told me (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) that Frost's father was a martial-arts expert of
some kind, and that she was already a very convincing scrapper. Saddest of all, she actually came within
*this* much of signing on as the Molly-analog in JOHNNY MNEMONIC, but then didn't. I'd had fingers and toes
crossed, but it didn't happen.
http://www.soundaid.ch/images/dvd448.jpg
posted 11:29 PM
"MY CITY WAS GONE"
I've often said that what happened to my teenage bohemia was the equivalent of having had the Trump
Tower built on St. Mark's Place. Actually it's a little less clean-cut, as retail Yorkville, prior to the Summer of
Lurve (as seen in that footage) aspired to the then-status of Gerrard "Village", a stretch of Gerrard, on either
side of Yonge, that had been Toronto's beat bohemia in the 50's. By the mid-60s, all that was left were a
couple of jazz clubs and a few arty antique shops selling whimsical Victoriana of the sort recently made
popular by the Beatles. The merchants and club-owners who sought to popularize Yorkville were trying for a
more pedestrian-friendly but nonetheless commercial "Village" situation, and banking on the architectural
charm of what had originally been a sort of tower hamlet of the city proper. Their agenda was bushwacked by
the hippies, though, a year or two after people like the Buffalo Springfield and Joni Mitchell had gotten their
start on Yorkville Avenue, in venues like the Riverboat and the Myna Bird. By the time I came along, you
couldn't make a buck for the damned kids wandering up and down (my first experience of the Children's
Crusade). Real estate values, I'm sure, tanked briefly. Though two years later you could still have bought a
perfectly fine brownstone for what you'd pay for a mid-rung BMW today.
When I first met Keanu Reeves, and we found ourselves talking about Toronto, he told me that he had played,
as a child, in the excavation for the Four Seasons Hotel, on Yorkville Avenue. I was long gone to Vancouver,
by then, but had been shocked, on subsequent visits, by the truly remarkable ferocity with which the ambient
zone I remembered had been malled over. In retrospect, this had everything to do with Yorkville "Village"
having been, in the first place, a developers' simulacrum of the West Village, briefly invaded, in my day, by a
social simulacrum of the East Village.
As the tide of "weekend hippies" washed back out, many of the more organizationally-inclined habitues were
sucked up into the astonishingly Ballardian (as in HIGHRISE, it seemed to me) tower of Rochdale College.
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~sharpe/rochdale.htm
The genuine ambients swam down into the twisty, virtually ungentrifiable streets of Kensington Market
instead, and away from the Cronenbergian, acid-totalitarian creepiness of Rochdale, and I've regarded
Toronto, ever since, as a city somehow uniquely blind to its own psychogeography.
A LITTLE X-CLARIFICATION
Both episodes were co-written with Tom Maddox, with Chris Carter making his accustomed final pass on each
one (which invariably, in my experience, helped). The difference, though, was that KILL SWITCH was shot
here in Vancouver, with the original local production team at the very top of their form. X-F episodes were, at
that point, priced at around a million per, the most expensive individual episodes in the history of US episodic
television. And that million USD translated into way more in our local pesos, plus the crew had started out
getting optimum looks for way less. I was delighted with everything except Visigoth's eye-makeup. By the
time FIRST PERSON SHOOTER was written, X-F had moved back to Los Angeles, but the truly excellent
Vancouver crew were busy here with HARSH REALM, Chris Carter's ambitious and highly promising but
astonishingly short-lived third series, which was subsequently strangled in the cradle by the network. By the
time FPS was ready to shoot, Chris (I'm guessing) had a serious chip on his shoulder re the recent killing off
of HARSH REALM, and worked part of this out on the network by making sure that FPS, at around three
million, was an astonishingly pricey episode. The gaming set alone cost more than most low-budget features.
Somehow, though, this expansion of budget resulted in a more generic feel. KILL SWITCH was more fun, both
to write and to see shot. (I was working out some ideas for HARSH REALM episodes, and was deeply
disappointed when the series was cut. Writing for a show shot in your home town is huge fun.)
Friday, May 02, 2003
posted 5:20 PM
BLOGGING VS. WRITING
Inspired, so to speak, by the recent thread on Slashdot:
Blogging seems to me to be as undemanding an activity, however congenial, as "writing" is demanding.
Blogging is conversational, literally informal, and seldom even comes close to engaging the compositional
gear-train required for even a brief essay, let alone for an extended work of prose fiction.
Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, cited on Slashdot as a sort of proto-blog (assumed stream-of-consciousness
endless-roll-of-paper stuff) has meanwhile been discovered to have been the result of several very careful and
deliberate drafts, the teletype roll having apparently been...marketing. (This only emerged fairly recently, as
various caches of Kerouac papers began to change hands after epic, glacially-slow legal actions.)
ON THE ROAD is only as satisfying as it is, I would argue, because it does in fact have its own "rules", its own
coherent internal structure (though its author having been a Whitmanesque American prose genius no doubt
counts for much as well). Kerouac had contemporaries who cranked out equally lengthy, more purely
unstructured swathes of personal experience, but most of these found their generally uncelebrated way into
either landfill or the Special Collections hoppers of small college libraries. (The most characteristic literary
output of "the 60's" probably consisted of these generally unpublished bugcrushers, which were compiled, I
would assume from the evidence, by people who never doubted that Kerouac really had sat down with a roll of
teletype paper and whacked out ON THE ROAD in one benzedrine-fuelled, angel-headed go.)
One of the reasons, I'm convinced, that I've been able to produce even the few novels I have is that, almost
from the start, I largely swore off less formal avenues of literary expression. The culture of SF, particularly,
seemed to me to be studded with truly scary examples of talented writers who had chosen to sublimate their
energies in SF's native (and relatively ancient) fanzine scene, the geniuses of which (and there arguably were
a few) eventually (and perhaps inevitably?) evolved their own equivalents of blogging.
It's the "conversational" aspect, I think, that keeps this kind of writing from really getting off the ground. You
see the initial lift into heightened language, into intent, but when the wings begin to wobble (as they
invariably will) there's always the option of safe and instantaneous descent back into a fundamentally informal
relationship with the reader. There's no risk involved.
Unless, if you're accustomed to playing for higher stakes, it's the risk of some edge being taken off your
game.
Saturday, May 03, 2003
posted 9:05 AM
GOMI NO SENSEI -- NOPE
Mr. Gomi? Mr. *Gomi*?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2993389.stm
Sunday, May 04, 2003
posted 11:19 PM
CROSS-DRESSING SCHOOLGIRL BANDIT APPREHENDED
Yeah, I know they said on Slashdot that I was boring for listing BBC and CNN as frequently-visited sites, but
then I find a gem like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3000211.stm
Monday, May 05, 2003
posted 7:53 AM
NOBODY, BUT NOBODY, DOES CULTS LIKE THE JAPANESE
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030502p2a00m0fp025001c.html
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
posted 10:15 AM
TENTATIVE SUMMER-FALL APPEARANCES
Maybe Bumbershoot in August. In the fall, pretty definitely the Vancouver Writers Festival, then, almost
immediately after, the Toronto equivalent.
RAED, APPARENTLY, IS...
http://www.dearraed.blogspot.com/
HOMEBREW JAPANESE COMPUTER HOUSINGS
These people are just so superbly crazy...
http://www4.justnet.ne.jp/~kat/pc/pccase.htm
posted 5:58 PM
IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER
WASHINGTON POST STYLE has a contest in which readers submit instructions for doing various things, their
choice, as written by famous authors. Jeff Brechlin of Potomac Falls recently won for the following, for
wonderfully obvious reasons:
The Hokey Pokey (as written by W. Shakespeare)
O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.
posted 11:36 PM
SHADOWRUN: GAG ME WITH A SPOON
No relationship. No permission. Nothing. Nary a word exchanged, ever.
Except that the admixture of cyberspace and, spare me, *elves*, has always been more than I could bear to
think about.
I've just been ignoring it for years, and hope to continue to.
I do in fact follow the threads here, most of them anyway, and the gnomic remarks above prove it to those
who don't.
As does the following: When people are downloading your pirated texts for free, it means you're already
pretty widely distributed. I view downloading as a sort of natural, organic tax on reputation.
Buying used copies is ecologically correct and to be encouraged. The list price on a hardcover PATTERN
RECOGNITION in Canada is $40. After GST and PST, that would be closer to $50. When people have the
courage to shyly tell me they're waiting for the paperback, I'm all the more amazed and flattered at the
number of people who buy me in hardcover. I didn't start buying new fiction in hardcover until I was in my
thirties and owned a house. And most of the paperbacks I bought, up to that point, I bought used.
HOW BAPTISTS VIEW THE SPEECH OF TEENAGERS
Every five years or so, you need to check in with this.
http://www.thesourcefym.com/teenlingo/
posted 2:04 PM
NAMECHECKED BY SALAM PAX?
Blimey. That's a really peculiar frisson for yours truly. Though so's the world in general, and Mr. Pax's part of
it, currently, way more so than mine.
Make no mistake: Salam Pax is an extremely talented *writer*. The singularity of his position and subjectmatter can lead one to overlook this, but I was aware of it as soon as I started reading him, just prior to the
war. The fact that English is not his first language actually underscores his gifts of observation and
expression; he'll write *around* his own uncertainty of usage, and get it right on the button. (Noting that
people in the market can get cut up with knives purchased three minutes earlier, for example.)
Plus, given what's happened to his country, he now has *better material* than he did before the war. Grim to
say, but any novelist knows what I mean.
If WIRED was really on their game, they'd parachute Mr. Pax a solar-powered laptop and whatever satellitecellular rig he'd need to blog daily, *right now*. Then leave him the hell alone, except, possibly, for a simple
banner proclaiming "SALAM PAX'S BLOGGING-TACKLE PROVIDED GRATIS BY WIRED MAGAZINE AND [NAMES
OF MANUFACTURERS]".
WHILE I'M WAITING FOR THE SPIN-CYCLE TO FINISH ON THESE BUZZ RICKSON'S "SUGAR CANE" CHINOS...
First wash. 10% shrinkage both ways.
Anyway, someone asked:
The jacket in the PR author photo is very dark brown, rather than black, and is by APC, the French (or
Tunisian, depending how you look at it) design house.
Favorite poet: Parts of Dylan Thomas. Particularly his "Refusal To Mourn".
The "I Want Room Service" speech: Keanu asked for something a little more projective, for this scene, so I sat
up, one night, in the hotel on Avenue Road, writing this speech out, longhand, on a yellow legal pad.
Delivered it to the set in the morning. Keanu and and Robert Longo both liked it, so I went back to Vancouver.
They went off to Montreal, shortly after, to shoot the under-bridge exteriors. I don't remember when I first
saw what they did with it, but I had written it imagining Johnny hissing it petulantly into Jane's face, up close,
eyeball to eyeball, and the declamation from atop a gomi-mound threw me for a loop. It took a while to get
used to, but eventually it became one of my three or four favorite scene in the film. It's Johnny's infantile self,
pure and simple, and the plummetting VW-carcass full of Molatov cocktails is like a wake-up call from a
universe rapidly losing its patience with him.
PANAWAVE CULT GURU "CLOSE TO DEATH"
But *look* at that *van*!!
AL QUEDA STEGOPORN
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/ITeamInsider.html#porncode
posted 9:25 AM
DERAILING MOMENTS?
Alas, that's the tragedy of JM as released: it was *full* them, as written and shot, but Sony surgically excised
every one they could. They'd have probably cut the Room Service speech if it had been possible.
Ever notice how little sense Dolph Lundgren's Street Preacher character makes? Just this big lunatic who
periodically rages onstage and tosses people around?
I'll tell you something you may not believe: Dolph Lungren can actually do *comedy*. I mean, like, who
knew? But he can, and did, with great gusto. The nature of his character was anchored in a scene in his
church (he's the local Panawave-equivalent) in which he preaches, buck nekkid and skin-studded with creepy
nano-gizmos, to a congragation of adoring female NAS victims. He delivers a bombastic, faux-Sterlingesque,
literally balls-out *sermon* on the virtues of posthumanity. It came off sort of like Fabio as the Jesus you
wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. It *rocked*. Hilarious. So Sony cut it.
They cut it out of fear of offending the religious right. No kidding. They actually told me that. That's the sort of
thing I mean when I say the JM you see is not the movie we shot.
[JM as I wrote it, and Longo shot it, is only available as the published screenplay (but quite readily available
as that). I only agreed to publish it, in the first place, because I wanted to be in the position to demonstrate
the difference between what I wrote, and we shot, and what they released. I doubt there's even a remote
possibility of there ever being a restored "director's cut", although the Japanese version of the DVD is a little
closer to our intention.]
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
posted 7:25 PM
ONE-STOP LOG FOR LATE-BREAKING TECHNO-DOOHICKIES
http://gizmodo.net/
Check out the DoCoMo wrist-phone.
BUSY ELSEWHERE
Am putting together a talk for the Directors Guild of America this weekend in LA, not a public event but the
content may well wind up here anyway. We'll see.
FIFTY-SOMETHING IN THE CANADIAN PACIFIC SOUTHWEST
Someone asks whether I don't yearn, as I grow older, for a warmer clime?
While this is, technically, anyway, Canada, I'm in the most temperate part, the winters more akin to London
than Copenhagen. I'm not actually not all that fond of very warm weather, and will accept most any trade-off
to avoid the combination of extreme heat and humidity.
Some things I do somewhat long for, in Vancouver:
A populace with more interesting fashion sense.
A small retail sector demonstrating greater creativity and a willingness to take risks.
More creative entrepreneurial mainstreaming of the city's various ethnic food treats; why should I have to go
out of my way to get Singaporean hawker food? (Of course you could argue that I should be grateful that I
can get it at all, and I am, but why do they *hide* it?)
A magazine distributor who doesn't bring Fortean Times in a month after they get it in New York.
posted 1:39 PM
SPAM BEFORE THE LORDS
Any culture that can produce a woman actually called "Baroness Strange" has got to be said to seriously have
it going on.
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds03/text/3050603.htm#30506-03_star0
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
posted 11:57 AM
VANCOUVER AUTHOR IMAGE-BLEEDOVER
Someone just drew my attention to this image of a very perky young Douglas Coupland:
http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/
I suspect that somewhere someone has been having a good giggle over this.
posted 8:52 AM
SEEMS LIKE IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING, THESE DAYS
Now Billy Prion's shown up in Alberta. O well. Pass the, uh, I forget, like the red stuff? To put on this
hamburner? Yummy.
UP THE LINE
A talk given at the Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003
The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around this fire are primates of a certain species,
our ancestors, an animal distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.
There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire looks like nothing else. It generates
light in darkness. It moves. It is alive.
The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors know by day? They can’t be sure. At night
it is another place, perhaps no place at all. The abode of the dead, of gods and demons and that which walks
without a face. It is the self turned inside out. Without form, it is that on which our ancestors project the
patterns their interestingly mutated brains generate.
This patterning-reading mutation is crucial to the survival of a species that must ceaselessly hunt, ceaselessly
gather. One plant is good to eat; it grows in summer in these lowlands. But if you eat its seedpods, you sicken
and die. The big, slow-moving river-animal can be surprised and killed, here in these shallows, but will escape
in deeper water.
This function is already so central, in our ancestors, that they discover the outlines of the water-animal in
clouds. They see the faces of wolves and of their own dead in the flames. They are already capable of
symbolic thought. Spoken language is long since a fact for them but written language has not yet evolved.
They scribe crisscross patterns on approximately rectangular bits of ocher, currently the world’s oldest known
human art.
They crouch, watching the fire, watching its constant, unpredictable movements, and someone is telling a
story. In the watching of the fire and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call film.
Later, on some other night, uncounted generations up the timeline, their descendants squat deep in caves,
places of eternal night -- painting. They paint by the less restless light of reeds and tallow. They paint the
wolves and the water-animal, the gods and their dead. They have found ways to take control of certain
aspects of the cooking-fire universe. Darkness lives here, in the caves; you needn’t wait for dusk. The reeds
and tallow throw a steadier light. Something is being turned inside out, here, for the first time: the pictures in
the patterning brain are being projected, rendered. Our more recent ancestors will discover these stone
screens, their images still expressing life and movement, and marvel at them, and not so long before the first
moving images are projected.
What we call “media” were originally called “mass media”. technologies allowing the replication of passive
experience. As a novelist, I work in the oldest mass medium, the printed word. The book has been largely
unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce
extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform
still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease
and specificity denied to a screenwriter. But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is
and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socioeconomic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.
But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation or a Disney nature documentary (I
can’t recall which I saw first) and being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: in
that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the film itself. I was years away from being able
to read my first novel, and would need a lot of pedagogy, to do that. But film itself taught me, in the dark, to
view it. I remember it as a sort of violence done to me, as full of terror as it was of delight. But when I
emerged from that theater, I knew how to watch film.
What had happened to me was historically the result of an immensely complex technological evolution,
encompassing optics, mechanics, photography, audio recording, and much else. Whatever film it was that I
first watched, other people around the world were also watching, having approximately the same experience
in terms of sensory input. And that film no doubt survives today, in Disney’s back-catalog, as an experience
that can still be accessed.
That survival, I think, is part of the key to understanding where the digital may be taking us. In terms of most
of our life so far, as a species, it’s not a natural thing to see the dead, or hear their voices. I believe the
significance of that is still far from being understood. We can actually see what life, at least in some very basic
sense, was like, one hundred years ago. We can watch a silent movie, and not only see people who are long
dead, but see people who were in their seventies and eighties in the 1920s, and who therefore bore the affect
of their developing years -- i.e., from before the Civil War, and earlier. It is as if in 1956 we had been able to
watch silent film of, say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the various revolutions of 1848. When the
ramifications of this are really thought about, it becomes awesome in almost a religious sense.
Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that
it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying,
effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of
surviving the death of the individual -- perhaps even of surviving the death of the species. The start of
building what would become civilization, cities, cinema. Vast stone calendars, megalithic machines
remembering the need to plant on a given day, to sacrifice on another.
With the advent of the digital, which I would date from, approximately, World War Two, the nature of this
project begins to become more apparent, more overt; the texture of these more recent technologies, the grain
of them, becomes progressively finer, progressively more divorced from Newtonian mechanics. In terms of
scale, they are more akin to the workings of the brain itself.
All us, creators or audience, have participated in the change so far. It’s been something many of us haven’t
yet gotten a handle on. We are too much of it to see it. It may be that we never do get a handle on it, as the
general rate of technological innovation shows no indication of slowing.
Much of history has been, often to an unrecognized degree, technologically driven. From the extinction of
North America’s mega-fauna to the current geopolitical significance of the Middle East, technology has driven
change. (That’s spear-hunting technology for the mega-fauna and the internal-combustion engine for the
Middle East, by the way.) Very seldom do nations legislate the emergence of new technologies.
The Internet, an unprecedented driver of change, was a complete accident, and that seems more often the
way of things. The Internet is the result of the unlikely marriage of a DARPA project and the nascent industry
of desktop computing. Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well
have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to
unpredictable outcomes.
As indeed does the emergent realm of the digital. I prefer to view this not as the advent of some new and
extraordinary weirdness, but as part of the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary
weirdness: our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass nervous-system, out of some urge that
was present around the cooking-fires of our earliest human ancestors.
We call film “film” today in much the same way we “dial” phones, the actual dials being long gone. The fact
that we do still employ actual film, in the traditional sense, seems an artifact of platform-transition and
industrial economics. I tend to take arguments for the innate esthetic superiority of “film”, with the same
grain of salt I reserve for arguments for the innate esthetic superiority of vinyl. Whatever the current
shortcomings of the digital image, I imagine there will be digital ways around them.
But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that’s already and even more fully feeling the historical
impact of the digital: music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could do
to make serious money with music. Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise
to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of
the commercial audio recording changed that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological
monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings.
That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the
digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which
patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to
relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of
market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of
production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the
hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt
peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the
unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the
underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which
absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a
complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry’s initial
outcry against “home taping” with the situation today.
Whatever changes will come for film will be as unpredictable and as ongoing, but issues of intellectual
property and piracy may ultimately be the least of them. The music industry’s product is, for want of a better
way to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional product. Audio recordings just aren’t that technologyheavy. Though there’s one aspect of the digital’s impact on music that’s absolutely central to film: sampling.
Sampling music is possible because the end-consumer of the product is now in possession of technologies
equal or even superior to the technologies involved in producing that product. Human capital (that is, talent)
aside, all the end-consumer-slash-creator lacks today, in comparison to a music-marketing conglomerate, is
the funds required to promote product. The business of popular music, today, is now, in some peculiarly new
way, entirely about promotion.
Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, primarily owing to the technology-intensive
nature of today’s product. Terminator III Unplugged is a contradiction in terms. Hollywood is massively and
multiply plugged, and is itself a driver of new technologies. The monopoly on the means of production (at
least in terms of creation) can be preserved, in this environment, as the industry itself operates on something
very near the cutting edge of emergent technology. For a while, at least.
In terms of the future, however, the history of recorded music suggests that any film made today is being
launched up the timeline toward end-user technologies ultimately more intelligent, more capable, than the
technologies employed in the creation of that film.
Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what your budget was,
your product, somewhere up the line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary civilian
computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to today.
Remember the debate around the ethics of colorizing films shot in black-and-white? Colorization, up the line,
is a preference setting. Probably the default setting, as shipped from the factory.
I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is how we had all these
different, function-specific devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments and the trunks of their cars
will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The environment itself will be smart, rather than various
function-specific nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.
Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so transparent as to be invisible.
This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct and separate media, that’s where I
imagine we’re headed. Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would
think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as
how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow
his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can.
Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand
that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets
virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually
appeared in the original film.
Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball
that McQueen keeps tossing.
Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one that puts high-rez, highly expressive
dog-heads on all of the characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian
folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the
system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all
something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.
But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, and he’s not much into it at all, but
then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty good,
then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest…
And what has happened, here, in this scenario, is that our ancient project, that began back at the fire, has
come full circle. The patterns in the heads of the ancestors have come out, over many millennia, and have
come to inhabit, atemporally, this nameless, single, non-physical meta-artifact we’ve been constructing. So
that they form an extension of Johnny’s being, and he accesses them as such, and takes them utterly for
granted, and treats them with no more respect than he would the products of his own idle surmise. But he’s
still a child, Johnny, and swims unknowing in this, his culture and the culture of his species. He’ll be educated
(likely via this same system he plays with now, in a more pedagogical mode -- and likely, without his
knowing, it’s already doing that, in background as it were). It may be that he’ll have to be taught to watch
films, in the way that we watch them (or watched them, as I think DVD’s are already changing that, not to
mention changing the way you approach making them). He may need something akin to the sort of education
that I needed in order to read novels -- to appreciate, as it were, a marginalized but still powerfully viable
media-platform.
I can only trust that Johnny’s entertainment system, and the culture that informs it, will be founded on solid
curatorial principles. That there will be an ongoing archaeology of media-product in place to insure that
someone or something is always there to categorically state, and if necessary to prove, that The Maltese
Falcon was shot in black and white and originally starred Humphrey Bogart.
Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one
that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly-extruded
resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny’s entertainment system.
It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.
It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.
She has the head of a chihuahua.
posted 7:03 PM
"COMPLEX CULTURAL EDUCATION" REQUIRED TO READ NOVELS
By cultural, I mean the one you didn't even notice you were getting. As opposed to, say, lit classes in high
school. I was thinking in global terms, global comparisons. Brazil has the biggest tv network on the planet (or
used to, anyway): Globo. Brazil also has a very low literacy-rate. "Culture" in the anthropological sense isn't
an add-on (the way European classical music would be an add-on for me) but some sort of perceptual
template. If the culture that forms us (assuming cultures do form us) doesn't include prose fiction, prose
fiction can only be an add-on. I imagine that if you're reading this, odds are you're from a culture that still
includes prose fiction. (Not to say, though, that novels don't in some cases possess the sort of bootstrapping
power that my talk claims for film. There are readers, I'm sure, who were "taught" initially in a solo encounter
with a single novel.)
FROTHING SINGAPOREANS
Let it *go*, man; it's been *years* already. Go chew some gum.
posted 9:17 AM
YOUNG BILLDOUG
That tie and collar combination wouldn't have worked for me, at that age. Maybe in '77, as irony-wear.
The big surfer dude on the other end of the couch is Chris Carter.
GLASSES
I have been wearing big round Harry Potter frames, BTW, since I recovered from an unfortunate Sixties
involvement with those Peter Fonda "aviator" frames (the spectacle-frame equivalent of the mullet). I did
briefly have a perfectly round pair, by a Barcelona designer, immortalized on the dustjacket of MONA LISA
OVERDRIVE.
I bought a new pair of predictably Potteresque frames in West Hollywood, last weekend. Periodically I try on
newer, more linear styles, but they make me look like a chihuahua.
One of the post-Seventies technologies that's meant the most to me personally is the high-reflex resin lens.
My glasses had been as thick as Stephen King's, great tragic ashtrays of highly-reflective, dramatically
scratch-prone acrylic (plastic to keep the weight down, else they weigh as much as ashtrays). These
guaranteed a certain hall-of-mirrors effect, the wearer's eyes lost down individual Marienbad corridors of
endless re-reflection. Then the Japanese invented a plastic impregnated with sub-microscopic iron particles
that alter the reflective index. This results in corrective lenses a third the thickness. Shortly thereafter, they
introduced non-reflective coatings that did away with the Marienbad look, and then they topped it with
scratchproofing that'll stand up to vigorous application of O-grade steel wool. My quality of life changed
dramatically. I hope Stephen King has discovered this as well. Probably he has, as I no longer associate him
as much with the ashtray look.
S'PORE, IN RETROSPECT
That WIRED article may have managed to convey the now-cliched sense of Singapore as a creepy, analretentive city-state, but it didn't go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer underlying dullness of the place.
It's a terrible *retail* environment. The endless malls are filled with shops selling exactly the same products,
and it's all either the stuff that kicks Cayce into anaphylactic shock or slightly sad local-industry imitations of
same. You could easily put together a smarter outfit shopping exclusively in Heathrow.
SHAPE ON GREEN TIE
Well, someone asked. That's a handprint, in orange, woven into a green silk tie. It's an old Gaultier tie that
someone gave me because it was too strange for them, and I can't seem to lose it. I've never been foolhardy
enough to wear it in Ireland, though, where it would *seem* to mean *something*, though I'm not sure
what, and forcefully.
posted 11:29 AM
I'M NOT REALLY MUCH OF A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER...
Not in the biblical sense, anyway, so help me with this: If the SARS virus, as a much-quoted recent article in
The Lancet supposes, is possibly of extraterrestrial origin... How did it evolve to be what it is today: A virus
requiring host-species (birds, mammals, and...?)?
If it were proven to be extraterrestrial, would that necessarily imply that somewhere, somewhere seriously
elsewhere, there either is or had once been cellular life of a fairly complex sort? Or are there assumed to have
been coronavirii around prior to the advent of critters in general? If so, what did they *do*, prior to animals?
SEARCHING "NVA" ON EBAY.DE...
Turns up this truly remarkable necktie:
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2833015333&category=31060
What was *with* these GDR guys, anyway?
I would encourage any of you who happen to be eBay flaneurs to post anything you might run across that
smacks of this level of peculiarity. Maybe start a thread called "Odd, On eBay" or similar.
MEXICAN FIRST LADY IN TV CLOWN DEFENSE
I think I prefer it to the so-called "Matrix" defense:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=4&u=/nm/20030522/od_nm/people_
mexico_firstlady_d
posted 4:18 PM
FOX HEADROOM
Fuldog's backgrounder, from Mexico City, on El Presidente's wife, the clown, etc., is exactly the sort of
feedback that makes blogging worthwhile. Like, *who (around here, anyway) knew*? Except of course for our
man on the ground in the DF -- which is, by the way, the most, well, *cyberpunk*, for want of a better word,
place I've ever been. Mexico City is a moment by moment reminder of just how embarrassingly relative the
term "dystopian" is. The infrastructure there has been functioning for decades now in what for the cities of El
Norte would be conditions of grotesque Burroughsian emergency, but people just keep getting up every day
and getting on with their lives. Which I found both impressive and strangely hope-inducing.
Actually there is a better word for the DF ("Federal District", like DC) than "cyberpunk": "Ballardian". When
you see Fuldog here, he's checking in from one *extreme* urban environment!
THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR EATING ANYTHING AS CUTE AS A MASKED CIVET
Thanks to those who posted to update me on panspermia, etc.
Now I'm leaning toward the theory that the guilty parties in this case had been chowing down on stir-fried
civet. "Wok that civet and you've got a global pandemic on your hands." Of course we only hear these voices
after the fact.
Sunday, May 25, 2003
posted 9:03 AM
VISUALIZING CHARACTERS
In one interview I said that I imagined Cayce looked something like Beth Orton. That was probably the result
of having seen a photo of Beth Orton, not long before, and just then having imagined Cayce looking like that.
Myself, I usually don't have any very clear sense of the features of my central characters. Visualization of the
narrative is crucially important to me, otherwise, but the effort seems to go into physical surroundings,
relative movements of characters. I think that it may be that because I necessarily "inhabit" primary
characters, I can't see them because I'm "inside" them. I usually have a much clearer image of a minor
character, a "walk-on", but if that minor character becomes "a POV", I start to have less of an image, and if
the characterization then starts to involve interiority, it gets fuzzier still. It's almost as though, on the mind's
screen, these detailed and vivid figures I've worked up have, if I stop to notice, faces blurred by pixel-clouds.
But experience teaches that the reader, in spite of (or more interestingly perhaps, *because of*) this authorial
haziness, will complete the circle, close the loop. I do that too, because when I read fiction I form very distinct
images of what characters look like.
One exception to this was Rei, the idoru, who for some reason I felt a sort of special obligation to try to
visualize more exactly, and couldn't. Then I happened to see the latest issue of DAZED & CONFUSED, with a
wonderfully ambiguous model on the cover. Female. Male? Asian? Not? I instantly "cast" this model as the
idoru. You can see her (gender became obvious when she did more fashion work in New York) exactly as I
first saw her, on the cover of the British edition of IDORU. When I told Penguin, they acquired rights to use
the image.
AND THERE ARE TRAGEDIES OF BRANDING
Ever ask yourself "What's in a name?"
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11483&item=2832175044
posted 9:35 AM
"GONE FISHIN'"
Now that it's at least sporadically sunny here, and we're experiencing less need to huddle for warmth around
our Apple Studio Monitors, this blog will run the risk of looking like a ghost site. Fair warning. Wear sunscreen.
SALAM REDUX
Looking back on discussion of SP at the time, it's interesting to finally read a more complete backstory:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,966819,00.html
HOW UN"INDUSTRY" CAN ONE MAN BE?
*This* much, apparently:
http://www.hellomagazine.com/2003/05/28/keanureeves/
And that's...a lot! :-)
HOLY BODY TATTOO
Yep, that's me, in collaboration with Chris Halcrow, creator of William Gibson's Yardshow.
June
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
posted 8:03 PM
A DIFFERENT KIND OF FETISH FOOTAGE
Check out the trailer. Amazing!
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/03/1814245.shtml?tid=188&tid=97
PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN PR?
Are you kidding? The Curta, *definitely*, *and* the Sinclair ZX-81!
Otherwise, alas, no. I am indeed an Apple user, and have been since switching from my once-tediouslynotorious manual portable Hermes, but all I've ever been offered by Apple was, I think, once, a free upgrade
to OS X. Amazing, really; if I were them, I'd deluge me with fab cutting-edge hardware. Nudge nudge. Viral
marketing! Wink wink. No? O well. Fact is I wrote PR on a Cube, and wanted to describe it, and I felt it helped
build Damien's character. But then my friend Steve Brown pointed out that it was already sort of long in the
tooth, so I went back and explained why he still had it.
Full disclosure, though: I'm wearing a pair of Buzz Rickson's WWII Waist Overalls bluejeans, and *I didn't pay
for them*. But these were part of a corporate care-package sent after the fact of the once-imaginary black BR
MA-1 having appeared in PR. And they're making me a black MA-1 of my own...EXTRA LONG.
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
posted 9:16 AM
INTO THE TURKISH NEUROMATRIX
"You ever been to 'Stambul?"
"Couple days, once."
"Never changes," she said. "Bad old town."
A concerned reader in Turkey posts the following:
http://www.williamgibsonboard.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=5006046771&f=8606097971&m=3256095733
I do appreciate your concern, thanks, and I hadn't yet seen this packaging, nor been consulted on the titlechange, but a quick check with my literary agent confirms that this is indeed a licensed edition.
Publishers buying foreign rights actually do retain, I assume as a matter of course, the right to retitle the work
for sale in their particular market. The German edition of ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, for instance, is titled
FUTUREMATIC, the phrase "all tomorrow's parties" in translation being, apparently, deeply uninteresting.
FUTUREMATIC is a unique example, for me, because as soon as they suggested it I wished that I had called
the novel that over here. The Futurematic is a vintage Swiss watch that features in the text, and I've since
decided that naming your novel after an old favorite song is one of those almost-universal impulses best
avoided if you possibly can. (Another such impulse, according to Bruce Sterling, is the use of the word "song"
in the title of any work of science fiction.) A less inspiring example would be MICROCHIPS, a German trade
paper edition of COUNT ZERO. Actually, checking the shelves, I see that it isn't really that common a practice,
most foreign publishers opting either for the original title in English or something akin to MONA LISA
ACELERADA.
Be that as it may, my reaction to my Turkish publisher's evident intent is best described as one of
considerable and enjoyably convoluted amusement.
Please do bring any further interesting foreign editions to my attention. I may never yet have been pirated in
the old-fashioned sense, and somehow I find I feel the lack. (I'm not sure about a "Serbo-Croation" edition of
NEUROMANCER that someone brought me, years ago, from Prague; aside from there being, as far as I know,
no such language, it's definitely *the shortest* version of NEUROMANCER ever to see print.)
"There's a quality to a good translation that you just don't get in the original text." --Bruce Sterling
Friday, June 06, 2003
posted 7:44 PM
THE TRIBAL NATURE OF FASHION
http://www.exactitudes.com/
Sunday, June 08, 2003
posted 1:47 PM
APOPHENIA IN ACTION
http://www.williamgibsonboard.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=5006046771&f=6406046771&m=3596056933
There is a great deal more randomness involved in the creation of the point-of-sale artifact than this would
allow for.
I had absolutely no interaction with the designer(s?) of the Penguin UK edition's cover, and wouldn't have
thought, until I read this post, of Googling that number. Fripp's alleged one-time involvement with the
soundtrack of a proposed Neuromancer feature evidently dates from a long-dead option deal, and I've never
had any contact with Fripp. My guess is that the designer's needed a CD for the photograph, happened to
have the Fripp handy, and never thought about the number being Googled.
This is a perfect example of a certain kind of apophenia, though, and John *is* dead.
VIRTUES OF THE CUBE
Steve Brown notes that there are other, compelling reasons for there to be a Cube in Damien's apartment:
"Every single computer made, with the sole exception of Apple products, are pretty much obsolescent on
delivery. Nothing looks as useless and pathetic as last season's PC.
But Macs tend to hold their value, both absolute value and fashion value. They are superbly made and the
only computers where serious talent is applied to design. Once the G4 line came into being, enough
horsepower was built into the things so that they had become strong enough for any future needs (until you
start downloading high rez films from the internet).
Prior machines needed to be replaced frequently, as they were never quite strong enough for the avergae
demand put on them.
The Cube *is* strong enough to be used for a dozen years, and is perhaps the best-designed personal
computer ever made. Check them out on eBay. At a time several years after the line was terminated, by
rights they should be obscure tech-history curiosities. Yet they are worth as much or more today as they were
when introduced. I'd truly love to have one right now,
and thousands like me keep the eBay prices high.
Thus, the cube was the perfect and only choice for Damien's apartment. I can see Cayce getting an allergic
reaction in the presence of any other machine."
Monday, June 09, 2003
posted 2:03 PM
BLEEDING-EDGE TECH OF 1983
Absolutely the hottest consumer tech from the days of NEUROMANCER's composition. The Walkman was the
only one of these that I'd ever actually had in my own hands. The cell phone was something I wouldn't use
until JOHNNY MNEMONIC was in pre-production. Because I was a luddite? No. Because of what they *cost*.
http://gizmodo.net/archives/002242.php#002242
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
posted 2:54 PM
DUST
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Microscopic analysis of WTC dust by Nicholas Petraco, BS, MS, DABC,
FAAFS, FNYMS
at The New York Microscopic Society lecture held at AMNH 28 May 2003
45.1% Fiberglass, rock wool (insulation, fireproofing)
31.8% Plaster (gypsum), concrete products (calcium sulfate, selenite,
muscodite)
7.1% Charred wood and debris
2.1% Paper fibers
2.1% Mica flakes
2.0% Ceiling tiles (fiberglass component)
2.0% Synthetic fibers
1.4% Glass fragments
1.3% Human remains
1.4% Natural fibers
trace asbestos (it became illegal to use during the construction of
the WTC)
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Other trace elements: aluminum, paint pigments, blood, hair, glass
wool with resin, and prescription drugs were found.
NOTES:
Particles found were 1-4 micrometers in size. (In general, particles
that are 5-8 microns are irritants, and those that are 104 microns are
small enough to be airborne and ingested into the lungs.)
Fiberglass particles are smaller than asbestos and lodge deeper into
lungs creating more serious long-term health hazards than asbestos
like white lung disease which will become more evident 5, 10, 20 years
from 11 Sep 2001.
"Other trace elements: [...] prescription drugs were found. "
I suppose prescription drugs are so ubiquitous that traces of them would be found after the catastrophic
destruction of any segment of an urban nexus, but this still surprised me.
RYDELL WOULD NEVER GET TO DRIVE THIS
So VIRTUAL LIGHT, it hurts:
http://www.saracen.org/
Saturday, June 14, 2003
posted 8:35 AM
SOMEONE POSTED A LINK...
To an Anton Corbijn portrait with an Apple advertising slogan on it, asking me to re-post it here. Nope, sorry.
There are a couple of reasons I wouldn't want to do that. One is that I wouldn't want to confuse people, who
might easily assume I have some sort of relationship with Mac (none whatever, aside from using their
product). More importantly, that's Anton's image.
If you aren't familiar with Anton Corbijn's work, have a look at this:
http://www.corbijn.co.uk/
A very nice man, is Anton Corbijn. And a lot taller than I am.
posted 9:08 AM
MAKE YOURSELF A GIBSON IF YOU WANT TO...
Mine's a Red Bull on the rocks.
PIXELEEN
That thread about my chapter titles, a while back? It should be evident to all that it was Steely Dan taught me
the art of titling, as witness this fine batch from their new one:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
The Last Mall
Things I Miss The Most
Blues Beach
Godwhacker
Slang of Ages
Green Book
Pixeleen
Lunch With Gina
9. Everything Must Go
Of which, on as yet a single listening, I'm most taken with "Godwhacker", a little deicide ditty with lots of that
carbonated guitar they do so well. "Pixeleen" seems to be a Walter Mitty routine about a girl with possibly
Molly-like anime-heroine fantasies, ever brought down by the quotidian.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
posted 1:51 PM
GEORGE ORWELL'S SIX RULES
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English
equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of
the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own
habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless
phrase...into the dustbin where it belongs."
posted 9:46 AM
I'VE BEEN LOCKED OUT
For about a week, though at first I didn't know it.
That last blog, Orwell's rules, was something I ran across as I started Googling in advance of writing that
essay for the New York Times. When I'd finished that (on the night before it was to run, naturally) I tried to
log on, and discovered I couldn't. Changes to the Blogger site, it seems.
Feels remarkably like being locked out of your own appartment, except that there are lots of people in there,
having conversations.
Left over from my Orwell Google, this poignant photograph of the historic premises in Henrietta street. When
long since vacated, obviously. Note the very cool rat-hole boot-scraper built into the door-frame, lower left! I
loved that thing. No worries that the gentleman sleeping rough, to the right, is a former editor; my editor at
Gollancz, Malcolm Edwards, has gone on to far grander things in London publishing.
In spite of what the caption says, I doubt the place had been standing empty, when this was taken, for more
than a year or two.
http://www.zardoz.net/orwell/Gollancz.html
July
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
posted 12:04 PM
ORWELL'S RULES
Bear makes the point that I don't much abide by those rules myself. This occurred to me also, shortly after I
posted them.
I think the new usage that has struck me as most barbarous, in Orwell's sense, in my lifetime, has been the
expression "politically correct".
I can actually remember the very first time I heard it. In Seattle, as it happened. I assumed that the person
who'd used it was (1) using it entirely ironically, and (2) having as I thought coined it just then, was far
cleverer, and funnier, than I'd previously given him credit for. My horror, subsequently, at discovering that his
usage was entirely irony-free, was...Orwellian.
I suppose, in the meantime, that those people capable of using it without irony have pretty much ceased to
use it (though not, I'd guess, to think it).
It bothered me more, even, than that more actively barbarous late 20th-century expression, "ethnic
cleansing", probably because I've never met anyone who would admit to being in favor of...actually I don't
like to use this phrase, because it seems so inherently, er, politically incorrect.
MEANWHILE, FASHIONPOLICE HAS STARTED A POLL...
Earliest experience of "PC". I'd guess late Eighties, for me.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
posted 8:26 AM
STREET CONTINUES TO FIND USES FOR CAMERA-PHONES
This is one of those things that so perfectly demonstrates how older media (fashion magazines, in this case)
and their previously unexamined business models can dissolve on contact with new media. The unexamined
aspect of the model, here, has been that you previously hadn't been able to show anyone an image in a
magazine until you'd somehow physically acquired a copy of that magazine, and had left the retail
environment with it.
AUTHORS: ARE THEY HUMAN?
Perhaps not, "author" in current usage tending to mean something like "massively mediated writer". Your
"author", then, being by definition somewhat of an idoru-construct.
Writers, however, are human. All too, in most cases, as becomes immediately evident on reading even a few
literary biographies.
I think I was very fortunate, as a child, to love SF. SF was such a marginalized literature, in those days, that
its writers enjoyed (if that's the word) very little mediation. There was not much mechanism in place to
magnify and distort the image of the SF writer, so that by a very early age (thirteen or so, actually) I think I
understood that "writers" were actually just other humans. Who somehow wrote, and were then published.
The exception to this, for me, for quite a while, was William Burroughs, a writer sufficiently ambivalent about
being human that one could easily imagine he wasn't.
CALL FOR SUGGESTED CORRECTIONS
It turns out that I will have the opportunity to proof the paperback edition of PATTERN RECOGNITION.
I know that there've been threads citing various textual goofs, and I intend to go back and consult those, but
it would also be very helpful if someone could start a thread called, say, "Proofing The Paperback". Then, if
you've spotted something you think is amiss, please title your post "p. XX", using the number of the page in
question in the hardcover, and let fly.
Mistakes of a purely factual nature are hardest to know what to do with. I've since heard, for instance, from
perhaps the only reader of PR who actually drives a mini-Hummer, informing me that the mini-Hummer lacks
the super-cool tire-inflation system I credit it with in the text.
Friday, July 04, 2003
posted 10:55 AM
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL MOBLOGGING LOVE HOTEL CONFERENCE
Courtesy of Fuldog. Thanks.
http://www.tokyotidbits.com/lovehotel/
Monday, July 07, 2003
posted 1:30 PM
NONE OF THE NEUROMANCER SCRIPTS ON THE NET...
Are by yours truly. Nor are any of them in the least likely ever to be made.
I bring this up because someone from MTV asked me this morning whether I'd written any of them. The idea
that anyone familiar with my fiction could assume that I'd written those scripts produces a deep sense of
chagrin.
As far as I know, the only script of mine to have made it to Internet pirating is ALIEN III, which for some
reason is usually presented in a shortened 100-page version of the 130-page original (probably minus much
obsessive description of sets and costumes, a serious screenwriting weakness of mine.)
SO THE CHILEAN BLOB...
Turns out to be a giant squid? I wonder then if the similar mass that washed up in Florida in the 1890's was a
squid as well? There were thought to be samples of that one hidden away in the Smithsonian, or in that
warehouse at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and there was once talk of a search, and DNA-testing,
but nothing came of it. Something in me hates to see high strangeness absorbed by the quotidian.
posted 11:49 AM
SOMEONE POSTS THAT...
As an admirer of Ridley Scott's work, they don't see obsessive attention to sets and costuming as a
shortcoming.
Ah. But Ridley Scott is a director, not a screenwriter.
Given that feature screenplays are around 130 pages long, and have lots of white space due to dialoguespacing, it generally isn't seen to be in the story's interest for the writer to linger over the exact shade and
texture of the verigris crusting the bronze zipper of the spacesuit that...well, you get the idea.
Screenplays need their wordcount mainly for dialogue and description of action. If either of those aren't
happening, no amount of obsessive visualization of sets or costumes will help at all. And there are designers
and costumers who come along later and earn their livings doing those really fun things.
The person I most envied, on the JOHNNY MNEMONIC set, was Nilo Rodis, the designer. He could draw
something, then have that previously imaginary object in his hand an hour later.
Ultra-obscure JM design-factoid: When Jane whips out that weirdly flexible, blade-tipped weapon (which was
actually an antique collapsible cleaning-rod for swabbing out shotgun-barrels, circa about 1910) in her
introductory action-scene, there's a brief but extreme close-up of the blade itself. I made that blade myself,
out of the blade from a Spyderco pocket-knife called "The Harpy". Stainless steel, so the trick is to de-temper
it before you work on it. Actually I shouldn't say I made it, as I sent it to a skilled metal-worker to be de-
tempered, and to have those butt-ugly serrations filed into it, but I did put the Harpy, which I happened to
already have, in a vise, and tore it apart, and Fedexed the blade to the metal-worker. I did this because the
prop blade in the original shot, for safety reasons, looked exactly like a tiny little putter, and just didn't, uh,
cut it. Then I had it welded to a six-inch length of steel rod and Fedexed it to Toronto.
So there is that *one single shot* of JOHNNY MNEMONIC over which I can say I had *absolute control*, as
there's nothing in it but that blade. And I have the actual blade somewhere as well, having always vaguely
intended to frame it.
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
posted 8:21 AM
MORE SECRET TRIVIA FROM JOHNNY MNEMONIC
There's a forlorn cabin-cruiser wenched up under the bridge, in the film's version of LoTek Heaven, along with
an Airstream trailer and a schoolbus. I think it's a Chris-Craft, which would go nicely with the Airstream.
If you freeze on a scene where the bow of the cruiser is in profile, check out the boat's name, in handsome
Fifties cursive. Nilo let me name it.
I have a sort of secret museum of that set, in the form of several rolls of more or less blindly random
snapshots I took of it when it was first completed. The pictures themselves aren't that great, but the texture
of the set is wonderful. I might be able to stick them somewhere where they can be accessed.
THANKS
To everyone who's contributed to the proofing-for-the-paperback effort.
SINGAPORE TO LEGALIZE MEDICINAL USE OF CHEWING-GUM!
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1057562228
402&p=1012571727102
posted 8:57 AM
THANKS
To everyone who's contributed to the proofing-the-paperback thread. It will help.
MORE SECRET TRIVIA FROM JOHNNY MNEMONIC
Up under the bridge, in LoTek Heaven, there's a forlorn Chris-Craft cabin-cruiser. Close study of its bow will
reveal that it's been named after the screenwriter's wife.
SINGAPORE TO LEGALIZE MEDICINAL USE OF CHEWING-GUM!
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1057562228
402&p=1012571727102
Saturday, July 12, 2003
posted 12:10 PM
OKAY, WIRED, I'M READY TO GO BACK
Someone needs to take the measure of these efforts at loosening things up in Singapore:
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAW0HQP1ID.html
Sunday, July 13, 2003
posted 8:49 PM
THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THE XBOX...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/technology/circuits/10xbox.html
posted 11:23 AM
SOMEONE COMPLAINS THAT THOSE WOODEN STICKS AT STARBUCKS...
Don't really stir the sugar into your coffee.
True, but there's absolutely nothing better for mixing Humbrol model-builder's enamel, in those tiny little
cans. They also do a great job as disposable glue-spreaders. And if you build dollhouses, they can be used for
*flooring*.
After your 400th post here, you can build a model of the Empire State Building out of them!
They are arguably the only genuinely beautiful, commonly available "free" objects in the American retail
universe. Though not the most useful. The wire coathanger is still the most useful.
posted 11:26 PM
BUILD YOUR OWN HIGH-VOLTAGE ANTI-GRAVITY LIFTER USING STARBUCK'S WOODEN STIR-STICKS!
Actually I don't encourage anyone to do this; just looking at the pictures of what's inside your computer
monitor is scary enough! Touch the wrong wire, there, and we're talking Crispy Critter. However, if you
*were* going to build your own anti-gravity lifter, you *could* substitute Starbuck's stir-sticks, gluing them
together with Elmer's white glue and a 1" overlap.
http://www.americanantigravity.com/lifterplans.html
posted 7:59 AM
SOMEONE POSTS THAT NO STARBUCKS IN TOKYO ALLOWS SMOKING
Quite true. but the one in PR is "a...Starbucks clone". Not Starbucks but an almost exact copy. An actual
place, opposite a branch of Parco, and they do allow smoking.
And with that I think I'm going to cease responding to posts about PR, as I've already ceased paying much
attention to them. Which I think is both natural and a good thing. I need to allow PR to fade into the creative
past, leaving room for whatever's next.
I don't, in the natural course of things, think about completed books much at all, and I never reread them. It's
been so long since I've read COUNT ZERO and MLO that I'd have a hard time describing more than the
general plot of each and a few favorite sections. Somehow that seems very much as it should be.
posted 6:41 PM
I HAVE TO START KEEPING UP WITH SALAM PAX AGAIN...
I'd heard about the Guardian hiring him, but hadn't looked him up. I feel he's someone I got to know and like,
and who I then had to assume might likely be dead. I wish he were really blogging again, though.
I've also heard he has a book contract with an American publisher.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,998227,00.html
posted 11:41 PM
DANISH DESIGNER CHAIR OTAKU THRILLER
Danes take designer chairs very seriously. "What chairs did your parents have, when you were young?" seems
to have approximately the same weight as "Where did you live, as a child?" The evening I first noticed this, I
excused myself from from a long Copenhagen bar conversation about designer chairs to go to the men's
room, only to discover a framed poster of all the great Danish designer chairs. As if there to consult should
one tipsily forget who designed what.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/not_in_website/syndication/monitoring/media_reports/3079013.stm
posted 8:22 AM
UNDERGROUND BERLIN
http://thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=792292003
COLD, HARD CYBERCASH
There's a certain elegance to this...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21PATE.html?hp
posted 3:50 PM
THE SPRUCE CUTTER: SECRET LIFE OF A TYPO
Yesterday evening in Chapters (the Canadian equivalent, roughly, of Borders, or Barnes & Noble) I happened
to notice a stack of paperbacked ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES displayed on a Staff Picks table. Pleased to see it
there, I gave in to an uncharacteristic impulse to read a page or two, just to see how the opening would strike
me.
"Yamazaki sees that the thing is a model of some kind, a robot or military exoskeleton. It glitters in the sunbright light, blue and red and silver. Small tools are spread on the tatami: a razor knife, a spruce cutter, curls
of emery paper."
"Sprue," I began to mutter. "Sprue. Fucking *sprue* already..."
Here's a link to a sprue cutter:
http://www.greenwayproducts.com/buy_tool_sprue.htm
"Spruce cutter", aside from being precisely *not* that which I intended, also introduces a level of obvious
ambiguity into the text, in that it might well mean a number of things:
"It disturbed her that her daughter was sleeping with a spruce cutter." (A lifelong Green, she was troubled by
her daughter's liason with an ecologically incorrect lumberjack.)
"That's a mighty spruce cutter you have there, son." (The addressee's knife is natty indeed, perhaps a
balisong with pink mother-of-pearl handles.)
"He decided he needed to buy a spruce cutter." (The one he'd previously used for pine was clearly not up to
this new task.)
But my main point is that this error was likely produced without human intervention: this looks like a spellcheck misunderstanding, a purely digital typo. Had I taken the time with the proofs of the paperback, I might
have caught it, but in fact I think I assumed that the text of the hardcover, mightily labored over, would
somehow be transfered intact to the paperback.
O well. As long as you, the reader, know that all digitized text is to some extent fluid, and that we labor as
best we can to increase the signal while reducing the noise.
posted 4:50 PM
ENDER'S FUTURES MARKET?
If I'd made this up in a work of fiction, I'd expect to hear the suspension groaning, under your disbelief:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aFteJq2TUQoM&refer=us
DARPA. Those boys are *deep*...
posted 12:00 PM
ENDER'S FUTURES MARKET TERMINATED
"'My understanding is it's going to be terminated,' Wolfowitz told members of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. He added that while the Defense Department was supposed to be imaginative, 'it sounds like
maybe they got too imaginative' with the online futures market plan." (Reuters)
The last time DARPA got too imaginative, we wound up with the Internet.
posted 10:53 PM
MY MAN SALAM
I'm a total fan. Tells it like he sees it, and sees it like I can't.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1008584,00.html
August
Sunday, August 03, 2003
posted 8:04 PM
HEADLESS CARGO
RUR's thread about the oddest thing you ever (thought) you heard reminds me of a dinner I worriedly spent (I
think there were mild recreational psychedelics of some kind involved, beforehand) under the impression that
I had overheard the man at the next table use the sinister and mysterious term "headless cargo" several
times. On leaving, and telling my wife about my bizarre eavesdropping experience, she explained, while trying
not to wet her pants laughing, that he had in fact been discussing the last time he and his partner had "had
l'escargot".
SIGN IN, STRANGER
Somone asks what I think of the people who turn out for booksignings.
Well, I'm grateful that they do, since the publisher might look askance if they never did. Publishers do count
the house at signings, though not as closely as they count copies sold. But if that were the only reason I'm
glad to be there, it would still be a pretty dire experience -- and it never has been, so far.
I enjoy the reading, the Q&A, and signing, though on a given night I might enjoy one more than another,
depending on any number of things. Nothing like eyeball-to-eyeball connection with a reader who quite clearly
has *gotten it*, to momentarily banish the eternal imposter-syndrome of being a published novelist.
I think that what I like least, particularly in this age of big-event, heavy-turnout signings, is the brutal,
cattleyard efficiency with which people are moved through, getting usually no more than a "Hi, how are ya"
and a signed book. But given the way tours work, and the numbers of people involved, I can't imagine what
else one could do. Doug Coupland once gave each signee (?) on one particular tour a personal gift: a souvenir
moist toilette.
The very first time I ever sat at a signing table was at a Norwescon in Seattle. I had been roped in because I
had published a single story in OMNI, and they were short of actual authors to fill up the group signing table.
Nobody there had ever heard of me, but a few determined souls had me sign their program books. I think that
was where I first opted to use the now-familiar hand-printed "WM. GIBSON" logo, which I'd worked out years
before to sign cartoons, rather than the labored cursive signature I use otherwise.
Monday, August 04, 2003
posted 10:34 PM
MESSAGES IN BOTTLES: THE SUBLIME GLOBAL WEIRDNESS OF CALL AND RESPONSE
I'm still trying to fit my head around the idea that Salam Pax read my books. It makes me proud and happy.
But Salam Pax, more importantly, made me proud and happy before I knew that -- at a purely *species*
level. And continues to.
MY FRIEND RODNEY BUILDS A TIME MACHINE
Rodney Graham has been my favorite Vancouver artist since he started doing what he does (about the same
time I started doing what I do). He recently donated this extraordinary object to the city. I haven't gone out
to sit in it, yet, but everyone I know who has comes back raving about it. Not just art-raving, but some
species of more primary human delight.
The crucial but unknown collaborator on this piece is the Roman luggage-thief who made off with Rodney's
camera, years ago, leading him to build a pinhole job out of a wooden matchbox, aluminum foil, and black
tape. The matchbox mutated, over the years, into larger and more intricate structures, of which this landau is
the most recent:
http://www.belkin-gallery.ubc.ca/webpage/online/millennial.html
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
posted 10:36 AM
NO MAPS ON NETFLIX
Thanks to Kevin Kelly for pointing this out:
You can now rent NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES, Mark Neale's Lexus-bound, pencil-camera documentary
of your truly, from Netflix. I haven't tried Netflix, have no idea what it costs, but it might be easier than trying
to buy the DVD:
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60028592&trkid=73
posted 11:27 PM
FORTY MILES FROM THE ZONE
Got this via Bruce Sterling today. Looks like another Walled City scenario, this one Latvian and post-Soviet. I
have a special fondness for descriptions of places like this. They trigger ghost-dialog: "Forget it, man, she's
*Karostan*. Latvian 'alien' passport. It's not going to happen."
"The Soviet army
evacuated Karosta in 1994, following Latvian independence, leaving behind
some 6000
people. Mostly Russian speaking, the stateless citizens of Karosta either
carry
Latvian issued so-called 'alien' passports, or old Soviet ones. Today the
town
appears to be a landscape of ruins. Many houses are completely destroyed,
and the
town is plagued by mass unemployment. After and experience setting-up arts
workshops
there, documentary film-makers Kristine Briede & Carl Biorsmark began
making a film..."
Begin forwarded message:
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LOCATIVE MEDIA WORKSHOP
July 16-26, 2003, K@2, Karosta, LV | Longitude 21.00, Latitude 56.55
CLOSING REPORT [01/08/03]: Mapping â€?the Zoneâ€™
With portable, GPS-equipped networked computing devices, people can
produce and
share their our own cartographic data, and map their physical environments,
providing artists a tool by which space becomes their canvas.
The Locative Media Workshop brought an international
group of
artists and researchers to the K@2 Culture and Information Centre in
Karosta (a
partially abandoned military installation on the coast of the Baltic Sea
resembling
â€?the Zoneâ€™ from Tarkovskyâ€™s â€?Stalkerâ€™) to explore the potential of this
new mapping
paradigm, both conceptually and through the creative use of GPS
technologies.
The workshop utilized mobile, location-aware networking devices/software
(courtesy of and developed by the Waag Society/Esther Polak), to trace the
movements
of workshop participants in real-time as they mapped Karostaâ€™s so-called
â€?elephant
trailsâ€™, a web of footpaths criss-crossing the installationâ€™s rigid
military grid
structure. A unique application was produced during the workshop (by Pall
Thayer)
for dynamically visualizing these track-logs
in
addition to making use of the â€?Real-Time Rigaâ€™ application featured at
RIXCâ€™s Media
Architecture festival in May 2004 .
To provide participants with a conceptual framework for conceiving of how
to
geo-annotate their physical environment Jo Walsh and Andrew Paterson
developed a
semantic web model for creating â€?locative packetsâ€™ > i.net/karosta/>.
Based on this model, participants sampled local sights and sounds, wove
their
interpretations into vignettes and uploaded the packets to a file server
in order to
create an interactive, artist-generated map of the site --accessible via
the
Internet, but also designed to interface with mobile locative networking
devices.
The workshop participants pondered techniques for the cultural
appropriation of
military technology (GPS) from within the decaying ruins of a former
military
empire, perched on the edge of integration into a new regime (NATO & EU).
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With
participants attending from as far a field as Pyramid Lake Indian
reservation in
Nevada to Iceland and New Zealand, the workshop produced a diverse range
of
perspectives on this unique location.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
posted 5:01 PM
THINGS TO DO IN TOKYO
Re the recent thread, here, in no particular order, are the things that I'd be sad if I hadn't managed to do all
of on a given visit:
Go to Shinjuku and hang out in the streets. Do this by day, but also, most particularly, and preferably at great
length, at night. Eat things from street stalls. Shinjuku at night is one of the human world's greatest wonders.
Shinjuku Watch Kan, a multi-floor watch depato, for esoteric Japan-only Casio, and, often, clearance prices on
discontinued Japan-only Seiko. (The Japanese won't export their coolest watches, for some reason.) I like
watches. I also like crazed, in-depth retail operations offering thousands of different varieties of the same
object -- something the Japanese to with great vigor.
Go to Tokyu (not Tokyo) Hands, a sort of hobbyist department store (and much, much more). if you like the
retail experience, and like any of the sorts of things I like, an initial visit to Tokyu Hands is good for about four
hours of in-depth browsing and a solid denting of wallet-plastic.
Go to whatever branch of Parco, probably more to marvel than to spend. If you haven't already done so at
Tokyu Hands, buy an all-synthetic wallet or shoulder-bag by either Porter or Luggage Label (both brands of
Yoshida & Co.). They last forever.
The Akihabara experience. Try to give equal time to the areas that sell last year's stuff that nobody wanted,
Soviet-made vacuum tubes, etc.
Kiddyland, near Harajuku. Multi-floor toys. Beyond Hello Kitty. Way beyond.
Harajuku -- preferably when the kids are out in force, as this is more a people-watching than a shopping
experience (for me, anyway).
Eat. Lots. Okonomiaki, the pizza-looking stuff, which actually seems to be griddle-fried cole slaw (or
something that looks like it) is, as one of our posters indicates, not be missed. (If you're in Vancouver and
want to try okomomiaki, find a place called The Modern Club on Dunbar.)
Friday, August 08, 2003
posted 1:00 PM
IT WASN'T ME. HONEST.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/08/04/flash.mob/index.html
Odd echo here of "flash mob" in the Victorian sense...
posted 10:11 PM
NEITHER THE NUMBER...
Gaijin posted, nor the other one that that search turns up, are mine. Whoever those people are, they have no
connection with me whatever, and deserve to not be disturbed. Please don't call them.
And please think twice (or maybe even once would do it) before posting anything like that.
Sunday, August 10, 2003
posted 10:30 PM
INHALING VS. THE POWERS OF OBSERVATION AND IMAGINATION
The recent thread on whether I'm qualified to have described the subjective effects of amphetamines... Well,
actually, as I recall, I didn't. Describe them, that is. I described the imagined subjective effects of various
imaginary substances presented as being both more effective and even nastier than amphetamines. Nobody,
myself included, has ever done any "dancer" (which was cobbled together mainly from a couple of truly eyepopping first-hand accounts in Dr. Shulgin's book of homebrewed exotic amines -- in particular the one he
nicknamed "Hecate").
As someone else points out, I'm not experientially qualified to describe what it feels like to be a woman either,
but I persist in doing that as well.
Being able to do that is in my opinion a big part of what I get paid for, but the idea that some readers have to
assume that if I describe it, I must have done it, or been it (and otherwise it's somehow inauthentic) is sort
of...disappointing.
You are paying, it seems to me, for me to do a number of things on the page, and one of them is the
excercise of a disciplined mimetic imagination on an acquired body of (often anecdotal) experience.
A friend of mine, for instance, a police officer, was recently describing his subjective experience of a gunfight,
at very close range, in which he shot someone. His account of how he experienced this, and of certain bizarre
alterations in perception he now takes for granted as being a part of this sort of experience, were, from a
novelist's perspective, pure gold. But what I immediately pegged as being of even greater value was
something he mentioned about what happens, in a room, when stray bullets are penetrating a gyprock ceiling
overhead. That one little detail, which I could never possibly have imagined, is *it*, and will be with me until I
find a fictional use for it.
By the same token, the poster who wonders if my account of systema, the Russian martial art, means that I
practice it, is underestimating both the reach of Google and the power of *both* our imaginations.
Aspiring writers who might one day need to describe the subjective effects of amphetamines are referred to
the autobiographical SPEED, by the late William S. Burroughs Jr. (WSB's son, a very talented writer in his own
right, whose brief and extremely uncomfortable life brought new meaning to the word "hapless").
I do, however, practice the Pilates system of excercises. Twice a week.
posted 10:38 PM
EXPERIENCE > FICTION
Visiting San Francisco shortly before I began writing ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, I had the experience, in
Market Street, that the novel's Taoist assassin has:
"Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he
remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century, and this quite
clearly another girl, some newly minted stranger, one with whom he will never speak."
The woman I momentarily mistook a much younger woman for is neither dead nor a former lover, but the
experience, I immediately understood, never before having had it, is one that you can't have until middle age.
At this point I had neither the character of the assassin nor a narrative in which to find him.
But soon, still in San Francisco, I happened to be introduced to an FBI sniper.
He was a small man, much smaller than FBI agents were allowed to be in Hoover's day. In the right clothing,
he might have passed for a young teen, and I wondered how useful that might be, in certain situations.
He explained that he was required to constantly re-qualify, to an extremely high level of proficiency, with a
variety of firearms.
He mentioned "cold shots", the first shot out of the barrel of a rifle, and how these differ from subsequent
shots, when the barrel has warmed up, and how a sniper has to train to cope with that, as his first shot should
also be his last.
But what most struck me about him was his serenity.
Alert, relaxed. Present.
There was nothing that would suggest anything about my Taoist. Nothing but that sense of some inner
transparent stillness.
And then somehow the ">" of imagination, connecting the two experiences.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
posted 1:22 PM
SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF ENGLAND
"Imagine Tom Clancy mated with William Gibson, with James Michener acting as a midwife, and you begin to
get the idea."
--SEATTLE TIMES review of CRYPTONOMICON
posted 8:52 AM
AND BRAVUS NAILS IT ON ITS POINTY LITTLE HEAD
Yesterday's blog, that is.
"But more than that, I think he was making quite a funny joke about 'close your eyes and think of England'
(the advice allegedly given to Victorian women for enduring sex). I think maybe he'll be a little disconcerted to
see all this analysis of what he dislikes (which may well be projection of what we dislike, at least in part),
when the intention was probably to make a (wry) funny."
Yep. Indeed, I was attempting a wry funny. In fact, I continued to attempt them all day, privately, having
constructed the following blurbic boilerplate :
"[TITLE] is like watching [AUTHOR 1] worry the bloated corpse of [AUTHOR #2]." And some of them were
*really* funny, or so I thought, but I'd never post them here, else someone assume I had it in for whomever
I'd happened to plug into slots #2 and #3. (Hint: Filling #1 is at once the most challenging and most
rewarding.)
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
posted 7:53 AM
U-J3RK5
I think I only just became a U-Jerk retrospectively, and recently, via a couple of articles about Rodney
Graham. In truth I was only a sort of hanger-on and vague wannabe, attempting to write lyrics at one point.
But the lyric base was massively covered by the visionary Frankie Ramirez-Johnson, so in the end I mainly
just drank beer and watched them reherse. A peculiar outfit in the history of Canadian rock, as three of its
members would go on to become luminaries in the international gallery-art scene. This was between my
having written a first short story and the decision to get down to it and write a bunch more.
VIRTUAL MOSCOW
Someone asks how Cayce's Moscow was researched.
Russia is the only locale in the book that I wasn't able to base on actual and fairly recent experience (if you
don't count post-9-11 New York, which I didn't visit until the book-tour). To my great good fortune, though,
my friend Eileen Gunn went to Moscow just as I was getting Cayce onto Aeroflot. She most magnanimously
volunteered to act as remote-sensor, emailing wonderfully quirky descriptions illustrated with copious digital
snaps. That took care of the hotel, adjacent neighborhood and cafe (and if I hadn't had her on-site, I can't
imagine what I would have done).
The squat, however, was based on Jack Womack's account of a similar environment he visited there several
years ago. "Do you have an an American Express card?", a young man asked him, looking up from his
computer screen. Jack allowed as how he did. "Would you like another?"
Everything else, down to the names and approximate locations of shops Cayce notices on her way to the
squat, was gleaned via Google.
It was a relief, at that point, to finally be working in a relatively imagined construct. Someone posted recently
about a Norman castle near Poole, wondering if it might be the one Cayce glimpses. Well, it might be, her
journey having been based on a friend's email account of a daytrip that wound up, quite by chance, at some
sort of disused Ministry of Defense facility, which did in fact have a caravan exactly like Baranov's. I say
"exactly" because Baranov's caravan is based on the one my friend photographed there, and Baranov is near
Poole in the first place because of that photograph, which also has the MoD warning-sign that closes a
chapter.
posted 12:46 AM
"THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS."
Even things like the Segway. I guess.
A socio--technological first for New York City. And dull as ditchwater. Maybe they were using it to glide silently
around in the blackout, doing crimes. But it still would be boring. Why do I find this device so irritating? I
don't know. Lots of people do, though.
http://www.ny1.com/ny/TopStories/SubTopic/index.html?topicintid=1&subtopicintid=1&contentintid=32558
posted 2:23 PM
"MUNDWINKEL"?
"Then again the face. Merrily. A teacher could be. It would remain however not for a long time, with this easily
amused skepticism around eyes and mundwinkel. Strange nose."
I love it when German makes Babelfish give up. I love Babelfish hugely, anyway.
I got rid of those pants because they had pleats, albeit not very pronounced ones. Plain front, please.
Photograph by the very excellent Karen Moskowitz of Seattle.
If you have a strange nose, by all means cultivate an easily-amused skepticism around your mundwinkel. Use
a mirror, if you have to.
posted 8:13 PM
HYBRID ASSISTIVE LEG
I used something like this in a screenplay recently, but presented it as a cross between a treadmill and a
personal trainer:
http://sanlab.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/HAL/indexE.html
My version *resists*, when you try to move, but simultaneously urges you on.
The manufacturer's use of "gait disorder", here, reminds me of the Invisible Scooter said to ferry pubdamaged British drinkers home.
"You were uttered knackered. Legless. How'd you get back, then?"
"No idea. Must've ridden the Invisible Scooter."
posted 10:57 PM
FLY FISHING?
Sheer apophenia, that.
I said "GONE FISHIN'", as in gone to do nothing in particular. The only fishing I ever do that doesn't involve
the excercise of literary imagination is with search-strings, on eBay.
BUT THIS IS NOT TECHNICALLY A FISH...
Yesterday I took this picture of a member of J Pod, while I was technically, in my sense of the phrase, "gone
fishin'". Mammalian and roughly the size of the fusilage of your smallest Cessna...
http://members.shaw.ca/wxy123/orca-s.jpg
Taken with a Canon Ixus 400 courtesy of DAZED & CONFUSED and (oddly) the International Red Cross. (The
Ixus 400 is called something else, in North America; mine came via London, hence has an actual *mirrorworld plug* on the battery recharger -- getting the adaptor-gizmo for which introduced me to an amazingly
cool shop called Foreign Electronics.)
Saturday, August 23, 2003
posted 11:21 AM
JOYS OF MACHINE TRANSLATION
"Hang the premiere world war, known as the Large War, aviation is yet only with the premices. Of droles of
machines the battle fields fly over. Airships, monoplanes, biplanes qul have the made paper air a' cigarette.
So that the civil ones do not confuse the German planes with English, of the descriptions with drawings a' the
support are placarded on the walls. It is highly recommended to plunge in the cellar nearest, if a long aeronef
as one day without brownies is profiled in the sky. This one is an enemy teuton."
posted 8:57 AM
IN THE SEASON OF SLOW NEWS
Career-changing attack of apophenia strikes media-saturated burglar. The various subsidiary narratives that
can be inferred from this story are so rich as to lead me to suspect the hand of the Silly Season.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0819baconmask19-ON.html
posted 5:07 PM
WHAT DO I THINK OF THE PEOPLE WHO POST ON THE BOARDS, HERE?
Someone asks.
Well, really, one of the very last things I ordinarily spend any time thinking about is fiction that I've already
written. And while it's naturally gratifying if someone expresses pleasure at having read same, I generally try
to take the position that how people react to my fiction is basically none of my business. So I tend to pay less
attention to the boards where people are mainly doing that, and more to Random Thoughts.
But, that said, I've been very pleased with how the culture of the boards has evolved, and that always, in my
experience, has to do with a core of regular posters who are, in effect, the generous contributing talents who
generate that sense of place that any board-culture needs in order to be worth revisiting. And in that regard
I've felt, and continue to feel, very fortunate.
And while I've sometimes been tempted to comment on more threads more directly, I continue to think that
that would turn into exactly the sort of tar-baby timesink that keeps books unwritten, so I don't.
It's really all about *you*, a conglommerate of mediated selves in your own right. Is it a Relevant
Experiment? You decide.
posted 11:13 PM
ANOTHER BAGHDAD BLOGGER
This is Riverbend. Iraqi, female, 24.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#10620820183884181
posted 9:36 AM
RIVERBEND REDUX
Someone should start a Riverbend thread. Better yet (for me, anyway) start a new Talking To the Blog thread.
That was working for me, as a faster feedback loop, but lately people haven't been using it -- I suspect
because the original thread has gotten too cumbersome.
Someone has questioned Riverbend's authenticity. The same thing, you'll recall, happened with Salam Pax,
whose Iraqiness and whereabouts in meatspace were hotly debated, with some declaring him the subtle tool
of devilishly clever Iraqi intelligence operatives. He turns out to be the subtle tool of his very own clever Iraqi
intelligence, not to mention his droll and extremely resilient Iraqi sense of humor.
I posted the link without having read more than a few of the more recent posts and a few at the very start. I
found it on The Agonist, where the bridge-pricing episode had earned it a place amid yesterday's semi-hard
news. Still haven't had time to go through the whole thing.
I have doubts about the assumption that there could not be, today, in a population the size of Baghdad's,
Iraqi's in their mid-twenties whose English is fluent and idiomatic.
posted 10:18 AM
LITERARY GENRES OF NORTH KOREA
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0829/p01s03-woap.html
posted 9:33 PM
RETURN OF TALKING TO THE BLOG
I was indeed imagining Western versions of the genre. Blair hunched over a steaming cuppa in the motorway
cafe. Bush waxing laconic on a bench in Rock Creek Park. ("He looked so lifelike," declares the retired
secretary who shared that bench, and those magic moments.)
In a warmer, more global scenario, leaders start to drop in on ordinary folk in other countries: Jacques Chirac
enthuses over the California rolls at Tokyo Duane's Sushi Barn in a Denver strip-mall...
GOOD LUCK
To the meatspace explorers in Toronto!
September
Monday, September 01, 2003
posted 9:11 AM
SPOKEN LIKE A LAW-LAWYER, SIR
"With this arrest, we want to deliver a message to cyber-hackers here and around the world," said U.S.
Attorney John McKay in Seattle. "Let there be no
mistake about it, cyber-hacking is a crime."
[thanx to poster Colin.]
The first time I went to Tokyo, in the wake of NEUROMANCER's Japanese translation, I happened on a
department store with a window-display of dull, mini-checked, summer-weight sportscoats. "CYBERSUMMER", declared the huge banner behind them. Trembling with soul-delay, I experienced the uneasy
conviction that the future would be like *this*.
Now here we are, and it is. A rare incidence of actual prescience on my part. posted
posted 9:25 AM
I NEED A FAQ PAGE...
Someone asks about the ALIEN III script, yet again.
Yes, I did write that, albeit to a "story" by Hill, Giler, and the other guy, whose name momemtarily escapes
me. They suggested the Marxist space empire, and I happily elaborated on that. In spite of its almost instant
archaism, I found it fun. I couldn't recall a single piece of Cold War space opera in which the other guys were
commies.)
At the time, Ms. Weaver seemed doggedly unwilling to participate, so I was instructed to keep Ripley in stasis
throughout. This was the first screenplay I'd written, and as far as I know the only one on the net today, or
otherwise in circulation. Any others you might encounter are almost certainly not by me but have had my
name added.
The ALIEN III script as it turns up on the net is about thirty pages shorter than the version I turned in. It
became the first of some thirty drafts, by a great many screenwriters, and none of mine was used (except for
the idea, perhaps, of a bar-code tattoo).
Hardest thing about the job? I was still working on an Apple IIc, and there was no screenwriting software
available, so I had to do all that centering and spacing and whatnot *by hand*. This is probably why the net
version is short; nothing ever circulated but the printout, as nobody in Hollywood wanted my IIc floppy.
2:38 PM
THE WET ROOM
"Excuse me. I just have to use, er, 'the wet room'..."
Someone points this out as a Damienoid bathroom:
http://londonloft.users.btopenworld.com/wetroom.htm
It is, though the scale seems industrial.
My idea of Damien's flat was that it isn't very large, even by London standards. He'd rented the place when
he'd just started to make a bit of money, and eventually bought the lease on the entire building. He then has
the same not very impressive space renovated, but in a spare "designer-free" mode that's roughly the
equivalent of Cayce's dress-sense.
This loft is more like the place that Malcolm Stonestreet hopes to move into.
posted 4:35 PM
THEY ARE NATURE
Will be summer soon They are nature
and the season which exposes the skin.
There are some persons
who have gone to already engrave an engraver's place,
and probably, there is still a man in an idea.
then, you large emit a flash by cooperation of many tattoo artists
as from now on refer, and it is.
--from TATTOO THE LIFE vol. 03, 2003, p. 23
Below this poem are five pieces of flash (design sketches for tattoos). None are particularly remarkable except
for the randomly chosen English words provided in place of whatever name or heartfelt slogan a client might
want. On the traditional name-or-slogan ribbon scrolling around an equally traditional skull-piercing dagger:
"CD SELL BOOK RENTAL". On the flank of a pink, cigarette-smoking bunny seated on a hotrod flame: "EDGE
OF GIRL!".
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
posted 12:04 AM
NETWAR
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6807
posted 8:53 AM
HUMILITY AND PRESCIENCE
Someone asks (rather charmingly): How do I maintain such humility in the face of my evident prescience?
The answer is that I know that any illusion of prescience on my part is the result of the reader's complex
apophenic projection on the text. No kidding.
Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you. Eating the bear, for me, in terms of seeming
prescient, might best be illustrated by Rydell's beloved Cops In Trouble show, which was a simple satiric
extension of the first couple of seasons of Cops, but which has subsequently, with the advent of reality tv,
acquired a different, post-Survivor resonance. Someone may eventually accuse me of having "predicted"
Survivor, et al, but really I didn't. Being eaten by the bear? That would best be illustrated by the Soviet Union,
looming monolithic in the background of the world of Neuromancer. (One of the things I sniggered over, as I
wrote Neuromancer, was that it would be impossible to prove, from textual evidence, that the USA still existed
as a nation-state. It never even occurred to me that the USSR might not.)
ON THE OVERNESS OF CYBERPUNK
I just read that Neil Stephenson interview in Wired.
When cyberpunk wasn't over, I had a lot of Joy Division albums, on Factory vinyl.
So definitely over in that sense.
Though in another sense I don't think it can be any more "over" than punk, or the hardboiled detective story.
These things are modalities of some kind, and become part of the cultural palette. Which is what I think has
happened with cyberpunk.
One of the really refreshing things about the Pattern Recognition tour, though, was how markedly infrequently
the word "cyberpunk" came up in interview-questions. It was as though it was finally, in what I take NS's
sense of it to be, over.
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
posted 7:26 AM
ALAS, WORLDCON
That Globe And Mail piece, plus an experienced friend's more subtle reportage, reminds me why it's been a
long time since I went to one of those.
For that matter, it reminds me how unlikely a blossom cyberpunk was, in terms of that particular soil. In those
days, of course (puts on geezer hat) it was still more or less about books. The "dealer room" at a worldcon,
then, consisted almost entirely of books and magazines, most of some considerable age and some of genuine
rarity. If nothing else, you could browse fields of otaku-grade pulp. Watching the dealer room colonized, over
the course of the couple or three worldcon's I attended, by Star Trek and Star Wars bumf, I recognized the
thin edge of a wedge that would shortly move me right out of there, thank you.
posted 1:50 PM
HUM THIS
"You know what? There's just something inescapably bland about Hummer's slogan: 'Like Nothing Else.' It
doesn't really capture the macho essence of the company's singular vehicles. If you ask me, they'd have been
better to go with something more to the point like, 'See, You *Can* Be More of an Asshole.'"
--Scott Feschuk, NATIONAL POST, September 2, 2003
posted 6:55 PM
LOVESAN WORM ACTIVITY ANIMATION
http://www.hackerwatch.org/map/?special=rpc1
Hat tip to Bruce Sterling
Thursday, September 04, 2003
posted 9:30 AM
"IT WAS A VOICE OF THE ABANDONED POSITION
AND A JOKE OF THE ABANDONED POSITION"
Bruce Sterling just showed this to me:
http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/
The sky over the gate was the color of the television, grants a dead
guidance. "It as if I do not employ, " The case intended
someone, in order to say, because it supported its way by mass around
the door of the discussion. "It like my body this solid drug
developed deficiency." It was a voice of the abandoned position
and the joke of the abandoned position. Chatsubo was a staff for the
professional expatrie; They could drink during one week there and
never not hear two words on the Japanese. Ratz pulled the staff, its
prothetisches monotonously discharges the arm firmly, while it plate
of the glasses of the Kirin outline filled. It saw the case and
smiled, its teeth a work of the eastern-European steel sequence and
brown weakening. Case found place with staff, between which not very
probable acid number on one the Dirnen of the zone of Lonny and the
constant of a Marineknir large African, with whom those had touched
paumettes with boys with Joe, " Ratz indicated, one outline by
the staff W oppressive.
Part of the fun here, such as it is, is figuring out that, for instance, the machine reads "Sprawl" as "abandoned
position". Some days, I'm awfully easily amused.
posted 5:41 PM
NEUROMANCER: THE TIMELINE
Since this has come up in a thread...
I was indeed born in 1948.
Terry Carr commissioned a first novel, for his second Ace SF Specials series, shortly after the Denver
worldcon, 1981. Some of my fellow Ace Specials first-timers were Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Swanwick,
and Howard Waldrop. I don't remember whether Terry asked me in 1981 or early in 1982, but I do remember
that I had a year in which to get it done, and managed to be six months late. So that would mean that I
probably wrote the bulk of it in 1982/83. I can't remember how long it took to be published, from submission
of the completed manuscript, but it probably seemed like several decades.
Friday, September 05, 2003
posted 10:18 PM
OR THE THINGS IN HIS AMBUSH OF THE PERIPHERY
A pretty damned peculiar thing happened to my mediated persona's biorythms, today...
http://www.facade.com/celebrity/William_Gibson/
Fortunately, I had my Babelizer handy, in a Kydex shoulder-rig, and cored this out before they could get any
on me:
The words, the things, that can be something of you, "Bridge, I film it, expenses incarnent I am, Harem, the
head, Miami, the switch, prozession, Zen". Words, people or the things in his "Ambush of the periphery,
anonymity, attention, body, scato, proprietor, exact, who is chaos, incarnent selected, to cloud, agreement,
cramoisi, density, dictionary, Emissary, enthusiasm, retirement, furrow, stewed, future, the gangster, girl,
gram, guides, to the intruder, sky, hero, jewel, labyrinth, freedom, alcohol-ill person, mercy, mirror, film,
Krake, work, Overlord, the parliament, Phoenix, arms, victim, halting, Psychedelic, radiation, draining,
satisfaction, savage, Scorpion, sky, song, alcohol, it fights, Succubus, to fill, tatuaggio, theory, grippa the end
to the subject, Syzygy, screen, being getlteman, Warm".
Forget numerology, folks; the Babelizer is *deep*.
Sunday, September 07, 2003
posted 11:42 PM
MAKING SHORT FILMS BASED ON STORIES OF MINE
Someone mentions planning to do this. Actually this is not such a good idea, as the film rights to most of
those stories were sold long ago. What this means is that not only can I not grant anyone any sort of
permission (because those rights are no longer my property) but in some cases they have long since been
resold by the original buyer, so I don't even know who currently owns them and have literally no way of
finding out.
The smarter thing to do is write your own screenplay and make up your own title, and if the result is after the
manner of my early short fiction, I'm not sure where that might get you in 2003 but good luck.
Monday, September 08, 2003
posted 5:07 PM
HOMELAND SECURITY FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS
The SQUID, a la Johnny Mnemonic, detects terrorists packing concealed hypodermic needles:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/07/1062901944054.html
ACQUIRED SITUATIONAL NARCISSISM
You already knew this, but now you have something to call it:
http://www.talentdevelop.com/acquired.html
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
posted 6:58 AM
IT AIN"T ME, BABE
"I find it ironic that someone that writes so elegantly about characters raging against the 'machine' would
make [it] so difficult for people to adapt his works so others can enjoy them."
Uh... In the case of "The Winter Market", I do still own the rights. The problem is that someone else has been
paying me sums of money on a regular basis (this is called "having an option") to retain the exclusive right to
buy those rights. (For about five years now, as I recall.) The way the business of film rights works, I can't
take that money in good faith, as I've been doing, and then sell (or even give) the right to make a film (even
a short, determinedly uncommercial film) to someone else while that option agreement is in place. I would
argue that this is not some perversely ungenerous quirk of character on my part, but simply the reality of how
things are in the business of film rights. Writers, if they can, like to pay part of the rent with option money -which often proves to be "free" money, as options can lapse without the rights having been bought.
That said, this is probably as good a time as any to say that Pattern Recognition seems to be more or less on
the brink of being optioned, though experience has proven (and has it ever) that this, were it to happen, and
it hasn't yet, would not necessarily mean that there's ever going to be a film of Pattern Recognition.
posted 11:33 AM
STERLINGIAN, WALDROPIAN, TROGDORIAN...
I've always delighted in ironic neologorrhea (it was also a cyberpunk subcultural tic, I seem to recall) and
"Gibsonian" continues to strike me that way.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
posted 7:53 AM
SEPTEMBER 11, 2003
"Liza! What was it yesterday, then?"
"It was what it was."
"That's impossible! That's cruel!"
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, DEMONS
[quoted by Haruki Murakami at the start of AFTER THE QUAKE]
Friday, September 12, 2003
posted 6:06 AM
LAST POSTCARD FROM COSTA DEL BLOG
Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging.
I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve
most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing
a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it
would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image
that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.
The bits and pieces that Joseph Cornell assembled in his shadow-boxes wouldn’t have seemed nearly as
interesting if he’d simply left them arrayed on the bench of some picnic-table –- and they certainly wouldn’t
still be there.
I crave the sweet and crazy-making difficulties that can only be imposed by the box, the Cornellian stage, the
frame, of a formal narrative.
So I’m out of here, as of this installment, and wish to thank everyone who in any way furthered my ‘tween-
books holiday. It’s been ludic, as the anarchist says.
Perhaps I’ll be back, one day, somewhere on the far side of whatever it is I’m about to start writing.
Adios, then, to all.
And onward!
Created by Gary Bright on a Macintosh G5
Please email any questions to: gary.bright@gmail.com
Website: http://www.therealitystudio.com

The William Gibson Blog January to September 2003

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