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 ex-girlfriend'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 sentence-fragments, 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 three-book 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 stand-alone 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 macramŽ.) 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

Monday, January 13, 2003
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.

Thursday, January 16, 2003
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 non-book-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. 

Friday, January 17, 2003
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.

Saturday, January 18, 2003
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.

Sunday, January 19, 2003
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 Euro-keyboards.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003
posted 10:48 PM
 M¯NSTER GENKENDELSE

That's PATTERN RECOGNITION in Danish, apparently! "Pattern" is "m¿nster"? 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.

Saturday, January 25, 2003
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.
--B¿rsen

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).

Sunday, January 26, 2003
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. 

Monday, January 27, 2003
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.)

Tuesday, January 28, 2003
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 military-industrial 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 "walnut-sized" (his phrase) camera, which is strapped to the center of his forehead, it's shutter operated by a hand-held 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.

Thursday, January 30, 2003
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 media-product 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 consensus-pantheon, 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.

Friday, January 31, 2003
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 fold-and-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.

Sunday, February 16, 2003
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. 

Monday, February 17, 2003
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", sleep-deprivation 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 deep-fried 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.)

Sunday, February 23, 2003
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.

Monday, February 24, 2003
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 lovingly-crafted 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 non-anomalous 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 micro-labels 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 7-11. 

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 Anti-Starbuck'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.

> 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.

Saturday, March 08, 2003
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 Wagner-penned 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 � beginning. heh heh"

Heh heh indeed. 

Sunday, March 09, 2003
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. 

Monday, March 10, 2003
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. 

Tuesday, March 11, 2003
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. 

Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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 email-using, 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.)

Thursday, March 13, 2003
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 t