For the past few weeks now, the cinetrix, along with everyone else on the interwebs it seems, has been revisiting William Gibson. I prepared for his latest by rereading Pattern Recognition [around September 11th, as it happens, which I don't recommend] and Spook Country. Then last week I had a shitty, shitty stretch and treated myself to the [20% off!] hardcover edition of Zero History at the otherwise useless campus bookstore. Come to think of it, I have all three in hardcover, immediate gratification wrapped in the permanence of old media trumping thrift. It happens, and I'm a firm believer that all art that truly moves you, be it book, film, music, graffiti, finds you at just the right time. In fact, my first two posts on Pullquote back in 2003 sprang fullblown from a head that was still partway in Cayce Pollard's world.
Anyway, from the multitudes, I wanted to single out two recent Gibson interviews by FOCs Hugo Perez and Maximus Clarke. There's a bit of echolalic repetition that's par for the course for anyone doing press [who isn't a sociopath], sure, but also some gems unique to each. For example, the animation above, which details Gibson's answer to Hugo's question about his first memory of an encounter with technology or science.
Elsewhere, Perez observes
...There is great attention to detail in the way the characters find out that jeans are going to be on sale, they go to the location, they wait… as if on a pilgrimage. There’s something that seems almost religious or spiritual in your description of these moments, something about the spirit of the work that goes into making something real. Something about being able to touch real things that people made with their hands.
Gibson concurs
...[S]tanding in line and getting the real thing that isn’t ever going to be advertised. In some sense it’s a defiance of the system – that those artifacts even exist. People do it out of some stubbornness that I find admirable.
Now I recognize these phoners are frequently stacked like jets in New York airspace, but I wish Perez, himself originally from somewhere where thrift and ingenuity and reuse yield miraculous innovation, had more time to explore an aspect of the author's bio that he brings up in his introduction, "William Gibson grew up in an Appalachia of the 1950s that was so behind the times it seems like the 1930s when he looks back on it. In the 1970s, he made a living for a while scouring thrift stores for items he could resell at a profit to specialist dealers. He wrote his first novel on a 1930s Hermes portable typewriter."
Fortunately, Max is on the case:
You’ve written previously about your fascination with thrift stores and eBay. What draws your attention to a particular item, and what makes you think, “This has got to be in a story”?
WG: Well, it isn’t as though I wander through the flea market, spot something, and think, “Wow, that’s got to be in a story one day.” It’s that I have a kind of vast and half-forgotten library of objects — artifacts, really, because the things that I describe are always man-made. And one of them will be summoned from the library through some unconscious or poetic process when the narrative requires it. I know that sounds precious, but I can’t think of a less precious-sounding way to put it.
<snip>
...Europeans have lived forever happily among their own ruins. The very concept of retro-fitting strikes Europeans as weirdly redundant, because their world is in large part a retro-fit, and they expect what they’re building now to be retro-fitted. In North America, we’ve only recently come to that. Our cultural idea of the future has been something totally brand new, with no dirt in the corners.
Later on, Max mentions the character Milgrim, who is hounded through Zero History by a certain leitmotif that [those who know me shouldn't be surprised] brings me great pleasure.
What does this have to do with the seventh art? Past the lovely animation and the book's trailer, not a whole hell of a lot, I grant you. But hey, John Perry Barlow tweeted just today: "@JPBarlow "Zero History," @GreatDismal's languid and infinitely detailed prediction of the present, would make a wonderful film." So, um, there's that, I guess.
