And for completeness' sake, while I'm here promoting my journalism, it occurs to me that I never put a link on this blog to my essay for Aeon about Donald Judd.
Here is a section that I very regretfully had to cut from the William Gibson piece for reasons of space:
Gibson has described the internet as a
component of our 'global, communal prosthetic memory'. In that
spirit, I didn't bother to ask him very much about his personal
history, because he detailed it so comprehensively in a 2011 Paris
Review interview which is available for free online. All the same, he
did tell me one fascinating story about his past that I'd never come
across in the dozens of interviews with him that I'd read (although
I've subsequently discovered from Google, our most dependable
prosthesis, that he has mentioned it in the course of at least one
public event).
First, some background. One of the
most rewarding qualities of Gibson's work is the thoroughness and
precision with which he describes inanimate objects. You might think
of Gibson as the poet of the virtual, but really he's always been
much more about the actual. If fiction strives, as James Wood puts
it, 'to open the pores of our senses and feel the world', I'll
take Gibson over nearly any author of so-called 'realist' literature.
We live among objects, and it's still through objects that the future
creeps up: today a cheap smartphone or a polyethylene running shoe,
tomorrow a vat-grown hamburger or a 3D-printed sniper rifle. If a
writer reserves his or her best prose for faces and landscapes and
weather and other pretty things that have always looked the same, he
or she is giving only the vaguest account of real life, compared to
the exceptional tangibility of Gibson's work.
'When I started,' Gibson told me, 'I
had a list of what I regarded as deficiencies in genre science
fiction. There was a story I read – I have no idea who wrote it –
where the character looks out of the porthole of a spaceship and sees
a prone figure wearing “silver boots”. And those “silver boots”
made me so mad. Were they tarnished sterling? Were they Vegas lamé?
Just the laziness of it. I thought, “This is one of the reasons the
other writers don't take us seriously.” If it was worth doing this
ridiculous thing of imagining what the future might be like, it was
worth doing it less fuzzily.' (At this point I must apologise for
referring inadequately to my 'dictaphone' in an earlier paragraph. It
was in fact a Chinese-made Olympus WS-110 digital voice recorder
dating from the first generation iPod era when plastic in a hospital
shade of white was briefly a signifier of advanced technology.)
'Something else that fed into it,' Gibson went on, 'was a kind of
political awareness that everything in the human universe was made by
a person, or by a machine that had been made by people. And there
also may be, I sometimes suspect, a kind of borderline autistic
fascination with objects. Not everyone shares it, but there's much
more of it evident now on the internet than was previously evident in
the world, so I feel less odd about having it.'
Tracing this tendency back, he told an
innocuous story which practically made my jaw fall off when I heard
it because it seemed to explain so much about the work of one of my
favourite living writers. 'The only writing teacher I ever had was in
a high school composition class and he was someone he wrote contract
specifications for the US military. He talked a lot about his job,
and about how if he didin't describe the thing exactly, and then it
arrived and it went wrong, the Pentagon was stuck paying for it. He
would have us do exercises describing a wooden pencil to that
standard.'
Ernest Hemingway spoke fondly of his
time as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star, where the official
style guide instructed him to 'use short sentences. Use vigorous
English. Eliminate every superfluous word.' To me, Gibson's story
about the high school teacher is equally revelatory. Of course, it's
not the whole picture: Gibson would not have found that class so
stimulating if he had not had a preexisting interest in squinting at
objects through the loup of prose, just as Hemingway would not have
gone for that newspaper job if he had not had a preexisting interest
in getting manly deeds down on paper with a minimum of fuss.
Nevertheless, to use a Gibson phrase,
it's a 'nodal point' in his biography – not only because of the
writing exercise itself, but also because the teacher was working for
the Pentagon. One of the constants of his work is that we live in a
sort of military surplus society, where military technologies,
methodologies and philosophies are forever leaking into civilian
life.
1 comment:
I grew up on Gibson as well and just interviewed him for Slate. Big moment for me.
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