Tuesday, 02/04/03

Thom turned me on to William Gibson's month-old blog a few days ago, just in time for me to learn the man was coming to town for a reading of Pattern Recognition, his new book. He was too tall, or the lectern was too short, for the microphone to adequately amplify his voice, so the audience of a few hundred was forced into rapt silence in order to hear anything.

The book's protagonist's name is Cayce, which the Seattle Times suggests is a reference to Edgar Cayce, but which said aloud is also the name of Gibson's protagonist from Neuromancer. This shouldn't cause a problem for a reader, but for a listener, it just feels self-referential, like George Foreman claiming one of his sons named George was named after someone else. I suspect this problem will never be more pronounced than at a book reading, and may go otherwise undetected.

During Q&A someone asked a question about "mumble mumble weblog mumble", which I presume to have been "How do you feel about this brave technocratic new weblog medium in which you take part?". Gibson characterized his own blogging experience as "ludic", and somewhat at odds with the definition as I looked it up later, described his blog as feeling neither like work nor recreation, yet almost certainly incompatible with the mindset required to write a book. 12:44PM «

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