William Gibson
Feb. 20th, 2003 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
disbelief11Just got back from the in-store reading/signing that William Gibson did for his new novel, Pattern Recognition.
Before I tell you all about it though, I have a side note for the smelly guy who was in front of me for the first 20 minutes or so (and yes, I know he'll never see this, but maybe someone he knows will and will tell him about it).
Sir, I know you are not a homeless man, since you have a cell phone and are not quite as stinky as most of the homeless I have been near. However, you're giving off a proto-homeless scent. Or, if it makes you feel more macho, a "mountain man musk."
Did you know that it's a societal norm here to wash your hair occasionally? Or to comb it, or to use that same comb on your beard? Also, I'm wondering if some of your odor is coming from underneath your fingernails. By the way, that stuff that looks like crude oil under those nails? Not very appealing or healthy looking. How can you eat with those fingers? I think the CDC needs to cordon those off and bring in the HazMat teams.
One last thing, Smelly Guy: when you're wearing a puffy winter jacket, you need to add 6 inches to your personal space perimeter. There's more of you out there in the world when you wear that coat, and if you're not careful the extra stuff ends up bumping into nice people who are stuck against a book display and have nowhere to escape from your odoriferous emanations.
Now onto William Gibson.
Mr. Gibson is fairly tall and thin, with a kind of weathered face. Think Clint Eastwood at his thinnest and you're in the right ballpark.
It was interesting to hear him read his own writing. His work is incredibly layered, and to hear him read it in his somewhat scratchy voice made it feel different to me. I normally think of his words as vibrant, alive, washing over me in a wave of info; it was still great in his voice, but not as crackling. Hm, I'm not explaining this very well.
After his reading, he answered some questions. The first question was the best (in my opinion). A man asked Mr. Gibson how he plots out his books - to which Mr. Gibson replied, "Well, I don't really do any plotting." He went on to say that he thinks of the characters first, gets a sense of them, and lets them take him wherever they want to go. At the end of writing a book, he said he ends up with about 12 feet of butcher paper on a table somewhere, where he uses X's and arrows to diagram who's done what to whom...at which point, if he's stuck or has left something out, he goes back and adds in whatever he needs to make it all turn out okay.
I liked his description of how he does that. He was really funny about it.
Then there were more questions which I don't really remember. There was one man (who I couldn't hear, but I know he was talking for quite a while) who asked a really detailed, very in-depth question which clearly amused Mr. Gibson. His reply: "Well, not to give a flip answer to a serious, well-thought out question, but 'No.'" I always find it amazing (and funny) that we can pull so much out of a work that the author never consciously intended. Mr. Gibson's "No" was priceless.
I'm glad I went. Gibson is great. I only wish y'all could have been there with me to enjoy him. (Plus, we could have physically removed Smelly Guy much sooner.)
Before I tell you all about it though, I have a side note for the smelly guy who was in front of me for the first 20 minutes or so (and yes, I know he'll never see this, but maybe someone he knows will and will tell him about it).
Sir, I know you are not a homeless man, since you have a cell phone and are not quite as stinky as most of the homeless I have been near. However, you're giving off a proto-homeless scent. Or, if it makes you feel more macho, a "mountain man musk."
Did you know that it's a societal norm here to wash your hair occasionally? Or to comb it, or to use that same comb on your beard? Also, I'm wondering if some of your odor is coming from underneath your fingernails. By the way, that stuff that looks like crude oil under those nails? Not very appealing or healthy looking. How can you eat with those fingers? I think the CDC needs to cordon those off and bring in the HazMat teams.
One last thing, Smelly Guy: when you're wearing a puffy winter jacket, you need to add 6 inches to your personal space perimeter. There's more of you out there in the world when you wear that coat, and if you're not careful the extra stuff ends up bumping into nice people who are stuck against a book display and have nowhere to escape from your odoriferous emanations.
Now onto William Gibson.
Mr. Gibson is fairly tall and thin, with a kind of weathered face. Think Clint Eastwood at his thinnest and you're in the right ballpark.
It was interesting to hear him read his own writing. His work is incredibly layered, and to hear him read it in his somewhat scratchy voice made it feel different to me. I normally think of his words as vibrant, alive, washing over me in a wave of info; it was still great in his voice, but not as crackling. Hm, I'm not explaining this very well.
After his reading, he answered some questions. The first question was the best (in my opinion). A man asked Mr. Gibson how he plots out his books - to which Mr. Gibson replied, "Well, I don't really do any plotting." He went on to say that he thinks of the characters first, gets a sense of them, and lets them take him wherever they want to go. At the end of writing a book, he said he ends up with about 12 feet of butcher paper on a table somewhere, where he uses X's and arrows to diagram who's done what to whom...at which point, if he's stuck or has left something out, he goes back and adds in whatever he needs to make it all turn out okay.
I liked his description of how he does that. He was really funny about it.
Then there were more questions which I don't really remember. There was one man (who I couldn't hear, but I know he was talking for quite a while) who asked a really detailed, very in-depth question which clearly amused Mr. Gibson. His reply: "Well, not to give a flip answer to a serious, well-thought out question, but 'No.'" I always find it amazing (and funny) that we can pull so much out of a work that the author never consciously intended. Mr. Gibson's "No" was priceless.
I'm glad I went. Gibson is great. I only wish y'all could have been there with me to enjoy him. (Plus, we could have physically removed Smelly Guy much sooner.)
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Date: 2003-02-20 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-02-21 02:44 pm (UTC)It should be interesting to read Pattern Recognition, because he said he set that one in the recent past - last summer, to be exact. He told us that it created a new baseline of the present for him, and that up until then, he had been working from a view of the present from the 1980's.
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Date: 2003-02-25 04:14 pm (UTC)hey! I went to the William Gibson reading that he did in Portland, at Powell's. I wish I could remember more of the things he said. It *was* awesome.
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Date: 2003-02-25 04:51 pm (UTC)