Comfort Before Revising

"Though Whether Those Feet"

"The heels of Milgrim's Tanky and Tojo brogues, as he sat astride the high, raked pillion of Benny's Yamaha, didn't quite touch the cobbles of this tiny square.  Something about the angle of his feet recalled some childhood line-drawing from Don Quixote, though whether those feet had been the knight's or Sancho Panza's, he didn't know."

--William Gibson, Zero History

"His First Drug"

"Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

--William Gibson, Zero History

Literary Preoccupation

"Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

--William Gibson, Zero History

William Gibson: "A Walking Shadow"

At the moment, there are two particularly resonating pieces in William Gibson's 1999 cyberpunk novel All Tomorrow's Parties that I would like to share.  I'm also thinking -- or feeling, perhaps, as Laney might -- there's an echo of a few famous lines* from Shakespeare's Macbeth in Gibson's title.  Maybe that's just me.

In the first passage that I'd like to quote, I think Gibson provides a somewhat humorous self-portrait in his description of this particular character, a very adept killer.  I haven't done any kind of research to see if such is common knowledge, at least among those who know, but when I look at the author photo from 1999 (and consider Gibson's look over the years), I do see something a bit autobiographical in the passage.  Consider:

     But he does not draw [the knife] now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a goat of grayish green, the color of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small round glasses and raises his hand to halt a passing cab.  Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile.  They do not see him smile.


In the second passage, we get what I would consider an apt insight into tools, whether a knife (as in the novel) or in the handouts and prompts I make more or less everyday.   (I'm not eschewing focus or direction or precise utility for the students, not at all; still, the "handles" -- the ways I may manipulate and use those handouts and prompts -- ought to be "simple" to afford "the greatest range of possibilities".)  Imagine the handle of a knife from the kitchen: plain, streamlined, straight in design, I'm guessing.  Now imagine one of those knife handles shaped specifically with finger grooves, shaped to be held in only one way; that second knife affords a very firm grip, but only in one position, yes?  And therefore, the utility of the knife is limited, prescibed, overly-shaped.  Not the kitchen knife, though, as you can shift your grip to suit the particular job at hand.  All that's part of the meaning I find in the passage from Gibson below.

I love finding the truth in as many disparate places as possible. Consider:

     The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. 
     That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

--from William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties


*Those lines from Macbeth, from the character Macbeth himself in the last act just after he hears that his wife, the queen, has died:

She should have died hereafter,
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

A Moment From Gibson's "Zero History"

For me, this passage resonates . . . though probably not in any obvious ways.

That's one of the things I like about books, fiction and non-fiction: the often twisted, offset, or slanted ways they enter and illuminate your life, or how they may do so. Of course, there are plenty of books I turn to that offer much more straightforward echoing and modeling: Homer's Odyssey, Fowles' Daniel Martin, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Hiaasen's Basket Case, Martin Cruz Smith's Havana Bay. And yet you'd probably need a map or a strong dose of intuition to see the "obvious" connections in the works I just mentioned. The richest connections are often more associational and emotional than linear and logical. Certainly, I've found that I tend to avoid books about middle-aged college English instructors, for I find those stories far less illuminating than most bystanders would imagine.

(A good book offers characters and a story, perhaps multiple stories; a good book also offers a mirror --or mirrors-- to see oneself more clearly. Frankly, a good reader looks around, looks beyond, and looks within.)

Reading was probably my "first drug" too.

Here's that passage from William Gibson's fairly recent novel:

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he'd arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

"Quit staring," he said to the dressmaker's dummy as he stepped into his room. "I wish I had a book." It had been quite a while since he'd found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He'd look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

--from pages 92-93 of William Gibson's Zero History, published in 2010 By G.P. Putnam's Sons in New York City.

P.S. Gibson is an old favorite, a writer to whom I return year after year, though a full year may pass without my picking up one of his novels or stories. And yet when I do, I'm always happy I did. I am often mesmerized how he moves within and from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and so forth. Connections between writers and readers may differ from book to book, and within a single book, those connections may rely on character, conflict, plotting, narrative strategies, or even simple phrasing. Each time I pick up Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, I probably connect with a different aspect and find a different point of connection and enjoyment.

P.P.S. Check out Chapter 23: Meredith of Zero History if you want a quick sense of Gibson's deft touch with supporting characters as well as his utter command of the less obvious but nevertheless true springs of life. Note Meredith's back-story on pages 117-119, especially, for one example of the way a life can flow unpredictably and yet still make absolute sense.

Then, note how "easily" Gibson tells her story; there are lessons in narrative craft on every page.

Byron claimed that "easy reading" is not the result of "easy writing," but the author's job is to make it seem so. I know Gibson knows his Byron because I asked him in an eight-minute conversation back in the mid-1990's and because in The Difference Engine (by Gibson and Bruce Sterling), Gibson revises the dead lord's fate, defying history to have Byron survive fever and the Greek Revolution to become prime minister of England . . . . Byron's daughter Ada helped create the "Difference Engine," after all, historically and in that novel.

Okay, I'll quit revising and adding to this entry now.

Check out Zero History; do yourself that favor.