William Gibson
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constant escape
winter withered, warm
Very strange: This whole thing just started to remind of Death Stranding, about functional apparel making your job easier, and then I see the guy is wearing a Death Stranding shirt.Jason Statham's into it now too.
luka
Well-known member
yes thats the lead singer of the sleaford mods
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
"Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation."
I don't remember having this issue with Neuromancer, but I am with Count Zero. I can't really picture the environment.
luka
Well-known member
TL: Like Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: Yeah. That’s one of my personal favorites. Have you ever met Pynchon?
TL: Ohhhh … I had him tracked down and I could’ve. It was a deal where there was a People magazine reporter with an expense-paid thing. We were going to rent a car and pick up Ken Kesey. Pynchon was living up near Redding, Pennsylvania. We had him tracked there. And I decided I didn’t want to do it. I’ve said this to many people, so I should say it to you. Your book had the same effect on me as Gravity’s Rainbow.
The way I read Gravity’s Rainbow is pretty interesting. At one point, the American government was trying to get me to talk. They were putting incredible pressure on me. This FBI guy said if I didn’t talk . . . “we’ll put your name out at the federal prison with the jacket of a snitch.” So I ended up in a prison called Sandstone. As soon as I got in there, there was a change of clothes and they said, “The warden wants to see you.” So the warden said, “To protect you, we’re going to put you here under a false name.” And I said, “Are you crazy? Are you gonna put me on the main line?” And he said “Yeah.” I said, “What name are you going to give me?” He said, “Thrush.” And you know what a thrush is? A songbird. So I said, “Uh-uh. In a prison filled with dopers, everybody’s going to know that my name isn’t Thrush. I refuse to do it.” He says, “OK. We’ll have to put you in the hole.” And I said “Do what you gotta do — but I want to be out there in my own name. I can handle any situation. I can deal with it. I’ve been in the worst fucking prisons and handled it so far. So I can handle it and you know it. So fucking put me out there!” And he said, “Sorry.” He was very embarrassed because he knew. He was a prison warden. His job wasn’t to get people to talk or anything like that. He knew it was a federal government thing. The reason they were trying to get me to talk was to protect the top FBI guys that had committed black bag burglaries against the Weather Underground. So they wanted me to testify in their defense. They actually went to trial, if you remember, and got convicted. And were pardoned by Carter.
Well, they put me in the worst lock-up that I’ve ever been in, and I’d been in solitary confinement for over a year and a half. This was just a clean box with nothing but a mattress. The only contact I had with human beings was, five times a day, I could hear somebody coming down the hall to open the “swine trough” and pass me my food. And I’d say, “Hey, can I have something to read?” And they’d say, “No.” One of them was this black guy and, this one night, he came back. I could hear him walking — jingle, jingle, jingle — walking down the metal hall. He opens up the trough and says, “Here man,” and throws in a book. A new pocketbook. And it’s dark, so I waited ’til dawn and picked it up. And it was Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: Perfect! Of all the books you could get, that’ll last you a while.
TL: You should only read that book under those circumstances. It is not a book you could . .
WG: It stopped my life cold for three months. My university career went to pot. I just sort of laid around and read this thing.
TL: What I did — first of all, I just read it. I read it all day until dark when they turned the lights out. I woke up the next morning and read it. For three days, I did nothing but read that book. Then I went back and I started annotating it. I did the same thing to yours.
Yours is the only book I’ve done that with since. The film industry’s never been able to do anything with Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: It’s got 8 billion times more stuff in it than Neuromancer does. It’s an encyclopedic novel.
TL: But there’s a tremendous relationship, as you well know, between Neuromancer and Pynchon. Because Pynchon is into psychology. The shit he knows about! It’s all about psychology. But you’ve taken the next step because you’ve done that whole thing to computers.
WG: Do you think he’ll ever write another book? I know people who claim to have seen clearly, in Gravity’s Rainbow, that the guy would never write another book, that somehow it’s innate to the structure. Of course, one is extremely curious . . .
TL: There was an article in Esquire . . .
WG: You know, this guy makes Salinger look like Boy George. The levels of secrecy that surround this man. I know a man in Vancouver who claims to have washed a sinkfull of dishes at a Christmas party with Pynchon. Not the kind of guy who would make up a story. I think he may be the only person I’ve ever run into who’s actually spoken with . . .
TL: I’ve met several who knew him earlier. And do you know what all the stories are? He wrote Gravity’s Rainbow down at Huntington Beach. And he would wake up — he was taking a lot of LSD — and he’d wake up the next morning and reread what he’d written and he didn’t even remember what he’d been writing about.
WG: Well, a lot of it reads like that.
TL: By the way, I have some marijuana brownies if you wanna . . .
WG: Oh God no. I suffer from Cannabis dysphoria.
TL: (laughs) That’s a Sprawl joke. So Pynchon disappeared. There’s only one picture of him, and that’s in the Cornell yearbook. He’s totally disregarded author tours, and coming on the Donahue Show — all the hype and awards.
WG: He even set up some kind of legal thing to block his high school from revealing any of his records. All of his Naval records were destroyed in a “draft” bombing . . .
TL: The hero of the book is Slothrop. And you’re reading and reading and reading the book and suddenly, towards the end, you realize that the hero had disappeared and you haven’t seen him in about a hundred pages.
WG: That is the weirdest thing in the world!
TL: And you have to trace back. I traced back to the last time. Do you know what the last thing is that happens?
WG: It just trails off.
TL: The last time you see the character, he’s up on a mountain in Germany, and there’s a little stream. And he’s kind of — his memory is dissolving. And there’s a harmonica in the stream that was the one that Malcolm X dropped in the toilet at the beginning of the book. And that’s the end. But it just keeps going and Slothrop never reappears and you don’t notice he’s gone. Is that a way to end a book or to end your life?
WG: Yeah!
WG: Yeah. That’s one of my personal favorites. Have you ever met Pynchon?
TL: Ohhhh … I had him tracked down and I could’ve. It was a deal where there was a People magazine reporter with an expense-paid thing. We were going to rent a car and pick up Ken Kesey. Pynchon was living up near Redding, Pennsylvania. We had him tracked there. And I decided I didn’t want to do it. I’ve said this to many people, so I should say it to you. Your book had the same effect on me as Gravity’s Rainbow.
The way I read Gravity’s Rainbow is pretty interesting. At one point, the American government was trying to get me to talk. They were putting incredible pressure on me. This FBI guy said if I didn’t talk . . . “we’ll put your name out at the federal prison with the jacket of a snitch.” So I ended up in a prison called Sandstone. As soon as I got in there, there was a change of clothes and they said, “The warden wants to see you.” So the warden said, “To protect you, we’re going to put you here under a false name.” And I said, “Are you crazy? Are you gonna put me on the main line?” And he said “Yeah.” I said, “What name are you going to give me?” He said, “Thrush.” And you know what a thrush is? A songbird. So I said, “Uh-uh. In a prison filled with dopers, everybody’s going to know that my name isn’t Thrush. I refuse to do it.” He says, “OK. We’ll have to put you in the hole.” And I said “Do what you gotta do — but I want to be out there in my own name. I can handle any situation. I can deal with it. I’ve been in the worst fucking prisons and handled it so far. So I can handle it and you know it. So fucking put me out there!” And he said, “Sorry.” He was very embarrassed because he knew. He was a prison warden. His job wasn’t to get people to talk or anything like that. He knew it was a federal government thing. The reason they were trying to get me to talk was to protect the top FBI guys that had committed black bag burglaries against the Weather Underground. So they wanted me to testify in their defense. They actually went to trial, if you remember, and got convicted. And were pardoned by Carter.
Well, they put me in the worst lock-up that I’ve ever been in, and I’d been in solitary confinement for over a year and a half. This was just a clean box with nothing but a mattress. The only contact I had with human beings was, five times a day, I could hear somebody coming down the hall to open the “swine trough” and pass me my food. And I’d say, “Hey, can I have something to read?” And they’d say, “No.” One of them was this black guy and, this one night, he came back. I could hear him walking — jingle, jingle, jingle — walking down the metal hall. He opens up the trough and says, “Here man,” and throws in a book. A new pocketbook. And it’s dark, so I waited ’til dawn and picked it up. And it was Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: Perfect! Of all the books you could get, that’ll last you a while.
TL: You should only read that book under those circumstances. It is not a book you could . .
WG: It stopped my life cold for three months. My university career went to pot. I just sort of laid around and read this thing.
TL: What I did — first of all, I just read it. I read it all day until dark when they turned the lights out. I woke up the next morning and read it. For three days, I did nothing but read that book. Then I went back and I started annotating it. I did the same thing to yours.
Yours is the only book I’ve done that with since. The film industry’s never been able to do anything with Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: It’s got 8 billion times more stuff in it than Neuromancer does. It’s an encyclopedic novel.
TL: But there’s a tremendous relationship, as you well know, between Neuromancer and Pynchon. Because Pynchon is into psychology. The shit he knows about! It’s all about psychology. But you’ve taken the next step because you’ve done that whole thing to computers.
WG: Do you think he’ll ever write another book? I know people who claim to have seen clearly, in Gravity’s Rainbow, that the guy would never write another book, that somehow it’s innate to the structure. Of course, one is extremely curious . . .
TL: There was an article in Esquire . . .
WG: You know, this guy makes Salinger look like Boy George. The levels of secrecy that surround this man. I know a man in Vancouver who claims to have washed a sinkfull of dishes at a Christmas party with Pynchon. Not the kind of guy who would make up a story. I think he may be the only person I’ve ever run into who’s actually spoken with . . .
TL: I’ve met several who knew him earlier. And do you know what all the stories are? He wrote Gravity’s Rainbow down at Huntington Beach. And he would wake up — he was taking a lot of LSD — and he’d wake up the next morning and reread what he’d written and he didn’t even remember what he’d been writing about.
WG: Well, a lot of it reads like that.
TL: By the way, I have some marijuana brownies if you wanna . . .
WG: Oh God no. I suffer from Cannabis dysphoria.
TL: (laughs) That’s a Sprawl joke. So Pynchon disappeared. There’s only one picture of him, and that’s in the Cornell yearbook. He’s totally disregarded author tours, and coming on the Donahue Show — all the hype and awards.
WG: He even set up some kind of legal thing to block his high school from revealing any of his records. All of his Naval records were destroyed in a “draft” bombing . . .
TL: The hero of the book is Slothrop. And you’re reading and reading and reading the book and suddenly, towards the end, you realize that the hero had disappeared and you haven’t seen him in about a hundred pages.
WG: That is the weirdest thing in the world!
TL: And you have to trace back. I traced back to the last time. Do you know what the last thing is that happens?
WG: It just trails off.
TL: The last time you see the character, he’s up on a mountain in Germany, and there’s a little stream. And he’s kind of — his memory is dissolving. And there’s a harmonica in the stream that was the one that Malcolm X dropped in the toilet at the beginning of the book. And that’s the end. But it just keeps going and Slothrop never reappears and you don’t notice he’s gone. Is that a way to end a book or to end your life?
WG: Yeah!
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
Turner gets more interesting as you go
he's sublimated his entire self behind this persona of ultimate blank professionalism - as one of his co-workers says to him "I figure the ones like you and Sutcliffe, you aren't from any place at all. This is where you live, isn't it? On the site today, the day your boy comes out." it's like the dealer Case is in debt to at the beginning Neuromancer - I don't remember the exact quote, but something like "operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities". idk how far in you are, but his personal arc is basically about him emerging from that shell into full personhood. whereas Bobby's is a typical coming-of-age/audience surrogate, and Marly's is a journey of personal discovery in the guise of an undertaken job of discovery i.e. a quest.
IdleRich
IdleRich
I'm just watching a tv show called Next - seems to be brand new but today the first two episodes are on Portuguese telly. It seems to be about a malevolent AI that has escaped from a tech company and... well that's about as far as I've got. But it seems extremely similar to the plot of Neuromancer... there is a great scene in the book where the protagonist (Case?) walks by a row of pay phones and each one rings as he passes it. Well that seems to be the basis of this with the AI taking over various bits of machinery to kill those who have become aware of its existence. It's a bit sily but it's got Roger from Mad Men it and I'm enjoying it so far.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
yeah Wintermute - the AI that wants to free itself - does that in Neuromancer
it takes over some gardening or maintenance robots to kill some Turing Agency (which governs AIs) cops that are arresting Case
what's more interesting in the Sprawl books I think is the ambiguous relationship AI, as a being with agency, has with human characters
Gibson did a pretty good job - in his metaphorical, non-technical way - of expressing the idea that true AI (i.e. AGI) would have motivations totally alien to human ones, not necessarily malevolent but rather entirely outside our conception of malevolent/benevolent
there's a pretty good part where the personality construct - like a recording of a dead person's personality - of Case's mentor explains it to him
Case and the Dixie Flatline said:
Errolson Hugh, the Acronym co-founder, was involved in the Death Stranding clothing designs.
Gibson did a pretty good job - in his metaphorical, non-technical way - of expressing the idea that true AI (i.e. AGI) would have motivations totally alien to human ones, not necessarily malevolent but rather entirely outside our conception of malevolent/benevolent
Spot on. He also suggests this via art, these very oblique suggestive creations that the AIs make. In Count Zero, they're a direct steal from Joseph Cornell's boxes. The AI says something to Marly at one point re. the boxes - "our songs are of time and distance - the longing is in you."
Spot on. He also suggests this via art, these very oblique suggestive creations that the AIs make. In Count Zero, they're a direct steal from Joseph Cornell's boxes. The AI says something to Marly at one point re. the boxes - "our songs are of time and distance - the longing is in you."
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