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William Gibson

Sat., January 7, 2006

For The New York Times’ fifth-annual Arts & Leisure Weekend, I went to the City University of New York Graduate Center to hear an interview with author William Gibson.

The interviewer, Brent Staples, an editorialist for the Times, I disliked immediately for his lime green socks and the red silk scarf draped over his otherwise black Manhattan ensemble. (Gibson, on the other hand, was dressed in solid black, as you’d expect, except for forest-green socks. Strange.)

But worse than Staples’ wardrobe was his inability to ask a clear, concise question. He’s one of these guys that blathers, whether editorializing, mentioning himself, fawning over or misrepresenting the author’s work, and just as you’re wondering if there’s a question in the near future, he drops one, and more often than not, it could have been asked without the windy prelude and/or it’s a near non-sequitur. Here’s a sample question, regarding Cayce, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition, as “an agent of standardization”: “Now, does that frighten you or is it just neat?” There were some snickers from the audience, but we were laughing at Staples, not with him.

Gibson wasn’t as dynamic as I thought he’d be, with a voice resembling worms dying, as he’s described it. Face it: you too thought he’d have a rich British accent, even knowing he’s an American living in Canada. I blame the moody Anton Corbijn photo of him that circulated circa his novel Idoru.

Anton Corbijn's portrait of William Gibson.

But, no, Gibson was raised in a town called Wytheville in southwestern Virginia, and my ear caught a curl to certain words he spoke—high school, them, endless, turns up—that could have been repressed Southern.

As have many writers branded Sci-Fi, Gibson began writing to escape the “extreme poverty of information” in his surroundings. He recalls subscribing to sci-fi fan-zines, crude precursors to blogs, with their fevered, mimeographed articles debated by post. At 14, he read Burroughs, believing surely he was the only one at that moment in his hometown to be doing so.

The most interesting theme in his writing that he discussed was what constitutes a sense of place and how that’s eroding. This crops up often in his work— for those unfamiliar with Gibson, he is best known with coining the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. The “specificity of place erodes as more of us come into this circle of the expanding world,” he said, noting that he misses what Cayce calls “the mirror world,” or London’s small, strange differences from New York City.

In the U.S., he misses “the complexity of small places,” which have been replaced by prepackaged dullness: “Am I in Atlanta or the outskirts of Los Angeles?” In the world at large, he bemoans the fact that, say, Spain and France used to have “very distinctive flavors,” but that they’re running together into a generic European form, with the same ten shops on their High Streets, and standardized currency and electrical outlets. The world is tilting to a “Lonely Planet version” of itself where “every square inch of the globe is annotated.”

Gibson’s self-deprecating nature arose when he discussed how he has evolved technically in his writing. “When I started writing fiction, I didn’t know how to write characters,” he admitted, specifying that he took pains to give the ones in Neuromancer excuses as to why they had no discernable emotional depth. With each novel he’s also tried to stick more to a single point of view in real-time with not as much jump-cutting. As for his ritual of writing, he said, “If it didn’t get harder [to write each successive book], I would worry that I wasn’t doing it right.”

He’s also evolved to write more about the “real world,” instead of within the Sci-Fi genre he said he’s always had a friction with. He allows that he has a “European’s view of the future,” in which much at present remains recognizable, a vision proven to Gibson when he saw Blade Runner in 1982. “The future always consists, for the most part, of the past,” he said.

These “real world” themes, which featured strongly in his most recent book, will extend to the one he’s writing now, for which he gave up three small slices of detail. In it, he will deal with what he termed the “illicit facilitating” practiced by the people the “bad guys” hire to do their own dirty work, much like the Cowboys in Neuromancer.

“The NSA ECHELON base in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, will be mentioned at least once,” he added, carefully.

The only characters he mentioned were “America’s smallest ethnic crime family,” a Cuban-Chinese group by intermarriage that has “translated themselves” to living in Manhattan for the past decade, headed by a patriarch who used to be part of Cuba’s equivalent of the KGB.

Afterwards, I attended the event’s afterparty, held in a busy, dimmed room filled with couches and lounge-electronica. Because it was sponsored by a tasteful brand of alcohol, each attendee received a ticket for a free beverage. I ordered a martini with two olives, which I drank while eating crackers and wandering aimlessly among the crowd. With the lucidity of vodka, I caught a view of my seemingly rakish self in the restroom mirror and had a sudden simultaneous urge to be in the company of a beautiful woman and to purchase a book of Borges.

I took the subway down to Union Square, walked to the Strand, and found a single, excellent-condition used hardcover copy on the shelf for $20, as if it’d been waiting for me. One out of two isn’t bad. I thought about going to a bar by myself, but I must be going about such ventures the wrong way, because either the place is too crowded or it’s not crowded enough, and there’s no one at the bar but single guys such as myself, drinking their drink and possibly reading the newspaper.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Photo by Anton Corbijn. | Comments have been closed.

On January 8, 2006 at 7:43 p.m., Joe wrote:

The afterpary sounds like one of several scenes in Capote which Andrea and I saw this weekend.