Wednesday, January 08, 2003
posted 1:26 PM
Someone else wonders what I think of pirated copies of my work available as free downloads on the net.
Downloading a novel from the net is not something I’d ever likely do myself, but mainly because reading novels on the screen of a PDA is something I might get into only if I were incarcerated, with no alternative. And I’m sufficiently (and with good reason) aware of the book > royalty > author chain to want to feed those authors whose work feeds me creatively. I make it a point to buy the books of writers whose work and presence I value.
As for other people downloading pirated copies, that’s their business. The business part of my business, currently, is about publishers producing legitimate editions of my work, which they then distribute for sale, a certain predetermined portion of the price returning to me as royalties (against the publisher’s cash advance).
But I think that that has to be looked at in a broader context, today, so I suggest you read this piece by Tim O'Reilly, recommended to me yesterday by Kevin KellY:
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA’s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I’d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA’s.
I was in a bar in Barcelona, on the Rambla, with Alberto Manguel, just before Christmas, talking, as it happened, about why books, the paper kind, are such a good thing. Neither of us suggested building beds from them, but Alberto did say that he thought the book, like the wheel and the knife, was one of those perfectly and completely evolved inventions, an idea what wasn’t really going to be improved upon.
Alberto, who was once Jorge Luis Borges' personal secretary, is among other things a great anthologist, and, by virtue of that, a sort of meta-librarian, which is a very Borgesian thing to be.
Afterward, walking back to my hotel along one of the safer thoroughfares crossing the heroin-drifted maze of the Barrio Chino (you can tell them because they have lights, Christmas decorations, and policemen) I wished that I had been able to more clearly describe, for Alberto, the level of technology that this book/PDA/download business has always conjured up for me.
The Borgesian meta-library contains a copy of every book ever written, but my dream-artifact is already, and always, every book every written, on demand -- yet feels, looks, and even smells exactly like an ordinary hardcover book. Only the content is protean. That simple. The end of the world as we know it, and a good read every single night.
Shelve the PDA, thanks. I’m holding out for Borges’ library of Babel in one volume, Strindberg or Spillane as the heart desires.
And even a rather bland and limited sort of nanotech, on par with the “paint” now being developed for American combat vehicles, gets us closer…
Monday, January 06, 2003
posted 11:21 AM
The thread about the bridge in Virtual Light had me remembering where that all came from: a random glance out a window in The Clift, where I was staying during the tour for the previous book. Up early, on one of the upper floors, I happened to look out into thick, classic San Francisco fog and see, magically, just the top of that first cable-tower, suspended/isolated there in a field of gray. I suppose it became for me, at that point, a place.
But if you wanted it to be a place where you could be, where you could sleep, you’d need a floor and walls and a roof… Tree-houses, the forts that children build, secret places of childhood… Somehow, before I’d turned away from that window, I had the floor: it was made of two-by-fours, set on edge, making the deck a comfortingly solid four inches thick.
So, really, the world below, the bridge and its culture, all grew down from that, called into literary being to support what would become Skinner’s room, Chevette’s home, and the core of three novels.
***
My friend John Clute, the only critical historian of science fiction I pay any attention to, thought that the bridge was the ultimate elaboration of the Cornell boxes in Count Zero. I started understanding that he saw these environments throughout my work, and that he regarded them as claustrophobic, or rather agoraphobic. I didn’t like that, but gradually, at some deeper level, I guess I started to agree with him. Which is ultimately why I wound up torching the bridge in All Tomorrow’s Parties, and perhaps why Laney dies alone in his cardboard box at the end of that book.
In Pattern Recognition, the only physical environments I can think of that evoke Cornell boxes are the basement arcade off Portobello Road, where Cayce sees the book’s first Michelin Man, and Boone’s ex-girlfriend’s rather too perfect apartment in Hongo, and, possibly, Baranov’s fetid caravan. None of these are felt as sympatico environments for Cayce.
But there may be another sort of Cornell box there, in the form of F:F:F, the website where Cayce and her friends have been discussing the footage, in the months before the book begins. I think that’s an improvement, though, as a website can become a Cornell box full of friends. Having seen that happen elsewhere, and been a part of it myself, my best hope for this site would be that, for some of you at least, that will happen for you here. (If it does, it won’t have much to do with me, and everything to do with you.)
So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who arrived early and started colonizing the place before it was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I’m moving into an empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There is already some human space here, the start of that sense of duration and habitation, and soon there’ll be, I hope, more.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.