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You Are Here cover I’m finishing up a very neat book called You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination that was a Christmas present (which could explain why I haven’t written anything here in so long due to a lack of time). It’s written by Katharine Harmon of Tributary Books and I’m having a great time exploring it.

I first realized that I loved maps when I worked for a summer in a library many years ago. There was a map room which was filled with neat maps and I was lucky enough to be able to design some maps for the library. I didn’t know much about maps or design, but being in a library I was able to look up some stuff. I wanted to use symbols for the map so I look around and found a book of symbols that I used for the map. These were in the days before more visually oriented computers (and in the early days of the Mac before I had used one) so I photocopied and typed and pasted things together to make things. Now I have access to tools to make all sorts of graphics and maps and I don’t have time to do it…but I do have to right, so that’s what I’m doing now.

The book has over 100 maps that tell more about the people who made them than the places they describe. It’s a great way to think about mapping in a different way from simply describing the physical or geographical arrangements of things on the surface of the earth. It also reveals the amazing creativity and distinctive ways of looking and thinking about things that exist. It makes me think about my perception of the world in a different way.

February 4, 2004 book, katharineharmon, maps, review, visualization, youarehere

All Tomorrow’s Parties

I just finished reading William Gibson‘s All Tomorrow’s Parties which I like a lot. I’ve become a bit of a fan of Gibson in reverse. I’d known about him for a while with the “invented the term cyberspace” plastered throughout almost everything written about him, but I didn’t get around to reading any fiction by him. The nonfiction that I read was great, so one day I saw a discounted copy of All Tomorrow’s Parties and I picked it up, but never got around to reading it. Then I saw Pattern Recognition which I bought since I browsed through it and couldn’t put it down. I loved Pattern Recognition and started reading All Tomorrow’s Parties right after I finished it. I like the idea (since I arrived late at this particular party) of working my way through his work backwards.
The other thing that I didn’t do (which is a bit different for me) is research the book… when I like a film I’ll find out a lot about it and then track down similar works or previous works by the director or writer or other members of the team behind the film. It’s fascinating to find the patterns and connections between people, their work, their ideas and how it intersects with a particular time and place. This type of thinking and these themes are articulated by Gibson, so maybe that’s why I consciously avoided that approach so I’d be a bit fresher when I experienced the work.
I’m glad that I did, since I think that I may have enjoyed the book more. What I found out when preparing this entry is that All Tomorrow’s Parties follows on with characters from two previous Gibson books that are on my list… it was interesting to pick up the stories where I did. One character just showed up briefly near the end and I wondered why he was there… in reading an excerpt from Idoru I figured it out. Aside from that one blip, everything else worked great. The world existed and I loved how it felt real with a history. I think that where I latched onto Gibson will make me enjoy the direction that he’s going in now. Two novels can be enough to determine the general trajectory of a writer and I like where he’s going and I appreciate where he’s been. What I find fascinating about Gibson’s writing is the intersection between the characters and technology which is exactly where I am right now and what I love to think about.
All Tommorow’s Parties focuses on an emerging nodal point where everything changes. It’s the big change that everyone expected in 2000 that didn’t happen and was only delayed. The whole Y2K thing is quaint now, but the fear and hysteria leading up to it was real and overwhelming for a while. It’s a fascinating story of trying to make sense of a world on the verge of massive change. You know that something big is going to happen, but not exactly what it is. That’s where we are now in the world.
I can’t wait to see where Gibson’s next novel takes place. I get the sense that as our mediated world becomes more and more surreal and the technology more ubiquitous that it’s harder to writer about the future as that’s where we are. The world is changing and it’s more profound and moving to capture something that is real and close to now than it is to project something that will be in the future. All Tomorrow’s Parties is set in the future, but it is a future that existed in the pre-millennial phase before the year 2000 and before the 11th of September signified so much more than a date. Things begin their movement towards anachronism now so quickly that the when and where of creation can be very significant.

January 5, 2004 book, fiction, patternrecognition, review, sciencefiction, williamgibson

Pattern Recognition

One thing that I’m specifically trying to do is to read more books that aren’t manuals or non-fiction. So I picked up William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition a few weeks ago and started reading it. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it, but I haven’t actually read a novel by Mr. Gibson before…I’ve read interviews, saw “Johnny Mnemonic“, a great X-Files episode that he cowrote and, most recently, his blog, but never read the novels. It’s one of those things that I’ve been meaning to do, but the longer it took, the more he wrote, and I delayed buying that first book. Being a lapsed SF geek is why I felt a twinge of guilt at not reading a bunch of the cyberpunk stuff… so what better place to start than with Gibson’s latest, which isn’t SF at all.
I’m about 3/5ths through it (squeezing in chapters whenever I can) and I love it. Gibson nails the texture, taste and feeling of online culture, which what you are reading is part of as well. A good novel (or film for that matter) will stike a chord with you when you recognize the elements of truth in it. The idea of a coolhunter who doesn’t like having the ability is a great premise and it takes off from there. The obsessive nature of “footageheads” who seek out uploaded footage that is part of some larger and mysterious work runs through the novel as well and the intersection of our heroine and the footage is fascinating to me. The novel is making me think about my relationship with the online world, fashion, culture, etc. Maybe I like the idea of the novel because I love editing and editing a film (especially a documentary) is really about looking at a whole lot of material and recognizing patterns and then assembling them into a (hopefully) coherent whole.

I guess the other reason I’m enjoying the novel so much is that I identify with Cayce Pollard in some ways… seeing things emerge and recognizing what’s coming up. My daughter Caitlin once said that I like things before they’re popular. For some reason I seem to stumble into things just before they break into the wider world by noticing things that seem to fit together.

Why am I still writing? I have to go and read some more!

May 1, 2003 book, cayce pollard, johnny mnemonic, pattern recognition, review, sciencefiction, williamgibson