This is a transcription of handwritten notes taken during William Gibson's Vancouver CBC One interview, Monday March 10, as hosted by Sheryl MacKay of CBC Studio One Book Club, and John Burns, Books Editor for of the Georgia Straight:

These passages have been transcribed from notebook annotations and personal memory. They are highly incomplete, and I do not pretend that they accurately represent statements made by participants involved. In such fact, by posting them I am merely taking the speaker to the letter on his statement to the effect that ˜The author has no more privileged access to the text than any reader'. The following paraphrases are presented without attribution, but are acknowledged as being a mix of Bill Gibson, Sheryl MacKay, John Burns, and audience remarks, traced and moderated by my own selective and inaccurate hand. This post is intended as a naive experiment in collective memory and mimesis, as an attempt to alter or influence an impending future history which has already happened. The radio show will not broadcast until [five, four, three] days from this transcription.

Wry and concise aphorisms and clever articulations made by the panel's participants have been horribly maimed in the processing of this translation. Many ideas juxtaposed here are lacking their proper dialogic context and may mislead the reader as to the speaker's intended content. Please tune in to the CBC radio-one interviews broadcasting Saturday March 15 and 22 noted below for full contiguity. I highly recommend that you do, as Bill had a particularly robust sparkle about him that day, as far as his temperment for interviews goes.

This effort may misfire as a pre-emptive spoiler, or could serve as a provocative enticement to otaku with canadian radio or streaming capability curious enough to fill in the missing pieces. But it's primarily meant to amuse a personal desire to geek-out on posting-before-release-date - a p2punk tactic in which I've always privately longed to indulge. As someone who still frequently take notes with pen and paper - often only in order to quote/sample someone else, or just to brazenly steal, emulate or otherwise liberate a phrase or three appended to my own private curatorial collage of interior monologues [aren't we all diverse breeds of footage-freak, substantially composed of this tangle of hybridic poly-media dust-bunnies; uncertain but theologically-implicated hyper-link-compulsions, automous artificial entities populating our associative memory in swarms of tropes and memes].

I'm presenting here a multi-medium translation; a rough copying back of what I would argue to be an even older mass medium - preceeding both the manual typewriter and the printed word: the performative voice, in this case also the instantiation of a broadly coterminal contemporary mytho-poetics [radio being a respectably recent evolutionary mount for this linguistic organism. The much more ancient forum of public oratory must somewhere also qualify as a ˜mass medium', no less a highly sophisticated technology, even a dark art, however low-mech and limited it's unaugmented range-capability. It is still an always exhilarating and collaboratively affective [and somehow thereby greco-political], to share audience with a challenging thinker who is also a compelling public speaker, regardless of how sardonically he pantomimes the practiced delivery of his own best anecdotes.

Complicated still again, we now have rare opportunity to compare the heavily human-filtered interview made available below with the editorially mediated radio-broadcast copy [absent the facial gestures and esprit de corps which the studio audience enjoyed, like cussing, where significant entanglements of charming gesture and infectious collective mirth configure still subtler suggestions for the text transmitted]

The radio show Saturday will provide another opportunity to transcribe and record, to compare with this now twice reconstructed, twice re-mediated collective memory of the event. Where the recontained scrawl of the book blurs into the type of the net and the drone of the voice silently waits to be reanimated in the speakers/ears of thousands yet to hear, these ideas sprayed everywhere, recompiled from bits of already-rotting audio files, words entombed until they take parasitic-symbiotic life again in our daily discussions. These constructive phrases are already recurring in the world, within and through our more often oratory - and only occasionally literary - experiences. Run feral, viral little words, let this weirdness proliferate.

Many thanks to CBC radio one Book Club, Sheryl MacKay, John Burns, and William Gibson.

Thanks also to Grant Hescox, you cranky old codger, and to the Con-Artists, [and singular Con-Science] for all going out for beers afterward. May every episode be made available to you.

Love luck and laughs

Steppin Lotus, Steve


http://vancouver.cbc.ca/studioone/

The CBC Studio One Book Club featuring Bill Gibson was a fantastic evening! It will broadcast on CBC Radio One's North by Northwest:Part One on Saturday, March 15 from 8-9 amPart Two on Saturday, March 22 from 8-9 am

William Gibson's new book is Pattern Recognition, and unlike his other works, this novel is not science fiction. To quote Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods: "Pattern Recognition is William Gibson's best book since he rewrote all the rules in Neuromancer. Gibson casts a master extrapolator's eye on our present, and shows it to us as if for the first time." The CBC Studio One Book Club is an intimate gathering of ONLY 120 contest winners and invited guests. It is hosted by Sheryl MacKay of CBC Radio and John Burns of the Georgia Straight, and is recorded for broadcast on North by Northwest and other CBC Radio programs. As part of the program, Mr. Gibson will also be taking questions from the studio audience.

......................
[Voice to pen to type to text translation begins here:]
.......................


Using ˜Bill' saves on bandwidth
Digital ecologist
Saving the world one bit at a time

Pattern recognition
as a human faculty is both a gift and a trap
deny there's any such thing as a future for science fiction to write about
A novel is always about the time in which it is written
lapses in naturalistic mimesis, mistakenly uncorrected by copy editors

Footage heads
Collecting brief, enigmatic, terrifyingly beautiful fragments of video
Hunting fragments becomes like a religious quest, an obsessive avocation

September 11
Took the rest of the day off, then took the better part of the next month off
I didn't think I could write that seriously, too psychogeographically close
I could probably write a more mimetically accurate description of lower Manhattan than I could about downtown Vancouver
I couldn't achieve the distance necessary to articulate it
NY friends said, if you come here, it would be like feedback screaming into a microphone
You'd be like us, silent

Pattern Recognition, apophenia
Almost theological implications
Recognizing patterns that aren't there
Patterns and higher patterns
Repeated images of catastrophe, hideous punk archaeology
Imbedded patterns in the life we know

On the books lacking moral conviction
I never write didactically
Never predict what people will find in my automatism
Surprises I hadn't anticipated or expected

The Absent Expository scene
Gibson books lack the expository ˜lump', served otherwise by the essential ˜naïve characters'
Allows the reader to engage in reverse engineering technologies based on evocative details
I was taught by master teachers of the genre that the expository lump was poor form

To Google [v.]
We discovered it long predated my coinage
It's just there, the traces we leave
A presence deliberately created or not
Persons who can or can't be ˜Googled', it has become a distinction
People without trace, an invisibility that's increasingly rare
Not class, but similar to the landowners and the landless
A kind of cyber-Amish

The Difference Engine
To write a good recursive alternate history,
you must first ingest vast scads of normative history.
We absorbed great volumes of uncut Victoriana.
Anything to get us into that space so we could start changing it
We used a huge quantity of stolen prose
Bruce had discovered the capacity that word processing grants
which allowed you to lift great hunks of other people's prose into your own work
to which you can subsequently just airbrush out the edges
Produced details which were just infinitely weirder than anything two guys could make up.
Bizarre images blending constantly

Psychogeography
A Sense of place
I'm ambivalent about the post geographical aspects of cyberspace
You don't have to be anywhere in particular to do a whole range of things these days.
We lose those universes when they're not part of your immediate world
All change involves loss

The Liminal
The liminal has always interested me
But I wouldn't want to be there all the time
You're there because something's happening

On other formerly American sci-fi writers living/working in Vancouver/Pacific Northwest
None of us served our time in the US military
Properly speaking, we're in the Pacific Southwest [identifying as Canada]
A very special sense of place we have here
Border to the south, ocean to the west, mountains north and east
I like the sense for being in enclaves, hemmed in
There are ways to hop over that rim
But when you don't want to look you can crawl back under the rainshadow

Invisibility, lack of attention from the major media
A species of ghost, black guest
It's about the margin, what people throw away
Rubbish, gomi, beachcombing
Correct order removed, so banal

Thirty years of avoiding television
If you never watch, you have this whole other life

I don't ordinarily have conscious access to the part of me that writes this stuff.

I didn't know where that footage was coming from,
Not knowing caused me a lot of worry for a long time

It wasn't written to mean anything, it's just written
It shows they're writing! [reader participating?]

I've never really seen anything that looks like the inside of my head
No, one thing, City of darkness, photo book about Kowloon
http://www.amie.or.jp/daruma/city%20of%20darkness.html
that's what I've been dreaming
like nothing on the face of this planet

I'm not as fond of my own creations as many of my readers are
I try not to be a lowball didactic novelist
That's not where it's at
I strive not to write lessons or provide answers
I write to find questions,
Inadvertently cause the reader to ask questions about the world
If I were to push my morals onto someone else
That would make me to some extent, a fascist

Not to say that I'm not articulating them anyway
Discourse absorbed by osmosis
Relatively low pomo contingent on the list
Perhaps driven away by my cruel satire of that kind of discourse in my books

A religious quest of data accretion
If you can't recognize and rearrange patterns
Mere accretion becomes merely pathology
Has to be more than just having lots and lots of data

The garbage of this great mercantile family
Hobbled artificial intelligence system building these Joseph Cornell boxes
Junkyards are melancholy until someone appears to begin the process of bricollage
Framed by a device akin to narrative
That was the key to the whole thing

Cornell had been an enormously esoteric figure of dada and surrealism
In 1969 a friend gave me a catalogue
I was young enough to be very excited about it
Now I get it and it's really sad
Otherwise I'd be stable
It's not good to be stable and be a novelist

Music as inspirational stimuli
Kids would be appalled, Neuromancer era:
The best of Rocky Erickson, the Thirteenth Floor of Elevators
In france, where they really understood these things

Cutting edge determined by marketing
All technology is morally neutral until you do something with it
Dyson's application of nuclear warheads to power a starship
Technology and marketing, it's something we do
Neutral but for application

I can't go anywhere until I have a title
Pattern Recognition distinguishes everything human beings do
A new name for a basic human faculty [mimesis]
Around at least as long as we've had cities

Coolhunting
Magazine journalism is completely about novelty
Or it can be anything old presented as being really novel
Music and film industries
The time spent looking
The hunt is the addiction

Strange way realities seem to be tracking you
We don't have the luxury, the now being so short
We don't have solid enough place to stand on to judge where we're going
I don't think the media knows what it's doing
It's not autonomous that way, it's not controllable
Change is technologically driven
New technology is not legislated into being
It's wonderfully out of control
Conspiracy theories are popular and comforting because they can be expressed over two pints of beer or a tall latte.
I don't buy it
What's actually happening is far stranger
We're engaged in a constant biofeedback with our own extended nervous system
It's way weirder than I think even Michael Moore suspects

The author has no more privileged access to the text than any reader

I'm just a tired little publicity monkey

[...applause...]

Wow!

I attended the CBC interview with my husband on March 10, and must congratulate you on your notes.

I hope you get a chance to expand on them for the benefit of Gibson fans unable to listen to the broadcasts.

I especially liked the 'audience participation' aspect of the program, some of the questions from the audience were a real hoot as well as being very well thought out.

thanks for the effort you put into this! I really enjoyed reading these notes - almost a kind of multilayered poem

--shop as usual and avoid panic buying--

That's how they struck me, too - thanks so much SL.

I particularly like:

Properly speaking, we're in the Pacific Southwest
A very special sense of place we have here
Border to the south, ocean to the west, mountains north and east
I like the sense for being in enclaves, hemmed in
There are ways to hop over that rim
But when you don't want to look you can crawl back under the rainshadow

Lovely stuff.

http://vancouver.cbc.ca/nxnw

Follow the realplayer link

steppin' locust,

After hearing the first part of the meeting this morning, my appreciation for your lyrical account is even greater. Thanks for accurately relating the event with style and rhythm.


"Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight."