Is it just me or does it seem like everyone here is just a little too obsessed with what William Gibson's influences are? If I were him I'd start to worry that we all thought he didn't have an single original idea in his head?
I understand the desire to want to know what kinds of things he likes to read, to try and figure out what makes him tick, but it's gotten to the point where I've read someone actually say he probably didn't realize someone was an influence when he said in his blog that they weren't.
I don't know maybe it's just me, but it seems to be getting a bit old.

If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

Aye, but we live in a derivative society.

You can't just create something original.

I have it on good authority that the word original was really taken from the word origamai.

All kidding aside, I hear you. I've never understood why we feel such a deep need to analyze everything and forcefully catelogue according to that which is already familiar to us.
To be able to label it as - "Mostly Harmless".

are nothing more than threads in a fantastic quilt. Less attention should be placed on the threads and more on the artist that puts them together. Without spouting some sort of Yoda speak , all I am saying is that his influences can be anyone's influences. He is the reason that we even care what they are.

...we should rephrase the question as: "Which trends did you notice in your pheripheral vision and struck your mindset in order to notice an interesting node there?"

Anyways, it's the price to pay when some author or artist stands out there with his/her blog on the air. We fans become their therapists, trying to dig and know them better than they do themselves...

I like how people are worried about Gibson's influences but not worried about the near-obsessiveness of the "What would you do if you met William Gibson" thread....

As a student of literature, I think that it's always important to know who an artist considers to be their influences. Film scholars are still enraged that people were constantly asking Hitchcock questions like "How did you do that spinning shot in Vertigo?" and never once "What do you think of Freud?" That said, as long as the author is actually here (more or less) in person (more or less), once you've gotten past the reading list, I feel like the next step is to ask why. That is to say, okay, we know he digs Pynchon-- is it for the atmosphere or the sentence structure? Or something else entirely? Would he consider Borges an example to be imitated or an example to creatively diverge from? etc...

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Spike
Memes don't exist. Tell your friends.

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I've read someone actually say he probably didn't realize someone was an influence when he said in his blog that they weren't.

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That was me! It's nice to discover your friends are talking about you!!

Yes, of course, you can *only* have concious influences. You can't possibly be influenced by *anything else* you don't recognise, accept and approve.

Pfft.

I understand what you're saying. I was just trying to put myself in his shoes as he read that you were telling him he was wrong and that he really was influenced by PKD he just didn't realize it, and I imagined him rolling his eyes.

If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

Yes, and I was being *ironic*. I thought that my mention of academic/lit theory criticism that stated the author was the least qualified to give an account of their influences would be a giveaway... maybe I should start using emoticons more often.

The usefulness for me has been in finding works I wouldn't have otherwise. I probably would've never bothered with Cormac McCarthy if it weren't for Gibson's recommendation... Since I also read a lot of Gibson's books during formative years it's interesting to find the tangenital relationship the emotional reality of his books have to books written about any period or in any vernacular.

Time is relative, and it seems in context of culture it's currently non linear. Avril Lavigne's mispronunciation of David Bowie's name aside, media has guaranteed that certain cultural artifacts are accessible in ways they never were before. Led Zeppelin are in the minds of most college students in a holding pattern in the mid 70s. As someone in my mid twenties I can jump from Gram Parsons to Ryan Adams in one day.

If anything, Gibson's influences are interesting as his novels come across to me almost like Cornell boxes about a specific time and its expectations, put into prose. Seeing the other parts of that construction expands my mind a little.

He's also got fairly good taste, in my opinion.