"aboutiv" - читать интересную книгу автора (inhuman)
|
abiv. |
|
  |
 Author Article From somewhere On December 13, 1997, Clive Barker conducted an interview with William Gibson. Hosted by Next Theatre's Burning Chrome dramaturg, Charlie Athanas, this lengthy conversation is presented here as a series. Lasting well over an hour, they discuss such topics as the theater, the effects of the internet on both their lives, rare collections, pornography and their current projects. With regards to their projects, Mr. Gibson has completed an X-File episode and is working on the "third" installment of the Virtual Light/Idoru novels and Mr. Barker has several children's book projects and a huge family saga of one human family and one not-so-human. There's much laughter and several common interests, including a mutual fondness for David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Bookmark this page for all parts of this fascinating, rare, first time discussion between these two greats of contemporary popular culture. Clive = Clive Barker Bill = William Gibson Charlie = Charlie Athanas - PART ONE - Clive: Bill, I'm gonna ask a bunch of really dumb questions at the opening of this. Bill: Okay. I'm used to that. Clive: I know you are. By the way I just read an interview with you in Future Sex. An old issue of Future Sex. Bill: Oh, yes. Yes. Clive: That's a cool interview. Bill: Yeah, it was good. It was sort of threatening to get out of hand actually. Clive: In a good way? Bill: Yeah. More or less. Clive: Well, let's hope this one doesn't. The obvious question, firstly, is how did these guys approach you with the idea of doing Burning Chrome on stage? Bill: Well, you know I had met Charlie (Athanas) years ago at Art Futura and Charlie brought the possibility of Burning Chrome on stage in Chicago to my attention, and because it was Charlie doing the bringing (Clive laughs) I entertained it a little more seriously than I would a small theater group in Melbourne. Although I've frequently allowed small theater groups in Melbourne to mount tiny productions based on my short stories. Clive: Well, that was my next question. How regularly has this material, not specifically this story, but the short stories or indeed the novels, found their way onto the stage. Bill: Well, you know, I think this is probably a first in terms of a professional stage production. Clive: Okay. Bill: Everything up till now has been kind of in the student zone. Probably hasn't been documented very well. All I've ever had has been word of mouth. (laughter all around) A rumor over the years. Clive: Are you a theater goer? Bill: I'm an occasional theater goer here in Vancouver. Clive: Right. Bill: I love the form, but I'm lazy. (laughter) Clive: Okay, there you go. Bill: I need a determined companion to get me there. Clive: Now, you perhaps know from Charlie that these guys (Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman) have already adapted two of my pieces. Bill: Yes. Clive: And one of the things that I was forcibly struck by was that they seem to choose really difficult things. And I think the obvious thing that comes out is ... I just reread Burning Chrome ... it doesn't seem a very easy piece to adapt for theater. Would you agree with that? Bill: Yes, I'd agree. It's not something I would want to have to do myself. Clive: It presents all kinds of technological problems, I guess. Charlie - you are designing? Charlie: Yeah. In fact it's my responsibility for some of the most impossible bits with all the "cyber" tech stuff. Clive: Well, okay, can we jump just momentarily to that? Charlie: Sure. Clive: What are you giving us here? (laughter all around) Charlie: When we first started, much like when Steve took on your books and said, "No blood." Clive: Yes. Charlie: We said "no blood on stage" and that made the approach quite different. Clive: Sure. Charlie: We're doing the same thing with Bill's work and saying, "No computers. No video. No video projections. No slides." Clive: Well, this isn't sort of Robert Wilson style. Charlie: Not in the least. This is going to be very much about the story and the characters and letting the humans tell the story that's being presented in the text. Clive: Right. Right. Which, actually, that part of the story - Jack's story, obviously most strongly - is easy to follow how that's going to work on stage. It's all the technological stuff which seems very challenging. Charlie: Well, Steve has actually accepted the challenge. Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman, the adaptors, are going to stick with the narrative format that Bill has used in the story itself where the story jumps with the retelling throughout the story of cyberspace. Which is gonna make things very interesting. Clive: Yeah, well, particularly with all the things you're denying yourself. Charlie: Yes, denial. That's what we're good at. (laughter) Clive: Yes, self-denial. So now the next obvious question, Bill, is here you are having sort of invented some of the terminology, having cornered the market in a certain kind of vision of the future. Are you over it now? Are you, like, "Oh, that's old news?" Bill: Well, I think I'm living in it now. Clive: Ooh, there's a nightmare. (laughter) Bill: I've arrived at ... the rest of the world has now arrived in some slipshod fashion in the reality I described in 1981. It's not quite the same, but there's a little bit of it on everybody's desktop. Clive: It's not just that though. You mention in the story, vasopresin ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ...which I guess is used for senile dementia. You point that out in the story. Bill: Um hmm. Clive: A friend of mine is a huge fan of vasopresin as a recreational entertainment, I guess, in some form or other and you say something like, "The street makes use of things which are usually used for other purposes." Bill: Yes. Clive: And when you wrote that, was vasopresin ... I'd only heard of vasopresin last year ... I mean, where do you catch up with all these things? Some of them you're obviously inventing or at least coining, but some of this stuff ... how are you finding all this stuff? Bill: I don't know, it's a talent I developed early on. I've learned to scan to huge ... shallow (laughter all around) .. huge shallow reaches of popular and scientific information. And identify those odd nodal points from which change of some kind seems, not emerging, but emergent. It's almost there. And I don't actually recall how vasopresin found its way into the story, but the idea ... I think I'd run across a reference for it being used for Alzheimer's patients. And the idea of a recreational drug that heightened and improved memory ... Clive: Right. Bill: ... had such brilliant sexual possibilities ... Clive: Sure. Bill: ... that I thought it was a natural. Clive: You actually use it in this story as a source of melancholia in fact, right? Bill: Yes. Clive: Because he's ... I think, I forget. Is he doing alcohol and vasopresin? Is that what he's doing? Bill: Yes, he's going in two directions at once. Clive: At the same time. Bill: The combination is, in one sense, enjoyable and, you know, in another it's giving him a whole new level of problems. Clive: Which then brings me to the melancholia, which seems to mark a lot of your work. A sort of sense, a noirish sense. You're probably tired of that too, but it does seem in some ways appropriate. A noirish sense that these people are all horribly wounded by life and circumstance and they're only holding onto their sanity with the combination of will, drugs and, sort of, fatalism. Is that something that as you're ... how old are you now? Are you of my age? I'm forty-five. Bill: I'm forty-nine. So I'm ahead of you. Clive: Ah, not much. Here we are in middle age. Are you finding that your attitude to ... I guess, is a kind of melancholia which earlier in your life you kind of almost indulge, almost kind of wallow in? Because it seems okay now. Because it's sort of caught up with me as a life condition. (laughter) Do you find your attitude to the kind of dark undertow of your earlier material has changed at all? Bill: Well, I look at it now and it's all bit like Joy Division. (laughter all around) And it was all very, very heavily influenced by Joy Division and old Velvet Underground records. But, you know, I was almost thirty when I wrote that story and it was really sort of the first really effective piece of fiction I managed to write. And I think that I was at that peculiar pre-thirty point where you really feel that it's all over. Clive: Oh god, yes. Bill: Yeah, this is... Clive: The long road down. (laughter all around) Bill: Yeah, you know, it's not much fun after this. We might as well get it all out on the table. You know, that noir thing is funny. In my more recent work it tends to be inverted and turned inside out and become oddly cheerful. (laughter) Clive: Right. But the fatalism remains in place, right? The sort of sense that the world is too enormous to really make any significant changes upon. Somehow your characters always seem ... this is one of the things I like about it ... sort of, not at sea, but certainly fighting. You said before you described yourself as living in that world. The world you've been describing in '81. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: The sort of sense in which we're kind of victims in that world now. I mean, we can't move for it. I mean, I'm sitting here at a desk without a piece of technology except for this telephone that I'm speaking on and so I feel like I'm holding that stuff at bay as much as I possibly can. Not just the technology, but the sort of sense of detachment from the world that comes with that. Bill: Hmm. Yes. Clive: I know they talk about all this stuff being really a way to make a global village or connect us with pieces of information we didn't know we needed or whatever the hell else. (laughter all around) But actually, am I wrong now? Am I just being a technophobe or is there a certain soullessness with all this? Bill: No. I don't know. I'm sitting here looking at a webpage put up by a girl named Ana somewhere in the American Midwest and she's sitting naked in her young artist's living room ... (laughter all around) ... looking really rather striking. This was at, I think, eleven fifty-two Midwestern time, earlier today. You know, I check in on her occasionally. Her site is free. (laughter all around) Clive: So there's nothing to complain about. (laughter all around) Is that the inference here? Bill: Well, I don't find this stuff inherently alienating, but it's very hard to know. I think that something really big is happening to us again. It's something like what happened when we started doing cities. Clive: Yes. Bill: We're doing something like that and we just have no way of knowing all of the myriad things that will come out of it. It won't be any sort of approved, legislated future. It never is. - PART TWO - Bill: (From the end of Part One)...I think that something really big is happening to us again. It's something like what happened when we started doing cities ... We're doing something like that and we just have no way of knowing all of the myriad things that will come out of it. It won't be any sort of approved, legislated future. It never is. Clive: Right. And yet the cities' analogy is an interesting one, because we're sitting, let us say, in a rose-colored cottage somewhere out in the country. And somebody stops by our cottage and says, "Gee, you know they're building London? We should really go and check it out." And maybe you go down the road and see how London is and by sort of staying in the cottage for a little while ... and I guess part of me is feeling as though, by limiting my vision I can keep it intense. And maybe that's a piece of paranoia on my part, but it seems to me that you actually give lots of literary reasons or narrative reasons for me to have that paranoia. I mean, you picture a world incredibly convincingly in which information is coming in on all kinds of levels. Vast pieces of information. Even in the incredible compression of a story like Burning Chrome, you evoke the sense of almost limitless information. In this case, mainly fiscal information. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And the characters who are in the middle of this still have to deal with credibly universal feelings. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: Right? A sense of loss. Bill: Yeah. Clive: The moment has passed them by. That physical wounds have come to them. And let's change the subject. You say quite early on in the story that she (the character, Chrome) ... I forget exactly the phrase for the cancers that she induces, but they're rather unique. Bill: Yeah, they're custom. Clive: There you go. (laughter all around) They're custom! Bill: Yeah, they're customized. Clive: So the sense that you evoke of a world in which the physical and the problems of the physical remain very much intact. And certainly the sense of emotional loss. Separation from the one you loved or thought you loved remains very strong. You don't give the impression that any of this stuff really comforts at a fundamental level. Am I misreading it? Bill: Hmmmm, no. I think that's correct. Although it depends now on whether we're discussing the techno reality of the story or the techno reality of 1997. Clive: Right. Bill: Because the uses that people have put this stuff to in the mean time are not really the uses that I envisioned it being. Clive: Could you elaborate on that? Bill: In a story like Burning Chrome, cyberspace is corporate ... Clive: Right. Bill: ... and military ... Clive: Right. Bill: It's like an office building, but in fact cyberspace is like a city, in that it incorporates libraries, brothels, anything (laughter)! You know, literally. Clive: Yes. Charlie: Plays! Bill: Plays. Literally anything and everyone is doing it! Most of what's taking place in cyberspace is completely banal. Clive: Like any human experience. Bill: Dull human activity. Clive: Right. But then taking your... you used cities and the building of the cities earlier on as sort of the semi-evolutionary jump which is analogous to this? Bill: Yeah. Clive: One of the things you might reasonably say about cities is that they really are a curate's egg. There's good parts and bad parts. Bill: Yes. Clive: And that maybe in the concentration of people in relatively small space ... I come from England where there does seem to be a concentration of a lot of people in a very small space. Which I don't actually feel quite so much (now). I'm looking out at greenery and hills here (California) where I'm living right now and I'm grateful for that. When I lived in London I faced gray walls and as soon as I stepped out of the house I was facing other people. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: There was a sense in many ways the city of London aggressed against me. It didn't mean to, but it couldn't help it. So I want to follow that analogy up for a moment and say is there a sense in which this information, this sort of sense of something vast going on in these exchanges ... you were able to look at the lovely lady in the Midwest ... is a choice on your part? You can switch off your machine any time you like, but isn't there a sense that behind our lives now there is corporate usage. There is military usage. There is governmental usage of this material, this information, this way of computing. Bill: Yes, there's a sense of that. Some of the ways this technology is affecting us now are very, very subtle. Clive: Okay. Bill: One that I've noticed just in the last month is that because of the Internet and the World Wide Web, in effect, the world's attic is being sorted. It's being sorted with a speed and precision that would have been impossible ten or fifteen years ago. The whole concept of rarities and random finds is disappearing very, very quickly. Every book in every used book shop on the planet will be accessible to a search engine soon. Clive: Yes. Bill: And there's something... it's really something horribly sad about that. Clive: Yes. It really is. (laughter) Bill: Anything that you're looking for, I can tell you, for instance, I can tell you today in Fort Meyers, Florida, there is a 1948, mint, in-box Rolex Oyster (watch). With the original band. As far as I know, it's the only mint, in-box Rolex Oyster in the world. (laughter all around) Or at least the only one that's currently up for sale. There's not one in New York that I can find on the Net. And there's not one in Los Angeles. And there's not one in London. We're losing something there. Some very magic part. Clive: So there's no way, going to your attic analogy again, there's no sense that we're going to be able to discover the lost beloved rocking chair up there, because we'll know that it's there. I mean, the magic of it is going? Is that what you're saying? The magic of something which is hidden and covered in dust and... Bill: No, the magic of the search. Clive: Yes. Bill: I was talking the other night to a VERY wealthy woman who all her life collected just exquisitely arcane books and magazines, mostly surrealist periodicals. And this has kind of sustained her in her otherwise boring existence. Clive: Right. Bill: The hunt for these impossible editions. And the other day she got on her son's web browser and scored about twenty in an hour. Clive: And it spoiled it. Bill: Yeah! She was telling me about it and she was very excited and she saying, "I got this and I got that" and then she's saying, "I don't know if I like this though." We talked about it and we decided it commodified it in a different way. All that was involved now was rarity. There was no skill .. relative rarity and value ... there was no longer a skill involved. Clive: But let me go after this. There is a sense to me that something similar has happened in an area that is my primary area of reading interest, which is the general area of metaphysics. Which will range for the purposes of this conversation from sort of the driest German philosophical tome to the moistest Catholicism. Bill: (chuckle) Yes. Clive: And my sense is there is more open discussion and volumes being written about this material in the sort of sense that the mystery of religion... Bill: Yes. Clive: ... the veil has been lifted in a way. In some ways, and I'll go after this one moment longer if I may, may be analogous to this. You're not going to be able to turn a corner and discover a voice from a rock any longer. The details of every religious order and sub-order and practice and ritual seems to be ... to being laid out. We're finding revisionist versions of voodoo being written right now. Revisionist histories, for instance, giving us all kinds of details in something that particularly interests me right now. And I'm looking at this stuff and saying, "Boy, the mystery is gone." And now how do we put the mystery back? It seems to me now the mystery is in the personal choice. By which I mean, maybe now it becomes the rich lady's problem not to be able to buy things, but to choose the things she really wants. Bill: Yes. Clive: So maybe now the mystery becomes the mystery of personal decision. If I know all religious possibilities, let's say, that seems in some senses to be rather a reductionist place to be. It's all laid out like a deli counter, you know? But then what becomes important, significant, which one really speaks to me. Where my heart really is. And so instead of the mystery becoming finding, the mystery becomes choosing. Do you see what I'm saying? Bill: Yes, I do. Although with religion I would think that there would be a certain requirement of practice even now. Simply seeing the precepts laid out on the... Clive: Counter. Bill: Yeah, in the "FaithMart" site. (laughter all around) Clive: Right, right, right! (laughter) Bill: Yes. Open this link. Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. (laughter) Bill: My experience has been that seeing those things laid out, well, you know, that the map is not the territory. Clive: That might be also my point about the surrealist magazine. To know the title of the magazine and when it was produced or whatever. Or indeed its rarity value and maybe the point is about rarity value and how unimportant that finally must be, because if you're truly passionate about surrealism it doesn't matter if there's one magazine or ten thousand of them. Bill: Hmmm, yes. I know what you mean.... Clive: Am I being pissy about this? Bill: No, I think that there's a human, kind of primitive, almost pre-human pleasure in hunting and gathering. Clive: Right. Bill: And that we're losing our ... the attic is being too thoroughly sorted and we're losing our capacity for hunting and gathering. One thing that's fascinated me in the course of my life has been the cataloging of the world's stuff. When I was a young man there was a great deal of stuff scattered across the counters of the Western world. There were many, many treasures. Being young and unemployed, often had nothing better to do than going beachcombing through this stuff. And so much of this sort of thing that I used to pick up and admire and throw away, there's now a specialist shop in London or Manhattan that sells nothing but that sort of bakalite button. And they've all been numbered and a price assigned to each one. Clive: Yes. Bill: It's something we're doing this century. It's sort of done, you know, it's a done deal. And that gives me an odd feeling. Clive: Yeah, me too. I'm not a great hunter... My point was that I have several copies of Moby Dick here. I don't value the hard cover any more than the paper. And if Moby Dick speaks loudly and complicatedly to my heart, which it does, then the hunting and gathering can still go on because I still have the investigation of a human being to do. And that's sort of different from a bakalite button, I absolutely grant you. But the most profound experience perhaps that we can have are not with objects, which can indeed be cataloged, but with thoughts and ideas which actually resist that kind of cataloging. I mean, to go back to the story ... looking at again, that part of its power is its density and part of the power of its density is that when you revisit it, you find something fresh in it. Because when language is as rich and poetic as it is in many of the most evocative sections of this story, you revisit it and find something fresh. In other words, one of the great wonders perhaps of art is that you can hunt and gather forever there. I mean, there must be pieces of work, and not necessarily just pieces of literary work ... actually I think it's less true of movies than books and paintings, but I certainly know there were paintings which I first saw when I was in my teens, which I kind of cooled on in my twenties and then rediscovered again in my thirties. Bill: Yes. Clive: And what had changed was me. Bill: Yes. Clive: So perhaps I'm being sentimental here about the idea of what the individual can bring to the discovery process. But a part of me feels as though ... hmm this is going to sound really perverse given what you just said, but I'd like all the cataloging to get done. I'd sort of like very comfortably for it all to get done.(Bill laughs) We all know where everything is. Now the issue is - what do you want? Bill: Well, yes. It's very nearly done. And the question is, "What do we want?" Clive: Can I give you an analogy? Bill: Sure. Clive: The last time I went into the British Library as a reader ... Bill: Yeah? Clive: I'd never been to the British Library before, obviously I was intimidated as hell. And I went in and I was actually looking for a book - obscure eighteenth century pornography. It's not actually that obscure, it's a book called "The Autobiography of a Flea". I don't know if you know the book. It's an anonymous book about a flea which jumps from pubic hair to pubic hair and relates on the gigantic experiences that it has. Bill: Ah, yes. Clive: You're dwelling in this fine lady or in the pubic hair of this well-endowed gentleman and so on. And this is the tale. And I'd read reference to it in a footnote and I thought I have to get hold of this and clearly the book wasn't in print. So I went to the British Library and they said, "Sure, we have five copies of 'An Autobiography of a Flea', including one illustrated in France, but we only have one copy of each one and you'll have to go into a special room." You've been to the British Library, I guess. Bill: Yes. Clive: They make it kind of difficult to read the thing. And they make it even more difficult if it's a piece of pornography. I'm sorry. I should say "erotica". I went in and they had one copy of this book. A particular edition. Several editions were in French. I don't read French, there is literally one in English that I could read. And I sat there reading this very strange text and felt unique. Now the uniqueness of owning the turquoise blue bakalite button made in 1920 doesn't go away if you've got it in your fingers and nobody else has. Right? Bill: Right. Clive: The sense of specialness ... which I want to say has some metaphysical echo to it ... doesn't go away just because you know where that button belongs in a long list of buttons. Bill: Hmm, yeah. I would agree. Clive: So what interests me now is your vision is presenting this corporate usage of all this information and your characters seem to move through this world being very particular. Being very severely themselves. It seems like your characters seem to respond to the offensiveness, if I can say that, of the world around them by being, in a very noirish way, strongly, almost caricatures of themselves sometimes. They're very intense. They live very intense lives. They seek out very intense experiences, right? I mean, this constant sense of, I'm gonna feel what I feel as strongly as possible. If it takes drugs. If it takes a mechanism. If it takes hormones. Whatever it takes. Bill: Yes. I agree with you. It seems that they're driven to that. Whatever they're doing becomes an act of self-definition. Clive: The Debbie Harry character in Videodrome? Bill: Yes. Clive: Says in the interview with James Woods ... the TV interview... Bill: Yes. Clive: "We live over-stimulated lives." Bill: Yes. Clive: I always remember hearing that and hmm ... she's wearing a red dress at the time and James Woods refers to the redness of her dress. She says, "We all live over-stimulated lives." To which James Woods says something like, "Well, you shouldn't be wearing that dress for one thing if you're talking about over-stimulation." I remember seeing that movie and really, it being the first time ... Cronenberg has some things analogous to your own vision, particularly in that movie. Of a sense that these people are living headlong, racing headlong into experience because they feel like life will be short and brutish. Bill: Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that Videodrome is an interesting thing to compare Burning Chrome to because I think they're very much of a period. Clive: Ahh. Bill: Yeah, I think they're very much of a period. They're documents of high Reaganomics. (laughter all around) Clive: Yes. Yes. Bill: My favorite Deborah Harry line in Videodrome is where she says to Woods, "Do you have a Swiss Army knife or something? Could you cut me a little?" (laughter all around) Clive: Now just for our slower readers connect that with Reaganomics for me. I mean, we're talking about a kind of response to a severely reductionist world? Bill: Well, this is the period when we were told that taking the gloves off capitalism would straighten things out and fix the economy and not to worry. And I think there was an initial period in that where there was an interesting kind of panic abroad. As you would expect reflected particularly in the popular arts. And there is a kind of mean early 80's ... weird down and dirty, early 80's popular art. I mean, I'd be quite proud to see Burning Chrome and Videodrome on the same shelf. Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that about Cronenberg generally or specifically that movie? Bill: Oh, that movie is a real standout for me with Cronenberg. I really, really admire Cronenberg tremendously, but I thought that movie was just exquisitely over the top (laughter all around) in a way that he hasn't been since. Clive: Yes, I guess. I think the insect nation speech from The Fly gets up there actually. You know, the nature of insects speech ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ... the Goldblum character, Seth Brundle, gives us. There are times, I think, when David puts onto his characters wonderfully sublime extremes. Bill: Yes. Clive: But Videodrome is a great favorite of mine and one of the things that is kind of interesting and maybe is a parallel to Burning Chrome again, is a sort of sense that everybody has to live in their own heads. I'm obviously saying that maybe that's true of all literature, but this sort of sense of everybody living in their own private hell seems very strong in both pieces. It gets pushed to a great extreme in Videodrome because eventually you don't even know what's real and what's not. Bill: Yes. Clive: And you've certainly done that too. I mean, because your use of language, and I'd like to go to that in a moment, is so rich it seems to me in some ways to ... and I think only books can do this, Charlie. I'm sorry. Charlie: (Laughter) Oh, fine. Clive: But I think books ... the commonality of language, the sense that everything gets dissolved in the common soup of language means that a book can present us with a sense that reality is moving back and forth, in and out. I'm not sure an actor on a stage can ever do what passages in stories can ... actually several of your stories and several of my stories do ... which is just say, "I suppose this is Bill and Clive talking to you now." Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And the language that we're using is rich and poetic language and everything else is going to get dissolved in it. I mean, do you see any ... even cinema can't doing that ... though I think Cronenberg at his most hallucinogenic or delirious does. I remember coming out of Videodrome with a bunch of my pals and they'd just be completely furious that they did not know what was real and what wasn't in the last half hour of that picture. Am I saying, "Isn't that great though?" How often does that happen? Aren't movies dominated by reality constantly? Aren't they dominated by a sense that we're entering a "cinematic reality" and it's going to be a consistent reality. Particularly, I think, American pictures. I don't think that's so true of Fellini for instance, where you're moving back and forth into memory and then it's almost a little Fantasia that is just Frederico's. Bill: Uh hmmm. Clive: You know, it seems like art cinema, if you will ... this may be true of art literature, as opposed to pop literature, as well ... allows us to float a little bit in language, in memory, in Bill. If somebody goes to a ... god help us ... a Grisham novel, some popular romance or whatever, part of the point is you get this reality set up for you and the author sort of steps out of it. It seems to me you're constantly present in your fiction, because the language is so dense. Are you aware of that? Do you pursue that? Bill: I think that I didn't now any better. Clive: Oh. Cool. (laughter) Bill: At the start, I knew no different. And I have experimented subsequently with a lighter stylistic mix. Out of a curiosity to see what would happen. I've tried writing very plainly. It's actually fun to do that, 'cause then you can chord it. You can go from the simply spoken to the hallucinogenicly poetic (laughter) in the course of a sentence. Clive: Yes. Bill: That's good, too. But really I think that the way I learned to compose fiction left me there. It was the only thing I knew how to do and when I would not quite succeed at doing it, I would feel a certain panic. So I'd crank it up a bit higher. Clive: That would be linguistic cranking. Bill: Yes. Yes. I would crank the poetics up a few more notches and see what happened. I think the thing that attracted me to science fiction was the fact that science fiction allows us these episodes of heightened language. Clive: Oh, I think the fantastique as a genre allows us that or horror fiction allows us that. Fantasy fiction at its best allows us that. Children's fiction ... I'm doing a lot of children's fiction now and I'm aware that you get the freedom to take this linguistic jump into a space where you get great density of imagery and you get this kind of delirious stuff which is wonderful to write. There is also this sense, and I don't know if I'm going to get this right, but there's a sense in which the music becomes the meaning. And there seems to me to be passages in your work where if you were to look at it word for word it would be really hard to take apart. God knows I wouldn't want to be studying it in class. Any more than I would be wanting to be studying Bill Burroughs in class. At the end of the day, the language isn't susceptible to the same kind of analysis, that say, Milton is susceptible too. Bill: Yes. Clive: You just have to look hard. It seems to me that that would be really difficult in your work. For one thing you're inventing words, so that's kind of hard. There's also a kind of music and I know there's music in Milton. It's a different kind of music somehow. He wants to be plain, he just doesn't know how. (laughter) I don't know. He wants to be plain and maybe the distance between us and Paradise Lost makes it harder for us to understand what that plainness was. No one is ever going to look back on the collective works of Bill Gibson and say, "Time has made it a little tougher to understand Mr. Gibson," because there's certain times when a logical approach to what you're writing simply doesn't work. Am I being right? Bill: Hmm yeah ... I would think so. I think I saw myself, and to some extent I still do, as practicing not a lost art, but an art that's been fragmented. Even in the course of my lifetime, I have the sense of something that's been shattered and we're left with the shards of the Miltonian universe and my strategy was to hammer them into pipebombs (laughter all around). Clive: (Laughter) Oh, that's great! Bill: Impact them into tiny explosive containers. It's basically the same gunpowder, but he was able to ... sometimes I think of all the lovely prose in fiction of the past as being like Murano figurines. These lovely fragile things that just can't last long in a house trailer in Kansas. Clive: This conversation's coming full circle to the idea that these things are listed and available on the Net as ... well, these are all the folios of Shakespeare and this is all the versions of Paradise Lost you can find. In every edition you could ever want. And the issue is that probably that material could never have lasted outside a certain area, right? You're right they couldn't last for long in a trailer park in wherever, but actually is it any more fragile now than it's ever been? Is there not a sense that in some ways because we know we can access this information better than we could before and that maybe we have a better way of understanding it? Bill: No, I think that we can access it, but we're no longer producing it. That whatever armature of ... Clive: ..of belief? Bill: ... of belief. It's always felt to me as though something was broken. I don't know if that will stay with me all my life. Clive: One of the cornerstone stories of artists for me is the account of Swift reading his texts aloud to his servants because he passionately wanted them to understand ... even though they didn't read ... what his prose meant. And he was fearful back when he was writing Gulliver's Travels of, I think, some of the brokenness that you're describing right now. It was a different kind of brokenness perhaps, because here was a man who was incredibly sophisticated in lots of ways, very political obviously, but also a very religious man. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: Here's a guy whose reading his stuff to his servants, because he's fearful that the culture in which he's living is already so divided that the lessons he's trying to teach will be inaccessible if he tries to use anything but the plainest language. And he's testing the language. Do you see what I mean? Bill: Yes. Clive: He's sort of saying, "Does this work for you, Mary and Joseph?" And the reason why that's a cornerstone story for me is because I share the same sort of sense that things are broken, but I do feel that words on a page are remarkably potent still. And one of the few things I like about going around the country signing books and things, going to conventions or whatever, is seeing young people. I'm sure you have exactly the same experience. Fifteen, sixteen year olds coming up, who unlike us were brought up with videos and sixty-seven channels on the television or whatever, who are coming up and saying, "Your book is really important to me." Not, "Your story is important to me," even. "Your book, the item, this thing." And they'll give you ... you must have had this experience countless of times ... the book which is handed over to you to be signed is not the pristine new copy of something you're out there signing. Bill: Yes. Clive: It's some beaten up copy of the book that's been dropped in the bath three times and has been handed around the family. Bill: Oh, yes! I love that. Clive: Isn't that great? Bill: Yes. It's really, really great! Sueded with use. Clive: Exactly! The way our books were, I had a copy of Edgar Allan Poe that was like that, you know. That was completely treasured and eventually it completely fell apart in my hands. And maybe again I have too much faith in this being an influential movement, but I see so much of that. And I read so many letters from kids now, because I'm writing for children. I'm talking about nine, ten, eleven year olds ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ...writing to me saying, "I love reading your book." Unfortunately, almost always they say, "P.S. When's the movie?" Which is sort of scary, but there's definitely a sense of reading words on a page remains incredibly potent. And very individual. I mean, the sense that when somebody picks up a story of yours or a story of mine they're entering into our world in a very particular kind of way. In one of my notes, I think it was from you, Charlie, is one of things that Bill and I have in common is "world building"? Charlie: Right. Clive: There is a sort of sense that ... you talk about hammering the thing into pipebombs before ... do we have a little bit of a god complex? I mean, we are sort of making worlds because we can imply our own order. I mean, fuck the Miltonic order, how 'bout the Gibsonian order? Isn't there a sense in which you're saying, "Okay, the world doesn't really work for me quite the way it is right now, but check out my world." Bill: Maybe. I'm more inclined to see what I do as though I'm translating the world at large for myself. Giving it back to the reader. In a funny way, when I'm at my personal best abroad in the world, it's as weird and noir and hallucinatory as any of my writing and that's just going to the supermarket. (laughter all around) Clive: Well, that's about you seeing stuff. That's about your being alive to stuff that's right in front of you. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And maybe one of the functions of the kind of fiction the both of us write is to alert people to the surrealities. The casual surrealities of daily life. Bill: Yes. Clive: I mean, part of it is simply about stripping away scar tissue isn't it? And saying, "Don't be so insensitive guys. The world is far stranger and far more wonderful." And now we're back to "there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio." Bill: Uh hmm! I think that's a favorite function of mine to the extent that I ever do it. I love to think of myself as doing that. I like to think of people reading my books and thinking, "Oh, wow! What a scary, imaginary future. Wait a minute! Didn't I see that on CNN?" (Laughter all around) Clive: Okay. I'll wrap up. I know we're running hugely late here. I'll wrap up with a couple of questions that jump from there. As you now see yourself living in some portions of this world ... I mean, it's there being reported on CNN ... do you see a time when it's looked back on? If in '81 you were writing this stuff and it was predictive and it's simply ... I say simply ... now it's the world in which we live. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: What happens in another seventeen years, sixteen years time? Bill: Well, that's a really, really good question and it's actually something I given a bit of thought to. I think that the "cyber hyphen" things will go the way of the "electro hyphen" things, in that we do not wake every single day and think, "I live in a world of wonders of electricity." (Laughter all around) We really don't. We scarcely think about it. Clive: Yeah, we just plug in. Bill: And I think that with the evolution of computers and all of that, I have a certain faith that it tends to evolve towards transparency. And I think it will become sufficiently transparent. We'll become sufficiently used to it, that we really won't pay much attention unless something goes wrong and we're cut off from vast fields of memory which we depend on professionally ... or perhaps personally ... or erotically (laughter). Clive: Right. But then the problem with transparency ... the challenge with transparency, which may be as different from the parallel with electricity, is that because information is here and because you painted a picture, at least in some measure, that the gathering and use of the information against the individual by corporate entities, the governmental entities is something to be watched. And monitored. And to be anxious about. Isn't the danger of transparency that we will also take for granted the fact that our lives have become, in one sense, have become available? Our private lives have become part of a public machine. I certainly am powerfully aware that my private life, as somebody whose private life is perhaps more interesting ... lord knows why, to a certain section of the populace than others ... because some kind of public existence, my private life is available in all kinds of ways that it wasn't before. And I don't particularly like that. I don't particularly like the fact the Internet will tell the world about my new boyfriend before I tell my mother. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: I mean, should we not be worried about transparency in that sense if we take for granted the idea that this vast informational system will know about us on all kinds of levels or should we just sort of shrug? Bill: I think we'll become necessarily more sophisticated. If you had been living in the rose-colored cottage you probably wouldn't have been too terribly concerned with drawing the blinds (laughter). Whereas when you move to a garret in the city you learn to hang something over that. (Laughter all around) Clive: Or you become an exhibitionist. Bill: Or you become an exhibitionist like my little friend here, "Ana in the Midwest". (laughter all around) Clive: Exactly. That's an interesting thing. That's the other response. The other response is, "Well, fuck you. I'll let it all hang out." Bill: Yes. What's funny, you know, is Orwell thought that the televisions would be watching us. Clive: But Orwell also bathed three times a day because he thought he smelled. You know, so we're talking about a man ... oh no, except that was Aldus Huxley, wasn't it? I always get confused. Was it Huxley who had the bathing problem or Orwell? Bill: I don't know. Charlie: You know, you can go on the Internet and look that up. (laughter) Clive: Yeah. Find out who had the worst bathing problem. Bill: We could find that, but I mean really, you know, it seems like the evil in the world today is not that the televisions are watching us, but that we're watching the Shopping Channel. (laughter all around) Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. Bill: We're all buying "cubic zirconium." (laughter all around) Clive: And yet I also a want to say that the warning flags which you put up and that you continue to put up like, "Watch this shit." I wouldn't like to think that they just become things that we shrug about. If you as a writer were alerted to ... had some anxieties, you know, sixteen years ago, seventeen years ago, whatever ... shouldn't we be trusting your instincts as an artist? Should we be saying, "Well society moves on and what people were worried about in 1981 are not things we should be worried about anymore?" Because isn't the history of the world constantly telling us that the artists, when they raise flags and shake 'em and "Be careful of this," that very often they're right? Bill: Well, you can't stop. We can't bring the machine to a halt while we check under the wheels to make sure there aren't those nasty bits that William Gibson predicted. (laughter all around) We are rushing forward through the ringing grooves of time. Very, very quickly indeed. All I can do in terms of predictive function, yelling, "Watch out, fellas," is kind of cling to the cowcatcher. (laughter all around) Usually by the time the thing's gone to paperback we're so far down the track that it's all a bit quaint. I mean, I take a certain pleasure, because I do write science fiction, in watching the quaint factor creep in. Clive: (Laughter) Bill: And some of my early work is starting to have that wonderful secondary level of surrealism that I've always enjoyed in 1950's science fiction. (Laughter all around) It's fair game, you know? It's completely fair and if you're really doing your job right, like Alfred Bester, say, your work remains readable in terms of time in which it was written. I can never read Bester's SF without having probably the most upbeat sense of New York in the 1940's and early 50's than I know of anywhere in literature. Clive: Right. Right, that's smart. Clive: Well, I guess we should wrap up. Charlie, do you want to charge in with a couple of theatrical anecdotes? Charlie: Well, what I'd really like to do before we leave ... I want to make sure we talk about what the two of you are doing now. So who wants to go first? Clive: Bill. Charlie: Alright, Bill. What are you working on now? Bill: Well, I just finished an X-Files which is my first and could easily be my last stab at episodic television. (Laughter all around) I wanted to have a go. Charlie: Was it pleasurable this time? Bill: Yeah, it's kind of a neat process. You just do it and they shoot it. Pretty much. Clive: Remember Bill, we were at a convention together and we were on a panel? Bill: Yes, you were smoking a large cigar. Clive: Which I am now actually. I think it may even be the same cigar. (Laughter all around) And I want to say that you had just had a crack at ... I want to say Alien III ... Bill: Yes, yes. It was Alien III. I wrote the first of some thirty versions. Nothing of mine remained except a bar code tattoo. Clive: (Laughter) I said to you, "How was it?" You said, "It was like working for a fucking chicken franchise." (Laughter all around) Bill: Yes! Clive: Which I quoted so many times and I always put, "That's a Bill Gibson line, it's not mine." It's so smart and so true. But what's next on the book front? Bill: Well, I'm hoping the third and final volume of whatever it is I've been doing for the past two books and it may be my last word on cyberspace and what not. I'd really like to hit a different note next time around. Although, I'm actually enjoying this one quite alot. There's so much material to work with right now. Because there's the real thing in front of me and it changes every day and characters like Ana turn up. (Laughter) Charlie: Well, how frightening is it to write something like Idoru and have, within an instant of the book coming out, several virtual reality characters come to life in Japan? I mean, how frightening is that? Bill: Well, it really didn't surprise me. I was surprised that they didn't surface before I could get the book out. I knew they were coming because I knew of dry runs in that direction. What I'm really trying to do now ... I've got the futurity horizon cranked in so that it's only a few inches from the windshield. (Laughter all around) I've only got about six inches of play there between contemporary CNN and Gibsonland. Clive: The good thing about that is it means they edit really fast. Right? (Laughter) Bill: Yeah. Clive: They want to get the book out. Now how long does a book take you? Bill: Well, I've never been able to separate the, well, you know, the walking along staring moodily at shop windows from the physically sitting down and writing it bit. It runs usually longer than about eight months and not quite a year. But there's usually another, at least an equivalent time, of being very disagreeable (laughter all around) thinking about it all the time. Clive: Right. Bill: And hating having to do it. Clive: And do you? Do you actually get to the point where, you know ... I'm sitting around by my own stuff having a real funk about it. I know there are times when I get up in the morning, and this morning is certainly one, where I think, "Shit." (Laughter) I know what I have to write today or, in this case, what I have to polish and I really don't like it and I have to start all over and all that nonsense. I mean, do you have days when the prospect is just vile? Bill: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. I mean, I would be very, very envious of anyone who didn't. I mean, that's just a prejudice of mine. Anyone who's happy with their own work ... anyone who's entirely happy with the job of writing novels is strange. They're either strange or they haven't done it sufficiently. (Laughter all around) Clive: Good. Good. Yeah, I know I think that's completely true. That's completely true ... shall I chime in? Charlie: Sure. One quick thing. Is there a working title for this new book or are you still in that vague area? Bill: No, still bouncing them. Actually I was going to call it "All Tomorrow's Parties" which is a title of an old Velvet Underground song, but Billy Name, the Factory photographer brought out a big coffee table book with that title last year and somehow that took the magic away. I thought it would have been a great name for a sort of closing book in a science fiction trilogy. I'll come up with something and I'll make sure that it's in English this time. Charlie: (Laughter) Yeah, that's always been fun explaining how to pronounce that particular word ("Idoru"). Well, Clive, what are you working on? Clive: I am three weeks ... I've delivered half of and I'm three weeks from delivering the second half of a book called Galilee which is an 800, 900 page ... I don't know what it is.(Laughter) It's a novel. It's actually a kind of big romance in a way, set contemporarily. It's about two families, two vast dynasties. One of which is very human, one of which is slightly not. I've always wanted to do a family saga. There's something intrigued me about the idea of doing a book with complex, multi-generational stuff where I could track how psychologies changed. And I'm dealing with a family, a human family which comes to power during the Civil War and how they come to power. Being a visitor to this country, I wasn't taught the Civil War at all in school. Actually I was taught very little American history. So discovering the Civil War and finding it fascinated me has been one of the great revelations of this book. Finding all that neat stuff and going to the battlefields. Charlie: So you've been visiting the Deep South? Clive: Yes. I find historical sites, places where stuff happened. Actually that's pretty much around the world now isn't it, because stuff happened everywhere, but you know, notable stuff. I went to Bentonville, which is in North Carolina. Which is where really the last hurrah of the South happens in the very end of the Civil War in March and I guess the war ends in April. It was amazing. I'd been writing about it in a first draft and went to the site and sort of lay in the dugouts which are still there in the field. And the house which I had been writing about, turned into a field hospital, still stands. I find that stuff immensely moving. It just catches me up. Bill: You know, I grew up with that. That was like a kind of secret ... it's like growing up with a sort of secret history that people from other different parts of the country didn't have. It was almost covert, because I grew up in southwestern Virginia and my mother did not fully think of herself as American and my grandmother definitely didn't. My grandmother referred to it as the "War of the Northern Invasion". (Laughter) And would correct me if I said, "Civil War", just in the way she'd correct me if I said, "Colored lady". Which she thought was an oxymoron. Clive: The idea that all the statues of (General Ulysses S.) Grant that were put up after the war all faced north. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: Just in case those bastards try it again! (Laughter all around) It fascinates me. Bill: Well we use to find, you know, people in my hometown would find the odd Union soldier in the back garden. Clive: Sort of sitting there befuddled, but angry. Bill: Mmmm... well, in a shallow grave... Clive: Ooh, my god! Bill: ... where he had been tucked under the privet hedge. (Laughter all around) Clive: Ooh, my god. Bill: And you know he was a Union soldier because there'd be the buckle and the buttons and these got knocked off during bivouac. Or went to bed with the wrong southern belle ... Clive: And just quietly offed in the night ... Bill: Yeah. And they'd turn up in the back garden. I grew up in a neighborhood of mostly pre-Civil War houses, so those were the original gardens. Clive: What's uncanny about that is there's this scene in this book, which I literally just delivered to my typist. A scene in which one the captains goes back to Charleston. One of the characters of the book, a captain of the South, deserts and goes back to Charleston just before the end of the war and finds his back garden has been turned into a makeshift graveyard. Bill: Eeuuw ... Clive: So that goes straight to the heart of what I'm writing about which is uncanny and cool. He actually finds that the dogs have gone in and dug up the pieces. What used to be this kind of pristine garden before the war. And he remembers it as being the place where he proposed to his wife and his kids played and now he goes back and ... Bill: Well, you know you've gone straight to the motherlode of gothicism on this continent. Clive: You should see the big, shit-eating smile I've got on my face right now. (Laughter all around) Damn right, I know! You know what I did not know? What is interesting is I did not know. It sort of crept up on me. Bill: Yeah! It's sort of natural. I can't see you not being attracted to it. (Laughter all around) Charlie: Kind of like, "What took so long?" Clive: Well, it was realizing and having a friend in North Carolina and going out there and just sort of sensing it. And going to Charleston. Went out to Fort Sumtner together and he sort of looked at all of that neat stuff. So I have three more weeks and then I deliver this manuscript and then I guess it comes out in May. My editors in England called me this morning and said ... or my editor called me and said, "I really love this book." And god, that's such a relief because ... you know what this feels like Bill. Bill: Hm hmm. Yes. Clive: Nobody sees it. Bill: I know. It's very important. That initial phone call or two. Clive: It really is. And, you know, I cry. Tears always spring to my eyes. Like this time I'm sure I've written it in Sanskrit and don't realize. (Laughter) Bill: Well, I know when I finish a book I know that it's not only the worst book I've written (laughter all around), but that it's worst book that's been written. (Laughter all around) I always tell my wife that. Actually there's always a point where I go upstairs and go, "Oh, god, it's the worst book ever written." And she says, "Oh that's good dear, it means you're almost through." (Laughter all around) Charlie: Well, it's nice to have people who can understand the process. Clive: Oh, god. Suffer the process. Charlie: Well, I'd like to thank you both. This is amazing. Bill: It's been a pleasure. Clive: Real fun. Thank you so much for this. Bill: Well, thank you. Clive: My pleasure. |
additional reading an article another article |
|
|
abiv. |
|
|
|
abiv. |
|
|
|
Author Article From somewhere On December 13, 1997, Clive Barker conducted an interview with William Gibson. Hosted by Next Theatre's Burning Chrome dramaturg, Charlie Athanas, this lengthy conversation is presented here as a series. Lasting well over an hour, they discuss such topics as the theater, the effects of the internet on both their lives, rare collections, pornography and their current projects. With regards to their projects, Mr. Gibson has completed an X-File episode and is working on the "third" installment of the Virtual Light/Idoru novels and Mr. Barker has several children's book projects and a huge family saga of one human family and one not-so-human. There's much laughter and several common interests, including a mutual fondness for David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Bookmark this page for all parts of this fascinating, rare, first time discussion between these two greats of contemporary popular culture. Clive = Clive Barker Bill = William Gibson Charlie = Charlie Athanas - PART ONE - Clive: Bill, I'm gonna ask a bunch of really dumb questions at the opening of this. Bill: Okay. I'm used to that. Clive: I know you are. By the way I just read an interview with you in Future Sex. An old issue of Future Sex. Bill: Oh, yes. Yes. Clive: That's a cool interview. Bill: Yeah, it was good. It was sort of threatening to get out of hand actually. Clive: In a good way? Bill: Yeah. More or less. Clive: Well, let's hope this one doesn't. The obvious question, firstly, is how did these guys approach you with the idea of doing Burning Chrome on stage? Bill: Well, you know I had met Charlie (Athanas) years ago at Art Futura and Charlie brought the possibility of Burning Chrome on stage in Chicago to my attention, and because it was Charlie doing the bringing (Clive laughs) I entertained it a little more seriously than I would a small theater group in Melbourne. Although I've frequently allowed small theater groups in Melbourne to mount tiny productions based on my short stories. Clive: Well, that was my next question. How regularly has this material, not specifically this story, but the short stories or indeed the novels, found their way onto the stage. Bill: Well, you know, I think this is probably a first in terms of a professional stage production. Clive: Okay. Bill: Everything up till now has been kind of in the student zone. Probably hasn't been documented very well. All I've ever had has been word of mouth. (laughter all around) A rumor over the years. Clive: Are you a theater goer? Bill: I'm an occasional theater goer here in Vancouver. Clive: Right. Bill: I love the form, but I'm lazy. (laughter) Clive: Okay, there you go. Bill: I need a determined companion to get me there. Clive: Now, you perhaps know from Charlie that these guys (Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman) have already adapted two of my pieces. Bill: Yes. Clive: And one of the things that I was forcibly struck by was that they seem to choose really difficult things. And I think the obvious thing that comes out is ... I just reread Burning Chrome ... it doesn't seem a very easy piece to adapt for theater. Would you agree with that? Bill: Yes, I'd agree. It's not something I would want to have to do myself. Clive: It presents all kinds of technological problems, I guess. Charlie - you are designing? Charlie: Yeah. In fact it's my responsibility for some of the most impossible bits with all the "cyber" tech stuff. Clive: Well, okay, can we jump just momentarily to that? Charlie: Sure. Clive: What are you giving us here? (laughter all around) Charlie: When we first started, much like when Steve took on your books and said, "No blood." Clive: Yes. Charlie: We said "no blood on stage" and that made the approach quite different. Clive: Sure. Charlie: We're doing the same thing with Bill's work and saying, "No computers. No video. No video projections. No slides." Clive: Well, this isn't sort of Robert Wilson style. Charlie: Not in the least. This is going to be very much about the story and the characters and letting the humans tell the story that's being presented in the text. Clive: Right. Right. Which, actually, that part of the story - Jack's story, obviously most strongly - is easy to follow how that's going to work on stage. It's all the technological stuff which seems very challenging. Charlie: Well, Steve has actually accepted the challenge. Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman, the adaptors, are going to stick with the narrative format that Bill has used in the story itself where the story jumps with the retelling throughout the story of cyberspace. Which is gonna make things very interesting. Clive: Yeah, well, particularly with all the things you're denying yourself. Charlie: Yes, denial. That's what we're good at. (laughter) Clive: Yes, self-denial. So now the next obvious question, Bill, is here you are having sort of invented some of the terminology, having cornered the market in a certain kind of vision of the future. Are you over it now? Are you, like, "Oh, that's old news?" Bill: Well, I think I'm living in it now. Clive: Ooh, there's a nightmare. (laughter) Bill: I've arrived at ... the rest of the world has now arrived in some slipshod fashion in the reality I described in 1981. It's not quite the same, but there's a little bit of it on everybody's desktop. Clive: It's not just that though. You mention in the story, vasopresin ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ...which I guess is used for senile dementia. You point that out in the story. Bill: Um hmm. Clive: A friend of mine is a huge fan of vasopresin as a recreational entertainment, I guess, in some form or other and you say something like, "The street makes use of things which are usually used for other purposes." Bill: Yes. Clive: And when you wrote that, was vasopresin ... I'd only heard of vasopresin last year ... I mean, where do you catch up with all these things? Some of them you're obviously inventing or at least coining, but some of this stuff ... how are you finding all this stuff? Bill: I don't know, it's a talent I developed early on. I've learned to scan to huge ... shallow (laughter all around) .. huge shallow reaches of popular and scientific information. And identify those odd nodal points from which change of some kind seems, not emerging, but emergent. It's almost there. And I don't actually recall how vasopresin found its way into the story, but the idea ... I think I'd run across a reference for it being used for Alzheimer's patients. And the idea of a recreational drug that heightened and improved memory ... Clive: Right. Bill: ... had such brilliant sexual possibilities ... Clive: Sure. Bill: ... that I thought it was a natural. Clive: You actually use it in this story as a source of melancholia in fact, right? Bill: Yes. Clive: Because he's ... I think, I forget. Is he doing alcohol and vasopresin? Is that what he's doing? Bill: Yes, he's going in two directions at once. Clive: At the same time. Bill: The combination is, in one sense, enjoyable and, you know, in another it's giving him a whole new level of problems. Clive: Which then brings me to the melancholia, which seems to mark a lot of your work. A sort of sense, a noirish sense. You're probably tired of that too, but it does seem in some ways appropriate. A noirish sense that these people are all horribly wounded by life and circumstance and they're only holding onto their sanity with the combination of will, drugs and, sort of, fatalism. Is that something that as you're ... how old are you now? Are you of my age? I'm forty-five. Bill: I'm forty-nine. So I'm ahead of you. Clive: Ah, not much. Here we are in middle age. Are you finding that your attitude to ... I guess, is a kind of melancholia which earlier in your life you kind of almost indulge, almost kind of wallow in? Because it seems okay now. Because it's sort of caught up with me as a life condition. (laughter) Do you find your attitude to the kind of dark undertow of your earlier material has changed at all? Bill: Well, I look at it now and it's all bit like Joy Division. (laughter all around) And it was all very, very heavily influenced by Joy Division and old Velvet Underground records. But, you know, I was almost thirty when I wrote that story and it was really sort of the first really effective piece of fiction I managed to write. And I think that I was at that peculiar pre-thirty point where you really feel that it's all over. Clive: Oh god, yes. Bill: Yeah, this is... Clive: The long road down. (laughter all around) Bill: Yeah, you know, it's not much fun after this. We might as well get it all out on the table. You know, that noir thing is funny. In my more recent work it tends to be inverted and turned inside out and become oddly cheerful. (laughter) Clive: Right. But the fatalism remains in place, right? The sort of sense that the world is too enormous to really make any significant changes upon. Somehow your characters always seem ... this is one of the things I like about it ... sort of, not at sea, but certainly fighting. You said before you described yourself as living in that world. The world you've been describing in '81. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: The sort of sense in which we're kind of victims in that world now. I mean, we can't move for it. I mean, I'm sitting here at a desk without a piece of technology except for this telephone that I'm speaking on and so I feel like I'm holding that stuff at bay as much as I possibly can. Not just the technology, but the sort of sense of detachment from the world that comes with that. Bill: Hmm. Yes. Clive: I know they talk about all this stuff being really a way to make a global village or connect us with pieces of information we didn't know we needed or whatever the hell else. (laughter all around) But actually, am I wrong now? Am I just being a technophobe or is there a certain soullessness with all this? Bill: No. I don't know. I'm sitting here looking at a webpage put up by a girl named Ana somewhere in the American Midwest and she's sitting naked in her young artist's living room ... (laughter all around) ... looking really rather striking. This was at, I think, eleven fifty-two Midwestern time, earlier today. You know, I check in on her occasionally. Her site is free. (laughter all around) Clive: So there's nothing to complain about. (laughter all around) Is that the inference here? Bill: Well, I don't find this stuff inherently alienating, but it's very hard to know. I think that something really big is happening to us again. It's something like what happened when we started doing cities. Clive: Yes. Bill: We're doing something like that and we just have no way of knowing all of the myriad things that will come out of it. It won't be any sort of approved, legislated future. It never is. - PART TWO - Bill: (From the end of Part One)...I think that something really big is happening to us again. It's something like what happened when we started doing cities ... We're doing something like that and we just have no way of knowing all of the myriad things that will come out of it. It won't be any sort of approved, legislated future. It never is. Clive: Right. And yet the cities' analogy is an interesting one, because we're sitting, let us say, in a rose-colored cottage somewhere out in the country. And somebody stops by our cottage and says, "Gee, you know they're building London? We should really go and check it out." And maybe you go down the road and see how London is and by sort of staying in the cottage for a little while ... and I guess part of me is feeling as though, by limiting my vision I can keep it intense. And maybe that's a piece of paranoia on my part, but it seems to me that you actually give lots of literary reasons or narrative reasons for me to have that paranoia. I mean, you picture a world incredibly convincingly in which information is coming in on all kinds of levels. Vast pieces of information. Even in the incredible compression of a story like Burning Chrome, you evoke the sense of almost limitless information. In this case, mainly fiscal information. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And the characters who are in the middle of this still have to deal with credibly universal feelings. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: Right? A sense of loss. Bill: Yeah. Clive: The moment has passed them by. That physical wounds have come to them. And let's change the subject. You say quite early on in the story that she (the character, Chrome) ... I forget exactly the phrase for the cancers that she induces, but they're rather unique. Bill: Yeah, they're custom. Clive: There you go. (laughter all around) They're custom! Bill: Yeah, they're customized. Clive: So the sense that you evoke of a world in which the physical and the problems of the physical remain very much intact. And certainly the sense of emotional loss. Separation from the one you loved or thought you loved remains very strong. You don't give the impression that any of this stuff really comforts at a fundamental level. Am I misreading it? Bill: Hmmmm, no. I think that's correct. Although it depends now on whether we're discussing the techno reality of the story or the techno reality of 1997. Clive: Right. Bill: Because the uses that people have put this stuff to in the mean time are not really the uses that I envisioned it being. Clive: Could you elaborate on that? Bill: In a story like Burning Chrome, cyberspace is corporate ... Clive: Right. Bill: ... and military ... Clive: Right. Bill: It's like an office building, but in fact cyberspace is like a city, in that it incorporates libraries, brothels, anything (laughter)! You know, literally. Clive: Yes. Charlie: Plays! Bill: Plays. Literally anything and everyone is doing it! Most of what's taking place in cyberspace is completely banal. Clive: Like any human experience. Bill: Dull human activity. Clive: Right. But then taking your... you used cities and the building of the cities earlier on as sort of the semi-evolutionary jump which is analogous to this? Bill: Yeah. Clive: One of the things you might reasonably say about cities is that they really are a curate's egg. There's good parts and bad parts. Bill: Yes. Clive: And that maybe in the concentration of people in relatively small space ... I come from England where there does seem to be a concentration of a lot of people in a very small space. Which I don't actually feel quite so much (now). I'm looking out at greenery and hills here (California) where I'm living right now and I'm grateful for that. When I lived in London I faced gray walls and as soon as I stepped out of the house I was facing other people. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: There was a sense in many ways the city of London aggressed against me. It didn't mean to, but it couldn't help it. So I want to follow that analogy up for a moment and say is there a sense in which this information, this sort of sense of something vast going on in these exchanges ... you were able to look at the lovely lady in the Midwest ... is a choice on your part? You can switch off your machine any time you like, but isn't there a sense that behind our lives now there is corporate usage. There is military usage. There is governmental usage of this material, this information, this way of computing. Bill: Yes, there's a sense of that. Some of the ways this technology is affecting us now are very, very subtle. Clive: Okay. Bill: One that I've noticed just in the last month is that because of the Internet and the World Wide Web, in effect, the world's attic is being sorted. It's being sorted with a speed and precision that would have been impossible ten or fifteen years ago. The whole concept of rarities and random finds is disappearing very, very quickly. Every book in every used book shop on the planet will be accessible to a search engine soon. Clive: Yes. Bill: And there's something... it's really something horribly sad about that. Clive: Yes. It really is. (laughter) Bill: Anything that you're looking for, I can tell you, for instance, I can tell you today in Fort Meyers, Florida, there is a 1948, mint, in-box Rolex Oyster (watch). With the original band. As far as I know, it's the only mint, in-box Rolex Oyster in the world. (laughter all around) Or at least the only one that's currently up for sale. There's not one in New York that I can find on the Net. And there's not one in Los Angeles. And there's not one in London. We're losing something there. Some very magic part. Clive: So there's no way, going to your attic analogy again, there's no sense that we're going to be able to discover the lost beloved rocking chair up there, because we'll know that it's there. I mean, the magic of it is going? Is that what you're saying? The magic of something which is hidden and covered in dust and... Bill: No, the magic of the search. Clive: Yes. Bill: I was talking the other night to a VERY wealthy woman who all her life collected just exquisitely arcane books and magazines, mostly surrealist periodicals. And this has kind of sustained her in her otherwise boring existence. Clive: Right. Bill: The hunt for these impossible editions. And the other day she got on her son's web browser and scored about twenty in an hour. Clive: And it spoiled it. Bill: Yeah! She was telling me about it and she was very excited and she saying, "I got this and I got that" and then she's saying, "I don't know if I like this though." We talked about it and we decided it commodified it in a different way. All that was involved now was rarity. There was no skill .. relative rarity and value ... there was no longer a skill involved. Clive: But let me go after this. There is a sense to me that something similar has happened in an area that is my primary area of reading interest, which is the general area of metaphysics. Which will range for the purposes of this conversation from sort of the driest German philosophical tome to the moistest Catholicism. Bill: (chuckle) Yes. Clive: And my sense is there is more open discussion and volumes being written about this material in the sort of sense that the mystery of religion... Bill: Yes. Clive: ... the veil has been lifted in a way. In some ways, and I'll go after this one moment longer if I may, may be analogous to this. You're not going to be able to turn a corner and discover a voice from a rock any longer. The details of every religious order and sub-order and practice and ritual seems to be ... to being laid out. We're finding revisionist versions of voodoo being written right now. Revisionist histories, for instance, giving us all kinds of details in something that particularly interests me right now. And I'm looking at this stuff and saying, "Boy, the mystery is gone." And now how do we put the mystery back? It seems to me now the mystery is in the personal choice. By which I mean, maybe now it becomes the rich lady's problem not to be able to buy things, but to choose the things she really wants. Bill: Yes. Clive: So maybe now the mystery becomes the mystery of personal decision. If I know all religious possibilities, let's say, that seems in some senses to be rather a reductionist place to be. It's all laid out like a deli counter, you know? But then what becomes important, significant, which one really speaks to me. Where my heart really is. And so instead of the mystery becoming finding, the mystery becomes choosing. Do you see what I'm saying? Bill: Yes, I do. Although with religion I would think that there would be a certain requirement of practice even now. Simply seeing the precepts laid out on the... Clive: Counter. Bill: Yeah, in the "FaithMart" site. (laughter all around) Clive: Right, right, right! (laughter) Bill: Yes. Open this link. Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. (laughter) Bill: My experience has been that seeing those things laid out, well, you know, that the map is not the territory. Clive: That might be also my point about the surrealist magazine. To know the title of the magazine and when it was produced or whatever. Or indeed its rarity value and maybe the point is about rarity value and how unimportant that finally must be, because if you're truly passionate about surrealism it doesn't matter if there's one magazine or ten thousand of them. Bill: Hmmm, yes. I know what you mean.... Clive: Am I being pissy about this? Bill: No, I think that there's a human, kind of primitive, almost pre-human pleasure in hunting and gathering. Clive: Right. Bill: And that we're losing our ... the attic is being too thoroughly sorted and we're losing our capacity for hunting and gathering. One thing that's fascinated me in the course of my life has been the cataloging of the world's stuff. When I was a young man there was a great deal of stuff scattered across the counters of the Western world. There were many, many treasures. Being young and unemployed, often had nothing better to do than going beachcombing through this stuff. And so much of this sort of thing that I used to pick up and admire and throw away, there's now a specialist shop in London or Manhattan that sells nothing but that sort of bakalite button. And they've all been numbered and a price assigned to each one. Clive: Yes. Bill: It's something we're doing this century. It's sort of done, you know, it's a done deal. And that gives me an odd feeling. Clive: Yeah, me too. I'm not a great hunter... My point was that I have several copies of Moby Dick here. I don't value the hard cover any more than the paper. And if Moby Dick speaks loudly and complicatedly to my heart, which it does, then the hunting and gathering can still go on because I still have the investigation of a human being to do. And that's sort of different from a bakalite button, I absolutely grant you. But the most profound experience perhaps that we can have are not with objects, which can indeed be cataloged, but with thoughts and ideas which actually resist that kind of cataloging. I mean, to go back to the story ... looking at again, that part of its power is its density and part of the power of its density is that when you revisit it, you find something fresh in it. Because when language is as rich and poetic as it is in many of the most evocative sections of this story, you revisit it and find something fresh. In other words, one of the great wonders perhaps of art is that you can hunt and gather forever there. I mean, there must be pieces of work, and not necessarily just pieces of literary work ... actually I think it's less true of movies than books and paintings, but I certainly know there were paintings which I first saw when I was in my teens, which I kind of cooled on in my twenties and then rediscovered again in my thirties. Bill: Yes. Clive: And what had changed was me. Bill: Yes. Clive: So perhaps I'm being sentimental here about the idea of what the individual can bring to the discovery process. But a part of me feels as though ... hmm this is going to sound really perverse given what you just said, but I'd like all the cataloging to get done. I'd sort of like very comfortably for it all to get done.(Bill laughs) We all know where everything is. Now the issue is - what do you want? Bill: Well, yes. It's very nearly done. And the question is, "What do we want?" Clive: Can I give you an analogy? Bill: Sure. Clive: The last time I went into the British Library as a reader ... Bill: Yeah? Clive: I'd never been to the British Library before, obviously I was intimidated as hell. And I went in and I was actually looking for a book - obscure eighteenth century pornography. It's not actually that obscure, it's a book called "The Autobiography of a Flea". I don't know if you know the book. It's an anonymous book about a flea which jumps from pubic hair to pubic hair and relates on the gigantic experiences that it has. Bill: Ah, yes. Clive: You're dwelling in this fine lady or in the pubic hair of this well-endowed gentleman and so on. And this is the tale. And I'd read reference to it in a footnote and I thought I have to get hold of this and clearly the book wasn't in print. So I went to the British Library and they said, "Sure, we have five copies of 'An Autobiography of a Flea', including one illustrated in France, but we only have one copy of each one and you'll have to go into a special room." You've been to the British Library, I guess. Bill: Yes. Clive: They make it kind of difficult to read the thing. And they make it even more difficult if it's a piece of pornography. I'm sorry. I should say "erotica". I went in and they had one copy of this book. A particular edition. Several editions were in French. I don't read French, there is literally one in English that I could read. And I sat there reading this very strange text and felt unique. Now the uniqueness of owning the turquoise blue bakalite button made in 1920 doesn't go away if you've got it in your fingers and nobody else has. Right? Bill: Right. Clive: The sense of specialness ... which I want to say has some metaphysical echo to it ... doesn't go away just because you know where that button belongs in a long list of buttons. Bill: Hmm, yeah. I would agree. Clive: So what interests me now is your vision is presenting this corporate usage of all this information and your characters seem to move through this world being very particular. Being very severely themselves. It seems like your characters seem to respond to the offensiveness, if I can say that, of the world around them by being, in a very noirish way, strongly, almost caricatures of themselves sometimes. They're very intense. They live very intense lives. They seek out very intense experiences, right? I mean, this constant sense of, I'm gonna feel what I feel as strongly as possible. If it takes drugs. If it takes a mechanism. If it takes hormones. Whatever it takes. Bill: Yes. I agree with you. It seems that they're driven to that. Whatever they're doing becomes an act of self-definition. Clive: The Debbie Harry character in Videodrome? Bill: Yes. Clive: Says in the interview with James Woods ... the TV interview... Bill: Yes. Clive: "We live over-stimulated lives." Bill: Yes. Clive: I always remember hearing that and hmm ... she's wearing a red dress at the time and James Woods refers to the redness of her dress. She says, "We all live over-stimulated lives." To which James Woods says something like, "Well, you shouldn't be wearing that dress for one thing if you're talking about over-stimulation." I remember seeing that movie and really, it being the first time ... Cronenberg has some things analogous to your own vision, particularly in that movie. Of a sense that these people are living headlong, racing headlong into experience because they feel like life will be short and brutish. Bill: Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that Videodrome is an interesting thing to compare Burning Chrome to because I think they're very much of a period. Clive: Ahh. Bill: Yeah, I think they're very much of a period. They're documents of high Reaganomics. (laughter all around) Clive: Yes. Yes. Bill: My favorite Deborah Harry line in Videodrome is where she says to Woods, "Do you have a Swiss Army knife or something? Could you cut me a little?" (laughter all around) Clive: Now just for our slower readers connect that with Reaganomics for me. I mean, we're talking about a kind of response to a severely reductionist world? Bill: Well, this is the period when we were told that taking the gloves off capitalism would straighten things out and fix the economy and not to worry. And I think there was an initial period in that where there was an interesting kind of panic abroad. As you would expect reflected particularly in the popular arts. And there is a kind of mean early 80's ... weird down and dirty, early 80's popular art. I mean, I'd be quite proud to see Burning Chrome and Videodrome on the same shelf. Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. Is that about Cronenberg generally or specifically that movie? Bill: Oh, that movie is a real standout for me with Cronenberg. I really, really admire Cronenberg tremendously, but I thought that movie was just exquisitely over the top (laughter all around) in a way that he hasn't been since. Clive: Yes, I guess. I think the insect nation speech from The Fly gets up there actually. You know, the nature of insects speech ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ... the Goldblum character, Seth Brundle, gives us. There are times, I think, when David puts onto his characters wonderfully sublime extremes. Bill: Yes. Clive: But Videodrome is a great favorite of mine and one of the things that is kind of interesting and maybe is a parallel to Burning Chrome again, is a sort of sense that everybody has to live in their own heads. I'm obviously saying that maybe that's true of all literature, but this sort of sense of everybody living in their own private hell seems very strong in both pieces. It gets pushed to a great extreme in Videodrome because eventually you don't even know what's real and what's not. Bill: Yes. Clive: And you've certainly done that too. I mean, because your use of language, and I'd like to go to that in a moment, is so rich it seems to me in some ways to ... and I think only books can do this, Charlie. I'm sorry. Charlie: (Laughter) Oh, fine. Clive: But I think books ... the commonality of language, the sense that everything gets dissolved in the common soup of language means that a book can present us with a sense that reality is moving back and forth, in and out. I'm not sure an actor on a stage can ever do what passages in stories can ... actually several of your stories and several of my stories do ... which is just say, "I suppose this is Bill and Clive talking to you now." Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And the language that we're using is rich and poetic language and everything else is going to get dissolved in it. I mean, do you see any ... even cinema can't doing that ... though I think Cronenberg at his most hallucinogenic or delirious does. I remember coming out of Videodrome with a bunch of my pals and they'd just be completely furious that they did not know what was real and what wasn't in the last half hour of that picture. Am I saying, "Isn't that great though?" How often does that happen? Aren't movies dominated by reality constantly? Aren't they dominated by a sense that we're entering a "cinematic reality" and it's going to be a consistent reality. Particularly, I think, American pictures. I don't think that's so true of Fellini for instance, where you're moving back and forth into memory and then it's almost a little Fantasia that is just Frederico's. Bill: Uh hmmm. Clive: You know, it seems like art cinema, if you will ... this may be true of art literature, as opposed to pop literature, as well ... allows us to float a little bit in language, in memory, in Bill. If somebody goes to a ... god help us ... a Grisham novel, some popular romance or whatever, part of the point is you get this reality set up for you and the author sort of steps out of it. It seems to me you're constantly present in your fiction, because the language is so dense. Are you aware of that? Do you pursue that? Bill: I think that I didn't now any better. Clive: Oh. Cool. (laughter) Bill: At the start, I knew no different. And I have experimented subsequently with a lighter stylistic mix. Out of a curiosity to see what would happen. I've tried writing very plainly. It's actually fun to do that, 'cause then you can chord it. You can go from the simply spoken to the hallucinogenicly poetic (laughter) in the course of a sentence. Clive: Yes. Bill: That's good, too. But really I think that the way I learned to compose fiction left me there. It was the only thing I knew how to do and when I would not quite succeed at doing it, I would feel a certain panic. So I'd crank it up a bit higher. Clive: That would be linguistic cranking. Bill: Yes. Yes. I would crank the poetics up a few more notches and see what happened. I think the thing that attracted me to science fiction was the fact that science fiction allows us these episodes of heightened language. Clive: Oh, I think the fantastique as a genre allows us that or horror fiction allows us that. Fantasy fiction at its best allows us that. Children's fiction ... I'm doing a lot of children's fiction now and I'm aware that you get the freedom to take this linguistic jump into a space where you get great density of imagery and you get this kind of delirious stuff which is wonderful to write. There is also this sense, and I don't know if I'm going to get this right, but there's a sense in which the music becomes the meaning. And there seems to me to be passages in your work where if you were to look at it word for word it would be really hard to take apart. God knows I wouldn't want to be studying it in class. Any more than I would be wanting to be studying Bill Burroughs in class. At the end of the day, the language isn't susceptible to the same kind of analysis, that say, Milton is susceptible too. Bill: Yes. Clive: You just have to look hard. It seems to me that that would be really difficult in your work. For one thing you're inventing words, so that's kind of hard. There's also a kind of music and I know there's music in Milton. It's a different kind of music somehow. He wants to be plain, he just doesn't know how. (laughter) I don't know. He wants to be plain and maybe the distance between us and Paradise Lost makes it harder for us to understand what that plainness was. No one is ever going to look back on the collective works of Bill Gibson and say, "Time has made it a little tougher to understand Mr. Gibson," because there's certain times when a logical approach to what you're writing simply doesn't work. Am I being right? Bill: Hmm yeah ... I would think so. I think I saw myself, and to some extent I still do, as practicing not a lost art, but an art that's been fragmented. Even in the course of my lifetime, I have the sense of something that's been shattered and we're left with the shards of the Miltonian universe and my strategy was to hammer them into pipebombs (laughter all around). Clive: (Laughter) Oh, that's great! Bill: Impact them into tiny explosive containers. It's basically the same gunpowder, but he was able to ... sometimes I think of all the lovely prose in fiction of the past as being like Murano figurines. These lovely fragile things that just can't last long in a house trailer in Kansas. Clive: This conversation's coming full circle to the idea that these things are listed and available on the Net as ... well, these are all the folios of Shakespeare and this is all the versions of Paradise Lost you can find. In every edition you could ever want. And the issue is that probably that material could never have lasted outside a certain area, right? You're right they couldn't last for long in a trailer park in wherever, but actually is it any more fragile now than it's ever been? Is there not a sense that in some ways because we know we can access this information better than we could before and that maybe we have a better way of understanding it? Bill: No, I think that we can access it, but we're no longer producing it. That whatever armature of ... Clive: ..of belief? Bill: ... of belief. It's always felt to me as though something was broken. I don't know if that will stay with me all my life. Clive: One of the cornerstone stories of artists for me is the account of Swift reading his texts aloud to his servants because he passionately wanted them to understand ... even though they didn't read ... what his prose meant. And he was fearful back when he was writing Gulliver's Travels of, I think, some of the brokenness that you're describing right now. It was a different kind of brokenness perhaps, because here was a man who was incredibly sophisticated in lots of ways, very political obviously, but also a very religious man. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: Here's a guy whose reading his stuff to his servants, because he's fearful that the culture in which he's living is already so divided that the lessons he's trying to teach will be inaccessible if he tries to use anything but the plainest language. And he's testing the language. Do you see what I mean? Bill: Yes. Clive: He's sort of saying, "Does this work for you, Mary and Joseph?" And the reason why that's a cornerstone story for me is because I share the same sort of sense that things are broken, but I do feel that words on a page are remarkably potent still. And one of the few things I like about going around the country signing books and things, going to conventions or whatever, is seeing young people. I'm sure you have exactly the same experience. Fifteen, sixteen year olds coming up, who unlike us were brought up with videos and sixty-seven channels on the television or whatever, who are coming up and saying, "Your book is really important to me." Not, "Your story is important to me," even. "Your book, the item, this thing." And they'll give you ... you must have had this experience countless of times ... the book which is handed over to you to be signed is not the pristine new copy of something you're out there signing. Bill: Yes. Clive: It's some beaten up copy of the book that's been dropped in the bath three times and has been handed around the family. Bill: Oh, yes! I love that. Clive: Isn't that great? Bill: Yes. It's really, really great! Sueded with use. Clive: Exactly! The way our books were, I had a copy of Edgar Allan Poe that was like that, you know. That was completely treasured and eventually it completely fell apart in my hands. And maybe again I have too much faith in this being an influential movement, but I see so much of that. And I read so many letters from kids now, because I'm writing for children. I'm talking about nine, ten, eleven year olds ... Bill: Yes. Clive: ...writing to me saying, "I love reading your book." Unfortunately, almost always they say, "P.S. When's the movie?" Which is sort of scary, but there's definitely a sense of reading words on a page remains incredibly potent. And very individual. I mean, the sense that when somebody picks up a story of yours or a story of mine they're entering into our world in a very particular kind of way. In one of my notes, I think it was from you, Charlie, is one of things that Bill and I have in common is "world building"? Charlie: Right. Clive: There is a sort of sense that ... you talk about hammering the thing into pipebombs before ... do we have a little bit of a god complex? I mean, we are sort of making worlds because we can imply our own order. I mean, fuck the Miltonic order, how 'bout the Gibsonian order? Isn't there a sense in which you're saying, "Okay, the world doesn't really work for me quite the way it is right now, but check out my world." Bill: Maybe. I'm more inclined to see what I do as though I'm translating the world at large for myself. Giving it back to the reader. In a funny way, when I'm at my personal best abroad in the world, it's as weird and noir and hallucinatory as any of my writing and that's just going to the supermarket. (laughter all around) Clive: Well, that's about you seeing stuff. That's about your being alive to stuff that's right in front of you. Bill: Uh hmm. Clive: And maybe one of the functions of the kind of fiction the both of us write is to alert people to the surrealities. The casual surrealities of daily life. Bill: Yes. Clive: I mean, part of it is simply about stripping away scar tissue isn't it? And saying, "Don't be so insensitive guys. The world is far stranger and far more wonderful." And now we're back to "there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio." Bill: Uh hmm! I think that's a favorite function of mine to the extent that I ever do it. I love to think of myself as doing that. I like to think of people reading my books and thinking, "Oh, wow! What a scary, imaginary future. Wait a minute! Didn't I see that on CNN?" (Laughter all around) Clive: Okay. I'll wrap up. I know we're running hugely late here. I'll wrap up with a couple of questions that jump from there. As you now see yourself living in some portions of this world ... I mean, it's there being reported on CNN ... do you see a time when it's looked back on? If in '81 you were writing this stuff and it was predictive and it's simply ... I say simply ... now it's the world in which we live. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: What happens in another seventeen years, sixteen years time? Bill: Well, that's a really, really good question and it's actually something I given a bit of thought to. I think that the "cyber hyphen" things will go the way of the "electro hyphen" things, in that we do not wake every single day and think, "I live in a world of wonders of electricity." (Laughter all around) We really don't. We scarcely think about it. Clive: Yeah, we just plug in. Bill: And I think that with the evolution of computers and all of that, I have a certain faith that it tends to evolve towards transparency. And I think it will become sufficiently transparent. We'll become sufficiently used to it, that we really won't pay much attention unless something goes wrong and we're cut off from vast fields of memory which we depend on professionally ... or perhaps personally ... or erotically (laughter). Clive: Right. But then the problem with transparency ... the challenge with transparency, which may be as different from the parallel with electricity, is that because information is here and because you painted a picture, at least in some measure, that the gathering and use of the information against the individual by corporate entities, the governmental entities is something to be watched. And monitored. And to be anxious about. Isn't the danger of transparency that we will also take for granted the fact that our lives have become, in one sense, have become available? Our private lives have become part of a public machine. I certainly am powerfully aware that my private life, as somebody whose private life is perhaps more interesting ... lord knows why, to a certain section of the populace than others ... because some kind of public existence, my private life is available in all kinds of ways that it wasn't before. And I don't particularly like that. I don't particularly like the fact the Internet will tell the world about my new boyfriend before I tell my mother. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: I mean, should we not be worried about transparency in that sense if we take for granted the idea that this vast informational system will know about us on all kinds of levels or should we just sort of shrug? Bill: I think we'll become necessarily more sophisticated. If you had been living in the rose-colored cottage you probably wouldn't have been too terribly concerned with drawing the blinds (laughter). Whereas when you move to a garret in the city you learn to hang something over that. (Laughter all around) Clive: Or you become an exhibitionist. Bill: Or you become an exhibitionist like my little friend here, "Ana in the Midwest". (laughter all around) Clive: Exactly. That's an interesting thing. That's the other response. The other response is, "Well, fuck you. I'll let it all hang out." Bill: Yes. What's funny, you know, is Orwell thought that the televisions would be watching us. Clive: But Orwell also bathed three times a day because he thought he smelled. You know, so we're talking about a man ... oh no, except that was Aldus Huxley, wasn't it? I always get confused. Was it Huxley who had the bathing problem or Orwell? Bill: I don't know. Charlie: You know, you can go on the Internet and look that up. (laughter) Clive: Yeah. Find out who had the worst bathing problem. Bill: We could find that, but I mean really, you know, it seems like the evil in the world today is not that the televisions are watching us, but that we're watching the Shopping Channel. (laughter all around) Clive: Yes. Yes. Yes. Bill: We're all buying "cubic zirconium." (laughter all around) Clive: And yet I also a want to say that the warning flags which you put up and that you continue to put up like, "Watch this shit." I wouldn't like to think that they just become things that we shrug about. If you as a writer were alerted to ... had some anxieties, you know, sixteen years ago, seventeen years ago, whatever ... shouldn't we be trusting your instincts as an artist? Should we be saying, "Well society moves on and what people were worried about in 1981 are not things we should be worried about anymore?" Because isn't the history of the world constantly telling us that the artists, when they raise flags and shake 'em and "Be careful of this," that very often they're right? Bill: Well, you can't stop. We can't bring the machine to a halt while we check under the wheels to make sure there aren't those nasty bits that William Gibson predicted. (laughter all around) We are rushing forward through the ringing grooves of time. Very, very quickly indeed. All I can do in terms of predictive function, yelling, "Watch out, fellas," is kind of cling to the cowcatcher. (laughter all around) Usually by the time the thing's gone to paperback we're so far down the track that it's all a bit quaint. I mean, I take a certain pleasure, because I do write science fiction, in watching the quaint factor creep in. Clive: (Laughter) Bill: And some of my early work is starting to have that wonderful secondary level of surrealism that I've always enjoyed in 1950's science fiction. (Laughter all around) It's fair game, you know? It's completely fair and if you're really doing your job right, like Alfred Bester, say, your work remains readable in terms of time in which it was written. I can never read Bester's SF without having probably the most upbeat sense of New York in the 1940's and early 50's than I know of anywhere in literature. Clive: Right. Right, that's smart. Clive: Well, I guess we should wrap up. Charlie, do you want to charge in with a couple of theatrical anecdotes? Charlie: Well, what I'd really like to do before we leave ... I want to make sure we talk about what the two of you are doing now. So who wants to go first? Clive: Bill. Charlie: Alright, Bill. What are you working on now? Bill: Well, I just finished an X-Files which is my first and could easily be my last stab at episodic television. (Laughter all around) I wanted to have a go. Charlie: Was it pleasurable this time? Bill: Yeah, it's kind of a neat process. You just do it and they shoot it. Pretty much. Clive: Remember Bill, we were at a convention together and we were on a panel? Bill: Yes, you were smoking a large cigar. Clive: Which I am now actually. I think it may even be the same cigar. (Laughter all around) And I want to say that you had just had a crack at ... I want to say Alien III ... Bill: Yes, yes. It was Alien III. I wrote the first of some thirty versions. Nothing of mine remained except a bar code tattoo. Clive: (Laughter) I said to you, "How was it?" You said, "It was like working for a fucking chicken franchise." (Laughter all around) Bill: Yes! Clive: Which I quoted so many times and I always put, "That's a Bill Gibson line, it's not mine." It's so smart and so true. But what's next on the book front? Bill: Well, I'm hoping the third and final volume of whatever it is I've been doing for the past two books and it may be my last word on cyberspace and what not. I'd really like to hit a different note next time around. Although, I'm actually enjoying this one quite alot. There's so much material to work with right now. Because there's the real thing in front of me and it changes every day and characters like Ana turn up. (Laughter) Charlie: Well, how frightening is it to write something like Idoru and have, within an instant of the book coming out, several virtual reality characters come to life in Japan? I mean, how frightening is that? Bill: Well, it really didn't surprise me. I was surprised that they didn't surface before I could get the book out. I knew they were coming because I knew of dry runs in that direction. What I'm really trying to do now ... I've got the futurity horizon cranked in so that it's only a few inches from the windshield. (Laughter all around) I've only got about six inches of play there between contemporary CNN and Gibsonland. Clive: The good thing about that is it means they edit really fast. Right? (Laughter) Bill: Yeah. Clive: They want to get the book out. Now how long does a book take you? Bill: Well, I've never been able to separate the, well, you know, the walking along staring moodily at shop windows from the physically sitting down and writing it bit. It runs usually longer than about eight months and not quite a year. But there's usually another, at least an equivalent time, of being very disagreeable (laughter all around) thinking about it all the time. Clive: Right. Bill: And hating having to do it. Clive: And do you? Do you actually get to the point where, you know ... I'm sitting around by my own stuff having a real funk about it. I know there are times when I get up in the morning, and this morning is certainly one, where I think, "Shit." (Laughter) I know what I have to write today or, in this case, what I have to polish and I really don't like it and I have to start all over and all that nonsense. I mean, do you have days when the prospect is just vile? Bill: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. I mean, I would be very, very envious of anyone who didn't. I mean, that's just a prejudice of mine. Anyone who's happy with their own work ... anyone who's entirely happy with the job of writing novels is strange. They're either strange or they haven't done it sufficiently. (Laughter all around) Clive: Good. Good. Yeah, I know I think that's completely true. That's completely true ... shall I chime in? Charlie: Sure. One quick thing. Is there a working title for this new book or are you still in that vague area? Bill: No, still bouncing them. Actually I was going to call it "All Tomorrow's Parties" which is a title of an old Velvet Underground song, but Billy Name, the Factory photographer brought out a big coffee table book with that title last year and somehow that took the magic away. I thought it would have been a great name for a sort of closing book in a science fiction trilogy. I'll come up with something and I'll make sure that it's in English this time. Charlie: (Laughter) Yeah, that's always been fun explaining how to pronounce that particular word ("Idoru"). Well, Clive, what are you working on? Clive: I am three weeks ... I've delivered half of and I'm three weeks from delivering the second half of a book called Galilee which is an 800, 900 page ... I don't know what it is.(Laughter) It's a novel. It's actually a kind of big romance in a way, set contemporarily. It's about two families, two vast dynasties. One of which is very human, one of which is slightly not. I've always wanted to do a family saga. There's something intrigued me about the idea of doing a book with complex, multi-generational stuff where I could track how psychologies changed. And I'm dealing with a family, a human family which comes to power during the Civil War and how they come to power. Being a visitor to this country, I wasn't taught the Civil War at all in school. Actually I was taught very little American history. So discovering the Civil War and finding it fascinated me has been one of the great revelations of this book. Finding all that neat stuff and going to the battlefields. Charlie: So you've been visiting the Deep South? Clive: Yes. I find historical sites, places where stuff happened. Actually that's pretty much around the world now isn't it, because stuff happened everywhere, but you know, notable stuff. I went to Bentonville, which is in North Carolina. Which is where really the last hurrah of the South happens in the very end of the Civil War in March and I guess the war ends in April. It was amazing. I'd been writing about it in a first draft and went to the site and sort of lay in the dugouts which are still there in the field. And the house which I had been writing about, turned into a field hospital, still stands. I find that stuff immensely moving. It just catches me up. Bill: You know, I grew up with that. That was like a kind of secret ... it's like growing up with a sort of secret history that people from other different parts of the country didn't have. It was almost covert, because I grew up in southwestern Virginia and my mother did not fully think of herself as American and my grandmother definitely didn't. My grandmother referred to it as the "War of the Northern Invasion". (Laughter) And would correct me if I said, "Civil War", just in the way she'd correct me if I said, "Colored lady". Which she thought was an oxymoron. Clive: The idea that all the statues of (General Ulysses S.) Grant that were put up after the war all faced north. Bill: Hm hmm. Clive: Just in case those bastards try it again! (Laughter all around) It fascinates me. Bill: Well we use to find, you know, people in my hometown would find the odd Union soldier in the back garden. Clive: Sort of sitting there befuddled, but angry. Bill: Mmmm... well, in a shallow grave... Clive: Ooh, my god! Bill: ... where he had been tucked under the privet hedge. (Laughter all around) Clive: Ooh, my god. Bill: And you know he was a Union soldier because there'd be the buckle and the buttons and these got knocked off during bivouac. Or went to bed with the wrong southern belle ... Clive: And just quietly offed in the night ... Bill: Yeah. And they'd turn up in the back garden. I grew up in a neighborhood of mostly pre-Civil War houses, so those were the original gardens. Clive: What's uncanny about that is there's this scene in this book, which I literally just delivered to my typist. A scene in which one the captains goes back to Charleston. One of the characters of the book, a captain of the South, deserts and goes back to Charleston just before the end of the war and finds his back garden has been turned into a makeshift graveyard. Bill: Eeuuw ... Clive: So that goes straight to the heart of what I'm writing about which is uncanny and cool. He actually finds that the dogs have gone in and dug up the pieces. What used to be this kind of pristine garden before the war. And he remembers it as being the place where he proposed to his wife and his kids played and now he goes back and ... Bill: Well, you know you've gone straight to the motherlode of gothicism on this continent. Clive: You should see the big, shit-eating smile I've got on my face right now. (Laughter all around) Damn right, I know! You know what I did not know? What is interesting is I did not know. It sort of crept up on me. Bill: Yeah! It's sort of natural. I can't see you not being attracted to it. (Laughter all around) Charlie: Kind of like, "What took so long?" Clive: Well, it was realizing and having a friend in North Carolina and going out there and just sort of sensing it. And going to Charleston. Went out to Fort Sumtner together and he sort of looked at all of that neat stuff. So I have three more weeks and then I deliver this manuscript and then I guess it comes out in May. My editors in England called me this morning and said ... or my editor called me and said, "I really love this book." And god, that's such a relief because ... you know what this feels like Bill. Bill: Hm hmm. Yes. Clive: Nobody sees it. Bill: I know. It's very important. That initial phone call or two. Clive: It really is. And, you know, I cry. Tears always spring to my eyes. Like this time I'm sure I've written it in Sanskrit and don't realize. (Laughter) Bill: Well, I know when I finish a book I know that it's not only the worst book I've written (laughter all around), but that it's worst book that's been written. (Laughter all around) I always tell my wife that. Actually there's always a point where I go upstairs and go, "Oh, god, it's the worst book ever written." And she says, "Oh that's good dear, it means you're almost through." (Laughter all around) Charlie: Well, it's nice to have people who can understand the process. Clive: Oh, god. Suffer the process. Charlie: Well, I'd like to thank you both. This is amazing. Bill: It's been a pleasure. Clive: Real fun. Thank you so much for this. Bill: Well, thank you. Clive: My pleasure. |
additional reading an article another article |
|
|
abiv. |
|
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |