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(scan of the cover of my copy of Neuromancer -

is the computer trying to tell me something?)

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Trying to cram in as much reading as possible before The Return. Yesterday was devoted to William Gibson's Neuromancer (a text that has waited on the runway for several years). It is a fascinating 'novel' (such a term begins to crumble) and although written two decades back in the previous century seems - at least to me - to be an essential item in the toolkit for the 21st.

It's a text that comes at exactly the right moment as I'm trying to formulate ideas for the new course, for what I see going on (the U.K. riots, the Murdoch family and News International, gradual disintegration of the money markets) and for possible directions to follow. In the way Deleuze expected all literature to work: it is a book that demands you do something with it. In the short term, this means teach it (if only in extracts - I have to be realistic), in the long term - well ... plug it in and see ...

Today, I work through Larry McCaffrey's anthology Storming the Reality Studio which is abundantly useful both for throwing up new texts and reminding me of things I read years ago & could usefully re-read. After this post, I'll look into after yesterday's crash.

As always it's frustrating - as the free days evaporate so I strike a new seam. The Waves occupied a previous week (and sent out ripples into Woolf's diaries, essays, novels, stories). This week it seems to be Cyberpunk. I remember being asked on the last day of term what I was going to read during the break and tentatively suggested Wallace Stevens and The H.D. Book - but that I wouldn't be surprised if things took another turn. Well, I've read a little Stevens and not touched the Duncan (despite lugging it all the way to Burgundy and back). However there's been the Tanizaki ... Kawabata ... Jeanette Winterson discoveries ... . Go with the energy I tell myself.

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second attempt

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"I have a friend, Tom Maddox, who did a paper on my work. He's known what I've been up to for a long time - he says I display "a problematic sensitivity to semiotic fragments". That probably has a lot to do with the way I write - stitching together all the junk that's floating around in my head. One of my private pleasures is to go to the corner Salvation Army thrift shop and look at all the junk. I can' explain what I get out of doing this. I mean, I used to have to spend time there as a survival thing, and even now I'll go in and find something I want." (interview with Gibson in the McCaffrey anthology)

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"To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to control. True names ..." (Neuromancer, p 289)

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and surely one of the great last lines in literature:

He never saw Molly again.

(the simplicity ... the banality ... the pastiche of crud fiction ...

& the nod and the wink to the wise guy ...)