[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Gibson Blog's LiveJournal:
| Friday, December 25th, 2009 | |
| 5:01 am | HAPPY HOLIDAYS "Mean what you say, but don't say somethin' mean. Have a blessed Solstice." --Dr. John (known as the Night Tripper) on Twitter today  |
| 5:01 am | MY POOR OLD BLOG'S JUST SITTING HERE... While I write this book. Meanwhile, however, try this: @GreatDismal I really do find microblogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.  |
| 5:01 am | DUNCAN JONES' MOON My favorite sf on film usually consists of brief luminous moments in what are generally rather low-budget and often actually very bad movies. The outstanding big-budget exceptions of course being Alien and Blade Runner. Duncan Jones' Moon challenges my aesthetic of brilliant pebbles, though, because it's so tightly and consistently excellent. It does everything I want an sf film to do, and none of the things I don't want an sf film to do. How did *that* ever happen?  |
| 5:01 am | OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH "Aleph" as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever. Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring: PingWire Because you can't step in the same river twice.  |
| 5:01 am | GOOD THING I'M NOT AN ACADEMIC Had planned to sort through all the responses to my Orwell quote query and lay the result out here, but it turns out that I am a working novelist (among other things). So here's what I would tell you if you ran into me on the street and asked me about it: I doubt Orwell wrote it. It may have been cobbled together from a line in his essay on nationalism, and another, quoting Kipling, in his essay on Kipling. Weirdly, the very nearest thing to it is an authentic Churchill quote. As to how it became widely accepted as an Orwell quote, your guess is as good as mine. A great many of the people who most enjoy quoting it, I imagine, would actually be happier with it if it were a Churchill quote.  |
| 5:01 am | QUERY: RE THE AUTHORITARIAN'S FAVORITE ORWELL QUOTE "People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Often this is given as "Good people..." I have been unable to source this back to a specific piece of GO's prose. Have encountered the opinion that it is not an actual GO quotation. Can anyone help? Thanks.  |
| 5:01 am | WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE 'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?' -- Ta-Nehisi Coates  |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | FRANZ KAFKA, MEN'S OUTERWEAR DESIGNER He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for. "Who are you?" asked K., sitting half upright in his bed. --The Trial  |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | CIVILIZATION Video mural art for the elevator in New York's new branch of The Standard . Stuff's finally starting to look like the 21st Century. Next, your shower curtain.  |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | HOME OF THE WHOPPER The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. We lie daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, we would be quite difficult to deceive.  |
| 5:01 am | YES, THAT'S STILL REALLY ME On Twitter, as GreatDismal. I will get it hooked up here, eventually. Too busy in the gomi-strewn book-building hangar at present to sort that out.  |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | WHAT'S IN A NAME? Zero History, a novel in progress, by William Gibson  image: Alan Nazarian, 2009  |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | |
| 5:01 am | MAQUETTE Bigend’s office, when Milgrim was finally ushered in, was windowless and surprisingly small. Perhaps it wasn’t that specifically his office, Milgrim thought. It didn’t look like an office anyone worked in. The Swedish boy who’d brought Milgrim in put a gray folder on the teak desk and left silently. There was nothing else on the desk except for a stubby combat shotgun that appeared to have been made from solidified Pepto-Bismol.  |
| 5:01 am | TWITTER... Is one of those phenomena that don't easily yield to journalism. Its experiential nature is participatory. People tend to like things like that a lot, to the annoyance of journalists. Random Twitter factoid: bbcbreaking has (this morning) 90023 followers, but is following only 1 (one).  |
