... my hero...

I may have mentioned one or two times before that William Gibson is the closest thing to a god that this agnostic little jew has known.... Seriously, the way that man sees the world, and foresees it, it blows my mind....

And I think I may have just locked into the secret of the whole thing in this interview he did with Amazon.com:

"Amazon.com : We have your original proposal for the book up on our site, and the thing that struck me immediately was that none of the characters you discuss ended up, at least with the specifics that you give them at the time, in the final book. I'm just curious how you progress from one group of characters to another as you're planning the book or writing it.
Gibson: Well, I think the key thing there is that I never really believe in the proposal. 

Loves it....

No one ends up what they start out to be... The key is to not tie yourself too much to what you claimed in the beginning...

By the way, you can read the whole interview here on Gibson's website.... which you should check out anyway, cuz he just kicks all kinds of ass


***** i am adding to this post again... I did it twice already, and now it feels like cheating not to admit i jkeep coming back and adding more stuff... But I forgot how much I love this man... so many things out of his mouth are the ones i wished i had said first (if I had ever done anything worth asking me my opinion on these matters, anyway). This little gem is from his blog

"It’s unlikely that meeting a writer of fiction will get me any closer to the writer’s work, in my experience. The opposite effect is sometimes noted. Writers of fiction, as I understand them, are writers because they can get closer to you *as marks on paper* than they can any other way. They cannot sit and tell you. If they could tell you, then why would they write? They cannot explain. They do not know, that way. They know transiently, at best, in the act of marking paper."

... for the love of beards...

I have been following this blog ever since i first got a reader... in fact, it was the very first blog i ever added to my reader....

I love that she's been writing about, collecting images and even making beard crafts for almost 2 years...

loves it!

ps. if you want to secure my undying love or one whopper of a good mood, get me one of her yarn beards... i so want one

... the hunt....

I first read this article for a first year class. Actually it was this article that led me to consider cultural theory as a degree.

Someone reminded me about it today. I was talking about 'coohunting'. Not the website (no matter how much i love it), but the profession, marketing practice that was popular pre-internet. Searching through streets and stores and skate parks and dark bars for the people whoknew what was 'up' and then ripping it from their hands (or off their feet, their backs, their bookshelves and cd racks) and selling it to the public... forcing the alterna-kids to find the 'next big thing'.

It got me to thinking about whether that is possible, or even worthwhile in the exponentially faster trend cycle of the internet age... and so I went to search for it online. To remind myself what exactly that article said that made me so curious about spotting meaning in social symbol, and the process by which things become "things"... the journey of a real-world meme. and whether that process which so enchanted me a decade ago could be applied to the world i live in now...

.... and after some googling to avoid paying for a New Yorker Subscription to access their online archives i realized it was written by Malcolm Gladwell... The Canadian-raised author and theorist who had his 15 minutes when his books Blink, and the Tipping Point became the hottest things to pick up in the airport before a transatlantic flight, or a long weekend at the cottage. I always resisted, even refused, to read these books... for the same reason I hate Michael Moore movies. They have all the right ideas, but men like Gladwell and Moore make it so easy to fire off empty catch phrases without any content, research or thought... It propagandizes ideas which I actually believe to be true, worthwhile and useful. But they are never implemented or even studied because people would rather have the cliche than the lesson. It pisses me off that no matter how much I hate the Tipping Point for its Celestine-Prophecy-freakonomics-michael-moore-fly-by-night-nyt-bestseller list popularity Gladwell has a point...

I just think he pretty much summed it up in this article.... in 1997.

What does Gladwell think about trending in the internet age? I should probably read his book.

Its ironic that the only reason i dont want to read it is because everyone else loved it so much....