If anyone has noticed, I haven’t been writing much. At all. Some of this I blame on family drama and my health. I can’t force myself to write through some problems, no matter how hard I try. But it is how I chose to hide this fact that I am really ashamed of. According to my notes, this is Dirty Little Secret 657.
As my friends know, I am a big William Gibson fan…mostly because Gibson was the first writer to make me taste, feel, smell and hear language. Though many people consider Gibson a science fiction writer (and he was an integral part of The Movement a.k.a. Cyberpunk, a subgenre that combined the dystopian undercarriage of 80’s Reaganomics, the violence and apathy of punk rock, and an unholy marriage of technofetishism and fear of technology) he has mutated into a novelist with a command of language approaching (maybe exceeding) literary giants like J.G. Ballard and Cormac McCarthy, with the ability to describe in microscopic technicolor detail the society we are living in as opposed to a dark tomorrow that might be avoided. Genre writer or Great American Novelist, Neuromancer was the first novel I absorbed more as poetry than prose.
And it changed the way I wrote. Before Gibson, my writing idols were the aforementioned Ballard (High-Rise, Crash and Empire of the Sun) and Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero and American Psycho), both of whom are masters of description and density of setting and themes. When introduced to Gibson, it was like staring too long into the sun: it burned into my retina, these things he described:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
That one sentence has haunted me since 1990, like a ghost of some future Christmas where the presents were words for me to admire before unwrapping their meaning. It wasn’t like the other writers I loved did not have a certain poetry to their choices of verbs and nouns. But at his calmest, Gibson was like reading a poem in a wind tunnel. What came out the other end was streamlined, efficient (sometimes sparse), but colored with the range of human sensory perception. It is fitting that one of the most startling fictional technical achievements in the bleak future of “The Sprawl Trilogy” novels was “simstim”, a kind of full-sensory virtual reality that had replaced movies and video games as the opiate of the masses. When I read Ballard, I get the same depth of the human soul and descriptive power…but Gibson managed to translate his descriptions into the full force and range of sensation. Thus it was more poetry than prose, at least to my punk rock ears. I wanted some of Gibson’s magic, and I read all of my Ace paperbacks of his first three books to tatters. Of course, back then he was a “science fiction writer” which is to the critic as “nothing special”.
When I went back to school, my first papers for Art Appreciation, Women’s Studies, and even Intro Philosophy were all more stories than true critical essays. But something clicked, because strangely the lowest grade I got was an A-. Maybe the teachers thought I had ADHD and felt sorry for me. Maybe they thought I was trying to impress them and felt sorry for me. Please let it be the former. …But it was probably the latter. Because I most likely was trying to impress them. Either way, in all honesty those assignments were horrible. I used every bit of poetry I could muster to answer rather straightforward questions concerning the subject matter. Bad poetry. I tried, in other words, to use big free-form sentences and descriptions like “the darkness of a dungeon and life becoming light helps Plato hone an almost religious need to examine the world and the nature of reality, turning the allegory of “The Cave” into an eldritch examination of education, and its lack, on our most base lower natures.” Maybe that means something, but I can’t really divide it from the bullshit it is encased in. I had not learned to properly apply description in a Gibsonian model. Perhaps I never will, but so great was his influence…well, I have to keep trying.
Unfortunately, when I began to run out of stories to post on this blog I dug into the pile of crap I had written for school, erased the date (or changed it) and uploaded it. Always read your own stuff twice before you let anyone but your dog hear or see it. Reading it out loud to your dog might even be a good idea. Backspacing over the class and teacher’s name and sticking a bad collection of sentences on your blog to hide the fact that you aren’t writing is NOT a good idea. I humbly ask for your forgiveness.
To make up for it, I promise to apply ever more flowery language and description in the future. And then burn it, scrape it across the page, and scrawl “The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel” instead. Or something.
(the dog told me it was a bad idea)
SOMEWHAT TRUE LIES 