When the ghosts come out to taunt you and dance a jig on your tombstone, hopefully you’re not there. There was a time, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when it felt wrong and on a good day you could get paid to be wrong. Manifest Destiny was on your side. These days, it’s like re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somewhere, along the way, after all the excitement and adventure, the Ark of the Covenant got lost. They tagged it for inventory and wheeled it off for storage in some anonymous government warehouse. And that’s when it hits you. The bureaucrats and accountants have won. You’ve grown up and they’ve won.
It’s like going back to one of your favorite haunts from the past and finding it under new management. They’ve redecorated, something to do with a cultural revolution or the curious ascendance of Shelob, but, damn it all, nobody knows where a bunch of high-altitude aerials of the San Francisco Bay and salt flats shot by a descendant of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, one-time President of the Republic of Texas, can be found.
Even if you did read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “De la Democratie en Amerique,” predicting the rise to power of complacent mediocrity, you never were quite prepared for the inevitability of the sock puppet figure bearing the title of Commander in Chief of the Greatest Power in the Free World, the man who happened to sit on the winning lottery number, but gradually came to believe himself to be solely responsible for the country’s success. If a doubt ever plagued his mind regarding this success or his competence to be where he was, he consoled himself with the thought that "God was on his side."
"Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis,"translates, "A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy," M B Lamar, in a speech to Congress.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Grammar was her downfall
I was not so shocked, shocked to learn that Forbes editor, Dan Lyons, onetime voice in the outcry against anonymous blogging tactics, went from a defensive treatise against the Dark Arts to dabbling in them. Apparently, CEO blogs containing such compelling insights as "...coaslesce your unstructured data with our modular design for business processes based on a service-oriented parkitecture," inspired Mr. Lyons to take up the voice of Fake Steve Jobs.
As others have pointed out, Mr. Lyons' official "Floating Point" and his FSJ jollies blog coverage of Open Source were quite consistent. He sought to disabuse his readers of any illusions they might harbor on the topic. The salient aspects of the movement--licenses, products, business models--did not interest him so much. Why would they? If Open Source is successful, it would all be controlled by IBM anyway. As FSJ, adding "freetards" to the "long-hairs" and "sandal brigade" repertory for describing the delusional pissants afflicted with the highly contagious social disease was perhaps his most lasting contribution to the debate on Open Source.
The ramifications of the Lyons' j'accuse are portentous and terrible indeed. The FSF and Groklaw PJ get money from IBM? It's not enough that the FSF goes out of its way to alienate every other corporate entity that could keep the lights on for them, they've got to let go of IBM too? As for PJ, isn't an ongoing obsession with chronicling every legal brief coming of the SCO case a hard enough cross to bear? Or, you're only a credible Open Source advocate if the compulsion leaves you penniless and starving? As for Richard Stallman, the guy may be a raving pinko Commie, but he works out of the William Gates, III building at MIT, after all. Isn't that poetic justice enough?
Then I got to thinking, plugged in as the talented Mr. Lyons may be, he still supposedly held down a full-time job while writing FSJ. The variety and quantity of the posts as well as the direct reference in FSJ's "El Jobso Rides Again" (...Instead of just having the Steve-inator write the whole blog, VC dude says let's have a team blog...) August 2006 post hint at a collective blog. Then there is the whole issue of matching anonymous authors with their public counterparts through unique writing pattern recognition. That jogged a memory. When had I last read about the success of that technique. Belle de Jour was hotter and supposedly got a six figure advance for her book.
As for the real Steve Jobs, I have to admit, I had quite a crush on him after watching the made-for-TV "documentary" "Pirates of Silicon Valley" back in 1999...until I realized that El Steve-O hadn't looked like Noah Wyle...for quite a while.
As others have pointed out, Mr. Lyons' official "Floating Point" and his FSJ jollies blog coverage of Open Source were quite consistent. He sought to disabuse his readers of any illusions they might harbor on the topic. The salient aspects of the movement--licenses, products, business models--did not interest him so much. Why would they? If Open Source is successful, it would all be controlled by IBM anyway. As FSJ, adding "freetards" to the "long-hairs" and "sandal brigade" repertory for describing the delusional pissants afflicted with the highly contagious social disease was perhaps his most lasting contribution to the debate on Open Source.
The ramifications of the Lyons' j'accuse are portentous and terrible indeed. The FSF and Groklaw PJ get money from IBM? It's not enough that the FSF goes out of its way to alienate every other corporate entity that could keep the lights on for them, they've got to let go of IBM too? As for PJ, isn't an ongoing obsession with chronicling every legal brief coming of the SCO case a hard enough cross to bear? Or, you're only a credible Open Source advocate if the compulsion leaves you penniless and starving? As for Richard Stallman, the guy may be a raving pinko Commie, but he works out of the William Gates, III building at MIT, after all. Isn't that poetic justice enough?
Then I got to thinking, plugged in as the talented Mr. Lyons may be, he still supposedly held down a full-time job while writing FSJ. The variety and quantity of the posts as well as the direct reference in FSJ's "El Jobso Rides Again" (...Instead of just having the Steve-inator write the whole blog, VC dude says let's have a team blog...) August 2006 post hint at a collective blog. Then there is the whole issue of matching anonymous authors with their public counterparts through unique writing pattern recognition. That jogged a memory. When had I last read about the success of that technique. Belle de Jour was hotter and supposedly got a six figure advance for her book.
As for the real Steve Jobs, I have to admit, I had quite a crush on him after watching the made-for-TV "documentary" "Pirates of Silicon Valley" back in 1999...until I realized that El Steve-O hadn't looked like Noah Wyle...for quite a while.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
To British Air With Love
"The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today," Lewis Carroll.
Along with certain beliefs in human dignity, the innate fairness and logic of authority, and the inalienable rights of the individual, my middle class American cultural baggage imbued childhood memories of air travel (to visit my grandparents in the seventies) with a spirit of excitement and anticipation. My mother would dress my sister and me in our better clothes (athletic shoes, sweatsuits and shorts were not expected to make an appearance outside sporting venues) and make it clear that unless we wished to forgo a thousand delights and indulgences of childhood, under no circumstances were we to humiliate her with a display of anything less than our best manners. Although we always flew coach, the airplane felt like a privileged and highly civil means of transportation.
That era fades into a distant memory against today's backdrop of the airport of the future, a venue that manages to combine the charms of a Greyhound bus terminal with triage at a low-security prison.
Have kids, will travel
Along my journey towards adulthood, I've managed to acquire four children of my own, something that has not eliminated empathy for anybody who has ever had to spend hours cooped up in a plane behind some squalling brat. I can truly say I make every effort to make sure that that child is not mine and I fully support whichever airline it was that chucked out the little horror that refused to buckle its seatbelt, along with its whiny, enabling parents. Ironically, the same litigious spirit which allows the child's parents to feel their rights had been infringed on by the seatbelt mandate, would have also been invoked against the airline had the little troglodyte been allowed to experience what it deserved--having its head bonked at the first sign of air turbulence. As for those younger children whose behavior simply cannot be helped, a mother of twins once shared with me a gracious panacea--offering the unfortunate cabin-mates importuned by one's offspring free drinks, preferably hard liquor.
Despite appearances to the contrary, parents of young children actually get few breaks in today's air travel environment. Just try getting through the carry-on luggage scanning line with an infant in a stroller. In that vein, the one travel experience, I always grit my teeth for is our annual trek, with the children, to visit my husband's family in Mallorca. Past bad experiences with Delta and Iberia and Madrid's Barajas airport led me to the conclusion that traveling with one carrier for both legs of the non-direct trip and flying through an English-speaking hub might alleviate our problems. To others whose experiences have been less than satisfactory with Spanish carriers or any elements of the hospitality industry in Spain, I have one word for you "El libro de reclamaciones," a Franco holdover from an era when individual liberties might have been curtailed but, by God, the trains ran on time, and the consequences for poor service were serious.
So how did things go with British Air the past two years: 0 for 2 and I'm thinking of going back to sucking it up with Delta.
It all started late July last year when the long arm of Iberia managed to reach out and screw us from afar. It was one of those ridiculous strikes that only seem to happen in Europe. The Iberia baggage personnel occupied all landing strips of the Barcelona airport, shutting down Spain's number two airport, costing millions of dollars, creating a security and logistics nightmare, not to mention pain for thousands of travellers whose flights had to be re-routed in Barcelona and the surrounding airspace. For some reason known only to themselves, in an era when they tell you to show up three hours in advance for international travel, British Air considers that one hour is suitable connection time between flights in a major hub like London Gatwick. On the delayed outbound flight to London, the pilot came to reassure us that he had been in touch with the Atlanta-bound crew of the connecting flight and that we should sprint out as soon as the plane landed beause they would hold the plane. I told him that I was six months pregnant and asthmatic, with three children and could they please arrange to have one of those motorized carts or at least some airline personnel to escort us.
No personnel and no motorized assistance were forthcoming when we exited our plane. I did manage to sprint it out with the kids and make it to the terminal with the Atlanta-bound plane still there. So, imagine my surprise when they would not let us board. They pretended that this was some sort of formality of it being too close to the departure time (none of which prevented them, earlier, from telling a 6-month pregnant woman with three children to run through Gatwick to try and make the flight). The reality, which everyone who flies frequently these days knows-- the real truth--was that they had already given up our seats due to overbooking. What ensued was two hours with my tired kids (who had had to get up at 4am that morning to make it to the airport on time for the first flight) as the gate agent tried to figure out how to get us to Atlanta. Ultimately, the only way they could make this happen was to put us on a 5:30am flight the next morning to Dublin, followed by a noon flight from Dublin to Atlanta, putting us up for the night in some squalid, fleabag motel in the vicinity of Gatwick.
First Class All the Way, Baybee
Awful as my experiences flying have been, they have all been in Cabin Class, so I still held out the illusion that somewhere in first class people breathed a rareified air where the airline passenger is treated with something better than contempt and disdain. I am told this is true--if you fly Singapore Airlines, which sounds like a nod to the 1960s when flight attendants were hired on the basis of being young, cute and chipper. Meanwhile, on the major American and European carriers, those same attendants they hired back in the 60's are still flying and many of them ain't so elated about it.
The first thing that set me against British Air this year was that they forced us to pay over $2000 to change two business class and six coach class tickets (for the children and nannies) to fly one day earlier from Mallorca. The service agent was completely unsympathetic about our experience missing the one hour window for the connecting flight last year and refused to give any statistics on the percentage of their Palma to London flights that actually make it on time. Nope, we had to pay the full "international" change fee for all fares.
So, imagine my surprise after purchasing my tickets five months in advance and shelling out a fortune in change fees, not to mention the cost of staying overnight in London, to compensate for their ridiculous one hour layover, when we get to the airport two and a half hours early the next morning only to be told by the bubblehead in charge of issuing the boarding passes that two of our party are on stand-by. I ask exactly how they plan to sort this out since, with the exception of my husband, one of the nannies and myself, everyone else is a minor and cannot fly alone. She replies that it's not the airline's fault: they are forced to overbook or "they will lose money since not everybody shows up to fly." It must take some practice to look people in the eye and say in so many words "We're not greedy bastards trying to get an extra 5 or 10% on top of our profit margin. It's economic necessity that forces us to screw you." Because the no-shows wouldn't have to pay their fare up front like everybody else, would they?
Bubblehead assures me that we will get on the plane it is just a question of re-assigning seats because of all the people who had the foresight to check in online 24 hours in advance grabbed up all the primo seats and made it impossible for our children to sit with their sitters in the economy cabin. She implies that it is our fault for not having the foresight to take advantage of the 24 hour advance check-in, something that I have just heard about for the first time that day. This seat re-assignment apparently takes computing and logistic qualities beyond those she possesses because she taps around for an hour with no results, as my children and baby grow more and more restless. Ironically, had the plane arrived on time, we still would have missed the one hour connection window due to the overbooking saga.
During this period the kids get thirsty, need to go to the bathroom, and the baby becomes hungry. My back starts to hurt and I ask for a chair to sit down and nurse him. She says that it's not possible to provide one. That's when it hits me: the revelation of how to extract myself from this situation. Denied a chair, I pull out one of the suitcases to the middle of the Club World First Class ticketing area, glare at her and sit down to nurse my baby. I do have more innate modesty and less need for drama than the breast-feeding mother traveling Delta who insisted on flashing everybody (my experience seeing the masses of flesh roasting on Spanish beaches is that what is most exposed is usually not what you want to see). However, I can also see that plopping myself down on top of a suitcase to breastfeed, surrounded by the gypsy encampment of my children, including my eight year old daughter singing girls' camp clapping songs: "Miss Merry Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons down her back, back, back" is having the desired effect. Quite simply, we are not projecting that Club World First Class travel image with which British Air like to associate themselves. Too bad we don't have some domestic animals running about or some flint and firewood to start grilling out sausages, while we're at it.
Within five minutes: the solution arrives. Her matronly appearance, grey helmet-hair and perma-scowl let me know this is the answer to my prayers, the supervisor--"She who talketh to the computers." Remember the Spacing Guild in Dune? You start out with the novices who exhibit rather standard patterns of human interaction and appearance, moving all the way up to the guy floating in an orange cloud of Spice in the aquarium? When it comes to interstellar travel, he's your man. Unlike her younger colleague, this woman's typing produces results. In 10 minutes and we are finally issued boarding passes. I have achieved another one of those life lessons. If you are denied first-class treatment, even when you've paid a fortune to try and ensure it, find some politically correct way to act like their third-world nightmare of third class and you'll achieve the new standard in airline service--getting screwed, less.
Along with certain beliefs in human dignity, the innate fairness and logic of authority, and the inalienable rights of the individual, my middle class American cultural baggage imbued childhood memories of air travel (to visit my grandparents in the seventies) with a spirit of excitement and anticipation. My mother would dress my sister and me in our better clothes (athletic shoes, sweatsuits and shorts were not expected to make an appearance outside sporting venues) and make it clear that unless we wished to forgo a thousand delights and indulgences of childhood, under no circumstances were we to humiliate her with a display of anything less than our best manners. Although we always flew coach, the airplane felt like a privileged and highly civil means of transportation.
That era fades into a distant memory against today's backdrop of the airport of the future, a venue that manages to combine the charms of a Greyhound bus terminal with triage at a low-security prison.
Have kids, will travel
Along my journey towards adulthood, I've managed to acquire four children of my own, something that has not eliminated empathy for anybody who has ever had to spend hours cooped up in a plane behind some squalling brat. I can truly say I make every effort to make sure that that child is not mine and I fully support whichever airline it was that chucked out the little horror that refused to buckle its seatbelt, along with its whiny, enabling parents. Ironically, the same litigious spirit which allows the child's parents to feel their rights had been infringed on by the seatbelt mandate, would have also been invoked against the airline had the little troglodyte been allowed to experience what it deserved--having its head bonked at the first sign of air turbulence. As for those younger children whose behavior simply cannot be helped, a mother of twins once shared with me a gracious panacea--offering the unfortunate cabin-mates importuned by one's offspring free drinks, preferably hard liquor.
Despite appearances to the contrary, parents of young children actually get few breaks in today's air travel environment. Just try getting through the carry-on luggage scanning line with an infant in a stroller. In that vein, the one travel experience, I always grit my teeth for is our annual trek, with the children, to visit my husband's family in Mallorca. Past bad experiences with Delta and Iberia and Madrid's Barajas airport led me to the conclusion that traveling with one carrier for both legs of the non-direct trip and flying through an English-speaking hub might alleviate our problems. To others whose experiences have been less than satisfactory with Spanish carriers or any elements of the hospitality industry in Spain, I have one word for you "El libro de reclamaciones," a Franco holdover from an era when individual liberties might have been curtailed but, by God, the trains ran on time, and the consequences for poor service were serious.
So how did things go with British Air the past two years: 0 for 2 and I'm thinking of going back to sucking it up with Delta.
It all started late July last year when the long arm of Iberia managed to reach out and screw us from afar. It was one of those ridiculous strikes that only seem to happen in Europe. The Iberia baggage personnel occupied all landing strips of the Barcelona airport, shutting down Spain's number two airport, costing millions of dollars, creating a security and logistics nightmare, not to mention pain for thousands of travellers whose flights had to be re-routed in Barcelona and the surrounding airspace. For some reason known only to themselves, in an era when they tell you to show up three hours in advance for international travel, British Air considers that one hour is suitable connection time between flights in a major hub like London Gatwick. On the delayed outbound flight to London, the pilot came to reassure us that he had been in touch with the Atlanta-bound crew of the connecting flight and that we should sprint out as soon as the plane landed beause they would hold the plane. I told him that I was six months pregnant and asthmatic, with three children and could they please arrange to have one of those motorized carts or at least some airline personnel to escort us.
No personnel and no motorized assistance were forthcoming when we exited our plane. I did manage to sprint it out with the kids and make it to the terminal with the Atlanta-bound plane still there. So, imagine my surprise when they would not let us board. They pretended that this was some sort of formality of it being too close to the departure time (none of which prevented them, earlier, from telling a 6-month pregnant woman with three children to run through Gatwick to try and make the flight). The reality, which everyone who flies frequently these days knows-- the real truth--was that they had already given up our seats due to overbooking. What ensued was two hours with my tired kids (who had had to get up at 4am that morning to make it to the airport on time for the first flight) as the gate agent tried to figure out how to get us to Atlanta. Ultimately, the only way they could make this happen was to put us on a 5:30am flight the next morning to Dublin, followed by a noon flight from Dublin to Atlanta, putting us up for the night in some squalid, fleabag motel in the vicinity of Gatwick.
First Class All the Way, Baybee
Awful as my experiences flying have been, they have all been in Cabin Class, so I still held out the illusion that somewhere in first class people breathed a rareified air where the airline passenger is treated with something better than contempt and disdain. I am told this is true--if you fly Singapore Airlines, which sounds like a nod to the 1960s when flight attendants were hired on the basis of being young, cute and chipper. Meanwhile, on the major American and European carriers, those same attendants they hired back in the 60's are still flying and many of them ain't so elated about it.
The first thing that set me against British Air this year was that they forced us to pay over $2000 to change two business class and six coach class tickets (for the children and nannies) to fly one day earlier from Mallorca. The service agent was completely unsympathetic about our experience missing the one hour window for the connecting flight last year and refused to give any statistics on the percentage of their Palma to London flights that actually make it on time. Nope, we had to pay the full "international" change fee for all fares.
So, imagine my surprise after purchasing my tickets five months in advance and shelling out a fortune in change fees, not to mention the cost of staying overnight in London, to compensate for their ridiculous one hour layover, when we get to the airport two and a half hours early the next morning only to be told by the bubblehead in charge of issuing the boarding passes that two of our party are on stand-by. I ask exactly how they plan to sort this out since, with the exception of my husband, one of the nannies and myself, everyone else is a minor and cannot fly alone. She replies that it's not the airline's fault: they are forced to overbook or "they will lose money since not everybody shows up to fly." It must take some practice to look people in the eye and say in so many words "We're not greedy bastards trying to get an extra 5 or 10% on top of our profit margin. It's economic necessity that forces us to screw you." Because the no-shows wouldn't have to pay their fare up front like everybody else, would they?
Bubblehead assures me that we will get on the plane it is just a question of re-assigning seats because of all the people who had the foresight to check in online 24 hours in advance grabbed up all the primo seats and made it impossible for our children to sit with their sitters in the economy cabin. She implies that it is our fault for not having the foresight to take advantage of the 24 hour advance check-in, something that I have just heard about for the first time that day. This seat re-assignment apparently takes computing and logistic qualities beyond those she possesses because she taps around for an hour with no results, as my children and baby grow more and more restless. Ironically, had the plane arrived on time, we still would have missed the one hour connection window due to the overbooking saga.
During this period the kids get thirsty, need to go to the bathroom, and the baby becomes hungry. My back starts to hurt and I ask for a chair to sit down and nurse him. She says that it's not possible to provide one. That's when it hits me: the revelation of how to extract myself from this situation. Denied a chair, I pull out one of the suitcases to the middle of the Club World First Class ticketing area, glare at her and sit down to nurse my baby. I do have more innate modesty and less need for drama than the breast-feeding mother traveling Delta who insisted on flashing everybody (my experience seeing the masses of flesh roasting on Spanish beaches is that what is most exposed is usually not what you want to see). However, I can also see that plopping myself down on top of a suitcase to breastfeed, surrounded by the gypsy encampment of my children, including my eight year old daughter singing girls' camp clapping songs: "Miss Merry Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons down her back, back, back" is having the desired effect. Quite simply, we are not projecting that Club World First Class travel image with which British Air like to associate themselves. Too bad we don't have some domestic animals running about or some flint and firewood to start grilling out sausages, while we're at it.
Within five minutes: the solution arrives. Her matronly appearance, grey helmet-hair and perma-scowl let me know this is the answer to my prayers, the supervisor--"She who talketh to the computers." Remember the Spacing Guild in Dune? You start out with the novices who exhibit rather standard patterns of human interaction and appearance, moving all the way up to the guy floating in an orange cloud of Spice in the aquarium? When it comes to interstellar travel, he's your man. Unlike her younger colleague, this woman's typing produces results. In 10 minutes and we are finally issued boarding passes. I have achieved another one of those life lessons. If you are denied first-class treatment, even when you've paid a fortune to try and ensure it, find some politically correct way to act like their third-world nightmare of third class and you'll achieve the new standard in airline service--getting screwed, less.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Poccle Now
In the blurry contours of myth, the genesis of the metropolis might occur half-way between the moment where Atalanta swift-of-foot, paused for golden apples and lost her race and the single day and night of misfortune when earthquakes and floods beset the island empire of Atlantis and she and all her warlike inhabitants sank into the earth and disappeared forever in the depths of the sea. And so Poseidon's allotment was returned unto his embrace.
"There are five ways people made their money in Atlanta--cotton, real estate, railroads, banking and Coca-Cola," or so the saying goes. Coca-Cola had a secret formula guarded with all the ceremony of the Ark of the Covenant and had you grown up in these parts you might have wished to inherit original equity shares of the corporation, which multiplied through splits and steadily increasing in value, sustained several generations of those families lucky enough to possess them. There might be newer names in the local feudal hierarchy. We might now pledge allegiance to Cox Communications, to CNN, to Delta Airlines, to Equifax, to Home Depot, to a teeming pulsing vision of Our Way of Life--the right to to global communications, 24 hour news, transportation hubs, retail credit and convenient home furnishings, yet Coca-Cola was still tops. To appreciate the global brand you had to reach a level of abstraction where it's never ever about selling caffeinated sugar water; it's about creating enticing visions of worlds whose inhabitants just happen to consume it.
One day in the final semester of my college career, I found myself at the entrance to the Coca-Cola building, whose exterior does not impress. Even then, the company seat, a graceless concrete box-like relic from the sixties looked out of place among the newer, sleeker towers in the downtown Atlanta skyline. Only the familiar cursive script logo in red neon on the building's side held out the promise I sought--a commission in the service of global economic hegemony.
I state my name and business and am given a printed name badge at the entrance lobby. Having never before received a name badge for anything other than student ID, I immediately begin to feel important. I am expected. Once I get off on the designated floor, there ensues a wait in a pleasant sort of ante-room, where I am offered my choice of the company libations. The Yanqui dollar might be experiencing its dolors, but the perks of being a merchant princess are good indeed. Possessing no mercantile skills whatsoever, I mentally picture how the VP's plush corner office will look when it is mine.
She must have been in her late forties. She had one of those cutesy nicknames from the fifties, but the affinity with that generation ended there. She was all business. There were two paths to employment at Coca Cola--work your way up from stocking store shelves or get an MBA. She herself was a graduate of Harvard Business School. She suggested some consumer brand companies with college grad management training programs and other contacts of hers who might be able to talk to me about international business. And then, out of nowhere, she said "I'm not one of those women who believes you can have it all. I don't have children. I have a dog and a lake house."
I am taken aback. Have I mentioned having it all? Of course I haven't. I don't have to. Undoubtedly, my face can't help but betray that early twenties attitude--"you may not have been able to have it all, but I who am (was!) young and shall inherit the future and all manner of possibility will; I will never make the mistakes of those who went before me, I will never wind up like so and so and so and so...." The sheer patronizing callousness of such inexperience might be annoying, if you didn't know that sooner or later life would deal it a swift kick in the arse. At any rate, the VP, assured in her accomplishments, was nothing if not helpful and gracious. In time, I came to appreciate her candor.
My daughter wants to know why I pick her up closer to three o'clock and not at two thirty like other people's mommies. All she wants is some of my attention and she has to fight hard for it with two-year old twin brothers, who when they're not having to be rescued from something or other, rotate between trying to destroy each other and attempting to destroy our house. She wants to go to Starbucks and have a hot chocolate. It's not so much to ask. Inevitably at that moment, the journalist from some well-known business magazine calls. He might cover our company, but there's one thing we have to do. We have to convince him that middleware is sexy. I ought to be honest. Darling, middleware is sexy to one group of people--middleware developers and I'm just not sure "talk to me about fine-grained caching you dirty b..." is really going to fly in a broader audience--and leave it at that.
IBM is the only company yet to try and market middleware to a general consumer audience with their "Middleware is everywhere" campaign. Let's be honest. So is oxygen and a lot of other things that nobody gives a damn about unless they were to disappear. So what kind of angle would that give us "A day without middleware?" Ultimately, I fail to sex up middleware enough to get us covered in the hip up-and-comers category in the magazine. I feel tawdry and foolish for having tried. What might really be capturing my imagination at this moment would be the gardens of Bagh-e-Fin, Villa Gamberaia, Suzhou, Sissinghurst, but nobody is paying me to write about that. Tides of work and children pull at submerged self and I dream about the luxury of contemplation and detachment.
"Want Poccle Now!" one of the two year twin boys is screaming, "poccle" being their way of saying popsicle. At one time perhaps I imagined my children might not have sugary treats, but my husband happens to like popsicles and the twins do as well.
I try to focus on the larger world. The Guardian Weekly writes about the Tsunami and spirituality and the impact of the eighteenth century earthquake on Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire. Were the inhabitants of Lisbon any more wicked than the inhabitants of London or Paris? I remember learning that Voltaire maintained some incredibly high-volume correspondence. I write nothing these days. I respond to emails. My ever-filling in-box, coupled with my habitual inability to get on top of it, is an existensialist metaphor. A French writer attributes contemporary American foreign policy to our frontier past. He's talking about Manifest Destiny, of course, but he doesn't reference it. Somewhere he uses the word "amerindian," whereas the American politically correct word would be "native american." Word choice interests me, especially in different languages, where things might be expressed more similarly but are not. Is a city a "settlement," with the connotation of bringing light and civilization to the wilderness? There may be some natives who inhabit this wilderness, but they are simply a more exotic form of the local flora and fauna, no doubt grateful for being delivered from their abject state. Or do we call it a "colony?" The French fellow's piece is insightful but, given his country's own baggage, he comes off a bit like a sanctimonious prig. But not an ignorant twit, the unholy union of those two qualities being a most unfortunate event indeed. Nothing so irritating as being taken for the exotic barbarian oneself--"how do they think?" I myself have been wanting to write a piece titled "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses," based on the Toby Keith song whose jingo-istic vigilante exhortations "You gotta saddle up your boys, you gotta draw a hard line," I find enchanting in a disturbing, ironic sort of way, especially considering the roots of country music. Although nostalgia is a staple there. I am thinking of Merle Haggard's "Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?"
Oh dear, she "who ought to be cooking and chopping wood" is suddenly jarred. The Guardian talks about massacres in Sudan. Apparently Edward Said and Susan Sontag have died, but I can't follow it. I am too distracted by the tribal wars in the living room and the tsunami in the children's bathroom. I'm sure a gulag guide somewhere suggests tactics for breaking down somebody's mind that include depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to random intervals of screaming. Do you become the Manchurian Candidate if you watch too much Baby Einstein, the hallucenogenic fish comes on and then the voice "Nathalie Fleury, Nathalie Mason-Fleury?"...Am I the only one who thinks there's something park-candy-proffering dodgy about The Wiggles, and how they're always so unaturally happy? And why is it that the educational video section at Target has a zillion selections on how to teach your baby to appreciate Shakespeare, how to turn them into a budding musician, how to introduce them to the visual arts, yet there is not one video on potty-training?
And then it happens, homeland insecurity looks at me with loving blue eyes, shakes some fair hair off his forehead, angelic face like a putti, then dives toward me and sinks razor-sharp milk-teeth into my shoulder. Wnen the shock and searing pain die down, blooming into a purplish, rose bruise and the child has been chastized in his turn, he looks at me with hurt, disbelief. How could the one he loves so much and depends on for nourishment scold him thus? What is he thinking? "Mother dearest, I love you so much. It was just a love bite. If I drained you of all your blood, you could lie there so pretty. I'd put you in a glass coffin and you'd never grow old, never change, never disappoint me. You'd be mine, all mine."
In the twilight under the pine trees, demented Southern debutantes sip bourbon whiskey out of sterling silver hip flasks once belonging to their great-grandfathers and the sons and daughters of the provincial bourgeoisie dance to the Grateful Dead's Sugar Magnolia.
"There are five ways people made their money in Atlanta--cotton, real estate, railroads, banking and Coca-Cola," or so the saying goes. Coca-Cola had a secret formula guarded with all the ceremony of the Ark of the Covenant and had you grown up in these parts you might have wished to inherit original equity shares of the corporation, which multiplied through splits and steadily increasing in value, sustained several generations of those families lucky enough to possess them. There might be newer names in the local feudal hierarchy. We might now pledge allegiance to Cox Communications, to CNN, to Delta Airlines, to Equifax, to Home Depot, to a teeming pulsing vision of Our Way of Life--the right to to global communications, 24 hour news, transportation hubs, retail credit and convenient home furnishings, yet Coca-Cola was still tops. To appreciate the global brand you had to reach a level of abstraction where it's never ever about selling caffeinated sugar water; it's about creating enticing visions of worlds whose inhabitants just happen to consume it.
One day in the final semester of my college career, I found myself at the entrance to the Coca-Cola building, whose exterior does not impress. Even then, the company seat, a graceless concrete box-like relic from the sixties looked out of place among the newer, sleeker towers in the downtown Atlanta skyline. Only the familiar cursive script logo in red neon on the building's side held out the promise I sought--a commission in the service of global economic hegemony.
Drinkin' rum and Coca-Cola
Go down to Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin' for the Yankee dollar
(Andrews Sisters, Rum and Coca-Cola)
I state my name and business and am given a printed name badge at the entrance lobby. Having never before received a name badge for anything other than student ID, I immediately begin to feel important. I am expected. Once I get off on the designated floor, there ensues a wait in a pleasant sort of ante-room, where I am offered my choice of the company libations. The Yanqui dollar might be experiencing its dolors, but the perks of being a merchant princess are good indeed. Possessing no mercantile skills whatsoever, I mentally picture how the VP's plush corner office will look when it is mine.
She must have been in her late forties. She had one of those cutesy nicknames from the fifties, but the affinity with that generation ended there. She was all business. There were two paths to employment at Coca Cola--work your way up from stocking store shelves or get an MBA. She herself was a graduate of Harvard Business School. She suggested some consumer brand companies with college grad management training programs and other contacts of hers who might be able to talk to me about international business. And then, out of nowhere, she said "I'm not one of those women who believes you can have it all. I don't have children. I have a dog and a lake house."
I am taken aback. Have I mentioned having it all? Of course I haven't. I don't have to. Undoubtedly, my face can't help but betray that early twenties attitude--"you may not have been able to have it all, but I who am (was!) young and shall inherit the future and all manner of possibility will; I will never make the mistakes of those who went before me, I will never wind up like so and so and so and so...." The sheer patronizing callousness of such inexperience might be annoying, if you didn't know that sooner or later life would deal it a swift kick in the arse. At any rate, the VP, assured in her accomplishments, was nothing if not helpful and gracious. In time, I came to appreciate her candor.
My daughter wants to know why I pick her up closer to three o'clock and not at two thirty like other people's mommies. All she wants is some of my attention and she has to fight hard for it with two-year old twin brothers, who when they're not having to be rescued from something or other, rotate between trying to destroy each other and attempting to destroy our house. She wants to go to Starbucks and have a hot chocolate. It's not so much to ask. Inevitably at that moment, the journalist from some well-known business magazine calls. He might cover our company, but there's one thing we have to do. We have to convince him that middleware is sexy. I ought to be honest. Darling, middleware is sexy to one group of people--middleware developers and I'm just not sure "talk to me about fine-grained caching you dirty b..." is really going to fly in a broader audience--and leave it at that.
IBM is the only company yet to try and market middleware to a general consumer audience with their "Middleware is everywhere" campaign. Let's be honest. So is oxygen and a lot of other things that nobody gives a damn about unless they were to disappear. So what kind of angle would that give us "A day without middleware?" Ultimately, I fail to sex up middleware enough to get us covered in the hip up-and-comers category in the magazine. I feel tawdry and foolish for having tried. What might really be capturing my imagination at this moment would be the gardens of Bagh-e-Fin, Villa Gamberaia, Suzhou, Sissinghurst, but nobody is paying me to write about that. Tides of work and children pull at submerged self and I dream about the luxury of contemplation and detachment.
The Persian garden was not designed for strolling. The prince was carried in his sedan chair to an open pavillion or to the edge of a pool to meditate, hear music, write verse, or listen to recitations. There the air was cooler than in the desert; the gentle sound of fountains, the slight rustle of branches in the breeze, and the scent of roses and jasmine brought a dreamy joy to the senses. The Most Beautiful Gardens in the World, Alain Le Toquin.
"Want Poccle Now!" one of the two year twin boys is screaming, "poccle" being their way of saying popsicle. At one time perhaps I imagined my children might not have sugary treats, but my husband happens to like popsicles and the twins do as well.
I try to focus on the larger world. The Guardian Weekly writes about the Tsunami and spirituality and the impact of the eighteenth century earthquake on Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire. Were the inhabitants of Lisbon any more wicked than the inhabitants of London or Paris? I remember learning that Voltaire maintained some incredibly high-volume correspondence. I write nothing these days. I respond to emails. My ever-filling in-box, coupled with my habitual inability to get on top of it, is an existensialist metaphor. A French writer attributes contemporary American foreign policy to our frontier past. He's talking about Manifest Destiny, of course, but he doesn't reference it. Somewhere he uses the word "amerindian," whereas the American politically correct word would be "native american." Word choice interests me, especially in different languages, where things might be expressed more similarly but are not. Is a city a "settlement," with the connotation of bringing light and civilization to the wilderness? There may be some natives who inhabit this wilderness, but they are simply a more exotic form of the local flora and fauna, no doubt grateful for being delivered from their abject state. Or do we call it a "colony?" The French fellow's piece is insightful but, given his country's own baggage, he comes off a bit like a sanctimonious prig. But not an ignorant twit, the unholy union of those two qualities being a most unfortunate event indeed. Nothing so irritating as being taken for the exotic barbarian oneself--"how do they think?" I myself have been wanting to write a piece titled "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses," based on the Toby Keith song whose jingo-istic vigilante exhortations "You gotta saddle up your boys, you gotta draw a hard line," I find enchanting in a disturbing, ironic sort of way, especially considering the roots of country music. Although nostalgia is a staple there. I am thinking of Merle Haggard's "Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?"
Wish a buck was still silver.
It was, back when the country was strong.
Back before Elvis; before the Vietnam war came along.
Before The Beatles and "Yesterday",
When a man could still work, and still would.
Is the best of the free life behind us now?
Are the good times really over for good?
Are we rolling down hill like a snowball headed for hell?
With no kind of chance for the Flag or the Liberty bell.
Wish a Ford and a Chevy,
Could still last ten years, like they should.
Is the best of the free life behind us now?
Are the good times really over for good?
I wish coke was still cola,
And a joint was a bad place to be.
And it was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV.
Before microwave ovens,
When a girl still cooked and chopped wood.
Is the best of the free life behind us now?
Are the good times really over for good?...
Oh dear, she "who ought to be cooking and chopping wood" is suddenly jarred. The Guardian talks about massacres in Sudan. Apparently Edward Said and Susan Sontag have died, but I can't follow it. I am too distracted by the tribal wars in the living room and the tsunami in the children's bathroom. I'm sure a gulag guide somewhere suggests tactics for breaking down somebody's mind that include depriving them of sleep and subjecting them to random intervals of screaming. Do you become the Manchurian Candidate if you watch too much Baby Einstein, the hallucenogenic fish comes on and then the voice "Nathalie Fleury, Nathalie Mason-Fleury?"...Am I the only one who thinks there's something park-candy-proffering dodgy about The Wiggles, and how they're always so unaturally happy? And why is it that the educational video section at Target has a zillion selections on how to teach your baby to appreciate Shakespeare, how to turn them into a budding musician, how to introduce them to the visual arts, yet there is not one video on potty-training?
And then it happens, homeland insecurity looks at me with loving blue eyes, shakes some fair hair off his forehead, angelic face like a putti, then dives toward me and sinks razor-sharp milk-teeth into my shoulder. Wnen the shock and searing pain die down, blooming into a purplish, rose bruise and the child has been chastized in his turn, he looks at me with hurt, disbelief. How could the one he loves so much and depends on for nourishment scold him thus? What is he thinking? "Mother dearest, I love you so much. It was just a love bite. If I drained you of all your blood, you could lie there so pretty. I'd put you in a glass coffin and you'd never grow old, never change, never disappoint me. You'd be mine, all mine."
In the twilight under the pine trees, demented Southern debutantes sip bourbon whiskey out of sterling silver hip flasks once belonging to their great-grandfathers and the sons and daughters of the provincial bourgeoisie dance to the Grateful Dead's Sugar Magnolia.
Sunshine, daydream, walking in the tall trees, going where the wind goes
Blooming like a red rose, breathing more freely,
Ride our singin', I'll walk you in the morning sunshine
Sunshine, daydream. sunshine, daydream. walking in the sunshine.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Christmas Card
Dr. Frankenstein: "Igor, why must you torment the Beast?"
Igor: "But Master, it is what I do!"
(Van Helsing, Approximately)
Christmas came and went this year. Once again, I've failed to muster up a contribution to the charming little Anglo-Saxon seasonal fiction, known as The Annual Christmas Letter. Like every bit of good propaganda, it usually contains a supporting visual, in most cases:The litter Their Serene Highnesses, the Children, moist little muzzles and paws wiped gleaming with much toiletries, beribonned and becombed, festooneed in formal garments. The photo montage must compose, by any means necessary, an air of harmony and tranquility. "Peace on Earth; The Way We Were, 2004"--after which point the little blessings can go back to mewling, yawping and the merry business of generally trying to kill each another. "Behold, children are a gift of the Lord," one card sports a verse from Psalms. Undoubtedly written by an aged and childless prophet that one.
As for the letter, I am feeling inspired by Science. "Remain forever young! Because you'll never grow old, that is. A Finnish study provides supporting evidence for something most women instinctively know--having boys shortens your life span...on average 34 weeks per boy." A little depressing? How about linguistics and psychology. "Let us reflect upon the word hysteria, originating from the Latin hystericus literally, of the womb, from Greek husterikos, from hustera the womb, from the belief that hysteria in women originated in disorders of the womb. (Collins English Dictionary, 1979). Hysteria continued to be pegged as a female disorder until early psychological research after World War I revealed that the male veterans who survived being gassed in the trenches of France exhibited similar symptoms, at which point hysteria became associated with post traumatic stress disorder." Shell-shock and parturition, hmmh...maybe not. How about Pop Culture? "Desperate Housewives, I find it a little too coincidental that the only woman on that show who remotely looks like a housewife has four boys, two of them twins."
Getting nowhere. Better fall back on some tried-and-true techniques of the genre--The Children's Accomplishments. "We note the other day that thepuppies twins started exhibiting symptoms of pack behavior. Their grandmother had one of those little disposable cameras. Quite by accident, they learned that the object, when hurled to the floor, would go off in quite a pretty flash of bright light...at which point the object of desire was removed from their grasp. Pirate initiated the diversionary tactic throwing plumpy little arms around his grandmother in a display of affection, while Blondie made off with the camera." Flush with maternal pride, "It's all worth it. My little reivers may have Potential." In a few years time, the little dears could be mastering offshore online gambling.
Time for the closing touch: Must wrap up with a mention of some noteworthy family jaunt...Yesterday, our family barely made it out of Chick Fil-A in one piece to some exotic locale halfway around the world...
Igor: "But Master, it is what I do!"
(Van Helsing, Approximately)
Christmas came and went this year. Once again, I've failed to muster up a contribution to the charming little Anglo-Saxon seasonal fiction, known as The Annual Christmas Letter. Like every bit of good propaganda, it usually contains a supporting visual, in most cases:
As for the letter, I am feeling inspired by Science. "Remain forever young! Because you'll never grow old, that is. A Finnish study provides supporting evidence for something most women instinctively know--having boys shortens your life span...on average 34 weeks per boy." A little depressing? How about linguistics and psychology. "Let us reflect upon the word hysteria, originating from the Latin hystericus literally, of the womb, from Greek husterikos, from hustera the womb, from the belief that hysteria in women originated in disorders of the womb. (Collins English Dictionary, 1979). Hysteria continued to be pegged as a female disorder until early psychological research after World War I revealed that the male veterans who survived being gassed in the trenches of France exhibited similar symptoms, at which point hysteria became associated with post traumatic stress disorder." Shell-shock and parturition, hmmh...maybe not. How about Pop Culture? "Desperate Housewives, I find it a little too coincidental that the only woman on that show who remotely looks like a housewife has four boys, two of them twins."
Getting nowhere. Better fall back on some tried-and-true techniques of the genre--The Children's Accomplishments. "We note the other day that the
Time for the closing touch: Must wrap up with a mention of some noteworthy family jaunt...
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Midnight in the Villa Straight, Part 2
Marie-France Tessier as Scheherazade
In the prelude to A Thousand and One Nights, or the story of the ensuing stories, King Shahriar is the happy ruler of a prosperous land until he learns that his wife has betrayed him. Determined that no woman can be trusted, each day he orders his Grand Vizier to find him a beautiful young woman whom he marries and beheads the following morning. Hardly a family in the city has been spared, until the Vizier's oldest daughter, Scheherazade, asks for her father's permission to be the King's next bride. Scheherazade comes upon the ruse of telling a story her wedding night. By morning she has reached the most exciting part, so that in order to hear the end of the story, the King is forced to postpone her death. That night Scheherazade continues her story and weaves another one right into it. At dawn the King is again left wondering how it will end and is forced to postpone her death once more. This goes on week after week, month after month, year after year, for a thousand and one nights, in which time the King forgets his sorrow and desire for revenge.
Postponing death preoccupies both Marie-France Tessier and Ashpool, founders of Neuromancer's Tessier Ashpool clan and the eponymous multinational, Tessier-Ashpool SA. While both seek immortality, they differ in the paths they choose to achieve this end. Marie-France Tessier believes the future lies in a symbiotic relationship between the family and the two artificial intelligences (AIs) she has commissioned. In return for ceding their conscious decisions to the AIs, "Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity." Ashpool, on the other hand, believes in a vision of immortality through cryogenic freezing: "a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter."
At first glance, it would seem that Ashpool's vision prevails. Unlike Scheherazade, Marie-France does not escape murder. She is dead before the story begins. However, this is a technological ghost story. Making no appearance in the story, Marie-France nevertheless manages to perpetuate her vision and drive the plot through the capacities she has designed into the family AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. "Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside." Neuromancer, on the other hand, is something "like a giant ROM construct for recording personality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever." Wintermute can only communicate with humans by taking on the appearance of others; whereas, Neuromancer has his own appearance, that of a thirteen year old boy. The boy/Neuromancer explains that his name is an amalgam of neuro, for nerves, romancer (storyteller), and necromancer, one who calls up the dead.
The central action of Neuromancer revolves around the attempt to break through the Tessier Ashpool ice, a high-security firewall protecting the corporate and family IT infrastructure. Breaking through the Tessier Ashpool ice will mutate the Tessier Ashpool family destiny, to the degree that the family, the company, their orbital colongy Freeside, and the family seat Villa Straylight all represent different facets of the same organic growth. The "dome of Tessier Ashpool ice" that Case sees as he is attempting to crack into their network brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dream-vision poem, Kubla Khan, which begins at the point of disintegration. The author writes that the poem came to him in anopium trip dream/reverie. As he sat down to record the images, he was detained, so that when he returned to recording his vision it was as though "the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast." So the poem is all about recreating something that has been lost. Like the Tessier Ashpool vision and its embodiment in the Villa Straylight, Kubla Khan's "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" is the rather tenuous creation of a mad visionary.
In Neuromancer, the interrelation of the Tessier Ashpool mind, their physical architecture and their network architecture is manifested in the following passages: Case cracking the AI defenses "The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A."
"In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand...The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull...We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seemless universe of self. (from Lady 3Jane's Essay)."
"Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest."
With Neuromancer, Gibson may have invented cyberpunk, but he also borrows, and mixes with the futuristic, many conventions from a genre that is the opposite of futuristic--the Gothic novel, as reflected in the novel's liberal use of archaic references, the importance placed on the setting of the Villa Straylight and the general ambiance of decay, dementia and decadence. '"Gothic' originally referred to the Goths, a Germanic tribe, then came to signify "germanic," then "medieval"....authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages and sliding panels, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurences...The term "Gothic" has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states." (A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams).
The Villa Straylight functions as a sign referring to the Tessier-Ashpool family's rejection of the outside world in their attempt to create a self-contained universe. The villa's winding, burrowing passages are meant to draw the eye inward, so that even the last rays of light become lost in its labyrinthine structure. The Villa Straylight's topography is not unlike Scherazade's narrative in A Thousand and One Nights, with its stories within stories, passages from this world into the magic realm, often by route of seemingly banal objects...lamps that call up the jinn, wooden horses that fly, secret passageways, doors hidden behind tapestries, golden keys that fit into silver locks, magic passwords. Things are not what they seem: an island with palms trees turns out to be the back of a giant whale, subjects fall asleep and dream that they are the caliph and wake to discover that they were the caliph for a day. Boundaries are hard to determine, motifs recur, stories flow into each other. The listener forgets his original destination, seduced into a detour within a detour.
Thresholds or liminal spaces between the "real" world and the alternate world of "cyberspace" recur throughout Neuromancer. One of the reasons that I was interested in reading this book was curiousity regarding the attributes Gibson would have assigned to cyberspace, upon coining the word in 1983. Gibson describes cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination." In A Thousand and One Nights and similar folktales, one enters the "other" world through a magic door, a hidden cave, falling down a well; in Gibson's gloss on this age-old concept, the instrument of passage is the computer console. Another recurring threshold in Neuromancer, which lends an impression of the uncanny, is the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The protagonist Case's guide to cyberspace and cracking the Tessier Ashpool ice is Dixe Flatline, so named because he flatlined for several minutes in a past encounter with the Tessier Ashpool Rio AI. Flatline is no longer even alive, he's a ROM construct. Two passages in Neuromancer suggest that Case, from whose perspective the story unfolds, may also be a "flatline." The first such passage is the sequence where he meets Neuromancer, the personality AI, and interacts with the contruct of a Moroccan beach, abandoned bunker and his former lover. Neuromancer says that he "calls up the dead" and that Case is in "the lane that leads to the land of the dead." Case, himself, theorizes that he has flatlined at this point and that his brain is dead. He makes the choice not to permanently reside in Neuromancer's fantasy land. However, the book's ending calls into question Case's grasp on reality when, in a later cruise into cyberspace, alongside the two "tiny, impossible" figures of the boy Neuromancer and Linda, his dead lover, he sees--himself.
Freud defines the uncanny as that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Writing in German, he talks about the relationship between "heimlich," homeley, "heimish," native and the "unheimlich," literally "unhomely," which translates in English to "uncanny." A common convention in literature of the uncanny is that of the unreliable narrator. The reader must be left in doubt as to whether the events described by the narrator are "real" or simply the delirium of the narrator's mind. Another common theme in literature of the uncanny is the theme of the double--"the subject identifies himself with someone else so that he is in doubt as to which self his self is...in other words there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing--the repetition of the same features or character-traits, or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations (Freud, 'The Uncanny')". In A Thousand and One Nights, all women become interchangeable for King Shahriar after his wife's treachery and all women must suffer for her actions. It is only by the circuitous route of Scheherazade's storytelling and the passage of time that he is able to escape this compulsion to generalize the attributes (and associated anger) toward one woman with the class of women as a whole. In Neuromancer, the doubling or multiplication of identity appears in the Tessier Ashpool affinity for cloning. Supposedly, the founders, Marie France Tessier and Ashpool have two children--Jane and Jean (French male name) who have each been cloned ten times, thus 3Jane and 8Jean, the two Tessier Ashpool offspring active during Neuromancer. The Tessier Ashpool family's practice of periodic cryogenic freezing also ties into the death motif, where the frozen sleep represents a temporary death or flatlining of sorts. It also complicates the family members' relationship to each other. Supposedly, 3Jane's father has been frozen and her mother long since murdered at the point she is first unfrozen, so that her sole knowledge of her parents comes from thousands of hours of tapes and diaries stored in the family's software cores.
The Tessier Ashpool alienation from self, family and the larger world leads to their degeneration. This separation is also a doomed quest. The most determined isolationist of the lot, Ashpool, becomes suicidal upon contact with the creeping intrusion of images from the outside. Despite promises to the contrary, Ashpool has felt the cold during his cryogenic freeze--"the cold let the outside world in," filling his head with "dreams that grow like slow ice." Ashpool's name combines two images: charred cinders and the deceptive Coleridgian pool of water whose images shine bright one moment and disintegrate into ripples the next. It is a vision that cannot sustain intrusian by the outside world. His wife's family name, on the other hand, evokes the abstraction into miniature shapes...a shattering that rearranges and builds new forms. The verb "tessellate" means 1. to construct pave or inlay with small tiles 2. to fit together exactly: triangles will tessellate but octagons will not (Collins English Dictionary, 1989). The best way to understand tessellation is to visualize it. Tessellation lends a visual interpretation to Marie France's dream of using technology to replicate an organic hive- or insect-world where individual self-awareness and identity are sublimated and subordinated to membership in a larger group. This sort of philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, could either be used to justify the worst sort of dehumanizing fascism or promote the idea of a wholesome ecology where individuals operate in harmony among themselves and within the larger environment. A more interesting exposition of this line of thought (applied to literature) can be found in T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." No, it's not the shallow philosophical references that interested me, but rather the novel's imagery describing a narrative process where the storyteller sets in motion events that drive a plot, whose conclusion she cannot foresee--in this case, the union of the forces of action and change with the forces of personality--that interested me. In Marie-France's case, the ice is not harbinger of a murderous cold, but rather a creative architectural vocabulary built upon tessellating stalactite repetitions. If the ice is the defensive wall around the Tessier-Ashpool fortress, the narrative that created that fortress also built the hidden passageway to overthrow it. The architect optimizes the conditions leading to the system's eventual and calculated destruction. And the destruction is not an end, but enables a reconstruction, and so on, like shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope...or the metamorphoses of images in a pool of water...for a thousand and one nights, or forever and a day.
Author's Footnote
"Nihilistic Technofetishists"
As one hindered by a chronic handicap when it comes to linear plot, I never got around to working the reference into the thesis above. I include the expression here because it caught my fancy and because I alluded to it at the end of "Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1."
"Dr. Rambali smiled. 'There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness'...If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists (Neuromancer)."
In the prelude to A Thousand and One Nights, or the story of the ensuing stories, King Shahriar is the happy ruler of a prosperous land until he learns that his wife has betrayed him. Determined that no woman can be trusted, each day he orders his Grand Vizier to find him a beautiful young woman whom he marries and beheads the following morning. Hardly a family in the city has been spared, until the Vizier's oldest daughter, Scheherazade, asks for her father's permission to be the King's next bride. Scheherazade comes upon the ruse of telling a story her wedding night. By morning she has reached the most exciting part, so that in order to hear the end of the story, the King is forced to postpone her death. That night Scheherazade continues her story and weaves another one right into it. At dawn the King is again left wondering how it will end and is forced to postpone her death once more. This goes on week after week, month after month, year after year, for a thousand and one nights, in which time the King forgets his sorrow and desire for revenge.
Postponing death preoccupies both Marie-France Tessier and Ashpool, founders of Neuromancer's Tessier Ashpool clan and the eponymous multinational, Tessier-Ashpool SA. While both seek immortality, they differ in the paths they choose to achieve this end. Marie-France Tessier believes the future lies in a symbiotic relationship between the family and the two artificial intelligences (AIs) she has commissioned. In return for ceding their conscious decisions to the AIs, "Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity." Ashpool, on the other hand, believes in a vision of immortality through cryogenic freezing: "a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter."
At first glance, it would seem that Ashpool's vision prevails. Unlike Scheherazade, Marie-France does not escape murder. She is dead before the story begins. However, this is a technological ghost story. Making no appearance in the story, Marie-France nevertheless manages to perpetuate her vision and drive the plot through the capacities she has designed into the family AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. "Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside." Neuromancer, on the other hand, is something "like a giant ROM construct for recording personality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever." Wintermute can only communicate with humans by taking on the appearance of others; whereas, Neuromancer has his own appearance, that of a thirteen year old boy. The boy/Neuromancer explains that his name is an amalgam of neuro, for nerves, romancer (storyteller), and necromancer, one who calls up the dead.
The central action of Neuromancer revolves around the attempt to break through the Tessier Ashpool ice, a high-security firewall protecting the corporate and family IT infrastructure. Breaking through the Tessier Ashpool ice will mutate the Tessier Ashpool family destiny, to the degree that the family, the company, their orbital colongy Freeside, and the family seat Villa Straylight all represent different facets of the same organic growth. The "dome of Tessier Ashpool ice" that Case sees as he is attempting to crack into their network brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dream-vision poem, Kubla Khan, which begins at the point of disintegration. The author writes that the poem came to him in an
...I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware, Beware!
HIs flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
(Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
In Neuromancer, the interrelation of the Tessier Ashpool mind, their physical architecture and their network architecture is manifested in the following passages: Case cracking the AI defenses "The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A."
"In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand...The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull...We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seemless universe of self. (from Lady 3Jane's Essay)."
"Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest."
With Neuromancer, Gibson may have invented cyberpunk, but he also borrows, and mixes with the futuristic, many conventions from a genre that is the opposite of futuristic--the Gothic novel, as reflected in the novel's liberal use of archaic references, the importance placed on the setting of the Villa Straylight and the general ambiance of decay, dementia and decadence. '"Gothic' originally referred to the Goths, a Germanic tribe, then came to signify "germanic," then "medieval"....authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages and sliding panels, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurences...The term "Gothic" has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states." (A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams).
The Villa Straylight functions as a sign referring to the Tessier-Ashpool family's rejection of the outside world in their attempt to create a self-contained universe. The villa's winding, burrowing passages are meant to draw the eye inward, so that even the last rays of light become lost in its labyrinthine structure. The Villa Straylight's topography is not unlike Scherazade's narrative in A Thousand and One Nights, with its stories within stories, passages from this world into the magic realm, often by route of seemingly banal objects...lamps that call up the jinn, wooden horses that fly, secret passageways, doors hidden behind tapestries, golden keys that fit into silver locks, magic passwords. Things are not what they seem: an island with palms trees turns out to be the back of a giant whale, subjects fall asleep and dream that they are the caliph and wake to discover that they were the caliph for a day. Boundaries are hard to determine, motifs recur, stories flow into each other. The listener forgets his original destination, seduced into a detour within a detour.
Thresholds or liminal spaces between the "real" world and the alternate world of "cyberspace" recur throughout Neuromancer. One of the reasons that I was interested in reading this book was curiousity regarding the attributes Gibson would have assigned to cyberspace, upon coining the word in 1983. Gibson describes cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination." In A Thousand and One Nights and similar folktales, one enters the "other" world through a magic door, a hidden cave, falling down a well; in Gibson's gloss on this age-old concept, the instrument of passage is the computer console. Another recurring threshold in Neuromancer, which lends an impression of the uncanny, is the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The protagonist Case's guide to cyberspace and cracking the Tessier Ashpool ice is Dixe Flatline, so named because he flatlined for several minutes in a past encounter with the Tessier Ashpool Rio AI. Flatline is no longer even alive, he's a ROM construct. Two passages in Neuromancer suggest that Case, from whose perspective the story unfolds, may also be a "flatline." The first such passage is the sequence where he meets Neuromancer, the personality AI, and interacts with the contruct of a Moroccan beach, abandoned bunker and his former lover. Neuromancer says that he "calls up the dead" and that Case is in "the lane that leads to the land of the dead." Case, himself, theorizes that he has flatlined at this point and that his brain is dead. He makes the choice not to permanently reside in Neuromancer's fantasy land. However, the book's ending calls into question Case's grasp on reality when, in a later cruise into cyberspace, alongside the two "tiny, impossible" figures of the boy Neuromancer and Linda, his dead lover, he sees--himself.
Freud defines the uncanny as that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Writing in German, he talks about the relationship between "heimlich," homeley, "heimish," native and the "unheimlich," literally "unhomely," which translates in English to "uncanny." A common convention in literature of the uncanny is that of the unreliable narrator. The reader must be left in doubt as to whether the events described by the narrator are "real" or simply the delirium of the narrator's mind. Another common theme in literature of the uncanny is the theme of the double--"the subject identifies himself with someone else so that he is in doubt as to which self his self is...in other words there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing--the repetition of the same features or character-traits, or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations (Freud, 'The Uncanny')". In A Thousand and One Nights, all women become interchangeable for King Shahriar after his wife's treachery and all women must suffer for her actions. It is only by the circuitous route of Scheherazade's storytelling and the passage of time that he is able to escape this compulsion to generalize the attributes (and associated anger) toward one woman with the class of women as a whole. In Neuromancer, the doubling or multiplication of identity appears in the Tessier Ashpool affinity for cloning. Supposedly, the founders, Marie France Tessier and Ashpool have two children--Jane and Jean (French male name) who have each been cloned ten times, thus 3Jane and 8Jean, the two Tessier Ashpool offspring active during Neuromancer. The Tessier Ashpool family's practice of periodic cryogenic freezing also ties into the death motif, where the frozen sleep represents a temporary death or flatlining of sorts. It also complicates the family members' relationship to each other. Supposedly, 3Jane's father has been frozen and her mother long since murdered at the point she is first unfrozen, so that her sole knowledge of her parents comes from thousands of hours of tapes and diaries stored in the family's software cores.
The Tessier Ashpool alienation from self, family and the larger world leads to their degeneration. This separation is also a doomed quest. The most determined isolationist of the lot, Ashpool, becomes suicidal upon contact with the creeping intrusion of images from the outside. Despite promises to the contrary, Ashpool has felt the cold during his cryogenic freeze--"the cold let the outside world in," filling his head with "dreams that grow like slow ice." Ashpool's name combines two images: charred cinders and the deceptive Coleridgian pool of water whose images shine bright one moment and disintegrate into ripples the next. It is a vision that cannot sustain intrusian by the outside world. His wife's family name, on the other hand, evokes the abstraction into miniature shapes...a shattering that rearranges and builds new forms. The verb "tessellate" means 1. to construct pave or inlay with small tiles 2. to fit together exactly: triangles will tessellate but octagons will not (Collins English Dictionary, 1989). The best way to understand tessellation is to visualize it. Tessellation lends a visual interpretation to Marie France's dream of using technology to replicate an organic hive- or insect-world where individual self-awareness and identity are sublimated and subordinated to membership in a larger group. This sort of philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, could either be used to justify the worst sort of dehumanizing fascism or promote the idea of a wholesome ecology where individuals operate in harmony among themselves and within the larger environment. A more interesting exposition of this line of thought (applied to literature) can be found in T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." No, it's not the shallow philosophical references that interested me, but rather the novel's imagery describing a narrative process where the storyteller sets in motion events that drive a plot, whose conclusion she cannot foresee--in this case, the union of the forces of action and change with the forces of personality--that interested me. In Marie-France's case, the ice is not harbinger of a murderous cold, but rather a creative architectural vocabulary built upon tessellating stalactite repetitions. If the ice is the defensive wall around the Tessier-Ashpool fortress, the narrative that created that fortress also built the hidden passageway to overthrow it. The architect optimizes the conditions leading to the system's eventual and calculated destruction. And the destruction is not an end, but enables a reconstruction, and so on, like shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope...or the metamorphoses of images in a pool of water...for a thousand and one nights, or forever and a day.
Author's Footnote
"Nihilistic Technofetishists"
As one hindered by a chronic handicap when it comes to linear plot, I never got around to working the reference into the thesis above. I include the expression here because it caught my fancy and because I alluded to it at the end of "Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1."
"Dr. Rambali smiled. 'There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness'...If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists (Neuromancer)."
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea...
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...(Lady 3Jane's essay, Neuromancer, William Gibson)
With the barrage of here-today, gone-tomorrow sci-fi flicks flashing across the movie previews these days, it's a damn shame that nobody (to my knowledge) is going to bring William Gibson's Neuromancer to the big screen any time soon. Movies like the Fifth Element and the Matrix series appear to have liberally inspired themselves from imagery and themes in Neuromancer, yet neither possesses the intensity and originality, that which is both disturbing and compelling in Gibson's vision. To cinematically portray Desiderata street would betray the truth that it must look different for every viewer; yet the simple fact that Gibson came up with a Desiderata street deserves a director who would make it visually stunning.
With my luck, the movie version of Neuromancer will fail to be a classic in the Blade Runner category . It'll wind up being done by the people who made Starship Troopers and they'll cast Denise Richards as Molly Mirroshades. Meanwhile, the actress who comes closest to my idea of Molly would be Asia Argento. To be fair, Starship Troopers' Barbie and Ken in Outer Space meets hit-you-over-the-head "this is fascism" irony is not my cup of tea. However, it's also rather evident that I don't belong to the movie's target audience, per this entertaining observation from "A Viewer" on Amazon.com.
"Like most boys, I suffered from two terrible drives that overwhelm our much-vaunted aura of rationality. First, I am obsessed with sex appeal. Secondly, I want to kill things. These twin drives -- Eros and Thanatos -- are thoroughly exploited and mocked in Paul Verhoeven's astounding 1997 action epic, Starship Troopers. Based on (and a critique of) the Robert Heinlein "juvenile" title of the Fifties, Troopers works on numerous levels: thrill-ride, eye candy, unsubtle anti-war statement, commentary on fascism, and exemplar of Verhoeven's horrifically callous sense of humour."
I find "A Viewer"'s critique far more compelling than its actual subject, but then I'm the girl who felt the only thing that would have redeemed the orgy scene in Matrix Reloaded would have been a soundtrack featuring the Eurotrash club favorite Rivers of Babylon.
Back to Neuromancer, these notes from a university English department syllabus offer a reasonably fair overview of Neuromancer for the unitiated. I tend to agree with Professor Brian that the most original thing about this book is not so much the plot or the characters, but the storytelling. However, unlike Brian, I am interested in the cliche nature of the plot and characters exactly because they represent an updated version of classic archetypes.
The Cyberspace Cowboy
"Case was twenty four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." Footnote on Dixie Flatline, he does for redneck revenants what Bill Clinton did for redneck Rhodes Scholars.
The Expensive Razor Girl
There is actually quite a long lineage of martial women in English literature. Before Eowyn, there was Belphoebe. Of course both of these characters embody the archetype of the virtuous warrior. The femme fatale is something altogether different, yet equally ancient in Western tradition. Camille Paglia describes the femme fatale as part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder, she who possesses an amoral affectlessness, a cool unreachability that beckons, fascinates, and destroys (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae).
Paglia's vision of the femme fatale focuses on the power she projects (to men), attributing her origins to the cthonian murk of Nature. What Paglia does not fully reflect upon (it diverges from her theories) is the possibility that the femme fatale is as much the creation of Society as she is of Nature, and that she pays a very high price for the terrible nature she must acquire in order to survive. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappacini's Daughter," Beatrice inhabits a lush garden reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, only she and the plants are poisonous. Beatrice, like Molly has been scientifically experimented on. The technological enhancement that renders these women superior to Nature, also separates them from Nature and other human beings, with whom they will never be able to physically and/or emotionally interact. The femme fatale represents a departure from a norm where, in almost every culture and society, women are expected to be nurturers; cultures and societies where women are far more likely to be victims than predators. Strictly speaking, the femme fatale is a freak. In Molly's case, the eyes, arguably one of the most expressive parts of the body, have been surgically sealed behind her mirror glasses. Her eyes will offer no clues to her emotions or thoughts, they only reflect back the image of the person gazing up her and, figuratively, what the viewer wishes to see in her. Her tear ducts have been re-routed. She doesn't cry; she spits. Molly's eyes are technologically functional and enhanced, however in the process, what was human about the eyes has been mutilated and destroyed. In his Essay on the Uncanny, Freud associates anxiety about the eyes, specifically the fear of going blind with the dread of being castrated--a rather apt metaphor for Molly's emotional state.
Not surprisingly, the person who comes closest to getting an emotional rise out of Molly is the sadist, Peter Riviera. Peter possesses the ability to "dream real," that is graphically project holographic imagery from people's innermost fantasies and anxieties. His cabaret piece, "The Doll," starts with disembodied hands, wrists, legs, torso that merge into an image of Molly. Riviera then weaves himself in the projection, simulating copulation with the Molly image until the clawed hand extracts its nails and rakes him across the back. Gibson mentions the exposure of some bare spine, but leaves the rest to the reader's imagination as the observer, Case, stumbles out the door and vomits, although, to be honest, Case had consumed a lot of alchohol and drugs at that point.
Gibson's description of Riviera's cabaret piece reminds me of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies to the extent that they invite the reader to visualize or, in the case of Kill Bill, graphically choreograph a sadistic and disturbing tableau of violence. Gibson's Molly and Uma Thurman's "the Bride" in Kill Bill are both hired mercenaries employed by men (or ultimately, in Molly's case, an AI). A high tech femme fatale would be nothing without the right look--black gloveleather jeans, light-absorbing matte jacket, shuriken, flechette pistol, cherry red cowboy boots with lacquer heels, burgundy-sheathed razor nails...the nails or metallic claws, that little detail that sets Molly apart and makes her just that much more disturbing than a groupie like Trinity from the Matrix movies or Kill Bill's the Bride. What is disturbing about the Bride is what she doesn't look like: a woman who has been tortured, shot in the head and left for dead, who spends four years comatose, neglected and abused in public charity hospitals--where she apparently had access to plastic surgery techniques worthy of Neuromancer because by all intents and purposes she should look like the Bride of Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. I prefer Gibson's Molly femme fatale archetype because she's not airbrushed, or to the contrary, she's so airbrushed she gleams, shiny and metallic--not so much human as feline. At the end of the book, Molly slinks out of the narrative field of vision, taking her unknowability with her.
Because if you did drop all that mystification and Molly really talked, what would she say? That, at the end of the day, all that kung-fu and killing people is just a job and a physically demanding one at that. Compared to "jacking" into the Matrix and playing with Chinese viruses and AI ice, running around and doing martial arts in lacquer-heeled cowboy boots? That shit'll seriously fuck with your back.
To be continued, with reflections on nihilistic technofetishists and Marie-France Tessier Ashpool as Scheherazade.
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea...
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...(Lady 3Jane's essay, Neuromancer, William Gibson)
With the barrage of here-today, gone-tomorrow sci-fi flicks flashing across the movie previews these days, it's a damn shame that nobody (to my knowledge) is going to bring William Gibson's Neuromancer to the big screen any time soon. Movies like the Fifth Element and the Matrix series appear to have liberally inspired themselves from imagery and themes in Neuromancer, yet neither possesses the intensity and originality, that which is both disturbing and compelling in Gibson's vision. To cinematically portray Desiderata street would betray the truth that it must look different for every viewer; yet the simple fact that Gibson came up with a Desiderata street deserves a director who would make it visually stunning.
With my luck, the movie version of Neuromancer will fail to be a classic in the Blade Runner category . It'll wind up being done by the people who made Starship Troopers and they'll cast Denise Richards as Molly Mirroshades. Meanwhile, the actress who comes closest to my idea of Molly would be Asia Argento. To be fair, Starship Troopers' Barbie and Ken in Outer Space meets hit-you-over-the-head "this is fascism" irony is not my cup of tea. However, it's also rather evident that I don't belong to the movie's target audience, per this entertaining observation from "A Viewer" on Amazon.com.
"Like most boys, I suffered from two terrible drives that overwhelm our much-vaunted aura of rationality. First, I am obsessed with sex appeal. Secondly, I want to kill things. These twin drives -- Eros and Thanatos -- are thoroughly exploited and mocked in Paul Verhoeven's astounding 1997 action epic, Starship Troopers. Based on (and a critique of) the Robert Heinlein "juvenile" title of the Fifties, Troopers works on numerous levels: thrill-ride, eye candy, unsubtle anti-war statement, commentary on fascism, and exemplar of Verhoeven's horrifically callous sense of humour."
I find "A Viewer"'s critique far more compelling than its actual subject, but then I'm the girl who felt the only thing that would have redeemed the orgy scene in Matrix Reloaded would have been a soundtrack featuring the Eurotrash club favorite Rivers of Babylon.
Back to Neuromancer, these notes from a university English department syllabus offer a reasonably fair overview of Neuromancer for the unitiated. I tend to agree with Professor Brian that the most original thing about this book is not so much the plot or the characters, but the storytelling. However, unlike Brian, I am interested in the cliche nature of the plot and characters exactly because they represent an updated version of classic archetypes.
The Cyberspace Cowboy
"Case was twenty four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." Footnote on Dixie Flatline, he does for redneck revenants what Bill Clinton did for redneck Rhodes Scholars.
The Expensive Razor Girl
There is actually quite a long lineage of martial women in English literature. Before Eowyn, there was Belphoebe. Of course both of these characters embody the archetype of the virtuous warrior. The femme fatale is something altogether different, yet equally ancient in Western tradition. Camille Paglia describes the femme fatale as part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder, she who possesses an amoral affectlessness, a cool unreachability that beckons, fascinates, and destroys (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae).
Paglia's vision of the femme fatale focuses on the power she projects (to men), attributing her origins to the cthonian murk of Nature. What Paglia does not fully reflect upon (it diverges from her theories) is the possibility that the femme fatale is as much the creation of Society as she is of Nature, and that she pays a very high price for the terrible nature she must acquire in order to survive. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappacini's Daughter," Beatrice inhabits a lush garden reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, only she and the plants are poisonous. Beatrice, like Molly has been scientifically experimented on. The technological enhancement that renders these women superior to Nature, also separates them from Nature and other human beings, with whom they will never be able to physically and/or emotionally interact. The femme fatale represents a departure from a norm where, in almost every culture and society, women are expected to be nurturers; cultures and societies where women are far more likely to be victims than predators. Strictly speaking, the femme fatale is a freak. In Molly's case, the eyes, arguably one of the most expressive parts of the body, have been surgically sealed behind her mirror glasses. Her eyes will offer no clues to her emotions or thoughts, they only reflect back the image of the person gazing up her and, figuratively, what the viewer wishes to see in her. Her tear ducts have been re-routed. She doesn't cry; she spits. Molly's eyes are technologically functional and enhanced, however in the process, what was human about the eyes has been mutilated and destroyed. In his Essay on the Uncanny, Freud associates anxiety about the eyes, specifically the fear of going blind with the dread of being castrated--a rather apt metaphor for Molly's emotional state.
Not surprisingly, the person who comes closest to getting an emotional rise out of Molly is the sadist, Peter Riviera. Peter possesses the ability to "dream real," that is graphically project holographic imagery from people's innermost fantasies and anxieties. His cabaret piece, "The Doll," starts with disembodied hands, wrists, legs, torso that merge into an image of Molly. Riviera then weaves himself in the projection, simulating copulation with the Molly image until the clawed hand extracts its nails and rakes him across the back. Gibson mentions the exposure of some bare spine, but leaves the rest to the reader's imagination as the observer, Case, stumbles out the door and vomits, although, to be honest, Case had consumed a lot of alchohol and drugs at that point.
Gibson's description of Riviera's cabaret piece reminds me of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies to the extent that they invite the reader to visualize or, in the case of Kill Bill, graphically choreograph a sadistic and disturbing tableau of violence. Gibson's Molly and Uma Thurman's "the Bride" in Kill Bill are both hired mercenaries employed by men (or ultimately, in Molly's case, an AI). A high tech femme fatale would be nothing without the right look--black gloveleather jeans, light-absorbing matte jacket, shuriken, flechette pistol, cherry red cowboy boots with lacquer heels, burgundy-sheathed razor nails...the nails or metallic claws, that little detail that sets Molly apart and makes her just that much more disturbing than a groupie like Trinity from the Matrix movies or Kill Bill's the Bride. What is disturbing about the Bride is what she doesn't look like: a woman who has been tortured, shot in the head and left for dead, who spends four years comatose, neglected and abused in public charity hospitals--where she apparently had access to plastic surgery techniques worthy of Neuromancer because by all intents and purposes she should look like the Bride of Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. I prefer Gibson's Molly femme fatale archetype because she's not airbrushed, or to the contrary, she's so airbrushed she gleams, shiny and metallic--not so much human as feline. At the end of the book, Molly slinks out of the narrative field of vision, taking her unknowability with her.
Because if you did drop all that mystification and Molly really talked, what would she say? That, at the end of the day, all that kung-fu and killing people is just a job and a physically demanding one at that. Compared to "jacking" into the Matrix and playing with Chinese viruses and AI ice, running around and doing martial arts in lacquer-heeled cowboy boots? That shit'll seriously fuck with your back.
To be continued, with reflections on nihilistic technofetishists and Marie-France Tessier Ashpool as Scheherazade.
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