BLOGGING FOR DOLLARS?

Well, dear readers, I knew all of that whining about being an unemployed hack for hire of a hobo wannabe writer fending off ridiculous job offers and jacking up your water rates would pay off someday.

Somebody wants to pay me to blog!

Now, before any of you wailing and crying and gnashing your teeth and pouring ashes over your head at the thought of having to pay to read my drivel, rest assured that said drivel will still be free; I shan't be discontinuing LIANT, and as far as I know my Hip New Employer doesn't charge to read stuff on their site, either. No indeed; said HNE, Backwash.com*, simply channels some of its advertising revenue to keeping its contributors in gum and mouthwash, or maybe it's in ramen noodles and Sanka, or maybe it's in Schlitz and cigarette papers, or maybe it's in teabags and carpet fluff.

In other words, I ain't getting rich off of this new gig, but as you know I'm a sucker for anything that nudges up that fame bubble, especially if that anything involves me doing pretty much what I'm doing anyway (Mark Ames' formula for evaluating such prospects – a ratio of fame to work, i.e. how can I squeeze out as much fame from as little work as possible – suits me as well!).

Look for me on the site pretty soon (as soon as I get this column posted to LIANT and a different one posted to Backwash, actually) under the in-your-ribs moniker of "Officially Elected Hobo Scribe."

I don't suppose I'll inflict quite so much municipal/Wyoming politics on the Backwash audience as I do on you (unless you think I should. Should I?) (hell, why should I start using my mindshare responsibly now?), nor so many book reviews, but I can prattle on about national issues and trends as well as anybody else, I guess, so that's probably what I'll do.

Well, that and my incredible collection of stories and nonsense about the Sewer King, the Oracle, Tad the Grocer, Jet Fuel, the Heart Surgeon, the Lady of the Lagoon, Squeaky, Sketch, and the rest of the gang. Nobody can ever get enough of those. Not even the people who know these characters personally.

Onward!

*Backwash, in the persons of the Bewitching Vagabond and the Zenball Wizard, having been the first big bad website out there to take notice of little ol' me and start directing traffic my way about a year or so ago. Once I was even, for reasons that are still unclear to me, one of the site's "Top 40" rates sites for a week in 2002. No accounting for taste. Or something.

BACK TO WORK... SORT OF

I started an extremely part-time job today.

It was fine, really.

I'm back in the wonderful, wacky world of retail, just in time to join a good friend of mine in completely freaking out getting everything ready for the end of mud season, when the tourists come back with their disposable income, unreasonable demands, and terrible taste in tee shirts. She insists that lots of people are going to queue up to buy tank tops depicting several cartoon moose pulling down their cartoon jeans (don't ask) and baring their cartoon butts (really: don't ask) at the viewer. I'm willing to stipulate that she is right, though I still insist that I'd really rather not meet those kind of people...
Still and all, I do need ink for my printer and electricity to run it and stuff.

At least the interaction is brief.

And it's going to be fine and dandy and mostly harmless. Our staff meetings include margaritas, and I will have zero responsibility, which is glorious, since I have plenty of that in my other other life.

Nice contrast there, today. At 4:30 p.m. I stopped being Kate Sherrod, retail peon and became Kate Sherrod, Municipal Budget Bee-hatch. Yup, that glorious day came at last: our "goal setting" workshop for the FY 2004 budget for the Town of Saratoga.

We're still in the process of figuring out the actual size of the pie we're going to get to carve over the next two months of workshops, meetings, strategy sessions, etc., so we didn't talk dollar figures, natch. Really, we didn't talk about much at all, except for the upcoming capital facilities tax election (May 6 - for god's sake, go vote, people! And please, vote yes! There's a county jail, a water plant for Dixon, a decent town shop for Hanna, a sewer lift station for Riverside, water line replacement in Encampment, and of course the community center in Saratoga at stake! And this is the most equitable way to pay for all of these facilities... and the county jail, which, you may remember, My Own Dear Personal Dad fought to construct more than TEN YEARS AGO when it would only have cost five or six million dollars is now looking more like 15 million, and do you think it's going to get cheaper if we don't lock in a project now?) and the community center, and the fact that our favorite local newspaper hasn't caught on yet that its favorite police chief has resigned, though the paper up in Rawlins has.

Ah, me.

But I digress, as usual.

Now you'll all have to excuse me. The aforementioned ODPF is hungry, and MODPM is off working an even more part-time job at the branch library, and so it falls to me to feed the boy. Into the kitchen wid' me!

LIBRARY MUSINGS

Just now I finished my latest library book – since I became a full-time hobo, I'm able to catch our little branch library when it's open, and of course I have ample time for reading – and happened to look at the date due slip on the front page.

The library acquired this book (Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune for those of you who care) in June of 1982, when it was first published and I was just 12 years old. I first checked it out in January of 1986, when I was 16. During that span of four years, only five other people read this book.

Only six others have read it since me.

With a little effort, I bet I could tell you who those eleven people are. There aren't that many science fiction fans around here to begin with, and few of those use our public library.

Regardless of whether I know who they were, I feel connected to them as I hold the book which they held, too. I feel their curiosities as I proceed through the story. I wonder what they thought of the subtle sexiness of Leto-the-almost-worm, the army of women he formed around him, the worry about a made-up planet's ecology that permeates every page.

I have a queer urge to try to track them all down and ask them. I want to see what else joins us besides common possession of this book. What other books bind us? What else do we share?

Who all of us is still trying to make a go at living here?

I look at the list of library card numbers and wonder, am I the last? Are any of those people still here? Will someone read this book after me, and who will that be?

What's the likelihood that this book will now just spend the rest of eternity gathering dust on that high shelf in the Saratoga Branch Library, until it all returns to dust?

How much of this physical volume's fate is tied to the likelihood that the Sci Fi Channel will continue its efforts to transfer Herbert's works to the small screen. We've had a good mini-series version of the original Dune novel and an interesting adaptation of Dune Messiah/Children of Dune mooshed into another show. Is a movie of God Empereror of Dune now in the works, and if so, how strange will James Macavoy, who played Leto in the recent mini-series, look with his face and arms poking out of a CGI worm suit?

Will that make more people want to read God Emperor? Will that send some curious 16-year-old to the Saratoga Branch Library to check it out, or just funnel him over to Amazon et al to buy a cheap paperback copy of his very own?

Not that even shitty paperback editions of new books are very cheap anymore. I hate to sound like a codger (OK, I'm lying: I actually pretty much get off on sounding like a codger, on out-codgering my coffee buddies. I know it's weird, but I also know that when I actually am a codger I will be well practiced at it, good at it, not shocked or ashamed or afraid of it. I will age much more gracefully than all of you dingalings who cling foolishly to the vanities of youth, you silly young whippersnappers, you!), but the sticker shock of seeing books that I could have afforded simply by skipping my coffee group once or twice a week now exceeding my former hourly wage by a bit is profound.

When I was a teenager, I bought the original three Dune books for something like $3 apiece. The Elric books (which I've also since checked out of the public library – I seem to be on a weird book-nostalgia trip these days, turning ever more often to the stuff I read in high school to see if it still gives me a thrill. It does, but it's a different thrill from what I felt then, but that's probably the subject for another blog) were $2.95 apiece when I was a teenager, and I snapped up all six of them in the course of a speech season's wanderings through the malls in Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs, then moved on to Moorcock's other slim volumes about Corum, Erekose, Jerry Cornelius, devouring like Agak and his sister Gagak until the supply was exhausted.

Of course, I can remember when candy bars were 26¢ with tax, too. And remember my cranky old grandfather grousing about how you used to get more chocolate for a nickel back in his day. My current ramblings are about as productive. I'm digressing, as I will with no editor to sit on me and make me stick to my subject, which was what again?

Oh yeah, the weird continuity of library books, and the likelihood that anyone else is going to borrow the one I just returned. Which is small; the population has changed rather dramatically since the first time I checked out God Emperor of Dune and the library's collection reflects this; recent acquisitions (narcissist that I am, I dub anything acquired after I left Saratoga in 1988 as "recent") tend more toward what I regard as true Old Fart Literature: endless hack mystery novels and westerns, with a smattering of "book club" books like Ahab's Wife, plus a complete selection of L. Ron Hubbard's awful Battlefield Earth novels (Beggars can't be choosers; someone bequeathed every last Scientoscatological one of these to the Read and Return section. I wonder if anyone has ever taken them out; unlike the rest of R&R, these still sit in the bottom of the spinner rack in perfect order, showing none of the wear and tear that paperbacks display almost immediately after first being opened. Definitely one-reader depredation on those suckers) no saner person would touch.

So, OK, this is the part where certain among my readership feel anew the urge to urge me to get a life already. I've just devoted something like 1000 words to my having checked out a library book that only a few other people have checked out. What next, a thorough examination of the dust motes slowly accumulating on my nicknack shelf? A discourse on the contents of my refrigerator? A song-by-song criticism of all of the tunes I ripped off during Napster's heyday?

Hey, you never know. Anything to dissolve that writer's block, you know?

Cuz you know, I aspire to being one or two of those dusty, infrequently consulted hardcovers on the shelves there someday myself.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)

Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.

But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.

Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.

Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.

Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":

Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?

The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.

Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.

The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.

Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.

I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...

But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).

Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."

Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."

Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.

So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!

There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...

One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:

"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.

I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?

Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.

All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.

Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.

* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at this web site.

**Incidentally, it is because of Exposure that I am most likely the only person in Saratoga, maybe even Carbon County, maybe even Wyoming, who is ever in the least bit familiar with the animated and live action shorts that get nominated for the Academy Awards each year.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)

Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.

But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.

Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.

Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.

Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":

Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?

The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.

Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.

The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.

Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.

I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...

But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).

Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."

Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."

Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.

So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!

There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...

One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:

"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.

I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?

Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.

All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.

Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.

* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at

Sunday, April 13, 2003

YOU THINK I SHOULD WHAT?

So, while I desperately cast about for enough paying work to keep the Unabomber Cabin heated and dog food in the Collie of Folly's bowl, I have swallowed a bit of my pride (there's still plenty left, I assure you) and done the paperwork to go on unemployment for a bit while I await the college transcripts that will allow me to become a substitute teacher, responses from magazines to queries I've sent, checks for articles I've already sold, etc.

But of course, the good State of Wyoming doesn't know my good intentions, and couldn't care less about them if it/they did know. So, there are some flaming hoops through which I've had to jump in order to collect that little bit o'money to keep the power company and the landlord happy while I straighten out all of this foofraw. So, among other things, I've had to re-register with Job Service.

Now, since I first registered with them, the day after I arrived back in this fair state with my Ryder truck full of books and my killer Bostonian resume, the service has undergone some admirable changes. For on thing, folks can register online (this made even easier for me since my old record was still in the database; I just had to add all of my snazzy new skills and experience to it). For another, job leads can be sent via e-mail or phone.

And that, of course, is where the hilarity comes in.

As far as I can tell, Job Service is relying pretty much solely on its dueling databases to match up slackers like me with what jobs are out there. And, well, its algorithm for making those matches could use a little work.

Now, I can very well understand why its systems might think that I would be eager to pull up stakes, abandon family, friends and civic responsibilities to go be a part-time telemarketer in Jackson paid on a commission basis. I can. Barely. Understand it.

But under what universe's laws of probability, physics and personnel management am I qualified to become the next director of special education for the Cody Public Schools?

Or a senior accountant for a law firm in Douglas?

But, of course, I have to follow up on these leads because if I don't, I will be considered a vagabond, a moocher, a lazy ass trying to get a free lunch. And it would appear that all of the article queries I'm sending out, all of the story leads I'm chasing down, all of the project contracts I'm pursuing via services like CreativeMoonlighter.com don't count as looking for work.

So, I'm sure the supe at the Cody schools got a good laugh at my expense, though perhaps he got several laughs. If I'm qualified for that job, who isn't, after all? But, I do what I must so that I can do what I can so that I can do what I can't stop doing, which is, of course, writing.

But, just to keep the bums happy, I did take an extremely part-time job, helping out a girlfriend of mine this summer. She's managing a silly little gift store in downtown Saratoga for yet another friend of mine, and has decided that she wants weekends off. So, what the hell, it's some money, it gets me out of the house (apart from my coffee group and the odd public meeting, I'm becoming a fearful hermit), it's as close to zero responsibility as I'm likely to get, and staff meetings consist of margaritas at the Crazy Liver Cantina next door.

Plus, she doesn't care if I write on the job. Which I will have to do, and copiously, if I want any fun stuff in my life like wine or a phone line in the near future. And I really should have both of those.

Meanwhile, please excuse me. I have to fill out an application for a ranch management position in Powell.

Never mind that I don't know a heifer from haenfeffer.