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Saturday, February 22, 2003
posted 6:54 AM
BACK IN THE BASEMENT
I did find an even worse method of public Internet access: LodgeNet, an in-room system at my hotel in Chicago. You surf on tv, using a wireless keyboard that has no cursor. Just the arrow-keys and Enter. Almost comically awkward. It couldn't talk to Blogger, though.
The night before, in contrast, playing with my friend Alan's new Samsung photo phone. If even one of Cayce's friends had had one of those, PR would have been way more postgeographical. Actually, this little gizmo induced serious techno-vertigo. This'll change things, I suspect. Until you see one, it sounds like just another bell or whistle, but it's one click for image-capture, another to email the jpeg to preselected addresses. People tend already (and has this ever changed, since the last time I toured in the US) to have phones in their hands most of the time. If each of those phones were an email-ready digital camera...
Thanks to everyone who posted reports and photos. Interesting, to have digitally-augmented memory of these events, which tend otherwise to slide past, on tour, and blur into a tunnel of planes, hotel rooms, book stores, people.
Sorry the weather conspired to make me miss DC.
Otherwise, it was my most pleasant US book-tour. (Well, I've never run a marathon, but I imagine that the people who do, enjoy them; not sure they'd say one was "pleasant", though; satisfying, more like it.)
NICENESS AND DISAPPOINTMENT
While "surfing" the site on LodgeNet, in that Chicago hotel room, I fumbled past a post from a reader declaring that PR sucks, and very badly indeed. He had had a brief moment of hope when Cayce headbutted the guy in Tokyo, but then, alas, he had found that it all (as he read it) went back to nice people doing nice things to one another. Actually I had expected more of this, as I know that a certain part of my readership will always (literature being magically atemporal) be looking for the deep-fried anomie of NEUROMANCER. There's nothing really to be done for this either way, except to recommend, for those of you needing a hit of deep-fried anomie, Robert Stone's DOG SOLDIERS. This is a book I always forget to mention when people ask about NEURO influences. But it definitely was one. I remember finishing it and wondering what it might have been like if it had been reframed as science fiction. Absolute zero niceness; fine book.
CANADIAN SIGNINGS
Will try to get this info sorted and posted Monday morning.
BOONVILLE
That novel I kept recommending, on the tour, is Robert Mailer Anderson's BOONEVILLE.
I can only hope that Rydell and Chevette, after the close of ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, make their way up the coast to Boonville. He, at least, would be very happy there. (Thanks to RMA for seeing that I got a copy of this in San Francisco. It was very much enjoyed.)
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