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Sunday, March 09, 2003
posted 6:27 PM
THIS SITE AS A MIRROR OF F:F:F
Someone suggests this (it's been suggested before) in a recent post, along with the suggestion that I might have set it up that way, as some sort of mirror of the situation in the book.
The situation in the book [I'll try to avoid spoilers] involves an author (of sorts) who is an utterly unknown quantity. About whom nothing whatever is known. Who is in fact (though this never comes up on F:F:F, because it would have complicated things for me) a hypothetical entity. (Why couldn't the footage be the result of some sort of collaborative, community process? Why does Cayce and everyone else automatically assume that there must be a lone maker, a solo auteur?) The fifty-four-year-old man (as Fashionpolice keeps reminding me) typing this into a window on blogger.com is no hypothetical entity, but someone who's just braved a coast-to-coast gauntlet of bookstores (not to mention the Great President's Day Snowstorm) to demonstrate his physical presence.
I'm a guy in a basement in Vancouver, pecking away at the same coffee-stained keyboard I wrote PATTERN RECOGNITION on, and am here, in fact, as part of some vague personal process of deliberate dePynchonization.
If there's a mystery here, it's that some aspect of the rather ordinary person I know myself to be (and whom you would certainly know me to be as well, were we both to stay here long enough) is somehow able to write novels. I am not the Man Behind The Curtain. The mystery is that I do, apparently, somehow contain one.
And that's the mystery we all live with when we know writers, as indeed it's the mystery we live with when we *are* writers.
When the publisher suggested having this site (there had been a site for ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, but I'd had nothing to do with it) I suggested, somewhat to my own amazement, that I should have some sort of personal presence here. I hadn't had much contact with my readers, for the past decade or so, and had started to worry, vaguely, about the sort of legends that grow up around excessively reclusive writers. (It had begun to bug me, for instance, that I continued to meet people who believed that I still wrote on a manual typewriter.) And in the course of writing PATTERN RECOGNITION I'd experienced (anonymously -- ah bliss) enough of the world of online fora to have some idea of what the experience of being here would be like. So I did it, and here I am.
But I certainly didn't do it to further confound any mystery. I am personally not all that impressed with the mysterious creativity of my Man Behind The Curtain. Probably because I've had to clean up after him for decades now (as indeed, and even more constantly, have my wife and family and friends). And I, I'm proud to say, turn up for work a lot more regularly than he does -- most of the time, anyway.
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