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Wednesday, March 12, 2003
posted 9:34 AM
LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST
That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described how it feels to be a novelist between books. No place to take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating his own condition, he said, by writing a horror sorry about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is* scary).
No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge, something no magpie would ever be satisfied with doing.
This is, in some way, the first time I've ever had the recognition that I've become someone who needs to be writing a book, to some extent, in order to feel content. Interesting how we "catch" recognitions from others -- in this case requiring, for me, someone whose recognition emerges from what I can take to be a very similar ecology of mind.
SOMEONE EXPRESSES SURPRISE
At my having remarked yesterday (with an evident sense of discovery) on something (the mediated persona) that I dealt with, extensively, as far back as IDORU.
Keep in mind that anyone who's read a novel of mine has read it much more recently than I have. I can't recall ever having reread anything of my own, in its entirety, after publication.
But, also, now I think about it, IDORU was the last of my full-on I-don't-do-the-Internet freestyle extrapolations. When I wrote IDORU, I was still faxing my daily pages to friends for comment, and probably wasn't at all sure what websites *were*. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES was the first book I wrote as an email-using, web-searching, spam-accreting human. So I suspect that my unlikely-seeming wonderment at the democratization of mediated personae is about that awareness arriving, for me (as opposed to my Man Behind The Curtain) only just now.
SPEAKING OF FREESTYLE
The point-form notes on the CBC Radio taping, posted today, I find quite wonderful. Dreamlike. If I could get away with it, I'd be that gnomic in all of my public utterances, and could feel sort of like that back-alley fireplug that the Finn winds up getting downloaded to. (I *hope* that was the Finn. It's literally been so long since I've read that book that I'm no longer certain. And I'm perversely proud of the fact, too.)
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