Gibson on "the videotape" as a paranoid's bohemia

[Perry Noid]

Cool, thanks. I hadn't known about this. Read Pattern Recognition for the
first time not too long ago and enjoyed it as much as Bleeding Edge. Maybe
even more.
On Aug 16, 2014 10:18 AM, "Prashant Kumar" <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson
>
>
> INTERVIEWER
>
> Had you already begun to write Pattern Recognition before 9/11?
>
> GIBSON
>
> I had but as soon as that happened just about everything else in the
> manuscript dried up and blew away.
>
> INTERVIEWER
>
> Why did the September 11 attacks have such an effect on you?
>
> GIBSON
>
> Because I had had this career as a novelist, Manhattan was the place in
> the United States that I visited most regularly. I wound up having more
> friends in New York than I have anywhere else in the United States. It has
> that quality of being huge and small at the same time—and noble. So without
> even realizing it, I had come to know it, I had come to know lower
> Manhattan better than any place other than Vancouver. When 9/11 happened it
> affected me with a directness I would never have imagined possible.
>
> In a strange sort of way that particular relationship with New York ­ended
> with 9/11 because the post–9/11 New York doesn’t feel to me to be the same
> place.
>
> INTERVIEWER
>
> Are you glad you wrote a book that had so much 9/11 in it?
>
> GIBSON
>
> I’m really glad. I felt this immense gratitude when I finished, and I was
> sitting there looking at the last page, thinking, I’m glad I got a shot at
> this thing now, because for sure there are dozens of writers all around the
> world right this minute, thinking, I have to write about 9/11. And I
> thought, I’m already done, I won’t have to revisit this material, and it’s
> largely out of my system.
>
> INTERVIEWER
>
> Alongside that public narrative runs a very private one, with Cayce
> chasing through the maze of the Internet after the source of some
> mesmerizing film material she calls “the footage.”
>
> GIBSON
>
> Having assumed that there were no longer physical backwaters in which new
> bohemias could spawn and be nurtured, I was intrigued by the idea and the
> very evident possibility that in the post-geographic Internet simply having
> a topic of sufficient obscurity and sufficient obsessive interest to a
> number of geographically diverse people could replicate the birth of a
> bohemia.
>
> When I started writing about the footage, I don’t think I had ever seen a
> novel in which anybody had had a real emotional life unfolding on a
> l­istserv, but I knew that millions of people around the world were living
> parts of their emotional lives in those places—and moreover that the
> Internet was basically built by those people! They were meeting one another
> and having affairs and getting married and doing everything in odd
> special-interest communities on the Internet. Part of my interest in the
> footage was simply trying to rise to the challenge of naturalism.
>
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