TRP - Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

[j e l]

i've always tripped out on Gibson's obsession with clothing but then again
clothing/textiles are a technology of sorts...as McLuhan would say
"clothing is an extension of our skin."

never heard that Buffett story.

On Fri, May 9, 2025 at 4:54 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> William Gibson, who lived on the streets of Toronto when I went to
> university there; who improvised
> a hand-to-mouth living on those streets by learning he had an eye and feel
> for cloth, for clothing and
> could buy the best for the cheapest and take it uptown ---so to speak--and
> resell for a bit more because
> they could sell for more. Clothing arbitrage on foot.
>
> One of his most recent novels is more about cloth and clothing than the
> cyber world I overstate for effect.
>
> (Warren Buffett learned of cheaper just-in coffee beans
> down at the South Street pier from uptown 110th street where he was going
> to Columbia business school and
> he would ride the subway down and back a lot to make some money...)
>
> On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 11:23 PM j e l <ssnomes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003091189-34/thomas-pynchon-1937%E2%80%93-rob-latham
> >
> > ABSTRACT
> >
> > This chapter introduces US author Thomas Pynchon, who was prominently
> > mentioned in the Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
> by
> > Bruce Sterling, outlining the literary and cultural influences that had
> > helped form the cyberpunk ethos, from J.G. Ballard to Alvin and Heidi
> > Toffler, the hacker underground to hip-hop music. Sterling reserved a
> > “special admiration for a writer whose integration of technology and
> > literature remains unsurpassed: Thomas Pynchon” (x). In a 1986 interview
> > with Larry McCaffery, William Gibson referred to Pynchon as his “mythic
> > hero,” whose work—especially the 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow—prompted
> his
> > interest in “a certain mutant pop culture imagery” fused with “esoteric
> > historical and scientific information.” Pynchon’s novels are units in an
> > evolving mosaic, with characters and ideas recurring from book to book,
> and
> > with an overarching focus on the tempos and trajectories of western
> > technoscience as it comes to grasp and command the world. This focus
> helps
> > to explain his popularity among the cyberpunks, and within the science
> > fiction (sf) field more generally, but there is also a pronounced Gothic
> > strain to his technocultural imaginings.
> >
> > --jel
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>