| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Apr | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
April 7, 2008 by admin.
Thanks to all the registered users and some great comments over the past few months. More posts to come soon, especially as we learn more about the Neuromancer movie.
Posted in nodeNews | 1 Comment »
January 9, 2008 by admin.
Will Hayden Christensen [Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episodes 2-3] play Case, the protaganist in Joseph Kahn’s $70M movie adaption of William Gibson’s cyberpunk genre-inspiring Neuromancer? JoBlo says so.
Posted in cyberpunk, news | 3 Comments »
January 1, 2008 by admin.
This article recently hit my GoogleReader [the original is in Italian and the English translation follows]:
Node Magazine: the future (hypertext) literature
A new trend is emerging on the horizon of writing and could subvert the dynamics of publishing a radical and far more incisive than you predstavijo e-book. A launch, a group of fans inspired by the revolutionary movement in writers: William Gibson.
NodeMagazineL’uscita last awaited novel by William Gibson has been accompanied by a roll really. When the book had not yet entered the circuit of British and American libraries, a handful of tough fans, who have come in possession of a copy of reading Spook Country, had already begun to establish a network promotional totally unconventional. The material narrative of the novel has become the subject of a thorough and methodical analysis, which has resolved the design of a web-magazine that in the name refers to a magazine quoted by the same Gibson in its history. But if the Node of Spook Country Magazine is a publication dedicated to new frontiers of interactive, designed to explore the network of relationships between people, objects and places, the Node Magazine of real world has become an ambitious project to catalogue all touched the knowledge or even touched by the novel and its author, not only as it concerns the building or structure. It is no coincidence that the literary critic John Sutherland said that the project threatens to “overturn the habits of literary criticism.”
It all started when the creator of the project, still unnamed, has put his hands on a copy reading of the novel and decided to mobilize a volunteer to trace the entire network of references and shape the cloud of information related to book, without sparing nothing in the work found in the database network from search engines, from Google to Wikipedia. The architect of the project, masked behind the nickname patternBoy, conceived the Node Magazine as a “multi-blog pseudo-news from narrative Spook Country”, but at the time of its conception certainly did not envision himself to finish focus of the media. The intention of starting a text to a more detailed narrative of the birth from that work is not without precedent: in hypertext, the same thing had been accomplished precisely on the same last novel Gibson, Pattern Recognition ( The academy in Italy Dream), by another passionate hidden behind pseudonym. But if the work was at the party after the publication of the novel and had required about two years to reach its final form, in this case, the project started on February 7 this year, has brought forward the release of the novel and accompanied step by step dissemination to the general public, gaining official recognition of Gibson in person.
As noted by Sutherland, this can really serve as a way to fruition nuovaPynchon_Wiki critical texts. The potential offered by the multimedia platform blog reflect the complexity of references and levels of reading a book as Spook Country, allowing in this way to thrash out the plot of the references through the incremental cognitive mechanism that is the basis of. An operation metaletteraria and if we also want to mythopoetic, which not only facilitates the understanding of the text but to a certain extent it also complete iconography. And as experience shows similar mass standing for the last Pynchon, with a wiki dedicated to the monumental Against the Day, this is a strategy now more than promising.
Posted in nodeNews | 1 Comment »
December 2, 2007 by admin.
William Gibson sat down for this short interview for Fast Forward [he mentions Node Magazine about half-way through as well].
Posted in nodeNews | 1 Comment »
November 9, 2007 by admin.
From William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview [by Andrew Leonard]:
Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.
In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.
Posted in SpookCountry novel, culture | 1 Comment »
October 30, 2007 by admin.
Arguably, NodeMagazine.com is the most self-referential website yet of the new millenium where nearly all of the content is an aggregate of outside references to itself [and its “sister site” the node tumblog]. For those of you not thoroughly annoyed by this, here is a chronological summary of the summaries about itself.
10.30.07: Skomorokh recently created a beautiful entry on Node Magazine to Wikipedia that shows an otaku-level of beauty as “a small token of apprecation” that is itself greatly appreciated.
08.05.07: “Someone’s already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in ‘Spook Country,’ ” [Gibson] said. “It’s sort of scary.” — Chris Watson, Bookends: William Gibson explores the science fiction of the here-and-now in his new novel [Santa Cruz Sentinel]
08.06.07: Here is another quote about NodeMagazine.com and the Node tumblog from the man himself:
Someone has a website going where every single thing mentioned in Spook Country has a blog entry and usually an illustration so, every reference, someone has taken it, researched it and written a sort of little Wikipedia entry for it and all in the format of a website that pretends to be from a magazine called Node, which is an imaginary magazine, within Spook Country, and which turns out to be imaginary in the context of the narrative.
08.06.07: “Along the way, Gibson, 59, keeps the reader Googling, trying to match his uncanny grasp of historical and contemporary culture, from the gods of the Santeria religion to “piggybacking” on wireless networks. (A couple of Web sites named after Node, a fictitious “Spook Country” magazine, track these references — go to http://node.tumblr.com/ or http://nodemagazine.com.)” [seattle times]
08.29.07: Thanks to my friend Memetic Engineer for posting this report on a recent William Gibson book signing in the UK to his excellent blog SpookCountry.co.uk:
William Gibson mentioned Node website at least twice during his reading, talk and signing session at the TUC conference centre in London:
- The very first question the moderator asked about was the impact of the annotations in the Node magazine node.tumblr.com. - William Gibson seemed to be positive about them, but noted that the previous PR-otaku site for Pattern Recognition took about a year to appear after publication, whilst this project, to which I have added my own annotations here on this blog happened even before the official book publication date.
- When asked about the impact of “micro-celebrity” and “Web 2.0″ technology, William Gibson again cited his meeting with patternboy who made an impact from a small town in Colorado, with the help of international contributors.
09.01.07: This is so spooky, I can’t help but laugh!
Immediately after reading an article on conspiracy theories about Denver International Airport [or “Kansas” as many of us in the Denver area like to call it], I found Node idea, an article by John Suthlerland for Guardian UK about the William Gibson’s “theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice” floating on a “critical cloud” of fan-promoted literary criticism combating professional neglect and “antibuzz”:
Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country. The fan is unidentified: Gibson knows who he is, and says he lives in small-town USA and wants, apparently, to stay anonymous.
Apparently patternboy is now all grown up and hiding underground after mobilising “a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts” [that would be you, Memetic Engineer] to create a “Google aura” for promoting Spook Country.
What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based ‘everybody pitch in’ mess. He’s channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.
09.06.07: Now romancer by Dennis Lim, Salon
Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of “Spook Country” at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.
Gibson: Yeah, I’ve seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I’ve looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.
09.06.07: Bruce Sterling calls this interview by Joel Garreau for the Washington Post, the one of the best William Gibson interviews ever:
“It’s curious. When I published ‘Pattern Recognition’ ” — his previous book, which was also set in the recent past and achieved mainstream success — “within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together.
With ‘Spook Country,’ the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.” Somebody got an advance reader copy, and instantly put up a site for his fictional Node magazine. [thanks to Infocult for another reference]
Plus, if you just can’t get enough, there is the story by Michael Janairo about the story by Professor Sutherland about this site and the node tumblog.
09.08.07: Kevin Broome logs this summary of William Gibson at the CBC Book Club [scheduled to air Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 a.m. and then available as a podcast on CBC Words At Large on Wednesday September 19].
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I.
And this from Steppin’ Locust on the William Gibson message board:
Seek: NODE online – encyclopedia of Spook Country’s details and marginalia – visual concordance to each googleable reference in the novel - Google is there the way your memory is there – your brain is going to grow into google
We volunteer to become parts of vast distributed intelligences that are fantastically smarter than we are.
09.20.07: “One Guardian writer observed that [William Gibson’s Spook Country] could change the field of literary criticism. He notes how one fan has created a website, named after a magazine described in the book, to annotate the contents of Spook Country and anything that is written anywhere about it so chances are this very post and any of your comments may end up being referenced there.” — Captain Xerox, Fan site annotates contents of Gibson’s new book Spook Country [The Website at the End of the Universe]
Posted in nodeNews | 2 Comments »
September 19, 2007 by admin.
Finally, the CBC “Words at Large” Bookclub podcast of William Gibson’s appearance is now available for audio download [link corrected by mi shi]! To my knowledge, this is the first audio interview where Gibson discusses this blog and its sister the Node tumblog.
If you missed the last one of these interviews, you can listen to the 2003 Bookclub audio as well.
Posted in SpookCountry novel, nodeNews | 2 Comments »
September 15, 2007 by admin.
Here are a few more reviews of Spook Country [initially courtesy of oddmanrush]:
“The slot in culture that I’m most closely associated with is one in which charlatans declare that they know the future. My job is to sit near that slot and when people approach me I say: ‘Only charlatans say they really know the future.’ I sit near the tent where they give out bullshit and offer people a different sort of dialogue. My role is to raise questions.”
“What we call technology in our science is almost always emergent technology. … They don’t mean the technology we’ve had for 50 years, which has already changed us more than we’re capable of knowing,” he says. “When I say technology, I’m sort of thinking of the whole anthill we’ve been heaping up since we came out of the caves, really.
He begins with a blank slate, he says. When he begins to write, he has no idea of plot, or of who his characters are or even what it is he wants to say. He just sits there, hoping the non-rational will take over. Only then will he begin to write.
“Very slowly, it can be a very slow process. I really do like to keep myself open to the characters and to what is happening. I don’t rule the thing rigidly. My characters, they really rule the whole thing. And their names rule them. They seldom just come to me, the names. And I am just a little reluctant to explain where the names come from, because sometimes I might even be having a joke at someone’s expense.
“Spook Country is the place where we have all landed, few by choice, and where we are learning to live,” he wrote. “The country inside and outside of the skull. The soul, haunted by the past, of what was, of what might have been. The realization that not all forking paths are equal, some go down in value.”
Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of “Spook Country” at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I’ve looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.
Where did you get Blue Ant and the character Bigend from?
WG: I was having one-on-one meetings very late at night with someone at the London offices of Ridley Scott’s advertising agency. Wandering around making coffee and stuff… It suggested something. It was an interesting space. I’d never been in an advertising agency before. I had this space, and had a company… and then I kind of reverse engineered Bigend out of the company. A lot of what I do in terms of creativity is actualy kind of a reverse engineering… I’ll find a flying saucer, and figure out how the drive works… And then I’ll put it in a Volvo.
We spent nearly four weeks holed up in a ‘houseboat hotel’ floating alongside the banks of Dal Lake with the rest of the press corps. At night we would hear AK-47 fire echoing through the city, and there were constant rumors. Some nights we’d be pulled ashore, with everyone convinced that the militants were planning to drive a motorboat into the hotel and shoot everybody. Sometimes blustering Indian officials would appear, insisting that the militants had killed him or that he was about to be released. The entire ordeal, at least on our end, was conducted through bribery, threats and terse discussions over cups of tea.
- 08-13-07: A 2007 Interview With William Gibson by Scott Rosenberg, NPR
- Space to think by The Observer, Guardian Unlimited
- Book review: ‘Spook Country’ follows complex path of post-9/11 by Claudia Smith Brinson, The State
- Novelist William Gibson tries techno-noir by Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Books
- ‘Spook Country’ by William Gibson by Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Review: Gibson sees America in ‘Spook Country by Charles Taylor, Newsday
- William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ by Matthew Bey, American-Statesman
- New York Time Out by Drew Toal
- William Gibson says reality has become scifi by Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters
- Ideas outshine characters in fast-paced technothriller by Vince Darcangelo, Rocky Mountain News
- Q&A with William Gibson by Clay Evans, Boulder Daily Camera
- Spies, spooks flit about in war on terror by Michael Berry, San Franscisco Gate
- Has Gibson Lost Ability to Terrify Us? by Andrew Rosenblum, New York Observer
- A pattern of change [review for Pattern Recognition] by Chris Packham, The Star
- The dread and the fury: William Gibson delivers an unsparing post-9/11 novel by Bill Sheehan, chron.com
- ‘Spook Country’: A fitful, fast-forward spy tale by Ken Barnes, USA Today
- Spook Country Review by Thomas M. Wagner, SF Reviews
- William Gibson Is Freaking Me Out by Joshua Zachariah Ellis, Zenarchery.com
- OnPoint audio interview with host Tom Ashbrook
My favorite of the new bunch is Regis Behe’s “Author captures world chaos in ‘Spook Country’” [Pittsburgh Tribune Review]:
“In the early ’80s, if we thought about cyberspace at all, it was somewhere very special that we went occasionally,” Gibson says. “But the rest of the time, we were here. What’s happened is the very special place we used to go for adventures has become the here. That’s where a lot of us are, most of the time. It’s a very special place, and kind of the unusual place is becoming the place where we aren’t connected to anything.”
Posted in SpookCountry novel | 6 Comments »
September 8, 2007 by admin.
Kevin Broome logs this summary of William Gibson at the CBC Book Club [scheduled to air Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 a.m. and then available as a podcast on CBC Words At Large on Wednesday September 19].
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I.
And this from Steppin’ Locust on the William Gibson message board:
Seek: NODE online – encyclopedia of Spook Country’s details and marginalia – visual concordance to each googleable reference in the novel - Google is there the way your memory is there – your brain is going to grow into google
We volunteer to become parts of vast distributed intelligences that are fantastically smarter than we are.
Posted in SpookCountry novel, nodeNews | 1 Comment »
September 7, 2007 by admin.
Memetic Engineer has now created a secret subsite annotating the Node tumblog in chronological order [a much more accessible method, especially for newcomers].
Posted in nodeNews | 1 Comment »
