In a bizarre merger of the background materials of my last two posts, Jill Walker today directs our attention to William Gibson‘s thoughts on writing, “truth,” and accountability.

When did we all become such literalists that we would suggest that someone who hasn’t actually experienced the effects of amphetamines isn’t qualified to write about them?  Even in something that calls itself fiction?

Has the recent efflorescence of the memoir—so pervasive I’m not even going to bother linking to anything, because how would I narrow the field—had a hand in this demand for “truth” in writing?  If so, I wonder:  is the blog as a genre partially responsible for or a mere reflection of this apparent cultural predilection for the literal?

Determined to heed Francois’s advice and practice my rereading of Neuromancer in the hope that some of its details might adhere, this go-round, I’ve decided to blog certain of the comments and questions that arise as I make my way back through the text.

And here’s the first, which focuses on Screaming Fist, the Special Forces operation in which the person we come to know as Armitage was damaged:  at the first mention of the maneuver, Case remembers it, and Armitage similarly describes it, as taking place primarily in cyberspace:

“Some kind of run, wasn’t it?  Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs.  Yeah, I heard about it.  And nobody got out.”

He sensed abrupt tension.  Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay.  “That isn’t true.  One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.”

Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

“You’re a console cowboy.  The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist.  For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus.  Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey.  We were running a virus called Mole.  The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.” (28)

The second time Screaming Fist is mentioned, however, Julius Deane emphasizes the physical aspects of the run, the aspects that take place in meatspace:

“Famous.  Don’t they teach you history these days?  Great bloody postwar political football, that was.  Watergated all to hell and back.  Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean?  In the bunkers, all of that… great scandal.  Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology.  They knew about the Russians’ defenses, it came out later.  Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons.  Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.” Deane shrugged.  “Turkey shoot for Ivan.”

“Any of those guys make it out?”

“Christ,” Deane said, “it’s been bloody years….  Though I do think a few did.  One of the teams.  Got hold of a Sov gunship.  Helicopter, you know.  Flew it back to Finland.  Didn’t have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process.  Special Forces types.” Deane sniffed.  “Bloody hell.” (35, ellipses in original)

This slight slippage in our understanding of Screaming Fist is, I think, crucial to understanding the novel’s take on the relationship between cyberspace and lived geographic space.  Despite Case’s apparent dismissal of the physical (shrugging when Armitage reveals that one unit made it “back to Helsinki”), despite his sense that, in cyberspace, “he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta.  Travel was a meat thing” (77), these passages suggest that geopolitical boundaries are still operative.  Case’s inability to comprehend or accept the continuing importance of meatspace seems, at the moment, the locus of a significant critique of the cyberculture to come.

More soon…

For years I’ve nagged my students to adopt a more critical eye toward the work they turn in to me, to refuse to be content with the first draft, to step back, take a breath, and attempt a real re-vision of their writing.  Writing is rewriting, was the mantra we chanted back in the faculty development workshops in the Expository Writing Program.

So I’ve been watching with interest and a bit of befuddlement the debate surrounding the blog-entry-revision question:  Jill Walker first drew my attention to it with her post on the ethics of entry deletion, which references the brouhaha between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer over Winer’s sense of his blog’s malleability (and Pilgrim’s sense that this malleability was the result of a lack of accountability).  Jonathon Delacour (link via mamamusings) recounts his own change of heart with regard to the question of ethical blog-permanence, thinking through in great detail the points at which his own principles diverge from those laid out by Rebecca Blood.  And Chuck Tryon rightly notes that this debate bears some import for those of us who use blogs in the classroom.

The question that I’m left with, though, is how to balance my dedication to the practice of rewriting with my sense that the blog is and ought to be a relatively permanent record of a moment’s thoughts.  This, I think, may be at the root of one of the difficulties I’ve encountered with this site:  I’m fairly cautious, by nature, about releasing my words into the public sphere.  I’ve been a long-term lurker on a number of listservs, but never a regularly active participant, because the form always seemed to me to move so much more quickly than my own thought- and writing-processes do.  I’ve only begun commenting recently on a number of blogs that I’ve been reading for months.  And I’m always nervous at that moment when I change my MT post status from “Draft” to “Publish.”

Clearly I’ve got the sense that my words, once out there (once “published”), are on the record, permanentesque in the way that the web has become.  (Yes, pages are deleted and links are removed every day.  But with the existence of the Google cache, has that removal become illusory?) But I still feel the need to convince my students that the first draft of anything is rarely right, and that no piece of writing should be considered finished.  (Ask Joyce Carol Oates about that one.)

So how do we reconcile this?  Are certain kinds of writing bound to a greater degree of permanence than others?  Should the class blog adhere to blogly standards of accountability or pedagogical standards of revision and rewriting?

I’m about to begin a rereading of Neuromancer for that article on spatial metaphors, geopolitics, and cyberspace I’ve been working on.  And it suddenly occurs to me:  I’m re-reading this novel for the umpteenth time.  I’ve read it for fun.  I’ve read it to write about it.  And I’ve read it to teach it.  Three times.  Not all of these readings have been complete or cover-to-cover, but I have had at least two such full-length linear encounters with the novel in the last four years.

And yet:  I have to read it again before I can write this article.

Is it just me—am I just spectacularly forgetful—or is there something in the sped-up twenty-first century computer-engaged television-saturated brain that accounts for this need to revisit a novel each and every time I write about or teach it?  Is this, for instance, the result of a change in educational strategies over the last few decades?  I have marvelled, at times, at the astonishing textual memories that a number of my senior colleagues have; they can not only quote extensively from texts in their own periods and specialties, but have impressive powers of recall of details from texts from all periods.  It’s a power that can quickly make me feel inadequate; I can quote the occasional line here and there, and I can remember the broad outlines of plot and character, but usually very little in the way of detail.

This begins to account for some of that slowness in reading I recently bemoaned; in order to make sure that I have some reasonable recall of a text (particularly something critical or theoretical that I’m hoping not to have to re-read repeatedly), I have to take extensive notes.  But perhaps there’s the problem—maybe Plato was right, and by externalizing my memory in this way, all I learn is forgetfulness.

Invisible Adjunct reports on Unfogged‘s pitch for a new reality series:  “PhD Island.” Quoth Bob:

Ten or so (somewhat attractive) men and women in their early twenties, maybe with a token older contestant, endure a numbingly drawn-out series of trials and humiliations. These include hostile dissertation-committee meetings, labyrinthine statistical methodologies, and ramen. Some contestants are eliminated along the way—we watch their tearful exits with the comforting knowledge that by the end of the show, it is the survivors who will envy the escapees…. There will be romances and sexual liasons. Alliances, rivalries, sacrifices, even a betrayal or two—and we’ll see it all! In the end, the contestants who survive the early trials must compete with each other for the ultimate prize: a tenure-track assistant professorship at a pretty-good college in a not-bad city. To win, each preens and performs before panels of disdainful judges whose own talents are ambiguous but unchallenged. One winner is chosen—a contestant who is probably perfectly deserving, as would have been any of the others. And like being engaged to Alex Michel, the prize is actually an unspectacular one, to which everybody but the contestants is pretty ambivalent.

The winner also gets to participate in the equally cutthroat sequel, “Tenure Island.” Then after that, “Lots of Big Grants Island,” “Full Professor Island,” “More Prestigious Institution Island,” and “Avoiding Intellectual Stagnation Island.”

It’s good.  But there’s just a little something missing, I think—the real squirm factor that only one of the sex-and-dating (in that order, I guess) shows can provide.  My response, posted last night to IA’s comments:  I’m kind of thinking of an academic version of “Fifth Wheel”—two recent PhDs and two search committees meet up for interviews and a drunken ride around town in a weird disco bus.  After the first segment, the PhDs switch search committees; after the second segment, each candidate (and committee) confides in the audience about how they think it’s going.  Then, in the third segment, the “fifth wheel” is introduced, an academic hottie of massive proportions.  Will it be a recent Yale PhD with a Cambridge UP book contract, seeking to lure the attentions of both search committees?  Or will it be a third search committee from a well-heeled Major U., seeking to poach the other committees’ candidates?  And who goes home alone?

Have spent nearly an hour on hold with AAA and the DMV, after having realized that my car registration and insurance both expire this Friday, and I haven’t received any renewal information from either.

Shockingly enough—and I know you’ll be stunned to hear this—it turns out to be a mail-delivery problem.  For whatever reason, the DMV has not changed my address from that which was valid two years ago—despite my having changed that address when I returned to California last August—and AAA has changed the “East” in my street address to “West,” despite having the correct modifier on my renters’ insurance policy.  Both entities claim, furthermore, to have mailed out the renewal forms over a month ago, which leads me to question what black hole of mail they’ve fallen into, if I’ve gotten neither and neither has been returned.

And, of course, neither recovery will be satisfactorily effected via either phone or web.  I have to bring evidence of my current odometer reading to AAA in order to qualify for a reduced rate on my insurance, and—horror of all horrors—I have to Go Into the DMV in order to get my renewed registration.

Oh, yes, and to change my address.

A weekend post by Liz Lawley returned me to my recent thoughts about how to integrate a group-authored blog into my fall class on the Literary Machine.  Liz has ingeniously leveraged MovableType’s calendar-based entries as a replacement for those clunky, kludgy, commercial course management packages.

There was a bunch of buzz last month among a number of bloggers pondering the expansion-of-MT-beyond-the-blog:  Rory worked through the MT naming-conventions problem in order to create and maintain other parts of his site via MT; Matt Haughey explored the potential for site management created by MT’s database-driven structure; see also Brad Choate, Doug Bowman, and even—sorta—Jason Kottke.

In terms of course management systems, my campus has started experimenting with Moodle, an open-source (and less clunky, and less miserably interfaced) option, which I’ll be using in both my fall classes.  What I’d love, though, would be some way to tie Moodle and MT together:  integration of (public, multi-author) course blog and (private, single-author) course materials, a synthesis of the professorial aspects of the class (assignments, readings, etc.) and the student-driven aspects (discussion, presentations, etc.).

… sort of.

We rolled back northward from SIGGRAPH yesterday, a bit dazed yet from the sensory overflow of the conference and the tradeshow.  I’m not sure that I’m quite done processing what I’ve picked up this week (including participating in a couple of quickie Apple Pro Training sessions on Shake 3 and DVD Studio Pro 2, catching a number of demos of other forthcoming and recently updated software and hardware packages, and watching a slew of new animation).  In fact, I’m pretty sure that I haven’t, as I find myself at a complete loss as I try to piece together some kind of report.  I’ve got some partly-formed ideas, though (particularly about the puzzling relationship between interactivity and presentation that the conference reveals), that I’ll hope to solidify over the weekend.  Watch this space as we (attempt to) return to normal programming on Monday.

In the meantime, I’ve got reading to finish, and an article that I think I might finally have a handle on to write, and there is that ominous breeze I’m feeling against the back of my neck as the calendar pages flip mercilessly toward September…