blinkit

Beginner's Dublin, Day Two

1. Irish women tend to have small noses and cute, almost lipless mouths.
2. Irish men, at least the ones who drive the tourist buses and work the numberous constructon crews around the city core are not to be trifled with. Heard in passing from a crew hanging out on the side of the road: "...he was a criking little English f---." OK.
3. bicycles share the major roads here more easily than in Vancouver
4. there are more scooters and motorbikes here. The cars are small. Hardly any SUVs.
5. people who work the tourist concessions are fairly easygoing, and about a third encountered so far are not Irish.
6. Irish tourism likes visitors to drink, so it's good that they also want to shuttle visitors around in what seems like several hundred tour buses jamming the city core: you get a "free" pint of Guinness after touring the Guinness Storehouse and you get a "free" glass of Jameson's after touring the Old Jameson Distillery. Neither is free because you pay admission for the tours. As far as tours go, the latter is the better deal, although the former is apparently Dublin's most popular tourist destination.And it does have a magnificent view of the city.
7. The James Joyce Centre is small and modest (see pic above), and like Joyce in his lifetime, considered important but not popular outside of the university crowd. I was one of six visitors the 45 minutes I was there. But worth the effort finding off the beaten tourism path.

Irish TV: stunningly the same as American TV, especially the news shows, with the same template of young female anchor paired with one or more avunculur or veteran male anchors. Morning show has sunny saxophone tune. Weatherman runs pictures from viewers, especially kids. Top stories: continued fallout over Irish voters' rejection of an EU treaty; scandal involving a former PM; contract killer for hire trial; Irish school children are happy, smart and active; hundreds turn out in Cork to pose nude for art photography. The last story on two different newscasts created an opportunity for male anchor to turn to female counterpart and say  something like, "Too bad you missed that one." Sex roles seem more conservative here, with news segments on fashion and weddings openly targeted at women. Also, dairy commercials are frequent.

Note: Guinness is spelled with two n's. I knew that.

Gibson at home

WMD: After seeing him appear half a dozen times in recent years haunting the neighbourhood around my office like an apparition of post-hippie art geek coolness, I finally got a chance to sit down and interview William Gibson last week. He was back in Vancouver on the final leg of his book tour for Spook Country, his latest novel. He was 20 minutes late, for which he apologized, but he noted that after weeks of touring he was reaching the end of his ability to keep up with one interview after another. He was also unfailingly polite, thoughtful and intelligently entertaining. Apart from the fact that I dig his writing (although what's up with all the happy endings ...), it was one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had in awhile, largely because he listened, thought and answered in real time, as opposed to spinning off rote answers. That's probably a bonus of interviewing writers.

My latest Courier column, available here, came out of that conversation, although it necessarily contains only a little of what was an hour's worth of Q&A. I've reproduced the text below. We talked largely about Vancouver, where he's lived since 1971. Aside from a short story or two, his adopted home city, for which he has great fondness, has never appeared in his fiction before. I wanted to know why:

Futurist fiction writer never imagined Vancouver in 2007

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 10, 2007

William Gibson's fiction has been set in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Most of it is a vibrantly imagined vision of the near future which, when it first appeared in the 1980s, anticipated the wired and increasingly virtual world of 2007.

It's a future alive in technology, with computer interfaces that rival the Matrix movies, buildings that "grow" into being, and people deliberately replacing parts of their bodies with machines. But it's also a harsh world, with lethal violence on the streets, corporate brawn usurping representative government, and a yawning chasm between rich and poor right out of the Fraser Institute's wettest fantasies.

It's also why, having lived here since 1971, the South Carolina-born Gibson never included Vancouver in his novels. He didn't want to do to his adopted hometown what his imagination had done so skillfully to other cities of the world: make them disturbing.

That reluctance ended with his latest novel, Spook Country, a contemporary tale in which Vancouver plays a prominent role in the final third of the book. But while the novel is a fascinating and often funny meditation on how the U.S. has been thrown dangerously off balance in the wake of 9-11, Vancouver comes across as anything but disturbing. We look pretty good.

Gibson didn't set out to include Vancouver in the story, he told me during an interview last week at a favoured Granville Street cafe. He doesn't like to predestine his narratives. On a good day, he said, "I'm not making executive decisions over the life of my characters."

But as the story developed, and the search by competing and shadowy agencies for a shipping container and its mystery cargo seemingly adrift at sea unfolded, his cast of spooks, criminals and former rock stars landed in our town. Gibson said as soon as he knew they were coming, he was nervous for weeks.

It turned out they liked it here, or at least found little that put them off, as they focused on international intrigue. Vancouver in their eyes is freshly scrubbed and clean smelling. Dollar coins baffle them, and they are surprised to be stuck in horrendous rush hour traffic. But the North Shore mountains amaze them. The green and blue glass condo towers of Yaletown and Coal Harbour look like they were built last week. The locals--with the exception of a Downtown Eastside drug dealer--are friendly, and downtown commuters going to work in the morning have, in the charmingly trippy mind of one key character, a low "f--kedness quotient."

Gibson found it "totally cool" to be a tourist in his own city while writing the book, and the experience his characters went through mirror what he's seen in countless other visitors. Cory Doctorow, a Toronto-born science fiction writer and blogger whose intellectual horsepower rivals Gibson's, once told him Toronto is a place that's easy to live in but hard to visit. Gibson says Vancouver, by contrast, is a city newcomers adore. "I've seen people from Paris fall tragically in love with Vancouver," he said. "And they dread having to return to Paris." Who would have thought Robson Street could beat out the Champs-Elysees.

Yet for a science fiction writer, Gibson never expected the Vancouver we have now. He remembers not only when neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour didn't exist, but also when no one ever imagined Coal Harbour was even a remote possibility. He also never thought Vancouver would become so dense, or that real estate would morph into a gambler's vocation. The rapid change in so short a period concerns him, and he worries about the city's sustainability.

Will he stay? He doesn't know, but only because he says he never knows what the future holds. But it's clear he'd like to remain here. Vancouver gave him a fresh start. The city wasn't as interesting or as big as Toronto, where he spent part of the hippie era after leaving an America convulsed by Vietnam. But it also had no baggage for him when he arrived 36 years ago. His wife is from here, his children were raised here, and he learned to write fiction here, eventually producing some of the most influential novels to come out of Lotusland.

He's grateful to Vancouver for that fresh start, and it shows.

- Gibson appears as part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, which runs Oct. 16 to 21. For more information, see www.writersfest.bc.ca/.

blink@vancourier.com

Today's bLINKit: The Courier's award-winning historical writer, Lisa Smedman, writes about the coming of the Swede-Finns to B.C., as seen through the eyes of her grandmother.

Don't write this down

WMD: And catching up with my weekly column from last week, I interviewed William Crossman, an American philosopher who believes writing will die out in the advanced West by 2050. Part of his argument, which I did not get into in my piece, for the always persistent problem of lack of space, is that I suspect Crossman is advancing his argument partly because he wants text to die because he believes an oral world supported by appropriate technology will be a much fairer one. All the same, I believe he believes in his thesis, and it's a compelling one to chew over. I heard Crossman interviewed over the summer on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show and gave him a call. You can hear the radio interview here.

The link for the original column, still tenuous, is here. I've reproduced the text below:

***

Three Rs down to one by year 2050

U.S. philosopher predicts digital age spells end of written word

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Fifty years from now, no one will be able to read the words printed on this page. Or any of the other pages in this edition of the paper, should it survive until then.

That's the argument advanced by American philosopher William Crossman, who believes hardly anyone in North America in 2057 will know how to read or write. And he believes it will be a good thing.

Crossman, director of the San Francisco-based Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, has spent more than a decade examining trends in computer technology and demography and their effect on how we communicate. His conclusion is that the written word is disappearing and will be replaced by talking computers that will make possible an oral and democratic global culture.

That's right. Text is dying, so much so that Crossman believes it will be gone from schools, business, work, leisure and even the sciences by 2050 in the developed West. We won't need to know how to read or write, because computers will provide us--through Star Trek-like sound and graphics, the likes of which we can only imagine now--with all the information we need to do everything we do now. Even your dayplanner and grocery lists will have gone super-digital. Within a century, the rest of the world will follow.

Few agree with Crossman. And anyone who's struggled with the horror of wordless Ikea construction manuals will place a technologically girded oral world in the same category as the mythical flying cars and robot maids predicted half a century ago.

But talk with Crossman and he becomes persuasive. Speaking by phone Monday, he said his argument is based on four main trends. The first is that by nature we are oral creatures. Humans are born with the hardwiring to speak. Even babies form their own languages. But we are not born with the ability to read and write, skills which must be taught, with a fair amount of blood and sweat, in schools. As computers learn to talk and to show us things visually, we'll go the easy route and talk with our machines.

That's the second trend--that humans are constantly replacing old technologies with new and better tools. First developed roughly 6,000 years ago, writing is merely a tool, like the plow or the PDA. As computers become like vast libraries we can access through regular conversation, the need for writing will wither away like an unused limb. "People simply won't use it," Crossman told me. "We don't cut our lawns with scythes anymore."

Crossman believes young people are already leading the way through their widespread rejection of text. That's the third trend. My generation, born in the '60s, developed a non-text beachhead by gluing ourselves to televisions. Today's kids are charging inland by throwing themselves into video games, computers and iPods, and doing it all at once through an ability to multitask that astounds their elders. Text, says Crossman, constrains us to the narrow sense of vision. Kids today are learning to learn by relying on the innate human desire to use all our senses.

As evidence, Crossman points to the infamous "how r u" speak of the text messaging world, popular among anyone born after 1975. It's a sign, he says, that writing is devolving to its bare necessities.

Finally, Crossman points out that writing was created and is maintained by social and economic elites. It took five millennia for writing to expand beyond a tiny segment of the population, and books were not widespread until a few hundred years ago. Even today, 80 per cent of the world's population, most of them in developing countries, are functionally illiterate.

But should information become widely accessible and cheap through computers based on orality, the poorer nations are likely to skip the huge expense of teaching their populations how to write and go immediately to digital, just as hundreds of millions in the Third World have skipped landline phones and gone right to cellphones. As they do, the world will become a fairer and more democratic place, Crossman says, as the poor plug into the global grid.

I'm still mulling over Crossman's thesis, the surface of which I've hardly scratched here. And I'm obviously romantic about writing, since I make my living from it. But last week, I bought the latest William Gibson novel--not in print form, but a spoken version downloaded from Audible.com. And truth be told, I'm really enjoying it that way. Oh, oh.

You can read about Crossman (while anyone can still read) and his ideas at www.compspeak2050.org.

24 Watch: slam bang

24 Watch: This season seems to want to end in a bloodbath, at least for the bad guys, who are losing red shirts left and right to Jack's wrath. Last week's bodycount was seven, and Jack borrowed two guns. This week, he takes a breather, and leisurely knocks out two more CTU guys trying to rein him in. One more episode to go, and considering the oil rig location, it looks to be a James Bond-villain hideout sort of ending. Prediction: dad will escape, nephew will be rescued, Jack will be annoyed and lonely.

Lost watch: Just when I was dumping on the show, it's come back with several well crafted episodes: good writing, real advancement both in the plot and in our understanding of the back story. But the new information must be taken in context, because Lost still has told us nothing about the truth behind the island because the producers and writers clearly don't know. Consider: in the very first episode of season one, we learned the castaways were marooned on a dangerous and really weird island. Three seasons later: we learn the castaways are marooned on a dangerous and really weird island.

Veronica, RIP: Veronica Mars is history, killed in its third season. I saw that coming. It was too smart for its own good, and too odd. Combining the witty banter of Gilmore Girls, romance plots involving rich, lonely kids from The OC, the creepiness of Twin Peaks and detective plots from The Rockford Files, it appealed to no single identifiable demographic. That made it a great show. It also made it a show without a natural audience. I for one wish it had dealt more with its early hints of class consciousness, which it soon forgot as soon as the story moved into university. And why the names? Mars? Neptune High? Pirate Points? And why the use of primary colours (red, green etc.) shining through stained glass in so many of the sets? I want to know what it all means.

Jericho, RIP: It, too, gone, nuked by CBS. Oh well.

Today's bLINKit: Grammar Girl, a short, punchy podcast each week about grammar, usage and writing. If only everyone listened.

Heroes of transit; comics vs. film

Today's bLINKit: I praise the great heroes of bus riding in my latest Courier column and argue why they deserve a tax break. That I'm one of them has nothing to do with the point I'm making. Honest.

Plus, JaqPike pointed me to his nifty Neil Gaiman (novelist, comic guy, now script writer) piece. Selected quote:

Ink is cheaper than film. Film, especially big budget film, often needs to compromise in order to be liked by the biggest possible number of people around the world. A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating.

Look waaayyy down ...

I like my family. They gave me a new sofa as a Christmas/housewarming gift. Yes, it's on the small side, and my mom actually made it, but you've got to start somewhere. (Some money that came with the sofa will help an eventual upgrade.) Meantime, the mini-sofa got me fantasizing about getting other tiny or toy-sized bits of furniture and running my own online version of The Friendly Giant. (I'll be the giant, of course, and Casper can play Jerome.) It was my favourite show next to Mr. Dressup when I was a kid. I always liked the show's opening, when the camera panned into the castle, the drawbridge lowered and the giant set up seats for visitors. Speaking of, read a whole page of tributes from ordinary folks to the real Giant himself. I wish kids today could see him.

Today's bLINKit: Writer Scott Sigler started podcasting his novel online, ie distributing audio versions of his novel on the Web, and he attracted 10,000 listeners a week to the what he says is the world's first podcast-only novel. It had never appeared in print form when he started, but now it's been picked up by an actual print-books-the-way-most-people-still-like-to-read-them publisher.

And it was a classic book, apparently a good movie, and now a well-regarded computer game. C.S. Lewis would have been appalled at both the movie and the game (he rejected previous overtures by Disney to turn the Narnia series into an animated film). But then Lewis never saw what a GeForce 6800 can do with pixels and polygons. Or so I'm told.