Yesterday's blog implied at one point that the deal that saw Harry Redknapp leave Southampton to become manager of Portsmouth, a move arranged by then-Portsmouth Chairman Milan Mandaric, might have been a little on the dodgy side.
Perhaps the police read this blog? Redknapp, Mandaric and three others were arrested yesterday on football corruption charges. Sheesh, that's some quick action.
It actually relates to a very specific deal, that of Amdy Faye moving to Pompey a few years ago, but let's be honest, Harry's never been far from suspicion and I'll never forget the blog I wrote while Harry's bookmaker odds became ridiculously short at the same time that the media were touting Neil Warnock to take over at Pompey. Yes, the arrest relates to just one event, but remember Saddam Hussein's trial? It was over one event. Harold Shipman? A tiny sub-section of his murders. The police go on their strongest case: the rest can follow later.
Harry says he's innocent, of course. "They have to arrest you to talk to you, for you to be in the police station," he says. Uh-huh.
Still, it probably rules him out of the England job.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
28 November 2007: Homecomings
*Beep*
Eugh. The 5.20am Beep Of Death.
That in part explains the now customary lack of blogging at this time of year. Since last report I have, for the moment at least, put this AKTing lark behind me and been focusing more on the Stellent (sorry, Oracle UCM 10gR3) side of things. After spending a little time twiddling with Kofax Ascent and then a sunny and at times hilariously bizarre two weeks in Italy, I'm now into my third week of the current contract, known locally as "The London Commute".
It's not as bad as it could be, to be honest. Up at 5.20, dress and walk down to Southampton Central train station (as it's a little too early for UniLink buses), catch the 6.30 train to Waterloo (which, incidentally, I'm on as I write this, currently 6.43 and we're still in Southampton Central due the the driver having to fill out a bunch of paperwork to report a signal fault he saw further back down the line - we'll be late again, no doubt). This train officially gets in at 7.44 but actually can't get in until at least 7.49 due to line speed restrictions at Basingstoke. Run off down the tunnel to the underground, six stops up the dirty northern line to Warren Street and out, walking to the building of a well-known research charity where I spend the day doing web-related things. Leave just after 4.00, back to Waterloo for the 4.35 departure, arrive in Southampton at about 5.50, get the 6.00 U1A and home by 6.20, at which point I sometimes just fall asleep.
Could be worse. The trains could be slower (well, except for this morning: 6.46 and still not moving), the place I'm working could be further from Waterloo, the people I'm working for could have said, "no, you're working 9.00-5.30 like everyone else" instead of "yes, 8.00-4.00 is fine". And it's only for another week-and-a-half.
(6.48 and the train pulls out of the station).
So, little blogging has taken place. Not to mention the power supply plug on the shiny Dell laptop dying last week, meaning either emergency microelectronics soldering or a new laptop (mmm, gotta love those Christmas prices, such great deals). So instead my life has been full of four-hours-plus travelling every day, mainly aided by the wonders of Podcasts of such broadcasting luminaries as Mark Kermode and Harry Shearer. However, events of such magnitude have taken place in the last few days that I feel I would be neglecting my duty if I didn't report and comment on them.
No, I'm not talking about Gordon Brown losing his Child Benefit details (and everyone else's, come to that), nor England getting knocked out of Euro 2008 (like they deserved to go through?). Forget the elections in Australia, and the potential elections in Pakistan (Musharrif says the State of Emergency will "help the elections". OK.) No, I'm talking about long-awaited homecomings of long-lost heroes. (No, seriously, it's not about the Pakistan elections.)
Firstly, somewhat obscured by the England's McLaren hilarity last week, the good ol' Atlanta Braves announced the return of 42-year-old left-handed starting pitcher Tom Glavine. So what? So, he joined the Braves first time round in 1984, made his debut in 1987 and from 1991 to 2002 was a member - a leader - of the now-legendary team that won their division every year during that period. When the Braves did their worst-to-first turnaround in 1991, Glavine won the Cy Young "pitcher of the year" award for the National League. He did so again in 1998. In 1995, the only year the Braves won the World Series, they did so on the back of Glavine's extremely frugal pitching, for which he won the World Series "Most Valuable Player" award. When budget cuts and contract issues meant he left to join the New York Mets for the 2003 season, he and his family remained living in the Atlanta area, and every winter the question has arisen: "will he be back this year?" Now, five years later and having completed the requisite 300 game wins to essentially secure his place in baseball's Hall of Fame, he's back. And ok, he's not the player he was ten or fifteen years ago, but he's still better than me (and, more importantly, better than Jo-Jo Reyes and Chuck James and the rest of the somewhat disappointing Braves pitching staff last year), so who knows - maybe this can be the catalyst the Braves need to turn it around and start winning the National League East again?
Anyway, that was last week. Also last week Plymouth Argyle manager Ian Holloway walked out on the club to join Leicester City. Holloway, who incidentally had led the team to fifth place in the Championship (and therefore in the playoff positions for a place in the Premiership), decided that it was better to jump ship and manage under the chairmanship of Milan Mandaric (he who tapped up, sorry convinced Harry Redknapp to go from Saints back to Pompey), apparently because they "have better training facilities". Well whoopie-do. Without him, Argyle again won on Saturday and went fourth.
Thing is, that meant a vacancy in the managerial position at Home Park. And that meant one thing: the usual speculation that Paul Sturrock, statistically the greatest manager in the history of Plymouth Argyle (which, admittedly, isn't saying much) would want to return. The difference this time was that it was actually not implausible. Sturrock, no longer managing in the Premiership or even the Championship, was having an ok time at Swindle Town, but was certainly open to suggestion. And yes, less than a week later, he's back, along with Kevin Summerfield and John 'Sloop' Blackley, sweeping in to Home Park at a Press Conference yesterday where he announced that there was nothing wrong with the way Holloway was running the team so he'd find out about the normal weekly routine and keep it that way. And there were big, beaming smiles all round, the days of Judas comments firmly in the past.
Of course, there's a good chance it won't work. It often doesn't when you go back. Glavine might get hit all over the place (and without Andruw Jones in center field, there's a good chance that will happen). Sturrock might find the players don't like him and don't want to play his way (and let's remember, Trigger Evans was a key - an absolute lynchpin - in Sturrock's system, and he's now retired from the game in order to spend more time with his bricks). And then a sad thing happens: the legend dies, or at the very least begins to look a bit sickly. It's no exaggeration to use the word 'legend' with both Glavine and Sturrock (and it's not often you can say that), both have been arguably the finest in their roles in the entire history of their respective teams, and if it doesn't work out, that record becomes tarnished.
But still, it's an exciting time for both clubs. Meantime the train is now speeding towards Basingstoke some 21 minutes late (how is it, by the way, that delayed trains often become more delayed as the journey progresses?) and I'm thinking it's time to flick on the mp3 player and listen to a little Harry Shearer before heading into another day of Stellent Site Studio.
Or maybe I'm still asleep and the alarm is about to wake me up...
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
2 October 2007: Taxman
Didn't plan on blogging today but as my sis just started blogging (blogging is just sooo 2004, Ali) I figured I'd better add her to my 'links' list.
Then I realised I didn't have a 'links' list. Silly me. And it's not like other people who read this blog don't have blogs of their own too: so Blaine, Andy and Nick also make the exciting new list. If you've got a blog and I can link to it but don't know the link (I'm looking in your direction, Becky), let me know and I'll add you. Not that it will help your Google PageRank rating much, but it'll make me feel a little less guilty about not having done it until now.
What news? Well, having left the university (notwithstanding the not unsubstantial expenses claim they have yet to pay from a month ago), I'm now full-time contracting on Stellent and Stellent-related systems, writing Java and - gulp, can you believe it - VB.NET in order to move various files around various workflows for an unnamed company. No diatribe on VB.NET today (I need to save that up for a blog in its own right I think) but overall the work is enjoyable and surprisingly creative.
Meantime in preparation for The Move, we've taken the step of leaving our house (on which the contract was up) and, with the helpful help of certain kind people, some of whom read this blog, we've moved to a nice apartment for a few weeks until the visa is granted and the US tax year ends, probably in that order...
The Visa Interview will take place on 9 October. Next week. Soon, and sooner than we'd been led to believe. Happily we have all the documentation they asked for, and more besides, so there shouldn't be a major problem with approving me a for a Spouse Visa, meaning we can move to the US and I can legally work there. If I'm approved, the visa will be granted in three to five working days, and that's that, we can up and move whenever we want (within six months).
Except for the good ol' US Internal Revenue Service - the taxman to you and I. Unsurprisingly, when we move we have to begin paying US Income Tax - in fact, Gloria almost has to do this already, being a US Citizen living abroad, although her earnings fall comfortably under the threshold where she actually would have to start paying. More of a surprise, perhaps, is that we become liable to pay income tax on all our earnings during the tax year, which in the US runs from January to December. Therefore were we to move in November or December, we'd get a whopping great tax bill come the spring on earnings on which we'd already paid a nice chunk of UK income tax. Nasty, but they're the government, who (apart from one day every four years) are an unregulated body.
It's not actually as clear cut as that, to be fair. Some portions of the IRS website, and some of the people you speak to if you call their "help" line, state that as a first-time first-year immigrant to the US, I'd only be liable to pay from the day we enter the country, although Gloria would have to pay in full. Other web pages and people you speak to say the opposite: we have to pay in full. The truth is that nobody really knows, and whether what we do is right or wrong depends entirely on who you speak to and how they interpret the rules. The simplest approach therefore: don't move until January, then there's no issue. So we're moving in January.
Meantime life continues apace - trying to find a decent shipping company (is air freight the better option given we're only shipping kitchen stuff, clothes and books?), giving away electrical equipment with UK voltage ratings and generally working hard. We have a couple of weeks vacation in Italy coming up in a few weeks, our first real break since Christmas in Texas, so I'd better try and learn some of the language.
Anyone know the Italian for 'pasty'?
Then I realised I didn't have a 'links' list. Silly me. And it's not like other people who read this blog don't have blogs of their own too: so Blaine, Andy and Nick also make the exciting new list. If you've got a blog and I can link to it but don't know the link (I'm looking in your direction, Becky), let me know and I'll add you. Not that it will help your Google PageRank rating much, but it'll make me feel a little less guilty about not having done it until now.
What news? Well, having left the university (notwithstanding the not unsubstantial expenses claim they have yet to pay from a month ago), I'm now full-time contracting on Stellent and Stellent-related systems, writing Java and - gulp, can you believe it - VB.NET in order to move various files around various workflows for an unnamed company. No diatribe on VB.NET today (I need to save that up for a blog in its own right I think) but overall the work is enjoyable and surprisingly creative.
Meantime in preparation for The Move, we've taken the step of leaving our house (on which the contract was up) and, with the helpful help of certain kind people, some of whom read this blog, we've moved to a nice apartment for a few weeks until the visa is granted and the US tax year ends, probably in that order...
The Visa Interview will take place on 9 October. Next week. Soon, and sooner than we'd been led to believe. Happily we have all the documentation they asked for, and more besides, so there shouldn't be a major problem with approving me a for a Spouse Visa, meaning we can move to the US and I can legally work there. If I'm approved, the visa will be granted in three to five working days, and that's that, we can up and move whenever we want (within six months).
Except for the good ol' US Internal Revenue Service - the taxman to you and I. Unsurprisingly, when we move we have to begin paying US Income Tax - in fact, Gloria almost has to do this already, being a US Citizen living abroad, although her earnings fall comfortably under the threshold where she actually would have to start paying. More of a surprise, perhaps, is that we become liable to pay income tax on all our earnings during the tax year, which in the US runs from January to December. Therefore were we to move in November or December, we'd get a whopping great tax bill come the spring on earnings on which we'd already paid a nice chunk of UK income tax. Nasty, but they're the government, who (apart from one day every four years) are an unregulated body.
It's not actually as clear cut as that, to be fair. Some portions of the IRS website, and some of the people you speak to if you call their "help" line, state that as a first-time first-year immigrant to the US, I'd only be liable to pay from the day we enter the country, although Gloria would have to pay in full. Other web pages and people you speak to say the opposite: we have to pay in full. The truth is that nobody really knows, and whether what we do is right or wrong depends entirely on who you speak to and how they interpret the rules. The simplest approach therefore: don't move until January, then there's no issue. So we're moving in January.
Meantime life continues apace - trying to find a decent shipping company (is air freight the better option given we're only shipping kitchen stuff, clothes and books?), giving away electrical equipment with UK voltage ratings and generally working hard. We have a couple of weeks vacation in Italy coming up in a few weeks, our first real break since Christmas in Texas, so I'd better try and learn some of the language.
Anyone know the Italian for 'pasty'?
Monday, September 03, 2007
3 September 2007: Cardiff
In Cardiff for a couple of days attending my last conference as a Research Fellow.
The last three months has seen me work, sometimes pretty frenetically, on a UIMA-based tool to take web pages, strip out the tags, investigate the text and populate an ontology (kind of like a database in this case) with information about terrorist incidents in Afghanistan, so that Dong-who-sits-opposite can use it to put dots on his map. Somewhat amazingly, it actually does seem to work, and so today we're showing a live end-to-end demo where, at one end, you stick a couple of words in a search engine (usually "Helmand" and "Incident") and it churns away for a minute or so, sending messages back and forth between servers located in various parts of England and Wales, and then boom, there it is, dots on a map showing the incidents reported by the documents you searched for. Neat, and not totally inaccurate either. And it's pretty much all programmed in Java, no Perl in sight, just a smear of PHP near the surface.
The fun thing is that, as our demo requires internet access, our colleagues based here at the University of Cardiff cunningly (and secretly) negotiated for our specific project to have a little web access so we can show our demo. The rumour is starting to spread that there's internet over here in this corner of the room... the looks we're getting from the other projects...
Course, it means I can blog a little while we wait for the presentations to finish...
The last three months has seen me work, sometimes pretty frenetically, on a UIMA-based tool to take web pages, strip out the tags, investigate the text and populate an ontology (kind of like a database in this case) with information about terrorist incidents in Afghanistan, so that Dong-who-sits-opposite can use it to put dots on his map. Somewhat amazingly, it actually does seem to work, and so today we're showing a live end-to-end demo where, at one end, you stick a couple of words in a search engine (usually "Helmand" and "Incident") and it churns away for a minute or so, sending messages back and forth between servers located in various parts of England and Wales, and then boom, there it is, dots on a map showing the incidents reported by the documents you searched for. Neat, and not totally inaccurate either. And it's pretty much all programmed in Java, no Perl in sight, just a smear of PHP near the surface.
The fun thing is that, as our demo requires internet access, our colleagues based here at the University of Cardiff cunningly (and secretly) negotiated for our specific project to have a little web access so we can show our demo. The rumour is starting to spread that there's internet over here in this corner of the room... the looks we're getting from the other projects...
Course, it means I can blog a little while we wait for the presentations to finish...
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
28 August 2007: Leaving
Took a big step today: resigned from my job at the university.
The reasons are fairly clear-cut. We're looking to move to the USA, and have submitted a visa application to get me over there as the spouse of a US citizen. We had initially planned on doing this much earlier, as soon as my PhD finished back in September, but that dragged on a bit. Then we thought we might be staying a little longer. But now we've made the decision to go, and despite the lengthy visa application process (it takes months, literally, although once you get an interview date from them it all moves very quickly), we are getting ready to go, initially to Texas, thence to wherever the right job takes us.
In fact, the visa application process has been underway for a while now. So why the decision to resign today (technically, yesterday)? Well, readers with computers who can click here will know that back in October last year I spent a month doing some consultancy work for an unnamed company. A similar offer emerged at the end of last week, with the remuneration for the five-week contract exceeding the salary I would get were I to remain at the university to the end of December. Since we're looking to go to the US anyway as soon as we can (and don't get me started on tax laws, which we're currently investigating after a tip-off from McDougal), it made sense for me to write my 'with regret' letter.
And it is with regret. When I leave after my notice period it will be four years, almost to the day, since I began work as a full-time PhD student with a computerless desk, a vague notion of the semantic web and no idea at all what an RDQL query was. Now I've got a computer on the desk, I've completed a PhD applying semantic web science to the digital library metadata and RDQL has become SPARQL. I've learned a lot, written papers, presented talks, taught students, even performed a little research along the way. And now, with the clean break of the USA move becoming imminent (and a little more about the visa process to follow in another blog, I feel...), it's time to move on.
Arouna from the other end of the level 4 lab is thinking of organising a farewell five-a-side testimonial for me (and possibly him, depending on what he decides to do when his contract is up next month). I wonder if they have much five-a-side in Texas?
Postscript: My leaving Southampton makes my blog title even more decoupled from reality. Any suggestions for an alternative title?
The reasons are fairly clear-cut. We're looking to move to the USA, and have submitted a visa application to get me over there as the spouse of a US citizen. We had initially planned on doing this much earlier, as soon as my PhD finished back in September, but that dragged on a bit. Then we thought we might be staying a little longer. But now we've made the decision to go, and despite the lengthy visa application process (it takes months, literally, although once you get an interview date from them it all moves very quickly), we are getting ready to go, initially to Texas, thence to wherever the right job takes us.
In fact, the visa application process has been underway for a while now. So why the decision to resign today (technically, yesterday)? Well, readers with computers who can click here will know that back in October last year I spent a month doing some consultancy work for an unnamed company. A similar offer emerged at the end of last week, with the remuneration for the five-week contract exceeding the salary I would get were I to remain at the university to the end of December. Since we're looking to go to the US anyway as soon as we can (and don't get me started on tax laws, which we're currently investigating after a tip-off from McDougal), it made sense for me to write my 'with regret' letter.
And it is with regret. When I leave after my notice period it will be four years, almost to the day, since I began work as a full-time PhD student with a computerless desk, a vague notion of the semantic web and no idea at all what an RDQL query was. Now I've got a computer on the desk, I've completed a PhD applying semantic web science to the digital library metadata and RDQL has become SPARQL. I've learned a lot, written papers, presented talks, taught students, even performed a little research along the way. And now, with the clean break of the USA move becoming imminent (and a little more about the visa process to follow in another blog, I feel...), it's time to move on.
Arouna from the other end of the level 4 lab is thinking of organising a farewell five-a-side testimonial for me (and possibly him, depending on what he decides to do when his contract is up next month). I wonder if they have much five-a-side in Texas?
Postscript: My leaving Southampton makes my blog title even more decoupled from reality. Any suggestions for an alternative title?
Friday, August 10, 2007
10 August 2007: The Luminous Flesh Of Giants
Once every four years I buy a new novel.
It used to be more often than that. Around the time of doing my A-Levels I actually bought and read no less than four novels in one year. This wasn't to do with a voracious literary appetite so much as curiosity into writing styles: how do different authors, in different contexts, for different audiences, tell a story? Turned out Emily Bronte, Alice Walker and Vikram Seth had a lot in common (English language, use of chapters, freeform movement between first and third person). The fourth was also similar in these respects, although the only reason I bought it was because I had a train journey and this book had a shiny, attention-seeking cover.
I spotted it, in October 1994, in Waterstones here in Southampton. A paperback, there were a small pile of them on the floor section of a black IKEA-style cuboid shelf unit in the middle of the basement room. It jumped out at me because of the unusual colours, the cool (even I could tell it was cool) use of sunglasses reflecting San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge in the hand-drawn artwork, and the fact that although it was clearly 'sci-fi' in loose terms (and I hadn't read one of those yet that year), I'd heard neither of the book nor its author.
The book was called 'Virtual Light', the author one William Gibson.
So, I bought it out of curiosity, mainly because of that cover. Even the tagline "Author of Neuromancer" made me curious: I hadn't heard of that either, but obviously it sounded like I should. And so I walked through the rain and under rapidly darkening skies down to the station, hopped on the train to Plymouth (requiring change at Westbury and costing no less than forty-nine pounds, and this in 1994, remember) and started to read.
The first chapter of Virtual Light remains the single most baffling piece of writing I've ever come across, and that includes all those bizarre Description Logic papers with upside-down A's I had to read for my PhD:
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod. Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down Lozaro Cordenas flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.
The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.
He opens his eyes.
Mexico City is still there.
And so it went on, the following paragraphs of that opening chapter equally baffling and yet somehow lyrical in their technical descriptiveness. Fortunately, the second chapter and those that followed made more sense, and now, some thirteen years on and having re-read Virtual Light countless times, I can pretty much understand of most of that opening sequence, although for 'faint hepatic corona' I still just read 'yellow glow'.
So this was Gibson's latest, at that time, newly released in paperback and, I discovered, his first novel not to be part of the 'Sprawl' series, of which the aforementioned 'Neuromancer' was the first. For whatever reason, I didn't rush to pick up the Sprawl series, nor indeed did I think about Gibson again until three years later when I saw a new paperback named 'Idoru' for sale, and read it on a train journey, this time from London to Plymouth, and was happy to note some of the same characters appearing.
Then it sped up a bit. Two years after that, in 1999, waiting at an airport in Los Angeles for a very delayed flight back to Blightly, I thought I'd better read Neuromancer (and enjoyed it, although I preferred the world of Virtual Light), then later in 1999 I spotted and purchased (in hardback this time) another new Gibson (All Tomorrow's Parties), which turned out to be the final (and lightest, in terms of both plot and prose, and thus more accessible) book in the Virtual Light series. Over the following couple of years I made my way through the remainder of the Sprawl series (Count Zero comfortably being the best of the three in my opinion, although clearly not as groundbreaking as Neuromancer), and the short-story collection 'Burning Chrome and other stories' which was like eating Gibson sandwiches for lunch instead of a huge evening meal that you had to spend a week digesting: you got all the goodness with less of the effort, and Burning Chrome remains, possibly, my favourite Gibson product. And that was that, the back catalogue dealt with.
2003 came round, and with it the next 'new novel' (at which point I realised he was producing them every four years). By this point I was plugged (a little, at least) into the online Gibson fan forum, and thus discovered that, to compensate for the new novel (Pattern Recognition - the first novel he's written that's set in the present day) being published in the UK some five months after its release elsewhere in the world, there was an official launch happening in Russell Square, with Gibson reading, answering questions and signing books. Naturally I went along, got his rather-too-printed signature in my copy, asked when he'd write more short stories ("when they come along," he replied, "although they don't pay the mortgage like a novel does").
Like he still has a mortgage after all the money I've paid for his books, I thought.
And that, then, was it for another four years (give or take the Relevant Experiment, conducted by Gibson fans and mildly Gibsonian in nature), until Spook Country came out last week. I finished it last night (four years wait for three days of reading: something's wrong with this equation, although I will re-read and re-read again numerous times for the sheer enjoyment of the prose) and will probably blog about it sometime (let's just say it makes me want to head down to Dock Gate 20 and drill holes in some of those containers). But it made me think back to whatever it was that got me started on the Gibson journey, and all I can trace it back to is that front cover, flourescing up at me from near the floor of Waterstones' basement level, beckoning me into Gibson's densely-worded universe of long-chain monomers, that new car smell, wolfishly professorial assassins and that faint hepatic corona.
Postscript: Wow, all that without mentioning stuff like cyberpunk, Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves, The Matrix ("the unpaid bill" according to Gibson) and the fact Gibson invented the word 'cyberspace', and envisioned what it meant, quite a number of years before Sir Tim invented the Web.
It used to be more often than that. Around the time of doing my A-Levels I actually bought and read no less than four novels in one year. This wasn't to do with a voracious literary appetite so much as curiosity into writing styles: how do different authors, in different contexts, for different audiences, tell a story? Turned out Emily Bronte, Alice Walker and Vikram Seth had a lot in common (English language, use of chapters, freeform movement between first and third person). The fourth was also similar in these respects, although the only reason I bought it was because I had a train journey and this book had a shiny, attention-seeking cover.
I spotted it, in October 1994, in Waterstones here in Southampton. A paperback, there were a small pile of them on the floor section of a black IKEA-style cuboid shelf unit in the middle of the basement room. It jumped out at me because of the unusual colours, the cool (even I could tell it was cool) use of sunglasses reflecting San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge in the hand-drawn artwork, and the fact that although it was clearly 'sci-fi' in loose terms (and I hadn't read one of those yet that year), I'd heard neither of the book nor its author.
The book was called 'Virtual Light', the author one William Gibson.
So, I bought it out of curiosity, mainly because of that cover. Even the tagline "Author of Neuromancer" made me curious: I hadn't heard of that either, but obviously it sounded like I should. And so I walked through the rain and under rapidly darkening skies down to the station, hopped on the train to Plymouth (requiring change at Westbury and costing no less than forty-nine pounds, and this in 1994, remember) and started to read.
The first chapter of Virtual Light remains the single most baffling piece of writing I've ever come across, and that includes all those bizarre Description Logic papers with upside-down A's I had to read for my PhD:
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod. Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down Lozaro Cordenas flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.
The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night. Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.
He opens his eyes.
Mexico City is still there.
And so it went on, the following paragraphs of that opening chapter equally baffling and yet somehow lyrical in their technical descriptiveness. Fortunately, the second chapter and those that followed made more sense, and now, some thirteen years on and having re-read Virtual Light countless times, I can pretty much understand of most of that opening sequence, although for 'faint hepatic corona' I still just read 'yellow glow'.
So this was Gibson's latest, at that time, newly released in paperback and, I discovered, his first novel not to be part of the 'Sprawl' series, of which the aforementioned 'Neuromancer' was the first. For whatever reason, I didn't rush to pick up the Sprawl series, nor indeed did I think about Gibson again until three years later when I saw a new paperback named 'Idoru' for sale, and read it on a train journey, this time from London to Plymouth, and was happy to note some of the same characters appearing.
Then it sped up a bit. Two years after that, in 1999, waiting at an airport in Los Angeles for a very delayed flight back to Blightly, I thought I'd better read Neuromancer (and enjoyed it, although I preferred the world of Virtual Light), then later in 1999 I spotted and purchased (in hardback this time) another new Gibson (All Tomorrow's Parties), which turned out to be the final (and lightest, in terms of both plot and prose, and thus more accessible) book in the Virtual Light series. Over the following couple of years I made my way through the remainder of the Sprawl series (Count Zero comfortably being the best of the three in my opinion, although clearly not as groundbreaking as Neuromancer), and the short-story collection 'Burning Chrome and other stories' which was like eating Gibson sandwiches for lunch instead of a huge evening meal that you had to spend a week digesting: you got all the goodness with less of the effort, and Burning Chrome remains, possibly, my favourite Gibson product. And that was that, the back catalogue dealt with.
2003 came round, and with it the next 'new novel' (at which point I realised he was producing them every four years). By this point I was plugged (a little, at least) into the online Gibson fan forum, and thus discovered that, to compensate for the new novel (Pattern Recognition - the first novel he's written that's set in the present day) being published in the UK some five months after its release elsewhere in the world, there was an official launch happening in Russell Square, with Gibson reading, answering questions and signing books. Naturally I went along, got his rather-too-printed signature in my copy, asked when he'd write more short stories ("when they come along," he replied, "although they don't pay the mortgage like a novel does").
Like he still has a mortgage after all the money I've paid for his books, I thought.
And that, then, was it for another four years (give or take the Relevant Experiment, conducted by Gibson fans and mildly Gibsonian in nature), until Spook Country came out last week. I finished it last night (four years wait for three days of reading: something's wrong with this equation, although I will re-read and re-read again numerous times for the sheer enjoyment of the prose) and will probably blog about it sometime (let's just say it makes me want to head down to Dock Gate 20 and drill holes in some of those containers). But it made me think back to whatever it was that got me started on the Gibson journey, and all I can trace it back to is that front cover, flourescing up at me from near the floor of Waterstones' basement level, beckoning me into Gibson's densely-worded universe of long-chain monomers, that new car smell, wolfishly professorial assassins and that faint hepatic corona.
Postscript: Wow, all that without mentioning stuff like cyberpunk, Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves, The Matrix ("the unpaid bill" according to Gibson) and the fact Gibson invented the word 'cyberspace', and envisioned what it meant, quite a number of years before Sir Tim invented the Web.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
