Books on which The Matrix was based, according to "The Matrix Revisted" dvd:

• Out of Control by Kevin Kelly


• Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard


• Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology by Dylan Evans and Oscar Zarata

Laurence Fishburn on "The Matrix":

I've said to a lot of people that a movie this smart—it's amazing that it got made because it is so smart.

Man Walking in Field finds new Harry Potter—and then gives it away! Sometimes what seems like being nice ends up just being stupid.

I can't believe I just said that.

Fans of David Foster Wallace should not miss his interview with Paul Brownfield for the LA Times. Wallace is the author of Inifinite Jest, which Brownfield fairly accurately (if reductively) summarizes as:

a 1,079-page, obsessively footnoted, high-comic novel -- that made Wallace a literary cause celebre. The book is set in a near future in which years are not numbered but corporate-sponsored ("Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar," etc.), and within its world are a junior tennis academy, a band of Quebecois separatists and addicts of various stripes and substances.

Wallace is something of a recluse so this interview is a rather rare look into his life at the moment. The interview touches on his new life in CA (he's the "Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing" at Pomona College), and on the whole Franzen/Oprah fiasco, about which this quintessentially DFW excursion:

[Wallace] expressed "admiration mixed with a mild contempt for the increasingly savvy way" Franzen handled the controversy that ensued when he spurned Winfrey's selection of "The Corrections" for her book club. He said the Franzen incident illustrates the trouble with whirlwind book tours, wherein the author moves in a state of surreal fatigue from airport to hotel room.

"There's something very uncomfortable about the whole thing, and yet on the other hand, what kind of prima donna says, 'Thank you, major corporation, for your advance, but now you're not allowed to use your marketing tools to try to recoup your investment'? You know, the head just goes around and around and around."

...

"There's a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it."

"Shall I say something so obvious that you just won't even put it in the article?" Wallace said. "A book is also a product. At least the books that we're talking about.... Even a book that's about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again ... hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.

"At a certain point," Wallace said finally, "I just stopped thinking about it."

If you didn't find that both fascinating and funny, don't read Wallace.

From High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher comes this insight into a key difference between the U.S. and Europe and Asia:

Nissan has found that drivers in Europe and Asia typically have very different attitudes toward vehicle safety from American drivers. Europeans and Asians tend to associate safety with a nimble vehicle with excellent brakes that can swerve or stop quickly so as to avoid an accident entirely, said Jerry P. Hirshberg, Nissan's recently retired president of North American design. Americans tend to have less confidence in their driving skills and assume that crashes are inevitable, so they have gravitated instead to tanklike vehicles that will protect occupants even if they plow into another vehicle. Buyers of sport utilities seem to be especially American in this regard, Hirshberg added (107).

Of course, Nissan's findings are well supported by the different cars driven by Americans vs. Euros and Asians. In the U.S., we drive tanks; in most of the rest of the world they drive safe, little anti-tanks. Now apply this difference to foreign policy and we get:

[People] in Europe and Asia typically have very different attitudes toward [national and global] safety from American people. Europeans and Asians tend to associate safety with a nimble [foreign policy] with excellent brakes that can swerve or stop quickly so as to avoid an accident entirely. Americans tend to have less confidence in their [diplomatic] skills and assume that crashes are inevitable, so they have gravitated instead to tanklike [policies] that will protect [them] even if [the country] plows into another [country]. The Bush Administration seems to be especially American in this regard.

Hence, the problem we face today: The U.S. just wants to plow through (using bombs as its plow) any obstacle to its vision of the world, while the rest of the world is saying, "Hey, why don't we avoid this problem instead of just trying to minimize the number of deaths on our side?" It's the difference between a world governed by force and violence (the SUV/American imperialist camp), vs. a world governed by preventive diplomacy and cooperation (the anti-tank/international and multilateral camp).

This is why Bradsher's book is so great -- the problems he identifies with SUVs are really metaphors for a vast number of the other problems we face today. The same selfish, anti-social, and wasteful people who buy SUVs also support selfish, anti-social, and wasteful policies with regard to foreign policy, education, health care, and all other social services. We don't live in a nicely divided world where our choice of transportation has zero to do with out position on home schooling, but that's the fantasy we really wish were true. (I don't have time at the moment to explain how/why SUV owners relate to home schooling, but if you don't see the connection, let me know and I'll give the explanation a try.)

I finally got to take a look at High and Mighty SUVs -- the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way by Keith Bradsher. As I slowly work my way through the book (very slowly -- reading time will have to come after many other more pressing things), I'll try to mention the most mentionable bits.

Here's one for starters:

The Sierra Club likes to point out that driving a full-size SUV for a year instead of a midsize car burns as much extra energy as leaving a refrigerator door open for six years. SUVs also spew up to 5.5 times as much smog-causing gases per mile as cars.

Transcript of the kind of one-sided conversation that happens every day in a parallel universe: Oh, honey, have you seen the keys to the Explorer? I feel the need to work off some more of my utter disregard for the wellbeing of everyone else on the planet. Oh, thanks, I'll see you in a few hours after I've enlarged the hole in the ozone layer enough to satisfy my pathological tendencies toward genocide. Yeah, love you, too. Bye bye.

Speaking of paranoia and conspiracy, I just finished reading William Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, thanks to my Valentine, who thoughtfully gifted me a copy for that day. I'm a huge Gibson fan; Neuromancer blew the top right off my head. How could you not be a fan of the book that envisioned an Internet on steroids before the Internet even existed? Ok, so ARPANET began in 1969, but even by 1984 when Neuromancer was published the "net" was nothing like what we know today. Sure, it's the job of Sci-Fi to be ahead of its time; part of what makes sci-fi fun is its ability to play with future worlds and show us the possible places we might go and things we might do. But Gibson brought a vibrant subgenre?cyberpunk?to the wider public, and it's hard to underestimate the impact of that subgenre on the sci-fi of the last 20 years. [1] Would there have been a "Matrix" if there had not first been a Neuromancer? Hard to say. And I'll shut up about this before I get further out of my depth as a sci-fi expert. I know if I start getting into claims about who was first with what idea or who inspired what, I'll be treading on super-thin ice in about one more step.

And but so anyway, as the title suggests, Gibson's new book deals with paranoia, conspiracy, the stories behind what we think we see. The novel focuses on Cayce Pollard and her quest to find the maker and the meaning of "the footage," a mysterious series of film clips that appear randomly on the Web. At the moment Cayce finally begins to see the patterns (or some of them) converge, Gibson writes:

There must always be room for conicidence, Win [Cayce's father] had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of consipracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, [Cayce] knew, took for granted was there (293-4).

Win's advice is perfect for this time we're living in. Is every bad thing that happens somehow connected to terrorism? Probably not?some of them may be coincidences. More specifically, does the fact that Saddam Hussien is a brutal despot mean he is also closely?or even loosely?connected with Al Queda and terrorism? Possibly, but again, these bad things may not go together. Finally, is the war on Iraq all about oil? Probably not; the reasons people claim for going to war are "invariably less symmetrical, less perfect" than that. The world is a complex place with forces and patterns and trends and histories converging and diverging all the time. How we read these convergences will make all the difference to our future.

With that in mind, I'll leave you with one of the best lines in the book. Cayce has met up with Stella, a Russian woman. While reminiscing about Russia's recent transition from the soviet to the capitalist model, Stella says:

Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism was true (303).

We're all vaguely but often almost viscerally familiar with the patterns behind the first half of Stella's sentence (communism = evil), but why do so many of us give so little attention to the patterns that give rise to the second half?

Footnote:
[1] For a quick into to cyberpunk, this list contains the most notorious examples. I've read the top 10 and recommend them all. (In fact, I like Neal Stephenson better than Gibson, but I don't think I'm supposed to say that, so don't tell.)

Check out Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a new sci-fi novel by first-time novelist Cory Doctorow. Under one of the new licenses from Creative Commons, the complete book is available to download absolutely free in a variety of forms. You can even print a copy for yourself, if you so desire. Of course, you can also buy a copy of the real thing—an actual, dead-tree, bound book. It's an interesting and refreshing experiment, especially in light of the Supreme Court's awful decision yesterday against the public domain. Copyfight has just about all the news that's fit to click regarding the decision. [link via Scripting News, which also links today to more inside scoop from Lessig on the decision.]

Instead of getting all morbid and ranting about what a huge step backward this is for freedom and creativity and American culture, I'll just ask: Is Cory Doctorow related in anyway to E.L. Doctorow of Ragtime fame?

Give yourself a 30-minute gift today and go read "Literary Devices," a new short story by Richard Powers. According to Scott Rosenberg, the story will only be available for one more week, so get it while you can. Could the "age of the rich, self-telling, process-authored, post-human, platform-independent story" almost be here? And why can't I come up with cool ideas like that? Ok, don't answer that, just enjoy the story.

It's back... almost. November is National Novel Writing Month, which means NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. Want to write a novel in a month? (A "novel" is considered complete at 50,000 words, for purposes of NaNoWriMo.) It's grrrreat fun! I only made it to 30,000 words or so last year, but it was the most fun I'd had with words in a long time—and that's saying something, really, considering all the reading and writing I do. Besides, would you rather:

1. Listen to a pompous windbag tell you not to write a novel? or....


2. Listen to a quirky writer tell you that anyone can write a novel?