No Maps for These Territories Page #7

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And the building is still hanging together perfectly well.

It's just that Union Trust has long moved on,

and migrated to...migrated to cyberspace, probably.

I don't have a very conscious

creative process at all.

It doesn't, those books don't...those books don't happen because I think about them.

I'm more and more...more and more conscious

lately that they happen...books happen because I write them.

And the...the genuinely creative parts emerge from the actual process

of putting one word after another.

Than the bits that I enjoy, which are the bits that surprise me

and that I didn't, you know,

that I didn't expect - they come out of the actual process of writing. They don't come out of...

they don't come out of a process of cogitating,

and consciously trying to be visionary, or imagining what the future would be like.

They just emerge from...from this very analogue

process of one word after another.

I feel that if I'm doing my job,

if I'm doing the job that I'm supposed to do,

I will not be in control of the narrative.

If I'm really achieving something with the characterization,

the characters become impossible to control.

I mean, they start driving, they start driving the action and...and losing the plot.

I have to make a deal with myself that I'll turn up

and make a real effort to see if there's any "incoming mail."

But there are times when the process

just remains closed to me, and it...it won't happen.

And the conscious part of me, the part of me that's talking to you now,

is not really that which writes those books.

I mean...the books are written by me...

the books are written by the guy who's talking to you now...

in collaboration with his unconscious.

And I don't have

reliable access to my unconscious, all the time.

I have to wait...I have to wait for it to turn up, sometimes.

at that point, had been in stasis: employed by the management of Lo/Rez,

the pop group, to facilitate the singer Rez's "marriage"

to the Japanese virtual star Rei Toei,

Laney had settled into a life in Tokyo that centered around visits to a private,

artificially constructed island in Tokyo Bay,

an expensive nub of engineered landfill upon which Rez and Rei Toei

intended to bring forth some sort of new reality.

That Laney had never been able to quite grasp the nature of this reality hadn't surprised him.

Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars...

It's a very strange...it's a very strange thing we do, when we...when we write novels.

Because this is an act that began somewhere with someone making a mark on a piece of wood,

or a rock, and its grown into millions of millions of marks on sheets of paper

that are bound together,

that, in a trained reader, produce incredibly complicated, complex reactions.

And Laney fell in love with her, although he understood

that she had been designed for him to fall in love with.

As the amplified reflection of desire, she was a team effort;

to the extent that her designers had done their jobs properly, she was a waking dream,

a love object sprung from an approximation of the global mass unconscious.

If there's been any - any visualization

of a text of mine, you know, a film or comic book, or even an... even an illustration

I'm always struck by the...the innocence with which some...some readers will say,

"But that isn't what it looks like. That's not what she looks like."

And it always makes me smile, because I realize when they say that,

that they haven't actually

realized that they are the creator of what "it" looks like, as much...as much as I am.

"This is human, I think,"

"This is human, I think," she'd said, when pressed.

"This is the result of what you are, biochemically,

being stressed in a particular way.

This is wonderful. This is closed to me."

Writing is inherently a collaborative act,

because the recipient of the writing will create...

create an inner world, according to whatever they're bringing to the text.

Ana has set up her "cam," Ana...Ana is a singer and performance artist...

Oh yeah...I know her!

Is that how you thought it would turn out?

No! No, not at all.

I mean, I just didn't imagine..

I didn't imagine that art-girls in the Midwest would...

would be flashing their tits in cyberspace.

Although, I'm glad they are.

I was in New York, and we were looking at - we were down in the

Chelsea Antique Market, looking at Civil War-era pornography...

hardcore, like, Matthew Brady hardcore.

And I never knew that this stuff existed.

It ranges from cheesecake, some of which is totally charming,

cheesecake, to the...to just the rawest, full-on hardcore.

You know, daguerreotypes.

The technology was new; the technology was there for the first time,

to reproduce pornographic...pornographic images.

And because there were these Union armies, that, you know...

there were tens, hundreds of thousands of lonely, wanking soldiers,

marching across the United States.

So, you know, the American porno industry was born there, I suppose.

Like, its modern, you know, the...

the Larry Flynt world was sort of born on the battlefields of Gettysburg!

And there's a market for this stuff. There's a very serious collector's market.

And I have a friend named Richard, who's, by day, a dealer in...

a dealer in rare books,

and...and by night, a dealer in Civil War porno.

My friend Richard reminded me once again that...

that new media is always driven by pornography,

almost always. Any new media that gets out into the world

for instance, it wasn't true of television, but television was a broadcast medium.

As soon as television became home video,

a lot of developments in it, of, like, what you could do with it,

were driven by the desire to create pornography.

He said that, as far as he knew, the most sophisticated marketing and billing on the Internet

was...was netporn. Those are the guys that have been doing e-commerce all along.

A couple of years ago, Bruce Sterling came up with a...

with a scenario in which it was discovered that there was no viable way

to make money - really make serious money - on the web.

And the web would become a sort of ghost town,

and it would be re-inherited by the sort of crazy people who...

who were there in the first place. The corporations would all go home, and it would all be a sort of giant "ghost site."

Well, my understanding,

such as it is, is that the Internet exists today

because DARPA, a federally-funded think tank, was asked by the Pentagon

to create a ()communication system that would survive a major nuclear...

a major nuclear war: global nuclear war.

DARPA came up with the idea of connecting...

connecting the mainframe computers - existing mainframe computers in universities

in the Western World - in a switching system that would allow the...

the communication to be carried around "problem areas"

say, a Chicago that no longer existed.

And if this switching was sufficiently fast, they would be able to communicate right through...

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