Posthuman Blues

Uneventful weekend. Plodding through Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"; yesterday, I read and reviewed "What If Our World Is Their Heaven?," a great series of interviews with Philip K. Dick. The main fountain in the large creek outside of my apartment building is working, despite the frozen surface; on my jog to the parking garage the other day, I noticed it oozing steam into the air like some sort of natural phenomenon transplanted from a nature tour.

Work on the Mars/SETI book is coming along well. I think I have something...I might post excerpts here, where potential readers are probably least likely to see them.

Last night I dreamed I was an android. Someone told me, very casually. I wasn't particularly surprised, but the revelation left me with a vague sense of existential unease. Speaking of dreams: that's one very good reason for creating a blog that I hadn't thought of moments before, when it just seemed like a Cool Thing To Do. A dynamic medium like this welcomes dreams...in 30 years, we'll be carrying around personal dream recorders and thrusting them into the faces of friends saying "Watch this!" But everyone will be too engaged in their own half-forgotten Technicolor reveries to pay much attention.

(Given the opportunity, I defend Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World," with its moody globalized milieu and Sterling-esque attachment to blobjects and gizmos. And the orchestral soundtrack is truly great.)

Dreams as addiction. Claire (pleadingly, frantic, like a child with a malfunctioning GameBoy): "Make it work!"

Why create a web log? What's the point? Speaking only for myself: to write. I have stacks of notebooks to be typed into readable form, but they're languishing. I fully intend to buy a laptop with my advance, so hopefully my collection of wirebound journals will shrivel and die.

You there. Reading this. You don't have to, you know. William Gibson's blog is almost certainly more interesting than this (yes, he has a blog now, and a pretty good website). This isn't intended for an audience, per se. Then again, that seems to be part of the cyber-chic/geek-appeal of this whole "blogging" thing: that reader and author are merged in an illicit conceptual pact, eavesdropping on otherwise uninteresting bouts of creative (?) self-indulgence.

Why "Posthuman Blues"? Jack Kerouac's "Book of Blues" contains some essentially worthless poetry...but if he'd toted a palmtop instead of a ruled notepad, his output would likely find a small but fervent niche audience. His "Book of Blues" is rich blogging material, written as one would scribble postcards to one's own clone or multidimensional counterpart.