Moomin and I went to Woll's house and he had a great time! Lots of running around and digging in the sand. I read them some bits of a book on c@stles too. They get along very peacefully.
Now he's watching B3dknobs and Br0omsticks. He can't understand anything that the little kids say though he likes the idea of a good witch. I forgot (? was the book ?) that it's all about Naz1s or something. "Mommy, I like that kind of dancing. Are they tap dancing?" (this to the scene with the sailors in uniform in p0rtobello road). "I don't like the WOMEN dancing. I just like the PEOPLE dancing." oops... ??? ack!!! Darling Moomin, I have failed you somehow in your feminist education!
Last night Chula and I wrote for a while in the C@nvas Cafe. As I looked around at all the "laptop people" I had a funny flashback to this time in maybe 1992 or 1993 when I was in a fancy arty cafe in S@n Jose, writing somethingorother on the prototype Duod0ck that Severin lent to me. The cafe people asked me to put it away or leave, as I was bothering other patrons with the negative vibrations of digitalosity. Yes! According to the snooty art boy who asked me to leave, my computer was causing waves of disturbance in The Force that was their weirdly parnassian cafe with its corinthian columns and fake murals and $3.50 dollar chocolate croissants.
Anyway there is something warm and nice to me about being in a cafe full of people looking pensive and busy over their laptops especially if they also have molesk1ne notebooks. Surely 99% of everything written is crap, but who cares. It's nice that it's happening anyway.
We were talking about the idea that people will evolve very quickly or reach some point of being unrecognizable as human in the same way in the near future. (I don't think so but apparently a lot of science fiction writers are obsessing on it.) I did suddenly think of trends in SF that go along with anxieties of a particular time. So -- when people were freaking out about overpopulation you got either very crowded novels or post-apocalypse novels where most of the population had disappeared. When feminism was rearing it hairy legs, you got books where all the men disappeared. when ERA didn't pass and reagan era was fucking everything feminist up you got a lot of very bitter patriarchal dystopias. When personal computers became a big thing then there was cyberpunk... i think we could maybe see some connection between industrialization and robot books or something... or the death of colonialism and books like Tarzan where endless tiny hidden primitive lands are discovered and led by the hand not so gently into the 20th century... So maybe now because of genetics and stuff people are freaking and writing more (?? more than what? I realize I"m talking out my ass here) about merging, melting, becoming an unrecognizable species... and also about something like the pace of change.
this is the sort of thing I know that the database Quilty and I have been talking about for ages woudl be so useful for. I woudl like to be able to index everything and to make little charts of "how many books in what decade were in some way about X topic or theme".
You should have seen the looks in the Anchorage Airport when I plugged in my laptop and went to work. And that was only two years ago! I wonder if they would still stare? Has the Revolution made it up there yet?
Posted by: Jo | August 20, 2004 at 07:12 PM
My ex-girlfriend & I would go on and on at length about the whole designer baby and genome project stuff being the subtext of most popular 90s shows like X-men & Buffy, etc.
Posted by: | August 21, 2004 at 06:55 PM