Facts

It’s been just over a week, and this war has become historical fact, as inevitable as the sun that set over Baghdad last Wednesday night. And now that it has become fact, it must be paid for. We must pay $75 billion dollars for it, and that’s just the down payment. There go social services. There goes the budget for educating the next generation of American minds. I’m not being unpatriotic, but it seems to me that if you’re prepared to spend $75+ billion dollars, surely there must be a more creative way to liberate the people of Iraq, which doesn’t require killing them, and sacrificing American lives. But hey, what do I know…

In “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” Chris Hedges talks about how war, once launched, creates facts, which in turn create war’s inevitability. Every death or wounding becomes a new fact that justifies, retroactively, war’s start. Every bombing or attack provides a reason to continue. Once sparked, facts become stories, stories become myths. War is a feedback loop, growing more powerful with every round of suffering. Canny aggressors throughout history have always known this and have been careful to co-opt the cuture's myth-makers. To in-bed them, as it were.

I’ve been traveling everyday to the relentless, mind-numbing soundtrack of CNN’s Orwellian war coverage, pumping through the PA systems of hotel lobbies and airline terminals across the nation. I’m glad to be moving, though. Glad to have an excuse to escape the television and to spend the evenings in the company of readers. I’m grateful to the bookstores for providing us with the space to congregate, and to everyone who comes to listen and to share. So...

Thanks to Book Passage and to A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, and to Dutton’s in Los Angeles.

Thanks to The Toronto Woman’s Bookstore, Spa Ha Restaurant, Food Share, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, and Polaris Institute (wow…talk about diversity!) for sponsoring a really fun evening.

Thanks to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York for the on-going advocacy and support for our voices, and to Barnes & Noble at Astor Place for welcoming me home.

And here’s a little story about media and reality. The other day I had an interview at the Toronto Star. When I walked into the vast newspaper office, the largest in North America, I was amazed at how perfect it was, a seemingly endless expanse of desks and cubicles, covered with piles of paper and files and coffee cups, and reporters in shirtsleeves threading their way purposefully through the maze. I exclaimed something dumb like, "Oh gee, this is so authentic! It's exactly what a newspaper office should look like!"... at which point the journalist who was doing the interview smiled and informed me that it had been used as the location for the Washington Post pressroom in the film “All The President’s Men.”
Right.

shock and....

…just more grinding shock. The events of the last few days have silenced this nascent weblog, and I am ashamed to be a wordsmith at a time when words are being so debased and abused. The cognitive dissonance created by Bush's speech on Monday is indescribable! It made me want to shut up, permanently. How can we write—what can we possibly write?—at a time when words have clearly lost all ties to meaning? Language has become disconnected from significance. Sacred words like “Truth” have been cheapened, become just another form of cynical manipulation. Sentences condemn real, live, innocent people to death. Communication is futile and deadly…Oh, my sweet Silkie chicks, how I envy your bean-sized brains now!

But no. No. No. No. I don’t believe this. I refuse it, and for good reason. I've been going from city to city on this crazy book tour, and not a SINGLE person I have met—readers, newspaper reporters, radio hosts, TV newscasters—believes this war is sane, right, just, or even inevitable, however inevitable it may seem. We might not have the words right away, but we know what is wrong. So we've got to be patient with our silence, even as we struggle towards speech.

The readings have been wonderful. Why? Because my readers are amazing—strong, smart, resilient, curious, active, funny, compassionate, alert. And I've been reading at the independent bookstores who hold their own and provide a community and a safe haven for us all. Thank you Elliot Bay in Seattle. Thank you, Powell’s in Portland. Thank you Kepler’s, tonight. I'm so grateful to you.

Here’s a bit of consolation. For now, as long as we are allowed to be readers and writers, and to read and write freely, at least some of our words will retain their integrity. Here in America, we still have the right to freedom of expression. We’ve got to guard against incursions, against erosions of this right.

And here’s a very powerful phrase that I learned: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I repeat this to myself, over and over, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, because it brings my choices to the surface. However pessimistic our empirical or “realistic” assessment of the world may be, these words make it clear that optimism is a moral imperative. It’s a choice that we can make, every day. Hang on to that thought, and I hope I'll see you around San Francisco and in Los Angeles in the next few days…

chicks

First up, thanks to Village Books in Bellingham for a great reading venue on Friday! You are a very cool bookstore, and Bellingham is a very happening book town.

Now, some news from home. Just got word that our Silkies have hatched out the first chicks of the season. The first clutch, in early March! This breed is phenomenally prolific. They’re an ancient Chinese chicken, first introduced to Europe by Marco Polo, and prized in China for their docile nature and the health-giving properties of their meat. Their feathers are downy-soft, and come in different colors, some blue, some buff, some black. Underneath, their skin is black, and they have brilliant sapphire spots on their cheeks, and fluffy puffs on the tops of their heads, like little pillbox hats, which make them look like mod fashion models from the Sixties. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it.

The secret to their long survival is their implacable maternal instinct. These hens will go broody at the drop of a hat. They’ll sit on a stone and try to hatch it. Even the roosters will hunker down on a clutch of eggs.

Isn't it amazing, that the same egg that we scramble and eat for breakfast can, in a mere 21 days, organize itself from a liquid yolk and a tiny spot of blood into a living, breathing, peeping, self-propelling organism, with an appetite, and a will to continue? From a single large cell, to a complex, multi-cellular life form, in 21 days! Not to make you feel bad or anything, but think back on the last three weeks of your life. What have you managed to accomplish? Even with these great big brains of ours, in our high-tech labs, we still can’t begin to replicate something that a chicken does with such casual off-handedness. I mean, it takes me years to write a novel. In 21 days, I might write a page or two, or twenty, but it’s still only words, marks on paper, like the scratching of a chicken. It doesn’t have a beating heart.

Of course, since chicken brains are about the size of a bean, they come up short in the imagination department. This is some consolation.

Here’s a question that I’ve always found puzzling. I’m sure there’s a simple answer, but I don’t know what it is, and I’ll send a free book to the first person who can clue me in:

I’ve read that if you weigh a fertilized chicken egg that’s just been laid, and you weigh it again just before it hatches, it will be heavier, which makes sense because it has a whole baby chick inside with bones and muscles and body mass. But where does all that mass come from? Not from the mother, clearly, because there’s no umbilical connection, therefore no material transfer. The egg is a closed system, so how does that additional matter get into the shell? It can’t come from nowhere, because according the Law of Conservation of Mass, in a chemical reaction, matter can neither created nor destroyed; it can only change it’s form. Clearly, an embryo changes form, but how do you explain the increase in mass? Where, for example, does the calcium come from?

liminal states

I love Vancouver. It is an edge city, a liminal world, clinging precariously to the rim of the Pacific, the last stop before you hit Hokkaido. Today it rained. It always rains, and the weather is sullen, glum and defiant. But when you see the lush rainforest vegetation, and dripping moss, and the size of the old growth trees in Stanley Park, you realize just how pathetic pathetic fallacy really is. The trees don't care about our notions of sullen. Glum is good. Rain makes things with roots grow taller.

This blog is another liminal world. A quiet place to retreat after a day of publicity, not quite public but not entirely private either. A transition zone. I like it here. I feel like I can say things that can’t be said in other places.

The reading last night at Women In Print was wonderful. What a fantastic bookstore! Thank you, Louise and Carole, for hosting such a great group of smart readers, and for the delicious birthday cake! It was a perfect way to start the tour.

We headed south toward the border this morning. Suffered the usual paroxysms of irony and gut-twisting guilt in the line-up at the Peace Arch crossing. What is it about the sight of these terse, humorless INS men that triggers the recall of every crime or misdemeanor you’ve ever contemplated committing? Today we got an officer who was quite literary. He asked why we wanted to come to the U.S. of A.. I told him I was an author on book tour. He asked me what my book was about. I told him it was about a farm in Idaho. He asked me what genre it was. I said, “Mainstream Women’s Fiction.” He shook his head. “Not for me,” he said, and waved us into America.

Of course, Mainstream Women’s Fiction isn’t really a genre. It’s the marketing category into which Viking has slotted my book. Still, it was the first time in my life that I could say, with full confidence and authority, that I was mainstream anything. What a feeling. I’ll have to remember that.

Then, on the way down I-5 in the pounding rain, heading toward Bellingham, a large double-hopper farm truck pulled on to the highway. After a few moments, we started noticing that stuff was falling from the truck and bouncing off the asphalt in front of us. At first we thought they were apple cores, partly eaten fruit, which the driver was chucking out the window, but there were too many for that to make sense. And then we realized that they weren’t apples at all. The truck was strewing our path with potatoes.

When you read “All Over Creation,” you will know why this felt like a sign from the universe. God throwing spuds. The Big Guy tossing tubers.

Oh, brave new world...

Highspeed Internet at the Sheraton Vancouver Hotel. This is lux.
Quite a change from the erratic dial-up on the island where we live in Desolation Sound.
Seems apt to be launching my website and entering my first blog from Vancouver, here in WilliamGibsonland.
I wonder who is out there. I hope this will be fun.

The book tour for my new novel, "All Over Creation," starts tomorrow,
and I'm excited/anxious/scared...
It's always hard to make the transition from private to public,
hard to leave the cats and the chickens behind,
and it's really hard to be contemplating a month and a half of air travel right now.
Spent the ferry ride reading a great article by Jonathan Schell, in the new Harper's, entitled "No More Unto The Breach: Part 1: Why War if Futile."
Not that I needed any convincing, but if you know anyone who does, tell them to read this. Excellent historical perspective on the past century of war-making.

More on this later.

For now...I just want to get this blog thing happening. I hope to see my friends out there. Check out the tour schedule on the website, and drop by and say hi. It's an excellent time for solidarity.

Peace.