homecoming

Okay, so clearly I still have a lot to learn about maintaining a weblog. “Maintaining” being the key word here. Sorry for the lapse.

I’m savoring my re-entry into domestic life after months on the road. Yet while it’s absolutely lovely to be home, transitions can be tricky. In recent years, I’ve gotten better at navigation, so it's not so bad now, but I remember back when I worked in film and television it was horrible.

It would start when the job was over, and you went home, exhausted but excited, dreaming of all the wonderful things you would do, now that your time was your own again…and maybe for a day or two you did enjoy your freedom before real life started creeping in, and there were bills to pay, and phone calls to answer, and the mail had piled up, and everyone was slightly annoyed at you for being away…and suddenly you found yourself kind of missing the suspended reality that passes for life on the film set. It's a lot simpler. You have a single mission. Few choices. A set schedule. Regular meals. A rigid hierarchy that governs relationships. The rules are clear. As long as you do your utmost, that's all that is required.

People in film and television like to compare working on a film to being in the military, which seems a bit self-indulgent, but hey. You can learn a lot about what it feels like to work on a film shoot by looking at “crisis” dramas like ER, or West Wing, or any of the cop or rescue shows. While they pretend to be about hospitals or law enforcement, they’re really about the lives of the crew members who are writing and filming the scripts.

The formula is always the same: a crew (team, squad, battalion) of people works together in a constant state of emergency, punctuated by a series of spiking crises, which they will succeed in resolving if they pull together and work as a team. These crises are followed by brief lulls, during which the heroes go home and makes a mess of their personal lives, but this is okay because the next crisis is always imminent and can be counted on to rescue them from all the banal, annoying, tedious complexity of domestic life maintenance.

Occasionally something nice will happen in their personal lives, which is okay, too, because it doesn’t have to last. The next crisis is always imminent and can be counted on rescue them from all the banal, annoying, tedious complexity...etc., etc..

It’s a narrative formula that sells. It pretty much describes what it’s like to work on a film or TV set, which in turn explains why TV producers are so addicted to it: They like making shows about themselves. It also pretty much describes why war, or any violent crisis, is such a successful political/mythic alternative to the annoying, tedious complexity of maintaining domestic stability.

fiction

These days I’ve been reading USA Today. It’s what shows up in front of my hotel room door every morning, no matter what city I’m in. On April 1, April Fool’s Day, the paper ran an article entitled, "Four-fifths of U.S. soybean crop is now bioengineered.” I had missed this article, but a kind woman in Wichita clipped it for me and gave it to me after the reading. I was glad she did.

In “All Over Creation,” my character Geek, a fervent environmental activist, rails, "Kids, did you know that more than half of the soybeans planted in America are genetically engineered? And a third of the corn too..."

When Geek said this, in 1999, the percentage was about 54%. The USA Today article reports, "A full 80% of this year's U.S. soybean will be planted in bioengineered seed, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey released Monday. Biotech corn plantings now comprise 38% of all corn planted in the USA. Biotech cotton is holding steady at approximately 70%."

As Geek's spokesperson out here in the "real" world, I'm pointing out these increases because he can't, in order to express his concerns and assuage his frustrations. The problem with being a fictional character in a novel is that, once written, you are fixed in time, and you have to rely on your author to stay current—an unsatisfactory situation all around, given how unreliable and out-of-touch writers of fiction can be.

Critics sometimes accuse novelists of putting our opinions into our characters’ mouths. These critics do not understand the creative process at all. As you can see, it is quite the opposite. I speak for Geek, not the other way around. Through me, Geek says things like,

“Genetic engineering is changing the semantics, the meaning of life itself. We’re trying to usurp the plant’s choice. To force alien words into the plant’s poem, but we’ve got a problem. We barely know the root language. Genetic grammar’s a mystery, and our engineers are just once click up the evolutionary ladder from a roomful of monkeys, typing random sonnets on a bank of typewriters.”

I do not believe this. Having spent time with a number of scientists doing this kind of research, I can tell you that they are nothing like a roomful of randomly typing monkeys. They are very smart, very concerned, very impassioned truthseekers, albeit a bit cut off from reality, which is what happens when you are a research scientist working in a lab. I don’t fault them for this. I’m a novelist, and I spend most of my time cut off from reality, too.

The difference between me and them, however, that as a novelist, the sequestration of my work from reality is unbreachable. No one is going to take my ideas, the results of my research, and actually make them manifest in the real world. And as a result, there’s a limit to the amount of damage I can do. There’s no such thing as “applied” fiction.

But wait. Clearly I’m wrong. Look at the Bush administration’s tales regarding Iraq, and the fantastic narratives that have been constructed by White House spin doctors. Isn’t this applied fiction at its most extreme? Apparently there is no limit at all to the damage that can be done.

potato culture

First up, some words of gratitude:

Thanks to Brenda Weber and Doug Slaymaker and all the fine folks at the Kentucky Women’s Writers Festival last weekend. It was great to be part of your company …

Thanks to Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore in Milwaukee, and to the University Bookstore in Madison. I was happy to come back to Wisconsin with a finished book since I did a lot of the research for “All Over Creation” here. More on this below…

In Wichita, thanks to Sarah and Beth and all the very cool people of Watermark Books for such a very warm welcome. I’d been to every one of the United States except for Kansas, so this stop completes the country for me. And thanks to the kind woman who handed me the USA Today article about genetically engineered soybeans. I’ll return to this topic, too.

And finally, thanks to the Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado, and the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. It’s always wonderful to come back here, and it was especially fun this time because I finally got to meet Donna Gershten, author of the Bellwether Prize winning novel, “Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth.”

Now, back to spuds. During the tour, many people asked me what kind of research I did for "All Over Creation." I did quite a bit of research, but in the end, with a heavy heart, I decided to cut out the more arcane bits of potato trivia from the novel, for fear of sinking it under the sheer weight of my obsession. However, now I see that a weblog is the ideal place to recycle this material, and the more obsessive among you can read it if you'd like.

One of my main stops was Wisconsin. There is a thriving potato culture in the state of Wisconsin, and one of the hotspots is the USDA Potato Introduction Center in Sturgeon Bay, also known as NRSP-6. It is the point of entry for all potato germplasm into the nation’s potato breeding programs and thus into America’s food chain. I often slip up and call it the Potato Induction Center by mistake, because I have this stupid image in my mind of all the little potatoes lined up, saluting, and marching off to enlist.

However, the Introduction Center does not dabble with tubers. Their motto is “Genes, not Genotypes,” and they deal in seed. As a gene bank, their job is to reproduce and keep germplasm alive, to maintain sufficient quantity for distribution, and to keep stock lists of active seeds. When I was there, they were maintaining 4709 collections of potato germplasm.

In order to reproduce the seed, they must do extensive hand pollination, which is very cool. In nature, the bumblebee is the only pollinator of potatoes. It buzzes the flower, causing the anther to vibrate, which knocks off the pollen. Chico, the head gardener at the Center, made a little contraption from a door buzzer, which he uses to simulate the bee and to fool the potato flower into releasing its pollen. I imagine it's very sexy, if you're a male potato plant.

The mandate of station is to seek useful things, collected from the wild, and to disseminate these collections to users. Most users are professional plant breeders and researchers, affiliated with university, and occasionally corporate, breeding programs, but non-affiliated individuals and amateurs can receive germplasm, too.

The Sturgeon Bay station is a part of National Plant Germplasm System. In 1990, it joined Intergene, an international association of genebanks. The operating premise is one of basic co-operation. They share their techniques and the secrets of potato culture in order to create a global potato database.

The Potato Introduction Center, in keeping with NPGS policy, does not to keep patented materials or materials protected as intellectual property. The operating principle seems to be that germplasm is part of our "commons" and that anyone should be able to have free access to it. In a world of increasing privatization, I like this policy a lot.

hotels

William Gibson said that book tour is like a rock concert tour, without the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. True. However some big music label was holding a convention in the Toronto hotel where I was staying, and one of the bands was in the room next to mine. They started practicing around midnight. They wore headphones so I couldn’t hear the music part, for which I was grateful, but from time to time they burst into loud, random-seeming vocalization, like cats in heat, mating just beyond my headboard.

In New York’s SoHo Grand, a “pet friendly” hotel with no high-speed Internet connection, my room was covered with white dog hair. Next door, a pack of hysterical beasts barked all night, until I longed for the caterwauling of the night before.

When I arrived at the Radisson, in Lexington, Kentucky, the front desk was besieged. Through the crowd, I spotted the sign...welcoming a convention of English Bell Ringers to the Bluegrass State. 170 rooms, the desk clerk informed me, full of bell ringers.

I like Milwaukee. The hotel is quiet. But there is tension in the lobby. I ask around and discover that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is due to check in at any moment, and so, coincidentally, is Carl Bernstein, co-author of "All The President's Men." Hmmm. First the Toronto Star pressroom last week, and now this? Is the universe trying to communicate something? The Watergate theme is certainly in the air, and journalists are getting fired for telling the truth about the war. The concierge, I can see, is determined to keep the incoming parties apart, fearing the outbreak of a catfight.

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.