On the way back from Awash National Park, Matthew, Zerihun and I ran out of gas. We coasted to a stop behind a ten-ton truck. Zerihun got out an negotiated for the driver to tow us with a cable tied around the frame of our jeep. We banged along like that toward the next town, which was supposed to be what, nine, fifteen kilometers away? After about twenty kilometers, Zerihun said, “Well, he’s either towing us all the way to Addis, or else maybe he’s towing is to Maljacha Ferenjecha.”
Welcome to the New Neolithic: Telecommuting meets Time Travel
by Sean Murphy
Stoned 77/July 1999Mountain View, California
The three technicians stare at the screen.
Yes! There it is again: a transmission that seems to originate from somewhere in the Mierda de Caballo mountains of northern New Mexico.
The woman at the keyboard types a command, beginning the decryption process. The transmission appears to be some kind of video feed. Faces press closer around the screen.
The current incarnation of the Tuesday Series takes place through an unmarked door and up some stairs to an abandoned second-floor apartment. The third act on the bill last night was a series of improvised duets between Naomi Joy on violin and Jon Davis on clarinet and bass clarinet.
The musicians banged back shots of telepathy and then chased each other flat out playing follow the leader and monkey-see-monkey-do. I ended up doubled over with recognition.
My daughters and I play the same musical games: chasing and mirroring each other with our voices and/or household objects until we fall down from laughter or hyperventilation, but the girls and I don’t possess frighteningly-acute instrumental skills. I asked Naomi about this after the show, and she said something along the lines of, “We’ve kind of moved through technique.”
I believe her.
I’m a fixer for Al Jazeera. It says so on my card: FIXER. That level of candor is what I like about the job. Any other place I’ve ever worked, I’ve had euphemistic titles like “compliance engineer” or “special assistant to the president.” Since I’m paid to cut the bullshit, bullshit titles really kill me.
When the ThoughtForm Revolution broke out in Tibet, my employers in Qatar sent me to recruit the world’s best-known thoughtform as their special correspondent. But since when does William Gibson do freelance journalism?
I took the redeye to Vancouver. Continue reading
Jack Move Magazine has published my story Rougaille de Poisson, about prep cheffing and sudden death on a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. READ IT!
And here is Jack Move editor Emma Alvarez Gibson’s interview William Gibson on Wa-Wa Pedals, Emotional Bandwidth and Space Castles. READ IT!
Image CC-BY by TheBusyBrain
We spent this morning at the Laguna Negra octopus sanctuary, hacking through the jungle behind our local guide. The Laguna Negra villagers looked toward octopus tourism in the late 1960′s when the market for chicle gum was drying out. The central Yucatan jungle is home to twelve subspecies of octopus arboris, all of them now endangered or threatened. Four of the subspecies have been found within the sanctuary itself, and all village adults take shifts on armed patrol, discouraging poachers seeking meat and leather.
Our guide told us a (wonderful, possibly apocryphal) story of a school of octopodes imitating a sleeping adult spider monkey and then swarming and devouring the hapless ocelot who tried to prey on the monkey.
We had just about given up hope of seeing the elusive creatures when our guide motioned for us to stop. We stood breathless and listened to the cracking of branches and then caught a fleeting glimpse of something before whatever it was disappeared in a blurry cloud of diffracting ink.
Photo: Me, uneasily trying on black-market octopus-leather cap at one of the ubiquitous folkloric-craft stands on the road to Valladolid.
In the years before the drought, it was a joke. The river was sweet, the lake was salt. Heaven to the west, hell to the east. We were caught in the middle. Continue reading
Per pushed the scrap of paper onto the floor and stared at the remains of his chili.
“You dropped this,” the waitress said, handing the paper back.
“It’s not mine,” he said.
She shrugged and carried it off with her armload of dirty dishes. Continue reading
I come from a long line of pig thieves.
1957
My father János VI and his father János V used to drive down from Chowchilla and poach boar along the backroads around Monterey. (Safari-suit-wearing big-game fanatics had created a breeding population of boar on the Central Coast in the 1920s.) One time dad and Grandpa got lost in the fog and shot a sea lion by mistake. Grandma put it in a casserole with macaroni and cream-of-celery soup.
Continue reading
He was my cousin and my father’s favorite apprentice.
Late at night when the fog was especially thick (which is to say every single night for many, many years) my father’s fakirs would slide down the chimneys of the grand and withdraw a few minutes later with a candlestick, a watch, a spoon, a brooch. When the thefts were discovered more servants would be sacked, more bellies would be empty and more children would crawl to my father pleading for work.