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Meeting Chairman Bruce
I haven't tried telling this story before so it's likely to be wordy and not as funny as my usual. Read on if you wish.
I was watching the Boingboing post of Bruce Sterling's keynote talk from an Art and Environment conference and thought to myself 'my, he's slowed down over the years.' If you haven't listened to Bruce Sterling talks/rants they're wonderful. Erudite and often surprising, and he has a certain cadence to the way he does things. He doesn't talk from written text, rather from notes and generally he'll glance down at them, get prompted for a point or two he wants to make and then take off on another riff. The riffs just come slower these days.
I suppose that's not surprising. We've all slowed down a lot in the last 25 or so years. Which got me to thinking about where and how I met Sterling. It was at my first ArmadilloCon, 1986. I had just moved to Austin, Texas, and I knew nothing about nobody writing SF there but I went to a panel to hear Grant Fjermedal talk about his book The Tomorrow Makers a volume recounting the extraordinary research done at places like MIT and CMU on Artificial Intelligence, which was a shiny and respectable thing back then.
After the panel I stayed to talk to the panelists and I noted to Fjermedal that if he was interested in continuing this sort of in-lab investigative work I could get him into MCC the then-new and exciting research consortium that was working on, among other things, AI. Fjermedal turned to one of his co-panelists and said "Hey, Bruce! This guy can get us into MCC - want to come?"
Sure enough they did come by and I shepherded them around to various demos and to meet various people. Fjermedal was all about talking to specific people; Sterling just seemed to want to see as many things as he possibly could, as fast as he could. I noticed he was taking notes on a little pad, flipping back and forth and around the end of the day I finally asked him what he was writing down. He explained he was writing down words and phrases he had heard, and I asked if he wanted any of them explained.
No, no, he replied. That wasn't the point. He was not trying to understand them so much as he wanted to immerse himself in the jargon. His little flip-pad notebook categorized things not by meaning but by how they sounded and particularly by the effect that saying them had.
Fjermedal went back to wherever he was living, and Sterling went home to a house in Austin a few blocks from where I moved not long after. I can't say we were great friends, but we hung out from time to time, drank beers once in a while, critiqued each other's writing now and then, and caught up when we happened to be in the same places after we had both moved to other parts of the world. Which is how I know, for example, that William Gibson did not in fact try to trademark the word 'cyberspace' as popular mis-legend sometimes claims. But that's a different story. This story is a little bit about how Bruce Sterling speaks, and how the way he speaks reflects the way he thinks, and how I came to find out about that, long ago.
I was watching the Boingboing post of Bruce Sterling's keynote talk from an Art and Environment conference and thought to myself 'my, he's slowed down over the years.' If you haven't listened to Bruce Sterling talks/rants they're wonderful. Erudite and often surprising, and he has a certain cadence to the way he does things. He doesn't talk from written text, rather from notes and generally he'll glance down at them, get prompted for a point or two he wants to make and then take off on another riff. The riffs just come slower these days.
I suppose that's not surprising. We've all slowed down a lot in the last 25 or so years. Which got me to thinking about where and how I met Sterling. It was at my first ArmadilloCon, 1986. I had just moved to Austin, Texas, and I knew nothing about nobody writing SF there but I went to a panel to hear Grant Fjermedal talk about his book The Tomorrow Makers a volume recounting the extraordinary research done at places like MIT and CMU on Artificial Intelligence, which was a shiny and respectable thing back then.
After the panel I stayed to talk to the panelists and I noted to Fjermedal that if he was interested in continuing this sort of in-lab investigative work I could get him into MCC the then-new and exciting research consortium that was working on, among other things, AI. Fjermedal turned to one of his co-panelists and said "Hey, Bruce! This guy can get us into MCC - want to come?"
Sure enough they did come by and I shepherded them around to various demos and to meet various people. Fjermedal was all about talking to specific people; Sterling just seemed to want to see as many things as he possibly could, as fast as he could. I noticed he was taking notes on a little pad, flipping back and forth and around the end of the day I finally asked him what he was writing down. He explained he was writing down words and phrases he had heard, and I asked if he wanted any of them explained.
No, no, he replied. That wasn't the point. He was not trying to understand them so much as he wanted to immerse himself in the jargon. His little flip-pad notebook categorized things not by meaning but by how they sounded and particularly by the effect that saying them had.
Fjermedal went back to wherever he was living, and Sterling went home to a house in Austin a few blocks from where I moved not long after. I can't say we were great friends, but we hung out from time to time, drank beers once in a while, critiqued each other's writing now and then, and caught up when we happened to be in the same places after we had both moved to other parts of the world. Which is how I know, for example, that William Gibson did not in fact try to trademark the word 'cyberspace' as popular mis-legend sometimes claims. But that's a different story. This story is a little bit about how Bruce Sterling speaks, and how the way he speaks reflects the way he thinks, and how I came to find out about that, long ago.