I admire the following sentence.
Large portions of this section were written in a hotel in Ban Hat Yai, Thailand, which is one of the information-transfer capitals of the planet regardless of whether you think of information transfer as bits propagating down an optical fiber, profound and complex religious faiths being transmitted down through countless generations, or genetic material being interchanged between consenting adults.
Who knew where it was from without googling?
9 comments:
So: have we found a pix of our aviatrix? Or, perhaps, a sister? Which has blue hair, and which orange...
:)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=7&f=/c/a/2008/08/25/DDFU12HOOP.DTL
Kevin
I was pretty sure it was Stephenson, but it didn't twig my memory has being from one of his books, so I had to google to find out where it was from...
I'd be interested as to how this became fodder for a blog post. Were you in a technologically advanced doctor's office with VERY old magazines?
dph
Someone sent me the link to the huge document in which I found it, during an online conversation.
I am interested in information and in writing, and that sentence is a perfectly cut gem. I absolutely had to display it for everyone to admire. I aspire to write that well.
My first thought was Stephenson as well - few people can craft a sentence as well as he does and it does have a bit of a Cryptonomicon ring to it, but I don´t think it´s from the book...
Hi aviatrix,
this is from a pice written by Neal Stephenson for Wired, it appeared in December 1996 in issue 4.12. The text should be available in the archives at wired.com. If you cannot locate it, drop me a line at taube@yahoo.com.
This is a great piece of journalism that I have re-read several times, although reading it takes very long :-). Sort of a companion piece, or advance piece, to Cryptonomicon.
Have fun,
Christian
Not me. A-and, what's wrong with googling? Ok, it's cheating, maybe...
World Brain, H. G. Wells, 1937
I had no idea. I've read and liked Cryptonomicon though, which rivals Pynchon for depth and threads.
From his website fwiw:
"Coverage of me on the Internet and in journalism has probably not been any better or worse than for anyone else with a comparable degree of fame. Which is to say that much of what is out there is wrong."
Funnily enough I've had the page in question open in another tab for months, waiting for me to get around to read it.
It sounds somewhat like the Late lamented Douglas Adams a'la "Last Chance to See...", but not quite funny enough.
Post a Comment