About halfway through my signed copy of william gibson’s excellent spook country, I stumbled across this amazing conversation between two of the characters, an ex-member of a band called The Curfew and her mysterious new employer;

“In the early 1920’s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’-making the quote with his hands-”took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing what they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star as we knew her”-and here he bowed slightly, in her direction-”was actually an artifact of preubiquitious media”

Now when I say amazing I actually mean ‘very similar to something I wrote‘. So similar infact that I have started to wonder if I had actually read this bit somewhere before, forgotten all about it, then regurgitated as my own work.

Either that or me and Will are ‘on the same wavelength’ in this small way-something far too amazing to contemplate.

I would imagine that any kind of ‘original thought’ gets harder and harder with the massive movements of information in (and out) of our minds every day. The real gift it seems, is to connect seemingly disparate threads and make sense of it a little.

Something Mr. Gibson does awfully well.

Sabres of Paradise-Wilmot