[The man, in late middle-age, gazes wistfully upon
his collection of aging electronics and realizes,
far too late, that all these treasures are as
e-waste next to her Walkman, that he discarded
without a second thought, so long ago.]
I have of late been touched by the old melancholy.
It manifests in all the usual ways: lassitude;
sleeping long, and waking up tired; an inability
to focus or concentrate. Such feelings are not
unknown to me, particularly in the autumn when
days grow short, the world grows cold, and the
trees loom skeletal against the darkening sky. But
it has been a long while since I felt the "black
dog" (as it is sometimes called) as such a
palpable presence.
At the same time, if you can forgive the bathos, I
have out of seemingly nowhere developed a
remarkable and hopefully short-lived fixation on
the author William Gibson.
To be sure, I have long enjoyed his work. Since
before the publication of Neuromancer in fact;
ever since a friend loaned me her copies of
"Burning Chrome," "Johnny Mnemonic," and
"Fragments of a Hologram Rose" back in '82. For
years afterward I would read every new book as
soon as it appeared in paperback, anyway until
"Spook Country", which kind of lost me. I began
again with "The Peripheral" and "Agency", and
sincerely hope he finishes "Jackpot" one day.
But I have never been what you might call a Gibson
fan, which is to say someone interested as much in
Gibson the man (or at least, the public persona)
as in his fiction. My friend once told me the
broad outlines of his biography, but I had little
interest in learning more. At least until last
month, when I began somewhat obsessively tracking
down recordings of old interviews at the Internet
Archive and elsewhere, watched "No Maps For These
Territories" in its entirety, read my way through
"Conversations with William Gibson", and even
downloaded copies of "Genre Plat," a science
fiction fanzine he co-edited with Allyn Cadogan
and Susan Wood back in the late 1970s.
I am at a loss to explain it, except perhaps as a
bout of nostalgia occasioned by the sudden and
puzzling melancholy preceding my newfound
fixation. Nostalgia, because there was a time in
my life when Gibson was indeed a figure of some
interest, not as a celebrity (because he was not
much of one, back then), but simply as the friend
of a friend. The same friend who loaned me her
copies of Gibson's short stories, and who I will
call Rikki, because she was the real life person
on whom the character "Rikki Wildside" was based,
in Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome". When I
read that story now I see a portrait of Rikki as
she was at a particular and fleeting moment in
time, and so recapture, however briefly, a
fragment of my own past life.
Nostalgia aside, my deep dive into Gibsonalia had
one rather unexpected result, a realisation that
briefly and unknowingly, I once had custody of one
of the foundational artifacts of cyberpunk.
In interview after interview, Gibson iterates over
the same biographical details, and in the various
tellings and retellings of his story some details
emerge, through repetition, as truly
important. One of these is the role the Sony
Walkman played in the development of cyberpunk.
An account published in the New York Times[1] is
typical, although perhaps more detailed than
most. After waxing lyrical about the
"revolutionary intimacy" of the Walkman interface,
Gibson says "his conception of cyberspace [...]
arose after he saw a bus-stop poster for the Apple
IIc that showed only the machine's CPU and
keyboard, not its monitor [...] 'I thought, if
there is an imaginary point of convergence where
the information this machine handles could be
accessed with the under-the-skin intimacy of the
Walkman, what would that be like?'" [2]
Which led me to recall, with a sinking feeling
that did nothing to allay the melancholy that had
brought me to this point, that once long ago Rikki
had given me her old Walkman. It was a model WM-1
with orange headphones, that (I'm fairly sure)
William Gibson had sometime previously given to
her and which was almost certainly the selfsame
Walkman he talked about in all of those
interviews. Why she made me a gift of it I can no
longer recall, but probably just because she
thought I might like it. She was kind that
way. And like it I did, wandering around the city
with my own personal soundtrack until, a few weeks
later, it stopped working.
And a while after that, I threw it away.
And sometimes late at night, I'll be on eBay
browsing thumbnails of overpriced Walkman relics,
identical in every respect to Rikki's Walkman,
but none of them ever are the same.
1. Headlam, Bruce. Walkman Sounded Bell for
Cyberspace. The New York Times; Jul 29, 1999;
pg. G7
2. Side note to cyberdeck builders: apparently an
extreme degree of authenticity can be achieved
simply by duct-taping an old Sony Walkman to an
Apple IIc.
