It’s fun to read a writer chronologically. You can feel them getting better. Their grip on the prose gets lighter and at the same time the cuts are more skilled. It’s like that passage in the Tao Te Ching where the better the butcher gets, the less frequently he has to sharpen his knife from joint ware. As his awareness sharpens the interstitial spaces widen to allow the passage of whole boatloads filled with knives. You could captain schooners through those gaps if needed.

I’m reading All Tomorrow’s Parties, the third book in my little Gibson binge and I have to tell you that I am impressed and grateful that he is writing.

I feel like a seamstress examining haute couture that she might want to knock off. Her sympathetic nervous system spins a pattern out of the fingertip brail and she ticks off notes to herself about how each stitch fell into place, how her version will be cheaper, faster, better in reproduction than the source, she hopes, an inverse law of inspiration echoes (not the first one, but the fiftieth).