Two additions to the blogroll, both of whom belong in some sort of canon or other: Samuel Pepys and William Gibson. Two blogs, two very different writers. To misquote Dickens, Pepys is dead, to begin with. But Phil Gyford is turning Pepys’s diary into a daily blog. Good reading and the comments (aka “annotations”) are fascinating. The ninth features such discussions as the date of the arrival of coffee in London and a discussion of Parliamentary politics after the age of Cromwell.
William Gibson is, of course, not dead (he’s just resting). So far since his blog started a week ago he’s kept it daily and is writing about topics as diverse as his life, his pets, and his books. Great entry today about Joseph Cornell, whom I discovered through Gibson’s description of his works in Count Zero. Through it all, there’s a refreshing humanity and lack of pretense:
Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of “William Gibson” we’re both, in our different ways, complicit in, there’s a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.