October 9, 2003
No Linkin Park for Neal
I went to see Neal Stephenson speak at the Harvard Coop tonight. He's the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon — two of my top ten favorite novels. (I don't really have a concrete top ten favorite novels list, but that sounded good.) I had never seen Neal in person until tonight — he looks like an evil magician... as if he could put his fingertips together, chant a little something and bunny rabbits would appear out of a dog-eared copy of Zodiac on some hippie's lap.
I drove into Boston because as much as people say it bites to drive in the city, it bites even more to be a slave to the commuter rail schedule. Dave will back me up on this. While the public transportation advocates were waiting for the T to South Station, I was already on the Pike, having a quiet moment with Chad Kroeger.
I did not get anything signed because:
1) Who wants to stand in a two hour line that doesn't have either food or a roller coaster at the end of it?
2) I would not be able to stand myself in the morning if I went all fangirl and said something like, "Oh my god, you're like my favorite author ever!" instead of something clever and memorable.
3) The West Wing was coming on at 9.
But I did get to hear most of the Q&A session from the second floor balcony of the Coop. Neal explained that he prefers instrumental baroque music for editing, but various genres for writing itself. Interestingly, any songs with spoken words in them are too distracting as a writing background. No rap metal for Neal.
Comments
And I'm just remembering now that he mentioned Tool and Rage Against the Machine, but NOT Audioslave. So there, Dave. Smart people don't like Audioslave.
I will concede that althought they seemed really cool at first, Audioslave is just recycled Rage and Soundgarden which just makes me feel like I should be wearing a flannel shirt and being lazy outside of school at lunchtime.
COMMUTER RAIL LAMENT: Try going to the Fleet Center and praying that the game or event ends by 10pm so you don't have to sit around until the next train at 12:30!