lives in a sunstruck bungalow that consists almost entirely of books, though there are a few walls scattered around for verisimilitude. At her desk is a monitor, a small dot-matrix printer, and a big flying saucer Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, same as I use, but no computer.
Even for a Californian technology writer, this looked minimalist. When I caught up with her, I asked what she’d done with the CPU. “I’m allergic to it”, she replied: “It’s in a shed until I figure out what it is about it that makes me ill”.
This started with a Berkeley moment: talking with Bruce Koball on a cafe terrace. A young man goes past wheeling a bicycle, with a Japanese length of cane about two inches think and the length of a samurai sword, strapped to his back. The handle is bound in alternating red and yellow cloth. In the bicycle of his basket he has a tortoiseshell kitten and a small white rat, which play together. It’s the kind of bustling villagey intersection where, if you stay long enough, everyone you need to know will walk past. there are cars, but they’re dispirited and outnumbered.
Bruce says the 22 years ago there was nothing here but Bette’s oceanview diner and some warehouses. I make a joke about oceanview being advertising
I think that this is fascinating and that the Darwin Wars is so brilliant it even overpowers the call of your bladder, but the Worm Book will be one of the finest books of the twenty-first century-I was leaked two chapters by an insider source.