April 13, 2002

Poor Impulse Control

So. Someone who shall go unnamed informed me that my key lime pie is not actually key lime pie -- I was using regular limes, but apparently you have to use actual limes from Key West in order to have Official Key Lime Pie. Otherwise it's just a crummy old Lime Pie. (Like my old math teacher Mr. Holland used to say, "You don't have a function anymore... you just have a crummy old relation.")

Not that I care about this too much -- after all, I have bigger key lime issues. The main problem is that I can never get the pie to jell properly... basically I always end up with thick key lime soup instead of key lime pie. It tastes fine, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.

Anyway, I asked Mom, who is a native Floridian, for the real scoop. When she heard about this, she guffawed. Then she patiently explained that the reason key lime pie was invented was because, back in the day. the people who lived on Key West didn't have much to bake with. "They had chickens, and limes... and condensed milk for sweetening -- and that was about it," she said. "Ah," I replied. "So this nattering about Key West limes is kind of like talking about gourmet grits." "Exactly," she said. "Or like Niman Ranch pork rinds."

In other news, I've just finished reading (and re-reading) Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. This is the first cyberpunk book I've ever read that I've actually liked.

Actually, M'ris says that some people call Snow Crash post-cyberpunk. At first I didn't understand... I mean, Stephenson has cybernetics, the Net, economic and environmental collapse, corporate control of everything, drugs, ultra-violence, the Japanese, ... you name it. What's "post" about it?

But now I think I understand. Most cyberpunk novels are satirizing us -- urban society, suburban society, corporations, and so on. But Stephenson goes one step further and also satirizes his fellow cyberpunkers. Take the opening scene with the "Deliverator" -- the ultimate pizza delivery man:

...The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in less than twenty-one minutes.

It took me a couple of reads to realize what Stephenson was doing, but after that I just rolled with it. All that breathless speed and post-apocalyptic deadly seriousness... applied to pizza delivery. Just fabulous. By the time the Deliverator gets handed a twenty-minute old pizza at the end of the first chapter (as I'm sure you could predict) it was just too much. Stop, Neal! You had me at "shoot the driver"!

It's all good from there on in, from little jokes (the main bad guy has "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on his forehead) to the plot (ancient Sumerian neurolinguistic hackers!) to the larger stylistic issues, like the way Stephenson can string adjectives together and somehow make it work ("Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown.") I'm a bit jealous of Stephenson -- once you decide to satirize cyberpunk, you are permitted all sorts of stylistic excesses. The only project that would be more fun would be a "post-postmodern" novel. But would anyone get the joke?