Gibson on Deadwood.

William Gibson is terrific. One of my five favorite writers, amongst whom I can assign no ranking. Some cool quotes from this article in the Washington Post:

Gibson puts a premium on making his details rich. He's always wanted his world to be "naturalistic -- where people used toilets. And dry cleaners. And things got rusty and things broke." He recently caught up with the HBO series "Deadwood," which, among its many achievements, once portrayed possibly the most convincing case of kidney stone suffering ever captured on film. Gibson thinks it's the greatest television America has ever produced. "This is like what I wanted to do" in his work, he says, "but they were doing it with westerns."

[Regarding "the death of the book"] "It's the oldest and the first mass medium. And it's the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it's still the same thing -- I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It's magic. It's a magical thing. It's very old magic, but it's very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out."

I don't think I mentioned this in the blogosphere, but we've finally gotten around to watching Deadwood on DVD and it's absolutely wonderful. Terrific television.