Neal Stephenson was at Kepler's books recently. Quicksilver, grith and metaweb

I went to a book signing/talk by Neal Stephenson last Friday. He was speaking at Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park, ostensibly about his new book Quicksilver. He opened the talk with an anecdote about blogs, the internet, video taping, etc. He mentioned that he was seeking to re-introduce the concept of grith to modern man. He invoked his right of grith with regard to the talk and asked that we all not share what he said and especially not to quote him. Girth gives him, in a modern sense, the freedom to say what he will "off-the-cuff" and not have it be held up to some blog, reporter, video clip, etc.

Note: It seems like I'm going against this, but I was the first person in the Q&A session and I explicitly asked him if I could blog about grith. He said, in effect, that I could, but that I also had to mention MetaWeb and the wiki there. If you have the chance, go listen to him talk, it's very enjoyable. I wish that I had the opportunity to sit down with him (ala My Dinner With Andre) and just bounce around in a conversation. I get the feeling that it might leave me overwhelmed, but it would be great to do.

The idea of the metaweb is very interesting. Since I'm only about 100 pages into Quicksilver, I've been resisting delving too far into it. Neal talked about using it to annotate other works and possibly anything. Since it's wiki anyone can take part and make their own entries. Right now, I've read the first handful of annotations which are mostly written by Neal to let people know what is factual and what he made up. It is a very cool idea and I hope to be worthy of taking part in it.