i heart gibson!
1:49 a.m.
oh, i had fun last night...i finally figured out how to customize icons on my desktop...the image has to be a bitmap. it's THAT simple. so now i have all these cool icons...i have the cover of "sheik yerbouti" for the shortcut to the zappa radio site...a heathen pic of bowie for bowienet, etc...i'm tickled pink.
i also found the official william gibson site...there's lots of cool stuff and links, there's a message board (which i joined), and gibson has a blog, which is SO cool and great, i sorta don't wanna read it - do you know what i mean? he's only been doing it since the first of the year, so there's not too much to catch up on. gibson is just about my favorite writer, if you don't know him, he's the father of the cyberpunk genre, blah, blah, blah, coined the term cyberspace, blah, blah, blah...i was looking at his new book pattern recognition the other day, thinking "i CAN'T spend 25 bucks on a novel"...but i think i probably will. maybe i should go check out amazon...(i DID go order it at 4 a.m....$17.44 total, not bad). here's a review from the s.f. chronicle:
Breaking the 'Pattern'
'Neuromancer' author turns his attention from science fiction to the strange digital world of today
Reviewed by Michael Berry
Pattern Recognition
PUTNAM; 356 PAGES; $25.95
The present has finally caught up with William Gibson.
Having completed two futuristic trilogies, the author of "Neuromancer" casts his eye squarely on the here and now with his latest novel, "Pattern Recognition." No characters are equipped with brain/machine interfaces that allow them to jack directly into cyberspace. But the digital world of ubiquitous cell phones, e-mail messages and iBooks governs their behavior and shapes their destinies.
Cayce Pollard's professional specialty is international marketing of a very rarefied sort: "Google Cayce and you will find 'coolhunter,' and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a 'sensitive' of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing." Cayce is so sensitive, in fact, as to be literally allergic to certain logotypes. The roly-poly Michelin Man, for example, can send her into paroxysms of nauseated dread.
On a freelance assignment in London, Cayce discovers that someone has broken into the apartment she has borrowed from a filmmaker friend. Cayce must decide whether the break-in is simply the work of a jealous colleague or is connected to her own obsession with snippets of inscrutable video footage that have mysteriously appeared on the Internet. Whether discrete episodes or parts of a larger narrative, the footage has developed enough of a cult following to interest Cayce's employer, the imperious Belgian, Hubertus Bigend.
Bigend wants to exploit the footage as a marketable commodity, and Cayce is hired to track down its source. The trail leads to Tokyo, back to London and finally to Moscow. Along the way, there are reversals, betrayals and last- minute rescues.
In keeping with the novel's relentless sense of topicality, Sept. 11 casts a long shadow over "Pattern Recognition." Cayce's father, a "security expert" with presumed ties to the CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center that morning and was never seen again. His disappearance haunts his daughter, psychologically and perhaps even literally. For much of the book, the connection between Win Pollard and the rest of the narrative seems tenuous,
but the final chapters reveal his pertinence and prove that Gibson's literary appropriation of a national tragedy is by no means gratuitous.
Much has been made of the influence of Raymond Chandler on Gibson's first books, but lately, and especially in "Pattern Recognition," it is the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock that seems to loom over the proceedings. Always fond of using a McGuffin to start a story rolling (think of the high-tech sunglasses of "Mona Lisa Overdrive"), Gibson shares Hitchcock's appreciation for obsessive characters, off-kilter dialogue and plots that don't quite stand up to logical scrutiny.
It is the cheerily sadistic Hitchcock of "North By Northwest" (whose protagonist, come to think of it, also worked in advertising) who seems to serve as a guiding influence on "Pattern Recognition." As in that Cary Grant/Eva-Marie Saint classic, a chance remark can have unforeseen catastrophic consequences, an innocuous beverage might conceal a powerful knockout drug. Here, an unfamiliar URL in a browser history can seem as menacing as a crop duster appearing out of a clear blue sky. Gibson uses the thriller plot as an armature upon which to drape his canny observations about fashion, technology and how the rapidly shifting flow of information can remake the world every day.
Gibson is not often given credit for his sense of humor, but it is a rare scene in "Pattern Recognition" that doesn't elicit a wry smile or an outright laugh. How can one not be amused by a main character whose mantra under extreme stress is "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots" (a reference to an unfortunate airplane/waterfowl collision)? Or an exchange with a dealer in obsolete computer hardware that includes the line "now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King's Wang"?
Gibson's recent novels have displayed a certain weariness with the tropes of science fiction. The completely contemporary "Pattern Recognition" finds the author rejuvenated, ready to acknowledge that the world has become a stranger place than could have been imagined even 15 years ago. It's his best book in a long time, and perhaps his most accessible one ever.
Sunday, February 2, 2003
By William Gibson
here's another, from wired.com:
LOGOMANCER by rudy rucker Science fiction has long been William Gibson's electric guitar - the instrument he uses to gain perspective, to transform life's ditties into anthems of transcendent strangeness. In Pattern Recognition (Putnam, $26), he goes acoustic, unplugging the overt sci-fi tropes that have marked his work and producing a mainstream product. He succeeds because our real world has such gnarly tech (Web surfing on a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection is functionally the same as jacking your brain into a cyberspace deck) and because his riffs make such a good read.
What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His story's central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigend's goal: Tap into The Footage's primo street cred strategy for profit. The gig isn't unusual for a professional "cool hunter" like Pollard. Her job is to walk around cities, spot new trends, and advise advertising agencies and marketeers how best to commodify them. Indeed, she's so good at her job that she's literally allergic (read: fainting spells and sneezing fits) to overexposed trademarks. She can be reduced to jelly by a drawing of the Michelin Man. She clips the labels off all her clothes, even going so far as to grind down the Levi's logo on the metal buttons of her 501s. Mickey Mouse is just this side of tolerable.
Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition - the book's acronym is PR, after all. Pollard "knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on." But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It's one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.
Gibson pulls you in with big ideas that make solid material for word-of-mouth proselytizing. But Pattern Recognition's essential quality is the sensual pleasure of its language. Gibson has a knack for choosing - or coining - the right phrase. With a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics. An expressway is "Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution." The Tokyo skyline is "a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home." Who needs sci-fi when you've got Japan? Gibson deftly taps the eccentricities of modern civilization to make our world look like an alien planet.
This ultracool sensibility lets Gibson tell us something new about the events of 9/11. In a flashback, we see the attack through Pollard's eyes: "It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture." The blending of our interior and our exterior is an idea Gibson returns to again and again. Pattern recognition itself can morph into the disorder apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things." Which means that even when Pollard discovers The Footage's maker, it's an ambiguous - and potentially apophenic - resolution. Are the subtlest patterns we see really there? To Gibson, the most satisfying moments of our reality are possibly just reflections of our needs and dreams.
Rudy Rucker (www.rudyrucker.com) is a mathematician and novelist. His latest book is As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel.