“German fridge... smells only of cold and long-chain monomers”: Are fridge interiors actually made of monomers or polymers? Evidently: “A long chain of monomers is called a polymer.”

• “Actually it’s not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point.”
• Ch1p22¶11: “Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says”
• Ch7p69¶4: “ ‘You “know” in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things”

The PowerMac G4 Cube “is on, but sleeping... he holds on to this Mac for the way you can turn it upside-down and remove its innards with a magic little aluminum handle.” The Cube is hermetic, like a hermit crab, with, as the Odds put it, tender bits underneath. My short, muscular, shy, sexy, blond friend in university studied marine biology and treasured his ancient horseshoe-crab shell, which I nearly broke. Suddenly, Last Summer, with the birds upturning the turtles to get at the living meat. Yes, I really do think of the Cube that way. Now. Thanks a whole fucking hell of a lot, Gibson.

Theme: Mirror-world. “The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America.” (There’s that blasted comma already.) Also Ch2p9¶4 (“trainers”) and innumerable others.

I’ve been online a long time and I use chat mode and I’ve placed and received many a TTY call over the years, but in the chat segment on this page –

Hi Parkaboy. nt

I don’t have a clue what nt stands for.

Chat mode is “strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.” If true, we can chalk this up to only one of the reasons subsequently listed: “the brevity of the lines in the thread.” I don’t know why people bother with chat sessions involving more than you and one other person.

Cayce’s friend Damien, a music-video director, is quite obviously Chris Cunningham, the real-life music-video director who was slated, for rather quite a long time, to direct Neuromancer. Gibson thinks Cunningham is a genius. Well, he is.

Screenager

As a teen, Chris Cunningham read Neuromancer – three times. Soon he could imagine every scene of a Neuromancer movie and started working on storyboards. Years later, the twentysomething prodigy (he worked with Stanley Kubrick as a youth) will bring William Gibson’s classic to the screen, when Seven Arts releases the pic next year [2000. Apparently not. – Ed.]. The British director – known for his f/x work in music videos and films like Alien 3 – shies away from hyping the movie while it’s in development. But Gibson isn’t so demure: “The guy’s a genius,” says the author. “He’s the man for the job – Neuromancer was his Wind in the Willows.”

“[E]ffects units from one of Damien’s videos” are “partially disassembled robots... like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies.” (There are such things, by the way.) It will be noted that Chris Cunningham’s music video for “All Is Full of Love” by Björk featured majestic pearlescent-white lesbic robots (“Björk-bots”) making love in slow motion even as they are assembled.

Serious people nominate this music video as a superior interpretation of the robotic longing for Pinocchio-style human transformation than mighty Spielberg’s A.I., for which Cunningham did “uncredited” special-effects work:

Video director and artist Chris Cunningham... was hired by Kubrick to make little robot-type humans for A.I., and... he did spend time with him actually making a few of them. Jan Harlan recalled to Steven Rose of the Guardian, “We did try to build remote-control machines and stuff like that. We tried to construct a little boy with a movable rubber face to see whether we could make it look appealing. But it was a total failure; it looked awful.”

Theme: Watches. “[S]he checks her watch, Korean clone of an oldschool Casio G-Shock.” Naturally, it would be an oldschool Casio G-Shock, and a clone of it, and a Korean clone at that.

“Charlie Don’t Surf”: I immediately thought of some ironic black-humour INTELLIGENT PEOPLE NEED INTELLIGENT FOOD–style T-shirt reusing Charlie the Tuna, sort of like Black Bart. No, it’s actually a Nam-era G.I. saying (Ch2p14¶3), or at least a coolhunted synthetic Tipsy McStaggeresque simulacrum thereof.

A meme that’s worth the price of admission all by itself: The Tommy Hilfiger event horizon. “But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole [of diluted faux-patrician fashion labels]. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, [blasted comma] beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.”

I wouldn’t upgrade (upsell – SuperSize) this to full-fledged Theme status, but the first conversations of Cayce’s we overhear that concern the footage are reminiscent of Tolkin’s The Rapture, absolutely and without exaggeration and in all possible seriousness the most frightening film, with the longest-term echo, I have ever seen. Mimi Rogers lives an empty life of casual sex (always equated in Hollywood – how many times by gay writers whose only sex is casual?). She overhears religious officemates discussing their shared experience of dreaming of “the pearl.” Later, she tries to fake it by importuning herself into their conversations and name-dropping the pearl. They don’t buy it.

I was just about to write “Jesus H. Christ, that movie bothered me,” but I suspect such blasphemy could be unwise.

At any rate:

He’d bought the house where he’d rented for several years, fruit of a series of Scandinavian car commercials. She’d forgotten the blurb in Time Out, one of those coolhunter things.

“You follow the footage.” His eyes narrowing within their brackets of black Italian plastic.

Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century. [...]

It’s as though they are in a bubble now, Cayce and the barman. No sound penetrates.

“Damien’s Studio Display fills with darkness absolute.” First of all, what’s he doing without a Cinema Display?

More germanely, how can shitty online videoclips provide “darkness absolute”? You’d need application software to black out the rest of the screen surrounding the player window. Enlarging the videoclip to full-screen size would invariably leave visible artifacts.

Anyway, the entire feel or ethos of the footage reminds me of something lonely, post-apocalyptic, and vaguely pretentious, like La Jetée, a film that is cited without having been seen to an extent rivaled only by Tron. (I have personally failed to schlep out to pay good money to see La Jetée three distinct times.)

“Zaprudered into surreal dimensions of purest speculation”: I suppose it is incumbent upon me to mention that the strange word Zapruder, always heard in the catchphrase “the Zapruder film,” refers to Abraham Zapruder, a civilian who shot the film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel like it’s stating the obvious to point out this fact, since my dear American readers will all know the catchphrase “the Zapruder film.” (It’s one of those American phrases you only ever hear in such a chunk, like “like a Quonset hut” or “ ‘we gather together...,’ ” the latter never actually being continued for the rest of the verse.) Since we’re living in the 21st century, it’s OK for authors to go all meta and specifically state a theme or origin of the book the reader is actually reading.

Of course the footage is analogous to the Zapruder film, and of course, to be meta, Gibson would declare that the footage had been Zaprudered.

“She clicks on Replay. Watches it again.” Since when is there a Replay button on video software? Play, yes. Replay, no.

“[T]hree men, variously jacketed, their collars up, staring gravely into the open trunk of a small and uncharacteristically old mirror-world car.” Not like Marcellus and Vincent gazing into the Kiss Me Deadly–esque glowing suitcase in Pulp Fiction, shurely?!

The Curta calculator is comparable to a difference engine. Bit of self-reference there, actually.

Theme: Watches. “Past small booths where Russians are laying out their stocks of spotty old watches.” I really do not like. The sentence fragments. Of individual frame-like observations. And sensations.

“[D]iscovering a stall selling what seem to be Victorian surgical instruments.” Not at all like Bev’s obsession in Dead Ringers, shurely?!

“[B]ut on impulse tells him her current hotmail address”: Why the lowercase? (Throughout, actually. Footage can be Zaprudered and a highway overpass Blade Runnered, but Hotmail becomes minusculized?)

“[A]nd she still has clients in New York willing to pay for a Cayce Pollard report on what the earlier adaptors in this crush are doing.” Early adopters, he means. But the malapropism communicates another truth. The new technology happens along, and you incorporate it, Borg-like, into your persona. You adapt yourself; you don’t “adopt” it. You are changed.

“Which she brailled” – hotmailed, shurely?! as opposed to Zaprudered – “into the square butt of an automatic pistol.” Also Ch6p50¶14: “An hour later, Damien’s door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol.” A tad formal, don’t you think? Like saying “automatic dishwasher”?

“Then she remembers that the keys are new, the locks having been changed after completion of the renovation, causing hers to have had to be FedExed to New York.” I love it when elaborate conjugations of this sort are necessary. I came up with one the other week: “Because of having been being irritable with people lately.”

“And passing these three she’d seen a face there, on the screen of his ciborium. She’d stopped without thinking and done that stupid duck dance, trying to better align retina to pixel.” Ducks don’t dance; they fly into cockpits (first mention, Ch4p34¶5).

“Anything other than the footage is Off Topic”: The maniacal hyperspecificity the Web enables and encourages. My life wouldn’t be the same without it.

“[T]he evident production values had come increasingly to argue against the idea of a student effort, or indeed of anything amateur in the usual sense. The footage was simply too remarkable.” I dunno why he just didn’t go for it and say “compelling.” If you’re gonna use buzzword euphemisms for other buzzword euphemisms (fabulous, nifty, bitchin’, rad), go all the way.

En tout cas, the phrase “production values” has vexed me for a decade and a half. I read it all the time, mostly in reference to music. (The obscure 1980s Montreal rock band the Box had astonishing production values, carrying off remarkable foreground antics with stereo effects, for example.)

“[S]ome guerilla creator out there alone in the night of the Internet”: I seem to recall Gibson’s hotmailizing that word to internet previously, but the reference escapes me. Also, I like my guerrillas with two Rs.

“Cayce’s dislike of Bigend is indeed personal, albeit secondhand, a friend having been involved with the man in New York, back in, as the kids had recently quit saying, the day.” Delicious!

“BSE” keeps coming up in the book, doesn’t it? If you subscribe to the prion theory, BSE is an unkillable disease; it always keeps popping up. And so does Billy Prion (Billy Tallent, shurely?!) of the punk-rock group BSE, a concept that itself embodies something that will not die. He turns up in Japan (“she knows that BSE had broken up” [Ch9p80¶1] – until she hits Japan, at least).

Helena... has been lecturing them about the uses, even today, in cosmetics, of reprocessed bovine neurological material, having gotten there via a discussion, over her stuffed eggplant, of spongiform encephalopathy as the price of forcing herbivores into an apocalyptically-unnatural cannibalism.... “I think they’ll hate us,” says Helena, only her gorgeous eyes visible now above her nightmares of BSE and a spongiform future.

• Ch9p79¶9: “The first thing she sees, going in, is Voytek, seated at a table with silver-haired Billy Prion, the former lead singer of a band called BSE.”
• Ch14p130¶7: “No. Putting her feet down firmly as she walks on. Walk like a man. I fought the law. Hands in pockets, the right clutching the sunglasses. And the law won.” What, is BSE an analogue of the Clash rather than, say, Billy Idol all of a sudden?

Theme: Yesterday’s history. “ ‘Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem relevant.’ ”

“Bigend obtains a table instantly, something she assumes not everyone could do under the circumstances.... Cayce assumes this is not because he’s known here, but because of some attitudinal tattoo, something people can read.” How do I get me some of that, exactly?

“ ‘ “CayceP,” when you start to know the players, is obviously you. Your interest in the footage is therefore a matter of public record.’ ” It always surprises people when what they write online becomes an object of debate and criticism. Posting online is publication by definition. The trick is not to act all scandalized when someone, for example, (b)logs what you wrote or talks to you about it in person, as Bigend does with Cayce.

Mash-ups and remixen: “ ‘You’ve seen the guer[r]illa re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [...] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films.... Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set out to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free.” Except to the remixer, apparently; they don’t get paid in this scheme.

“It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.” Like yesterday’s history.

Bigend is almost making sense here, but the entire narrative of Pattern Recognition disproves the LEAVE IT OUT ON THE WINDOWSILL AND SOMEBODY’LL COME ALONG AND IMPROVE it theory. Dozens (and, after the newbies hit, hundreds) of footage fetishists labour endlessly to discover the true nature of the footage, but cannot. The footage, deliberately left out on the windowsill, is impervious to explanation. That’s not supposed to happen. There are suppose to be enough minds out there in the hive to improve on anything – or to solve any problem. We even have a name for the latter: The LazyWeb.

This imperfect ethos parallels Cayce’s line of work. If something cool happens, eventually a coolhunter will happen along to “recognize a pattern before anybody else does,” helping someone else “commodify” and “productize” it (Ch9p86).

You are never really good enough for yourself. You need other people to improve yourself for you.

“[T]hen removes her seldom-used compact from her envelope.... On her knees, then, to use the mirror to check that the powder she’d brushed across the underside of the doorknob is still there, undisturbed. Thank you, Commander Bond.” Mrs. Peel, shurely?!

Theme: Watches. Damien: “Flesh is long gone, I’m glad to say, but bone remains, and also artifacts, in brilliant condition when you get the mud off, which is what brings the diggers. Weapons of all kinds, watches, one boy found an unopened bottle of vodka yesterday.”

The footage hits CNN. “[A]ssuming that heightened global interest will tip her in the direction of his proposition.” Everybody hates a newbie. Parkaboy: “[N]ow every site on the planet is clogged with the clueless, newbies of the most hopeless sort, including ours.” I was gonna call this a furtherance of the theme of yesterday’s history, but I think that’s a stretch at this stage of exposition.

“Taki... claims to orbit a certain otaku-coven in Tokyo... who have cracked the watermark on #78.” It’s all about numbers: The footage is enumerated (and I am annoyed at the use of the octothorpe rather than the abbreviation Nº), and one segment contains something within its bits. What people are interested in is the cinematographic nature of the footage: They watch it as cinema. But it’s also digital, which is in turn the footage’s delivery mechanism, and the footage contains a kabbala-esque secret code (“the Mystic number,” tellingly named: Ch8p77¶1). The majesty and fascination of the footage, like the literature of the Torah and all of G-d’s creation, rest on hidden sequences. Find the steganographically-concealed message and you find the Creator.

“And then?”

“I point a commodifier at it.”

“And?”

“It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed.”

And then our eyeballs get monetized?

Apparently. Ch11p106¶11:“ ‘He thinks he can productize it.’ ‘Then monetize it.’ ”

Kevin Bacon. Previously in the book, I saw the word “baconized.” You try searching 95 pages to find one word (minusculized, at that). I need a full E-text.

“I saw him there, once [frigging commas], in the lobby bar. He was talking to Kevin Bacon’s dog.”

“His dog?”

“Kevin Bacon was there with his dog. Hubertus was talking to it.”

“Didn’t know he liked pets.”

“A celebrity dog. But he didn’t seem to be talking to Kevin Bacon.”

“What do you make of him?”

“Kevin Bacon?”

• “He looks somewhat gimlet-eyed now, though maybe she’s misreading some Chinese-American nerd thing, an unabashed intensity of focus.”
• And, next (Ch11p104¶14): “He has one of those tall, impossibly dense Chinese-guy brush cuts” – yes! somebody finally had the guts to say it! – “and a long face that might seem feminine if it weren’t tempered, she guesses, by having grown up in Tulsa having to deal with being a Chinese-American named Boone.” We hadn’t heard that Boone was from Tulsa before. Anyway, by way of comparison, are you aware that Tim Blake Nelson is a Jew from Oklahoma?
• Ch24p202¶6: “Boone, Cayce notes, to her considerable resentment, looks attentive but absolutely neutral, sitting there in his old black coat; [finally, where a comma is needed, we get a semicolon] some kind of major Chinese-guy poker face going on.”

Dead history. “[W]et gr[e]y pyramids of bone rising beside excavations in a Russian swamp. What was that, to do that to the dead, to history?” I believe I was the first to report that the typeface Dead History, designed by P. Scott Makela, was named after, or at least in honour of, his mother. The poster for the font shows his hand resting on her forehead moments after she died. A tad ghoulish, or at least too strong a reminder that death is just over there and life just over here.

Now, as Cayce has articulated already, yesterday’s history just isn’t interesting to us today. It is, in essence, dead history, whether Victorian or Russian. Yet the history of the footage is of feverish interest. Cayce expects that our interest in the past – or what the past considered the past – will disappear altogether. But the recent past of the footage obsesses her and an otaku-coven of others worldwide. Tales of an accelerated culture.

“There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.” It’s all about asking the next question, which I finally located:

Cayce puts her facility with entirely left-field conversations down to her career of actual on-the-street coolhunting, such as it’s been, and as much as she hates to call it that. She’s done a bit, too. She’s been dropped into neighbo[u]rhoods like Dogtown, which birthed skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding whatever the next thing might be. And she’s learned it’s largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. She’s that good.

I like it as a catchphrase. I’m already using it. But it’s entirely unexplained in the book. So what does it mean? Keep the kidnapper talking and the hostages might manage to escape? What will the next question tell you? How, if you are a coolhunter, will it bag you cool?

Another case: “Cayce feels herself starting to lock up again. Next question. Anything. ‘Are Stella and Nora Russian names?’ ” (Ch35p286¶7).

“She blinks, trying to convince herself that this cannot be the former lead singer of BSE, but it quite clearly is, all in what looks to be last season’s Agnès B Homme.” Cayce is rather good at IDing exact model years of A-list fashion lines, including Prada and Gucci. (I trust I don’t have to look up those references?)

“She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline.” Stop there? No, let’s run it into the ground. “[A] floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn’t see elsewhere,” and so interminably on.

I don’t entirely know how to represent this typographically, since I’m quoting a quoted snatchmail.

Judy Tsuzuki, five-foot-eleven and about as Japanese as you are... we shot this long tall Judy then reduced her by at least a third, in Photoshop. Cut’n’pasted her into Musashi’s kid sister’s dorm room at Cal.... we decided to try enlarging her eyes a few clicks... and the resulting big round eyes are pure Anime Magic.

They made an idoru!

“Still wearing the robe, she curls up between the sheets of the big white bed and prays for the wave to come, and take her for as long as it can. It comes, but somewhere in it is her father. And the figure on the scooter. Blank expanse of that chromed visor.” The blank expanse of the reflective motorcycle visor is a recurring image in techno-mystery thrillers and science fiction. Boone Chu wears one on the previous page: “A rider on a scooter appears at the junction... a helmeted figure backlit by residual glare.... The helmet turns, seeming to regard her, its visor is blank, mirrored.” I’m not sure I would have punctuated it that way, but it’s a recurring, even classic space-age image. The motorcyclist as android.

For extra credit, wear that helmet on a Vespa!

“She dials it on her cell and hears someone say, [unnecessary comma] ‘Mushi mushi.’ ” The standard romanization is moshi moshi.

Cayce rings up and orders a replacement Rickson’s otaku jacket, which, I now note, I should be paying more attention to. “Her requests don’t have to make any sense, she gathers, which is interesting.” Cf. David Foster Wallace on being “pampered” aboard a cruise ship – or the promise of so being.

“She’s spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it’s been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net [sic], yet have never met, are odd.” I’ve done it a lot of times. In fact, I went to New York to meet a friend of mine I met that way. Every hour I spend on this otaku, in fact, is an hour I do not spend writing my recollections from that trip. Will I ever?

“Conversion to CPU status has been conferred with the aid of a seam ripper from the notions section of a branch of Muji... leaving all labels behind. All but the very small label on the hip bag, which simply says LUGGAGE LABEL. She might even be able to live with that. She’ll have to see.” Repo Man: Food labeled FOOD.

Hello Kitty. No, I’m not gonna bother with a direct citation. (But see also Ch17p151¶4.) The reason why Cayce doesn’t toss her cookies when faced with a wall o’ Kitty is simple: It’s “purest no-content marketing.”

I own an Hello Kitty key fob. It’s an excellent piece, and I’m running it into the ground. I required an East German with an Italian name at a leather bar to fix it one night. I am shopping for a replacement. But my loyalties have shifted. I have always preferred Bad Badtz-Maru. There is certainly no reason to do that, apart from girliness. It’s no-content marketing: Neither is better. Except I know I’m a Bad Badtz-Maru person at root and not, despite the incriminating evidence of my key fob, an Hello Kitty person. (I also very much enjoy my overengineered Bad Badtz-Maru mechanical-pencil set, a gift actually from Japan.)

I react rather like Cayce. Since there is no reason to prefer one over the other (it’s all kawai, though naturally I do also adore the absurd German-Polish-Japlish name “Bad Badtz-Maru”), rabidly preferring one over the other is OK. Meaningless rabid obsessions are.

I am shopping for a replacement. I was just now Googling for Bad Badtz-Maru key fobs. Finding none whatsoever, and the occasional Yahoo Store with a good lead that had gone mams-up, I muttered “the fuck?” to myself irritably. Twice.

You can have my Bad Badtz-Maru keychain after I manage to find one and buy it and after you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

“[R]eminding her of a certain kind of functionally alcoholic corner lounge in lower Manhattan, now nearing extinction as the city’s ley lines shifted further still.” Ley lines are continua or patterns of invisible power.

“Noticing a missing finger joint there against a flaming-eye decal.” Well, inept yakuza, obviously, but a reference to the assassin in “Johnny Mnemonic”:

The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament....

Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out os nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls of. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lightning yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pearshaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.

You realize that, at this point, Pattern Recognition has become functionally equivalent to “Johnny Mnemonic”? We’ve just reversed polarity on a few twiddles: Female seeker rather than male courier. Johnny and Cayce are both still in Japan – Gibson’s true challenge is not to write a Gibson novel set in the present, but one never set in Japan – and both still chased by assassins. Oh, and I suppose there’s another polarity-twiddle: The guy who can only count to nine is on our side.

“[G]ently[-]sloping rooftops that seem, impossibly, to be partially covered in knee-deep moss, but then she sees that this is something like the kudzu on Win’s farm in Tennessee. No, she corrects herself, it probably is kudzu. Kudzu where it comes from. Kudzu at home.” The lyricism is overwrought and eye-rolling, but shall we keep one thing in mind? William Gibson is a Southerner and has lived in voluntary exile in Canada for 24 years. Of course he gets all misty for kudzu.

One gathers, however, that Gibson never saw §3 of Creepshow.

This one’s on line two of the chapter and I nearly laughed out loud, which of course would not be done in a local Toronto coffeehouse, Toronto City Bylaw Nº 1 (“Thou shalt not talk to strangers”) being still in effect and all, but: “The night security man at her hotel looks like a younger, slightly less approachable version of Beat Takeshi, the Japanese actor whose existential gangster films have been the favo[u]rites of two former boyfriends.”

Yeah, but Beat fucking Takeshi was in Johnny Mnemonic!

Talk about self-reference.

“Boone arrives minutes later, in his black horsehide coat” – how Matrix; aren’t they called dusters? – “carrying his small leather suitcase and one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids.” Another watches-like fetish item.

(Notice that the product shots actually hint at Doc Martens, which we’ll come back to later? All they need are British military sweaters and we’d have a trio of fetish objects so combustible it would call for an Hello Kitty fire extinguisher.)

“ ‘No. This one. Chu-dot-B, [accursed commas] at...’ She writes it down. [...] She does this on automatic pilot, apparently remembering how to do it correctly, because her message to chu.b sends immediately.” Now, come on. We are not engaged in the practice of narrow phonetic transcription here. chu.b is chu.b and not Chu-dot-B. And note that Gibson pulls a 555 on us here and coyly refuses to fill in the entire snatchmail address, though he does that for a later address of higher importance.

“[S]he sees a crumpled military garment” – sweater, shurely?! – “in a camouflage pattern that she seems to recall is called tarn – information garnered during her time in the skateboard-clothing industry.” (Camo cargo pants, shurely?!) “She knows most of the patterns, and even that the most beautiful is South African, smoky mauve-toned Expressionist streaks suggesting a sunset landscape of great and alien beauty.” The term is perhaps German. Ch22p189¶8: “Flecktarn. That’s what it’s called. Like chocolate chips sprinkled on confetti the colo[u]r of last autumn’s leaves.”

“ ‘Irritated, mainly, though if I weren’t so jet-lagged I’d have room for serious paranoia.’ ” But paranoia is egocentric. Ch13p124¶6:

She remembers her father’s views on paranoia.

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained.... he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle [or kudzu]. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies. [...]

Win’s first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

“ ‘I know,’ hailing a black cab. ‘I mean yes – it is, both ways!’ The cab pulls over, he opens the door for her, gives her a quick kiss on the cheek. She gets in and he closes the door.” I’ve had this exact thing done to me. In New York. On the trip whose coverage I am failing to write with every passing minute spent on this otaku. It’s a thoroughly cheery, final, controlling, and only vaguely and implicitly menacing way for a friend to get rid of you. He hails you a cab, smiling brilliantly; you get in; he closes your door; you cease to be his problem.

This, I reiterate, actually happened to me.

“History erased via the substitution of an identical object.” Theme: Yesterday’s history. Replicants, essentially.

“She moves along until she finds a sandwich shop, small and preglobalized”: Bigend also mentions preglobalization, but under a different name. Now, will I be able to find the reference?

• Ch10p95¶6: “ ‘That’s the real version of that place we’re in now. [“That” place?] Some lovely spaces there.’ ”
• Ch18p162¶5: “The rooftops, in the light from surrounding windows, are corrugated iron, rusted a rich and uneven brown.... ‘This is an amazing place,’ she says. ‘There aren’t many left.’ ”
• Ch28p230¶9: “ ‘The market is not yet entirely rationalized, you see.’ ‘Rationalized?’ ‘Not yet established as a global specialist environment.’ ” That is, not on eBay in actual specialty-store subpages: “ ‘All such markets are being rationalized by the Internet, of course.... eBay. [Hobbs is] very adroit there.... Global values are being established.’ ”

“ ‘I’m leaving for Columbus, Ohio. This evening.’ [...] ‘What’s in Columbus?’ ‘Sigil Technologies.’ ” Well, and CompuServe. Gibson’s making a reference to yesterday’s technological history here.

“ ‘You’re unlikely ever to see me in [a suit].’ [...] But I’ll bet you’d look good in one, something in her says. It makes her blush. [...] [P]ast a girl with Maharishi parachute pants embroidered with tigers who, seeing the expression, whatever it is, on Cayce’s face, smiles at her and winks.” Knock off the romantic shit, OK? Roger Ebert on The Matrix: “Carrie-Anne Moss, as Trinity, has a sensational title sequence, before the movie recalls that she’s a woman and shuttles her into support mode.” And it’s only gonna get worse.

“ ‘Yes,’ says Ngemi, with quiet pride, ‘but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.... A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors.’ ” Yes. I distinctly remember those. With the portrait-mode display and the strange jogwheel on the keyboard. In the early ’80s, for a writer, a legitimate case could be made for an actual word processor over a general-purpose microcomputer, WordPerfect not having reached the peerless version 5.1 yet. (You do understand I used WordStar on a Victor 9000?)

Lucian (Freud?) (Peter?) Greenaway: “ ‘The dealer. Most recently, exclusively of clocks, and much resented by collectors in that field.’ ” Clocks are cognate with watches.

“ ‘The camps. Herzstark in Buchenwald, surrounded by death, by methodical erasure, by an almost certain fate. He continued to work. In the end, the camp was liberated. He walked free, never having abandoned his vision of the calculator. Hobbs hono[u]rs that triumph, that escape.’ ” I see a parallel here with yesterday’s history. What will Damien dig up in the pit in Russia? We haven’t hit that part yet, but he’ll find a gem of unimagined size. (Then again, it could be Christopher Walken’s dad’s watchface stuck up his arse.) Also later, we will learn of a camp, “surrounded by death,” that methodically creates.

Ngemi’s “shoes are black four-eyelet DMs, the ur-Martens of the first decade of punk, long since de-recontextualized into the inexpensive everyman’s footwear they’d been designed to be.” I just love that word. Sort of like deglobalization. (Note the lack of hyphen.) Reminiscent of the three stages of new ideas: Ridicule, discussion, acceptance. Use, reuse, use.

Also: “Logos of corporations she doesn’t even recognize: A strange luxury, and in itself almost worth the trip. She remembers this now from previous visits, and also the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here” (Ch14p127¶5).

Theme: Watches. “He glances at the old-fashioned calculator-watch on his wrist, its chrome case flashing in the wan sunlight.”

“Cayce has no idea where they are. Bournemouth? Poole?” Possibly a joke British place name, since they do rather lend themselves to jokes. (The funniest eight words in Monty Python: “The Humber & District Catholic River-Wideners Club.”) Also, Ch9p87¶8: “ ‘Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard’s, oddly. In lawn care.’ ‘Pardon?’ A place name?”

“[T]he caravan fills with smoke, though less of it than she would have expected. Sunlight, through a few small holes in the metal skin, shafts dramatically in, giving the space the look of a Ridley Scott set scaled for dolls.” But: “[A] multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town.... Now it’s been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral” (Ch17p146¶2). The fuckwit in Wired liked that quote especially. I suppose Gibson refers to the dilapidation of old technology and infrastructure that are still in use long beyond their expected lifespans. But it’s not a sure thing, is it? My Betamax and laserdisc player are tip-top. Then again, they don’t have cars running over them all day triggering resonance frequencies.

I am getting too frigging tired of the drippingly witty, improbably dense, copy-edited, Univers-typeset snatchmails included in the book. That pretty much refers to each and every one of them. Nothing’s in all-lowercase; nobody commits the Microsoft barbarism of appending the entire preceding message; no preceding text is quoted with > characters or f=f vertical bars. The text is an idealization of actual snatchmail as tapped out by a twee intellectual with an IBM Selectric.

“Ngemi has produced a loupe, and screws it carefully into his left eye. He leans forward, creaking, and gives the Curta his full and cyclopean attention.” But Cf. Ch33p269¶4: “Her first impression of Moscow itself is that everything is far larger than it could possibly have any need to be. Cyclopean Stalin-era buildings in burnt[-]orange brick, their detailing vaguely maroonish. Built to humble, and terrify.”

“[T]hese are easily the worst sixties buildings she’s ever seen, and visibly crumbling at the edges. Quite a few are being torn down, and indeed there is scaffolding everywhere, much renovation under way.” Shouldn’t she nick some of that scaffolding for Voytek?

“ ‘You are the one who writes, yes?’ Only lightly accented, a low voice but very clear.... [T]he stranger waves back her hand and takes the other chair. ‘Stella Volkova.’ ...Is that the maker? Is the maker named Stella? Is Stella a Russian name?” Well, is Max a woman’s name? Think of Vanessa Redgrave in Mission: Impossible. In William Gibson, anybody can be female. Half his books’ hero(in)es are.

“ ‘He had them put a line from that camera into her editing suite. When she looked at those images, she focused. When the images were taken away, she began to die again. He taped two hours of this, and ran it on the editing deck. She began to cut it. To manipulate. Soon she had isolated a single figure. A man, one of the staff. They brought him to her, but she had no reaction. She ignored him. Continued to work. One day I found her working on his face, in Photoshop. That was the beginning.’ ”

So:

The story of the footage is a story of adaptive technology. It is the story of what a disabled person creates when given customized hardware and software.

“ ‘Why did you tell it to me? Everything you and your sister do seems to be surrounded by so much secrecy. And yet ,when I find your address, finally, which was very hard to do, and [E]-mail you, you reply immediately. I come here, you meet me. I don’t understand.’ ‘...I suppose I had been waiting, and when you wrote to me, I decided you were real.’ ”

Stella seems to have encapsulated the entire experience of virtual and real friends that peppers Pattern Recognition. Scolds, doubters, conservatives, the very old, and ingénues tell us the Internet is dangerous because it is overrun with criminals and degenerates. It is merely overrun with people, few of whom are criminals or degenerates, and most of whom do what they do in real life: Tell the truth about themselves.

Once you meet them, it is merely a question of having had the ice broken already.

But Cf. “initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net” that are odd.

The most touching part comes much later (Ch43p355¶1): “Hello! When are you coming to see us again?” The Eastern cultures, even today, are honoured by your presence. They seem unashamed to admit they miss you.

“[Y]anking the canopy open, and how they simply tore him apart, the pilot. Just came to pieces. They got a watch, a compass from the other wrist and a pistol.” Gibson is so obsessed with wristwatches that he will plant one in an archæological dig. He will set his characters on a course of plundering an archæological dig for a watch.

Anyway, I see the discovery of the buried but perfectly-preserved airplane as a recapitulation of the Bermuda Triangle, or Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, and of course the return of “disappeared” airmen and civilians when the ship lands in Close Encounters (“Luncheon Counters”) of the Third Kind.

Relevant to the plot, the plane is an intact artifact of a foreign time, discovery of which is so unexpected as to flabbergast. But Nora’s creation of the footage in a sanatorium in Russia represents the ongoing creation of an artifact of a foreign space. Here I give credence to the pop-psychology maxim that people with mental illness, and, by extension, acquired brain injury, live in different realities. Damien’s documentary will allow viewers to glimpse the past time of the airplane; Nora’s footage allows viewers to glimpse the alternate space of her mind.

The discovered airplane shows us what its day and age looked like – and it falls apart the moment we touch it. We weren’t expecting a mystique, and it falls to dust. Nora’s sanatorium workshop was nothing but mystique, which disappeared in a puff of smoke once Cayce discovered it.

And it turns out that people are interested in yesterday’s history. Damien’s fishing expedition reeled in a whopper after all. Imagine how much his doc will fetch in the world TV market. It’ll be like flayed corpses or something.

“Her consciousness, Cayce understands, somehow bounded by or bound to the T-shaped fragment in her brain: [P]art of the arming mechanism of the Claymore mine that killed her parents.” Cf. Ch33p274¶1: “[T]his looks exactly like one specific part in the manual arming mechanism of the U.S. Army’s M18A1 Claymore mine.” Is Cayce really gonna remember the word Claymore later on?

“The past hour or so (she still hasn’t found her watch)” – obviously an unthinkable state for a watch-obsessif like Gibson. (This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is my Croton Aquamedico/“late-’40s Jaeger two-register chronograph”/Vulcain Cricket.) If Cayce is confused, check with the sun:

• “Sun at the zenith” (Ch39p321¶3)
• Less convincingly: “At first she thinks the room is windowless... but as her eyes adjust she sees that three tall narrow windows, behind the screen, have been painted black. But the part of her that notes this is some basic mammalian module tracking whereabouts and potential exits” (Ch37p303¶12)

It occurs to her then that the meal has been entirely free of toasts, and that she’s always heard that a multitude of them are to be expected at a Russian mal. But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.

The Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, in other words.

Yesterday’s forgotten history:

I’m fairly certain we’d never have gotten the tape out of the country, had I stuck to my guns. I do feel a bit more of a sleaze than usual but on the other hand I know I owe something to history, as revealed here for us to record.

It was a history nobody cared about until Damien hired some yobs from an immediately-recent history (the Soviet/post-Soviet interzone) to dig away at it.

“Damien’s shoot had been winding down, and where she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gr[e]y muck and bones, her face streaked with tears.” Now the bullshit part: “[S]he might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.”

No, Cayce has to plow through the “muck” because she has every reason to believe that her father Win came to rest under the muck of the World Trade Center. He, and his bones, became the muck. Damien and his yobs didn’t know the plane was there, while Cayce doesn’t know where Win went.

Gibson’s effort to elongate his theme of yesterday’s history doesn’t work here. This time it’s personal.