Data dump

Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily at the rear of her ethical universe.

---

[hilarious perfection]

Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs, she sees the Coca-Colo logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan "NO REASON!"

---

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father's absence.

---

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.
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.

---

"Thank you. Just a moment, please, while I find my key." Actually it's in the pocket of her Rickson's, ready to be palmed when needed, but she checks the bathroom, the closet, glances behind the black furniture, then notices a large gray carrier bag, with the Blue Ant logo on the side, at the foot of her bed. She kneels to look under the bed, discovers it isn't the kind you can look under, and comes up, still kneeling, with the key, a plastic mag-strip card, in her hand. "I've found it. Thank you very much."

---

[incomprehensible without background information, so you'll have to take my word that it's cool]

"Yes, it ends in .ru Observe the protocol H-B"

Baranov, emailing from the hyphen.

---

Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win's chargin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist.

---

[and an absolutely brilliant conclusion to the story, snuck in by way of an e-mail message from a background character]

Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery - revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in.

---

The ending wasn't exactly stellar, but it was a very enjoyable read nonetheless. Next up... The Graveyard Book, I guess.

Abridged

Gonna chuck some quotes at you, as promised. No preface, so just try to keep up with me now (01:23).

Not the first time she's used [the forum] that way. She wonders, really, if she ever uses it any other way. It is the gift of "OT," Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.

---

Seated, not bothering with the menu, Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French.
The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellant hairball.
"All right," says Cayce, under her breath, to the girl's receding back, "be French."

---

Assuming the footage is entirely computer-generated means that your maker eithyer has de-engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation.

Thank you for your attention.

Down for a Jack Move

Here's a small convergence of popculture flotsam that is probably only amusing to me and no one else, BUT each of the individual components is at least a teensy bit noteworthy in and of its own, so...

I'm still reading Gibson's Pattern Recognition. There will be quotes, at a later date, but this is about a chapter title - Jack Moves, Jane Faces. It caught my attention, because I thought it was verb-based (and thus vague in a pretty clever way), and implied a cause and effect thing. Later it was explained that a "Jack move" was actually the main character's ex-boyfriend's name for an unorthodox action, while "Jane faces" belonged in the bedroom.

Part two: Bohdan recently sent me this bit of genius. And today, as I was linking it to someone else, I found out that the best thing about Shortbus  seems to appreciate it as well:

So I listened to it again, this time actually paying some attention to the lyrics, and caught the bit around 0:52. Which gave me a smile. Then I started wondering if it's really kosher to mimic a dead person's lisp, but pretty guy guitar where was I?

The final bit of serendipity happened as I was writing this post and realized I have absolutely no way of working my new favorite photo into it. If you watched the above clip in its entirety you know that is no longer the case (the one I wanted to post originally had no umbrellas in it). So feast your eyes:

The entire glorious buildup can be found here.

Jumping bones

I was reminded recently of Dead Man's Bones. Apparently the record's out already. Will give it a listen once I get over the photo. To balance things out, the other guy is a complete uggo:

Fucking genetics.

She takes off her clothes, brushes her teeth, limbs wooden with exhaustion and vibrating with caffeine, turns off the lights, and crawls, literally, beneath the stiff silver spread on Damien's bed.
To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as the last wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.

I've started reading Pattern Recognition and was surprised at how easily I slip into Gibson's prose. Brisk and concise, with sleek, cleanly executed flourishes. I find it strangely comforting - instant insulation in a perfectly accessible pocket universe. 

New angles

I think I got hooked on books again. It started on the way to the US - I took William Gibson's Spook Country with me, just in case there was absolutely nothing to do on the plane. That I even had it in the first place was a small marvel in itself. I'd already resigned myself to my loss of literacy and simply stopped buying books, but it was only 25PLN, and I had such fond memories of Neuromancer...

Anyway, the book itself isn't exactly life-changing, but it has this instant accessibility - you get gently pulled into it from page one, and experience the same immediacy whenever you pick it up. It also seemed to provide me with a sense of stability (even though the main characters are constantly on the move* - I guess it's easier to cope with imaginary displacement). I always had this handy reference point, whether I was waiting for Ana at the Mall of America, or stuck in traffic entering New York City.

As for the plot, Spook Country takes place in the present, and is something of a spy thriller. Except, true to Gibson's cyberpunk pedigree, most of the spies aren't affiliated with any form of centralized government, and there's also a near-omnipotent, irrational, corporate presence. It also flirts with things like the nature of celebrity (and its data-preserving powers), the future of art, or Where The Hell Are Our VR Goggles - but these serve as ornaments rather than foundation.

It reminded me of some of the esthetic pleasures of reading. I liked some of his turns of phrase, like "Outside, wind found the windows from a different angle" or "Dawn was well under way, lots of it". Or how he somehow made an English-speaking French character sound French without using some weird accent transcription (I think the key was having her use the word "disconsolate"). But the thing that really stuck with me is how he made it seem like what you're reading is just a snapshot, and the fact that you close the book doesn't mean the people therin won't keep on doing their thing. Obviously, I know shit about literature, but the books I have read always seemed very self-contained and efficient, every plot point contributing to the greater whole, every detail a foreshadowing en route to revelation. Meanwhile, throughout Spook Country I found several threads that weren't neatly tucked in anywhere at all. It was always the tiniest of details: an extra sentence here, a small paragraph there... Almost subliminal in their subtlety, and never drawing your attention away from the main plot, but nevertheless succeeding in making the characters feel totally real. Like the story was merely something that happened to them, as opposed to them being a set of narrative tools used to tell a story. Unfortunately, I don't think I can make myself any clearer, and the only passage I marked at the time probably won't be much help either, but it at least gives you a sense of this non-sequiturial vibe (it's the end of a chapter):

"Milgrim nodded. Got up. He wasn't going to run, but for the first time, he thought Brown might be bluffing.
In the washroom he ran cool water over his wrists, then looked at his hands. They were still his. He wiggled his fingers. Amazing, really."

I remember Stephenson achieving a slightly similar effect in... Snow Crash, I think, except he made his world - not his characters - seem like something too big for the book to contain by hinting at certain, intriguing details only to return to the main plot a moment after, leaving you high and dry.

And now I'm on to Secrets of the Gotha, which reads like a tabloid adhering to the rules of the Spanish court protocol, so expect lots of random and absurd quotes about 19th century European royals in the near future.

* their route even mirrored ours to a certain extent, as they travelled from New York to D.C.. Eventually, they ended up in Vancouver, which I intend to treat as a portent.