The Bearcave fella's review of Pattern Recognition included this paragraph

quote:

What is interesting is that someone so highly attuned to design as Cayce Pollard is never elated by what they consider great design (which was the feeling I had when I saw the Salk Institute designed by Louis Kahn). We learn that certain logos and designs cause Cayce pain, but design does not seem to give her pleasure. The only artifact that speaks to Cayce Pollard's passion is the footage.

I think he may be right. Apart from her love for her Buzz Rickson's I can't think of any other expressions of design related passion from Cayce. Can you?

It is a matter of where you put the zero point. Normal people appreciate certain designs (difficult to assign greatness when it is culture influenced) and filter those they are not impacted by. She ignores acceptable design and is hurt by (her own criterion) bad design.

I think that when it goes as far as physical distress, the categories quickly become distressing/non-distressing, rather than remarkable/unremarkable, as most people tend to classify those things.

The higher the sensitivity, and the layers of meaning you extract of an object, the wider the classification and the range of potential responses. But her response is not mediated by her knowledge of design, so in fact she would need, in order to remain believable, to be able to ignore most of the meanings and attached symbolism, to avoid the distraction of her conscious evaluation on her gut response.

The footage lacks context and reference, so it should be attractive to someone who needs to avoid excess context and deliberate framing to keep her well paid work.

If this musings have any bearing on a fictional character psychological make up, the loss of her design gut response may be simply due to her becoming grounded and set in a certain referential frame, so that her responses are mediated between conscious and subconscious, rather than deliberately subconscious.

She grew up.

I think she has some affection for Damien's Cube.

Something like what Psychophant says, I think she finds good design soothing. The Cube, for example.

Also, there just weren't that many opportunities to rave about great, moving designs she came across (I suppose she could have gotten all orgasmic about the Curta, but maybe that just doesn't turn her crank... har har). Maybe the world has far more bad design than good?

She's enthusiastic about her Japanese haircut too. But I think there's evidence enough for me that she likes Skirt Thing, the Luggage Label bag, stuff from Muji, maybe her Stasi envelope, etc. These are all choices and not just negations, in my view.

I had not gotten an impression that she was engaged in design herself. It seemed more to me like she was utilizing her allergy to make money by applying it in reverse. More like a person with an intensely acute sense of smell testing perfumes for people but also being nauseated by McDonalds and the like.

It seemed to me like she was a person with a talent and a job and not a avant garde designer who was PASSIONATE about DESIGN because it was so IMPORTANT.

I also got the impression that she'd been doing the work for a period of time, and thus like most other professionals of her sort, I'd expect her to be a bit jaded by the whole thing.

...and furthermore Susan, in the book isn't the only stuff she's really exposed to a Nike design? Like colin says, there just isn't much there in the book for her to be PASSIONATE about.

And then finally, seems like a silly "complaint" or note to me. How are we supposed to believe Case is a real druggie from Neuro? He didn't engage in pages or chapters of drug-dialog introspection. How are we to believe Mona from MLO is a prostitute? There's like only a single couple refs to her profession, a "real" prostitute would clearly have had much more to say about her work. Which is to say, it seems like a straw man to say Cayce isn't passionate about design just because the particular novel (which had one or two other things going on in it) doesn't spend, what the reviewer would consider, "enough" time discoursing on her love of the simplicity of the Adidas logo or whatever.

She was a dowser. She knew what worked, but couldn't say why. And yes, her appreciation for design was more utilitarian, she adapted was might have been fashionable into things she could use without further analysis (the CPU). In a way she was consumer society's nightmare.

She might have grown up at the end. Or she just lost the tuning range to some frequency. We might never know. Maybe if she appears in the trilogy's coda?

I think the most we will get about Cayce will be a throwaway comment from Bigend about that cool hunter that once worked for him.

The problem with Cayce is that she has been numb since 9/11, and she spends most of the book in that numb state. And then, suddenly, at the end, all her interests collide and are resolved. I do not think that will just take some ability from her. She becomes someone different, probably more related to pre-9/11 Cayce, a Cayce we almost do not see, but with a different set of priorities. I just like to think that is what growing up is about.

My third wisdom tooth is slowly coming out, at last. I also can grow up.

"She was a dowser. She knew what worked, but couldn't say why."

Nicely put, fuldog.

Footage as Transitional Object? Cayce grew over the course of the book. To say she grew up is reductive and a little ...well, unimaginative. Being an adult doesn't mean abandoning obsessions. It means recognising and channeling them in productive ways that don't damage you. Do you think she'll transfer all that energy to Parkaboy now?

quote:

Do you think she'll transfer all that energy to Parkaboy now?

Not if she's the strong, resourceful, smart, and perceptive woman she seems to be.

We are also forgetting that she *is* passionate about the footage (which Gibson offers as a design miracle in and of itself), and brings to bear not only her own knowledge of film but also the collective knowledge that F:F:F brings to bear, at least as far as Gibson represents her knowledge base. She may have extensive design knowledge, but may have had much difficulty with some of it. How would one have the historical knowledge to be able to say that Tommy Hilfiger is a distant derivative copy of some hypothetical "original" design (this seems to be the basis of most of her design allergies: unoriginality in addition to the crassness of something like Bibendum) without having studied it, even informally (i.e. through popular magazines, etc)? Her own ability to track down street-level trends as a "cool-hunter" would also take skill beyond tapping into her allergy: the ability to study the trends and their history.

I think the original question (re: Cayce's passion for design) underestimates her (yes, perhaps underwritten) background, and the responses so far have fallen for the critic's premise as already proven.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Justy,