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i like her. you know, for the record.
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I was wondering how much the initial impression colors the image of Hollis. My first analogue was Elizabeth Fraser (from the Cocteau Twins, who I know were a trio rather than a quartet), partly because I was listening to the BBC sessions of CT, and partly because I wanted someone in her forties rather than the fifties. So my Hollis is more fragile looking, dark haired, yet moody and strong-willed. An introverted unwilling journalist...
Names. Numbers. Held as though they might be a map, a map back out of the underground.
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| Posts: 1500 | Location: I am behind you | Registered: June 04, 2004 |  |
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quote: Originally posted by Newromancer:
For a drug addict, Milgrim is unbelievably calm, isn't he?
That's what Rize is about.
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Birth, School, Work, Death
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| Posts: 8062 | Location: Berlin | Registered: March 04, 2006 | |
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It took awhile for me to stop reading "Hollis Henry" as "Henry Rollins". Not that I confused the two as characters, but their names just wouldn't stay straight in my mind until she's talking to Bigend and not mashing his face in because he's such a LOMBARD. (as I imagine Rollins would do. Least, in the early days).
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"As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior orals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying."
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| Posts: 733 | Location: Sierra Vista, AZ | Registered: October 19, 2006 | |
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quote: Originally posted by Hasa: quote: Originally posted by Newromancer:
For a drug addict, Milgrim is unbelievably calm, isn't he?
That's what Rize is about.
Ahh... Merci beaucoup. Was wondering about that whole Rize thing (never heard about it). But then I wasn't wondering enough, neither am I interested enough in drugs, to actually look it up. From the description I guessed that it would be some kind of stimulate or painkiller. Now thinking about it, that really fits the bill. quote:
SIDE EFFECTS: The most commonly noted side effects associated with lorazepam are sedation (which is reported in approximately 1 in 6 people), dizziness (1 in 15), weakness, and unsteadiness. Other side effects include a feeling of depression, loss of orientation, headache, and sleep disturbance.
Like all benzodiazepines, lorazepam can cause physical dependence. Suddenly stopping therapy after a few months of daily therapy may be associated with a feeling of loss of self-worth, agitation, and insomnia. If lorazepam is taken continuously longer than a few months, stopping therapy suddenly may produce seizures, tremors, muscle cramping, vomiting, and/or sweating.
I am wondering about long-term side effects?
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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay, 1971.
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| Posts: 4251 | Location: Cyberspace | Registered: January 09, 2004 | |
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quote: Originally posted by remotespook:
still only about p180. but between mike's comment and uberdog creeping me out quote, i think hollis is more resistant, so far, to the idea of bigend/blue ant. sure cayce resisted, but it was always kind of token, kind of well she was already actually tied and knew who bigend was. hollis has more of sense of really not liking what is going on. but yeah, that could well change in the rest of the book.
I won't, as yet, comment on characterization. What I will say is that Hollis is on the inside of the thing that Cayce is on the outside of. Cayce is, in some fashion, antithetical to the celebrity in which Hollis once found herself and to the volitional participation in said celebrity. Though neither are altogether comfortable with the idea of being "mediated?" Hollis has openly embraced it in the past. or anyhow come to accept it. As I suppose Gibson himself has, as a weird extension of his selfhood, that which he call the "celebrity self" in Spook Country.
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Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
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| Posts: 8601 | Location: A grue's belly. | Registered: February 20, 2003 | |
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quote: Originally posted by Splitcoil:
Not sure why there's so much hostility toward Hollis out there. Cayce was an aberration for WG. She was glorious, but she was a navel-gazing aberration compared to the man's usual characters' much more spare and reserved style of introspection. Previous heroes and heroines examined their thoughts with noir-like precision and ruthless dispatch. Cayce settled down in her obsessions like they were warm syrup in her swimsuit.
Like I said, I liked Cayce. But I'm glad to see a step back in the old direction at least in these respects. Unlike Cayce, Spook Country's characters are slanted more toward showing than telling.
The most notable exception is Milgrim, who I read almost as a kind of amused commentary on security culture taken directly from a corner of WG's own mind.
I don't know that I wholly agree, his characters have become increasingly more nuanced and complex as his work has progressed. I see you point that he is revisting an older style he once used but I think he's overlayed it with more depth. it's subtle, fragmentary, but effective. A few lines here and there describe each of the charcater ontic positions in the world succinctly.
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Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
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| Posts: 8601 | Location: A grue's belly. | Registered: February 20, 2003 | |
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quote: Originally posted by remotespook:
i like her. you know, for the record.
I'm with you, dude. Although my favorite was Milgrim. |
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| Posts: 549 | Location: I don't want to think about it | Registered: September 12, 2006 | |
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quote: Originally posted by mirrorgirl:
I'm done with the book.
I thought Hollis was a lazy-man's clone of Cayce, and was rather disappointed by this. Gibson seems to have a solid habit now of casting women as the protagonist, but if they all end up the same...?
Oh but I disagree. Cayce was a fairly young naive Daddy's girl. Hollis was a seasoned, worse-for-wear semi-famous culturine (gratuitous neologism). She didn't feel anything at all like Cayce to me. Hollis had an old friend, Inchmaile, and Holly, not a friend so much as a loyal ex-partner, and a fairly complex history that began, as I recall, with Curfew, although I think there were brief references to her family? Cayce had a crazy mom and a presumed dead semi-mythical Daddy who talked to her in her head, and her internet buddies, mostly per le footage. Hollis was experienced enough to know her own toughness (and vulnerability) and to flaunt them to her advantage the way animals puff themselves up to look bigger. Cayce knew how to be as invisible as possible.
Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher
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| Posts: 3833 | Location: Spokane, WA | Registered: August 11, 2007 | |
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yeah, there is a scene where hollis talks to her parents, and i found that humanizing. it did give her a grounding cayce didn't really have.
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Cayce's anxiety was far more the definiton of her selfhood rather than the exception to, as was Hollis'. Cayce seemed, until the end, to exist perpetually in watch for the Mongolian Death Worm whereas Hollis seemed to be on alert only by outside stimulus (more or less.) On a side note, I thought the last image of the worm having penetrated the corporate spire spoke well for the theme of the entire book.
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Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing - more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
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| Posts: 8601 | Location: A grue's belly. | Registered: February 20, 2003 | |
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At the Pasadena reading, regarding Milgrim and his political statements, Gibson stated that we should all remember that most characters are not reliable narrators. Nice dodge there, Mr. G. Back to Hollis... my husband has started reading Spook Country, and after talking about Hollis a bit we think she's more of an Xene Cervenka. Heidi, (er, Laura), is Debby Harry. I know, they've never been in a band together, but their charcterizations match these real-life musicians better I think. Epecially Heidi, who is "a gender preference all her own".
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"As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior orals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying."
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| Posts: 733 | Location: Sierra Vista, AZ | Registered: October 19, 2006 | |
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quote: Xene Cervenka
Exene seems like she would be more pro-active than Hollis, to me.
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| Posts: 3861 | Location: Pittsburgh | Registered: June 21, 2005 | |
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quote: Originally posted by shake:
Isn't it Townshend, and I don't remember Moon having a particularly big hooter.
Not proboscis protrudicus like Pete's but, well, looky here.
Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher
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| Posts: 3833 | Location: Spokane, WA | Registered: August 11, 2007 | |
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...is a bitch. A judgemental, defensive, above-it-all bitch. And of course, I love her. She's kind of a lovable mess; jaded, cynical, doesn't trust anyone except for her only friend, Inchmale. I bet she is chronically attracted to unavailable men.
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there is something that contains everything
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quote: Originally posted by Hasa: 
My friend said he thought of her as Kim Deal, and I instantly pictured Kim Gordon because I always do that...I'm sort of stuck at the moment between Kim Gordon and Chrissie Hynde, although neither band's pattern really followed The Curfew's. I expect at some juncture I will really sit down and look at indie charts from the 90s and see what else comes to me; on first reading I deliberately didn't try to think of the person because I knew I'd be insanely distracted. And then I forgot to ask WG last night if he had anyone specific in mind. Of course you hate to do that in case he says someone that disagrees with your image, and I suspect he's probably too canny to give a straight answer to that question.
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| Posts: 3778 | Location: Vancouver, BC | Registered: August 05, 2007 | |
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