The Guerreros were around him now, talking among themselves in a language like weather, like high fast clouds. He shivered within his jacket, and walked on through the sunlight, toward the bare trees with their green buds, Oshosi showing him dead spots in the square's human matrix, figures that were not part of unconscious dance formed here by this clearing amid the long city's buildings. He didn't look directly at these pretenders, watchers. He adjusted his path, avoiding them.

-p181, Chapter 40, Spook Country.
-may be my favourite chapter so far.

quote:

"A nation," he heard himself say, "consits of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's moral are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's law are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation."

...

quote:

"What did you say?"
"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?"

...

quote:

"The fuck--"
"If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him 'terrorist'. He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."
Brown opened his mouth. Closed it.

-p137, Chapter 29, Spook Country.

He put his empty plastic glass down as though it were something he was considering bidding on at Sotheby's.

p. 85. Chapter 17.

Weird sychronicity...for me anyway.

Just started Spook Country, opening chapter reminds me of a segment of a novel I wrote once upon a time. The Phoenix connection, re-enactment, et. al.

Great end to the chapter. Dead celebrity mojo must have been going around back in the day.

After my agent and I come to an agreement that I need to get moving on a new script, for the sake of my career and mortgage payments, I find China. He’s outside the Viper Club sometime before a long, cocktail sunset makes itself known. China’s there taking pictures, but he’s also there falling down. He’s doing some sort of pantomime death scene, splaying himself out, just so, on the pavement, arranging his limbs as he must imagine a certain combination of heroin and cocaine might leave them in the last spasms of death.
He’s surrounded by a crowd of fascinated kids, in their late teens and early twenties, the age when they should know better but clearly don’t. They are, all of them, armed with candles and pictures and little homemade wreaths and signs with words like “We love you River”, “You Are Not Forgotten” and other sayings you might have read here ten years ago, when another kid, who also should have known better but didn’t, collapsed on this very sidewalk, pulled a James Dean and ended what everyone posthumously regarded as a promising career.
So here’s China, securing the rapt attention of this anniversary crowd of mourners, kids who have rediscovered a fallen star and thus condemned him to that heinous immortality of iconography that only dead and fictional characters can really understand. I see China as some sort of twenty-first century macabre Fagan, leading all these bright young things into the world of celebrity, a supplemental, surrogate pantheon for old gods long since receded into the shadows.
China is so singularly equipped for this kind of work, so readily the provocateur for a group of bored youths looking for some half-assed Hollywood street deity. It’s unsettling to watch him, to watch his physicality as he resurrects himself from the sidewalk and begins to gesture even more passionately than before. China, this Aryan, L.A. uberman, this trendy hipster, this empty soul. He’s smiling with a predatory resonance, he’s laughing with the kids, he’s interviewing them for the site. And always, he’s taking pictures.
By the time you extract him from the throng, he’s got an airy gleam in his eyes (or rather a more airy gleam than usual), suggesting an even greater lack of depth, and he has a pocket full of phone numbers you don’t want to think about how he’ll use. And he says, “Man, those kids are really something.”

Weirdness.

Ch. 8, Pg. 42:

...Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that the space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in..." He frowned.

"Yes?"

"Might work the same way." He shrugged again, and picked up his burger.

You, she thought, are seriously creeping me out.

But she only nodded gravely and picked up her own burger.

quote:

Originally posted by englishvoodoo:
He put his empty plastic glass down as though it were something he was considering bidding on at Sotheby's.

p. 85. Chapter 17.

yeah i liked that. nice one line summary of his character.

and uber dog, that creeping me out was cool as well. a contribution towards her character.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: King Real,

I may be gliding into apophenia but this seems self referential or a personal joke:

quote:

The world outside [...] was the color of a silver coin misplaced for decades in a drawer.

p. 10, Viking Edition, Ants in the water

yeah i thought that was conscious.
how could it not be?

quote:

Originally posted by remotespook:

and uber dog, that creeping me out was cool as well. a contribution towards her character.[/QUOTE]Not just to her character but to a base state of ontology.

Which is creepier.

quote:

Originally posted by remotespook:
yeah i thought that was conscious.
how could it not be?

Well, his continuously reappearing bowl of never-ending soup always made me think of an allusion to some sort of Jungina sea but when he was on his last tour it was really about some chili someone he once knew used to make.

I don't have the book at hand to transcribe for us, but my fave was the paragraph describing how the effect of the new 'generic' -- Rize -- on Milgrim was like the effect of eating superbly rendered HOT Zechuan food. Not a single trope, per se, but a perfectly expanded simile.

Oh, and I remember the tarnished silver coin trope but didn't make the TV/sky connection. I just thought it was a really sucky trope. But, now that you make the connection, I suppose it served both purposes and Gibson would approve of both evaluations. I mean, he's gotta be sick unto late-night channel-surfed ennui of that infamous passage.

Someday, someone will invent, and inadevertantly make massively popular, the expression "uberspace" (think of ubicomp coupled with serious nanotech 'real-life' macro-matter interactability), and good ole boy Will will finally be off *that* hook.

quote:

Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:
Oh, and I remember the tarnished silver coin trope but didn't make the TV/sky connection. I just thought it was a really sucky trope. But, now that you make the connection, I suppose it served both purposes and Gibson would approve of both evaluations. I mean, he's gotta be sick unto late-night channel-surfed ennui of that infamous passage.

Oh... right. I see it now. i thought it was a reference to the shit characters found in drawers in both Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The sky, right.

Missed that bit.

quote:

They passed a Brobdingnagian futon, in whose squishy depths a covey of vicious, ass-hole chewing, hyena-like, and exeptionally pretty young people reclined with their drinks. But you don't know that about them, she reminded herself; it was just that they looked like A&R people. But then almost everyone here did.

Reminds me a little of Kathy in IDORU except with a conscience.