i have always loved "Maybe now i see you never." from Burning Chrome.
somehow it just evokes that terrible lonely feeling of knowing you will never see that person again.

there are more that i like but i'm at work and only have All Tomorrow's Parties with me.

ATP has some wonderful little conversations. Great rhythm.

quote:

"You have money?"
"A credit chip," Rydell said.
"Any contagious diseases?"
"No."
"Are you a drug abuser?"
"No," Rydell said.
"A drug dealer?"
"No."
"Smoke anything? Cigarettes, a pipe?"
"No."
"Are you a violent person?"
Rydell hesitated. "No."
"More to the point, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"
"No," Rydell said, "I haven't."
"That's good," she said, turning down the propane ring. "That's one thing I can't tolerate. Raised by 'em."

I love the "Rydell hesitated" beat, and also the way that (a) Rydell is instantly honest about not accepting Jesus as his personal savior and (b) that turns out to be the right answer.

Ok,here's a question.

I've seen in WG books, particularly I think in the Sprawl stuff, eyes that, "show(ing) a fraction\millimeter of white", and....uh, what?

I saw it in a Doctorow novel recently too.

But I've never been able to figure out what it means. Pupil dilation won't effect the amount of white showing. And...what else could it even be?

I'm totally stumped really, can anybody help a brutha out? It seems like it must be one of those very very obvious things that you obsess over, long past the point of being able to ever realize the solution, like looking for your car keys, which are on the table in front of you, all over the house, high, low, couches, yesterdays pants? Nothing. The more you look the worse it gets. Same here, every time I read that whites of the eyes thing, it becomes more baffling.

Can't remember an actual instance of that, so a quote would help, but if it's a fraction/millimeter of white all around, then that indicates eyes open wide in shock or surprise. Normally the eyelid will cover the white on the top and bottom.

If it's just a fraction of white then... squinting, maybe? Though, really, most people don't notice the whites of the eyes normally, so usually seeing the white means being really close and/or the wide open eyes of shock I mentioned above.

The fraction millimeter of white was an exaggeration of eyes dilated.

There may also be an instance in which the eye appears through a peep hole (Finn's as I recall) and so you wouldn't see the whole eye.

That's when Bobby meets Finn in CZ or when Case meets him if you want to look. I think it's Bobby though.

I noted that Gibson uses the same trope to describe Vancouver mountain backdrops:

"But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlight, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie."

-The Winter Market

"Beyond the box-pile were mountains. Beyond those, cloud. They made Milgrim uneasy, these mountains. They didn't look as though the could be real. Too big, too close. Snowcapped. Like the logo at the start of a film."

-Spook Country

Heh, I see what you mean now

He looks on his adopted home as a hyperreal simulacrum of an American actuality.

It's so clear!

It probably began when he felt disenfranchised after his father's death and his own growing awareness of life outside Virginia.

His comfort with technology belies early years of solitude in which his only companions were pulpy pages and the lonely quietude of attics andf rust-dusted remnants of fin de siecle American industry.

His former smoking habit merely confirms his frustrated desire to build those very things with his hands and which he now feitshizes in a misguided contrition toward heartland industry and the red, white and blues he left behind.

Harold Bloom told me this.

Always looking for patterns, for the connective shoals in the Jungian sea.

"He crouched there, suddenly aware of something he couldn't name. The goddess, the noise of the port, the old man, the ten painted disks slung around his neck like blank sigils. Somehting was about to change. In the world, in his life, he didn't know. He closed his eyes. Saw the blue vase glowing softly, where he'd hidden it, on the roof of his building."

Very much a Laney observation, but this one of course comes from Tito, whose gods are a like manifestation to Laney's nodal points in this instance. conjuring up the momentous now to reveal itself to Tito and outline a point where a convergence has accreted, where a great change is about to outline the future.

This is a recurring part of Gibson's work and is, I would argue, the very thing which he does as a a writer. He peers into a divining ball, through the mist and pulls out fragments of tomorrow. But his tomorrows are really just inverted pieces of today and only serve to suggest what will unfold. But it's what he does, he catches the whiff of the zeitgeist, the meme, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it and it propels the narrative of his books (and quite often the characters) more than any other single thing in the text, with the possible exception of simply constructing prose line-by-line.

These patterns which he recognizes and draws for the reader seem to be his mode and modus, his central kick.

I found this one in Idoru yesterday. Read it in a loop 4-5 times, faster each time, tell me if it doesn't make you laugh.

***
"Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.

***

I really like it because, not only can you reread it to try to runallthewordstogether, but Chia's words following his runtogether can also be read as a runtogether, AND, furthermore, the "he only said it because it was the law that he had to", is an interesting authorial artifact.

In that I suspect he was making a joke to himself about himself. That is, the author ("he") has to say the bit about noninvasive DNA sampling because it's "the law" (of sci-fi novels) that you have to explain these things ahead of time.

So Gibson as the "he" is only putting this line in so that when Chia goes thru the hair-snippin' checkpoint we already know that she already knows that this is no big deal.

And if that was not his joke...well, fuck it, I think it's funny in that way anyhizzle.

Also, back to the ThreeWordGibson (nevermind colin, I hope it doesn't give Hiz Gibness a complex ) here are a few from sequential pages of Idoru:

(the '96 Putnam hc)
p.16: ninety-year-old cedar clapboards
p.16: jade labret stud
p.17: beat-up aluminum lips
p.17: rubbery red candy
p.18: little silver wand
19 is a half-page and the chapter ends, so we pick up on
p.21: white, man-tailored blouse
p.21: seamless hissing surf
p.21: corrugated plastic carton (Fucking Classic!)
p.22: bright little sticker
p.22: palm-sized silvery hologram
finally, page 23, the point of posting all these
p.23: bright plastic teeth

I must say that going back thru them like this, looking for weird shit, I thought it would make them worse, you know, becoming aware of the "tricks", like looking for crappy shading and poor background movement in CGI in "blockbusters", but...it's been the reverse. I doubt I'd have ever put as much thought, and thus gotten as much enjoyment out of, that runtogether line if I'd not have done this.

Oh, yes, one more thing, per Uber, the zeitgeist grabbin' stuff, how about that noninvasive DNA scanning?

I mean...they can really do this, NOW, and, since it's a public space, the airport, it's probably legal. You don't even have to use it to confirm identities. You just use it for massive databases. Somebody is going to vacuum and clean the place anyway...why not take some hair samples while you do it?

So...I thought that was pretty good, for futurey stuff, even if it's not happened yet.

Also another thing, but I'll put that in the other "tech" thread.

Oh. And did anybody mention the airports\jetlag thing? Mostly the airports. They appear frequently and his feelings about them seem consistent across the texts.

quote:

In that I suspect he was making a joke to himself about himself. That is, the author ("he") has to say the bit about noninvasive DNA sampling because it's "the law" (of sci-fi novels) that you have to explain these things ahead of time.

I'm almost certain it's just a case of WG's wry observation, carried into a SF context. Plenty of people, especially in things like airport security, have to say or do things because they are obligated to by the law and their behavior when doing so can be kind of amusing, from a certain point of view. It's also a bit of an observation that Chia doesn't care about the DNA sampling. Not one iota. She was born into a world where this kind of thing is commonplace, and so she does not react to it. Something about how tyranny can sneak up on a society if it's just introduced softly enough for people to get used to each stage.

Anyway, I'm sure WG is used to people analyzing his work to death. Any author (even an unpublished pleeb like me!) get's used to that pretty quickly.

The thing that made me think that it was a joke was that it was it's own paragraph, so it's fairly distinct.

And, yes, to the rest of it. That's part of it as well. It has to be mentioned as it's mentioned (dual runtogethers) to both introduce the idea, indicate that the guy at the counter doesn't care, that Chia doesn't care, and that just makes it more obligatory to me. It's a sentence that "nobody" cares about, but it "has" to be there. Thus "the law" in both textual and meta-textual ways.

But I'll admit it's likely I'm pulling an Uberdog and reading too much in to it based on my personal contexts.

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

quote:

Anyway, I'm sure WG is used to people analyzing his work to death. Any author (even an unpublished pleeb like me!) get's used to that pretty quickly.

Your work is all about your estranged relationship with your first bicycle, Colin, That's pretty clear.

JBX, I read way too much into things. But shit...

It's just a little bit of dialog/description. he builds the details of a world and we infer the world...

quote:

Originally posted by jbx:
The thing that made me think that it was a joke was that it was it's own paragraph, so it's fairly distinct.

And, yes, to the rest of it. That's part of it as well. It has to be mentioned as it's mentioned (dual runtogethers) to both introduce the idea, indicate that the guy at the counter doesn't care, that Chia doesn't care, and that just makes it more obligatory to me. It's a sentence that "nobody" cares about, but it "has" to be there. Thus "the law" in both textual and meta-textual ways.

But I'll admit it's likely I'm pulling an Uberdog and reading too much in to it based on my personal contexts.

I think it's just more to do with the functionary and banal aspects of post-geogrpahy.

Yes, you can go anywhere you want but we get your DNA first.

And all that DNA does them very little good and becomes just another ritual of departure.

meaningless and largely divorced from it's context. Like making people take off their shoes before boarding.

Eating ironed bacon in Japanese hotels while mopping up you eggs with remnants of toast.

A major theme.

You can also eat the ironed toast in Vancouver but you don't get to mop it up with the remnants of toast.

The breakfast moments in Tokyo hotels are in Idoru and Pattern Recognition.

The Asian craze of ironing bacon continues in Vancouver in Spook Country.

Discuss.

Uh, it's not Asian.

They are just a tool to keep the bacon flat. The flatter the bacon the more crispy it will become, until it's over-cooked of course.

I see them at the Czechoslovak place near my house, which has Mexican cooks. Nothing Asian about it.


http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/links/link....1a&_requestid=145412

or google "bacon press"

To clarify, I don't know if you (Uber) are saying it's Asian\Japanese, or just that that's the emphasis in the books, so...uh, yah.

I, having made it to VL in my rereadings (middle book, 1st book, 3rd book, next series...) have begun to think Gibz has a set of pivotal experiences which he references again and again.

Some breakfast somewhere with the memorable bacon\eggs.

Some really big dude who impressed the crap out of him with his movements and size.

Things like that. I DO want to make clear that obvious he can write like a mo'fo' and doesn't have to have LIVED everything in every book, but many of them seem to share such underlying thematic or specific similarities I can't help but think they spring from something.

Like the jet-lag stuff, it seems to mirror what he has to say about book tours, no?

quote:

Originally posted by jbx:
To clarify, I don't know if you (Uber) are saying it's Asian\Japanese, or just that that's the emphasis in the books, so...uh, yah.

Gibson says that they are the Japanese interpretation of an American breakfast in Idoru and PR. In SC, the Asian man who work on the QE1 irons the bacon as well. In this fashion he paints the gastronomic trick as an Asian quirk or recontextualizing the West.