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| First Written | 2003 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Penguin |
| ISBN-10 | 0425198685 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0425198681 |
| My Copy | cheap paperback |
| First Read | March 08, 2020 |
Pattern Recognition
Other little crystalized ideas that I've become attached to from this book:
- CPUs: black or gray unidentifiable clothing
- Jetlag as soul-delay
- the Children's Crusade: any sufficiently popular crowd of young people consuming something
- Bigend's Country: where every part of culture has been flattened and productized
Noted on March 27, 2020
Gibson is great at this, explaining some kind of complex name but immediately Naming it, so you've got a hook to hang this whole idea on. Chief among these in Pattern Recognition are CPUs - something that Erika and I have been referencing and using as an idea for at least fifteen years now.
Noted on March 27, 2020
I picked this up to have something light (by ounces) to read on our camping trip to the Grand Canyon; it's a fun cyberpunk novel that's set in the present, or at least the immediate post-9/11 present. There are many parts of this that have become metonyms, little crystalized nuggets of ideas that stand for bigger fuller ideas, that I reference ALL the time. Maybe the word for this is 'meme'? Except I hate that work.
Noted on March 27, 2020
I am shocked, actually beshooken here, to find that I have never entered Pattern Recognition into this little reading journal. I know I've read it three, four times? At least. It's SUCH a fun read, and is superformative in its ideas.
Noted on March 27, 2020
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer. But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.
Quoted on March 27, 2020
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
Quoted on March 27, 2020
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
Quoted on March 27, 2020
CPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson's MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she'd worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.
She sees her own gray eyes, pale in the glass, and beyond them Ben Sherman shirts and fishtail parkas, cufflinks in the form of the RAF roundel that marked the wings of Spitfires.
CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
Quoted on March 27, 2020