Have a good weekend. Think only of beautiful things.

Finished Pattern Recognition last night. Too many thoughts!

S
P
OIL
E
R
S,
obviously...

Gibson still can't really do endings. Given that PR is almost as much a re-telling of Laney's story from Idoru as it is of Marly's from Count Zero, it's amazing that the deal cut with the Russian mafia at the end of this one is even *more* vague, dubiously motivated and morally unexamined.

But he gets the right emotional note, I think. Not sure about "weeping for her century", but there's a nice sense of closure: an end, however temporary, to loneliness. An acceptance of loss.

Cayce is the most well-rounded, 3-dimensional character he's ever written, I'd say. The most human of his 'strong women', to the point where she arguably doesn't suffer from being a bit of a fantasy figure in the way that Molly and Chevette from previous books did. Interesting too the way that Boone Chu is neither a serious traitor nor a hero in the end - he's just a bit crap, someone who doesn't live up to the hype or his own charm, which after years of Gibson characters being the best in their field, is quite a pleasant novelty.

Other lingering thought in my reptile brain: call me an obvious perv, but I found Dorotea's "And now I think you are my little puppenkopf, too" bit almost unspeakably sexy. Really wrong and creepy, too, but... wow.

And then there's all the ways in which the book is about Barbelith - that person you always argue with and can't stand is actually a nasty baddie out to get you, that person you think posts the best stuff is going to save your ass and be your soulmate.

And the ways it's also about the city I love and live in, about specific parts of it which I know so well of late that it's spooky.

But it's not really a science fiction novel at all, is it?

the rapture of control

Originally, I was just going to post a couple of poems generated here for lack of anything more exciting to write. But in fact, with a bit of snipping and pruning, they're pretty interesting if you like cut-ups (and I do), which is what they essentially are. Like weekly tabloid astrology predictions, cut-ups are endlessly inviting for those of us who love to read too much into things. They also have the habit of throwing up fabulous turns of phrase: witness 'The Rapture Of Control', which must surely be the title of this first piece and which I will probably have to use "somewhere".

The Rapture Of Control. Today, for a rhythm too,
You brought to read
It - actually no,
Less is typically awful.
Anyway, the
pub... Lounging
Around the cover, I am...
Sequential. The Man.
Like I smell
The greatest lyrical
Moments on the song.

Actually, the line structure of these is a bit too reminiscent of shockingly bad would-be angst-poets for comfort. But they do seem to have some strange ring of prophetic truth, largely I guess because they're cobbled together out of fragments of the recent past. This particular section of the second iteration is quite spooky:

One
Excuse for
Example, purely because the
Ministry of
Shaping your life in
Sitting pleasantly hungover
And ranting will always feeling
Optimistic. I think she sounds good
At things, that this week ahead
Looks
Pretty.

Indeed...

a simply marvellous weekend

...Which I don't really have time or energy to write about now; suffice to say that X2 is possibly the greatest movie ever made, but the highlight of the weekend was still not seeing that, but rather who I saw it with.