Excellent Quotes: Pattern Recognition

William Gibson is The Man. I was unprepared for Neuromancer, which was utterly engrossing, and I have absolutely loved everything I have read by him since. He was like a cyberpunk gateway drug steering me toward Haruki Murakami and Neil Stephenson but he remains a unique leading voice. Hey, anyone who says that "Earth is the alien planet now" and who re-wrote science fiction on a typewriter is okay by me.

In his excellent Pattern Recognition, Gibson's protagonist Cayce Pollard is a design consultant who is actually physically allergic to bad aesthetics. On a trip to London Cayce goes to Harvey Nichols and, unpreparedly encountering a Tommy Hilfiger display in the menswear department, she gets sick:

"My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn't know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity."
--Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York (NY): G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003. Pp. 17-18.

As a bonus, here is another fetching quote from the opening page of the same book as Cayce arrives in the U.K. from New York: "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." Two quotes, I know--woeful lack of discipline.

PS - My mom has some Cayce in her. She used to take the art in hotel rooms down and place it in the closet while she stayed to avoid visual discomfort and soul-strain. Oh, and I am seriously considering learning how to play "I Am Not the Only Cowboy" by the Josh Joplin Group; now playing on iTunes.