Pattern Recognition

[go_team]

Well, I finished it. That went faster than expected, so I think I must've started skimming pretty hard in there somewhere. Peter was right; I'm going to have to reread it, if only because towards the end I was reading so fast that I must have missed some stuff. I saw one plot twist coming, but the whole story strikes me as so carefully constructed that I'm wondering if I was supposed to guess the twist in question... it's that kind of book. Anyway, for my own reference mostly, here are some passages I marked while reading because they struck me as interesting, or entertaining, or important:

A funny rant about Tommy Hilfiger (our heroine is hyper-sensitive to brands, and has allergic reactions/panic attacks when overwhelmed by product placement):

My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of 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 (17) 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... (18)

I noted all references to the title phrase, since they're pretty clearly important:

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap. (22)

A bit that reminded me vaguely of Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash in particular:

...Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Forseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs... This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek's opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them....

"But if Timex sold it in the United States," she asks him, "why didn't we get the programmers?"

"You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers...."

Cayce is pretty certain that England wanted Nintendo too, and got it, and probably shouldn't be looking too eagerly forward to another bumper crop of programmers... (33)

I'm very interested in dialogue where the author is clearly hashing out Ideas with a capital I, so that's why I noted this passage:

"How do you think we look," Bigend asks, "to the future?"...(55)

Bigend has a way of injecting these questions into conversations... Caltrops thrown down on the conversational highway; you can swerve or you can hit them, blow your tires, hope you'll keep going on the rims. He's been doing it through dinner and their pre-dinner drinks, and Cayce assumes he does it because he's their boss, and perhaps because he really does bore easily. It's like watching someone restlessly change channels, no more mrecy to it than that.

"They won't think of us," Cayce says, choosing straight into it. "Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don't mean the icons, but the ordinary actually living souls."

...

"Souls," repeats Bigend... (56)

"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a futrue, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural figures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile." He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. "We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition."

Cayce blinks.

"Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks.

"History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. "Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct."

"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."

"You sound oracular." White teeth.

"I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we're interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won't seem very relevant." (57)

More title phrase:

What if the sense of nascent meaning they all perceive in the footage is simply that: an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition? (115)

Funny bit about trying to get a haircut in Japan but ending up with the makeover of doom:

Twenty minutes later, in Shibuya, she's settling in to a hot-rocks massage that she hasn't asked for, in a twilit room on the fifteenth floor of a cylindrical building that vaguely resembles part of a Wurlitzer jukebox. None of these women speak English but she's decided just to go with the program, whatever it is, and count on getting her hair cut at some point in the process.

Which she does, in great and alien luxury, for the better part of four hours, though it proves to involve a kelp wrap, a deep facial, manifold tweezings and pluckings, a manicure, a pedicure, lower-leg wax, and close-call avoidance of a bikini job.... (140)

Walking back out into the Shibuya sunlight, she feels simultaneously lighter and less intelligent, as though she's left more than a few brain cells back there with the other scruff. She's wearing more makeup than she'd usually apply in a month, but it's been brushed on by Zen-calm professionals, swaying to some kind of Japanese Enya-equivalent.

The first mirror she sees herself in stops her. Her hair, she has to admit, is really something, some paradoxical state between sleek and tousled. Anime hair, rendered hi-rez.

Describing one of our heroine's best friends' new girlfriend:

She looks, Cayce decides, like a prop from one sequel or another of The Matrix; if her boobs were bigger she could get work on the covers of role-playing games for adolescent boys of any age whatever. (179)

Describing the best friend hooked up with the Matrix sequel prop chick:

It's raining, and Damien's worn a black hooded sweatshirt under his (189) flecktarn. He keeps the hood up, here, seated in the back of this Starbucks clone, and she's glad of that, as his stubbled scalp disorients her. She's always known him as someone with a shoulder-brushing, center-parted shoe-gazer anti-haircut. (190)

Ack! Once I start taking notes, I can't stop! Here's a good one about our protagonist:

Leaving Neal's Yard and the Pilates studio, she tries to become just another lost tourist, though she knows she'll never be one. Like Magda going out to spread whatever shabby micro-meme her Blue Ant subsidiary requires her to, Cayce knows that she is, and has long been, complicit. Though in what, exactly, is harder to say. Complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.

She knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned, in the world, and sometimes she finds herself doubting that there is much else going on. But this is a mood, she tells herself, a bad one in its low-key way...

A little detail:

His shoes are black four-eyelet DMs, the ur-Martens of the first decade of punk, long since de-recontextualized into the inexpensive everyman's footwear they'd been designed to be. (235)

...which turns out to be relevant later:

If there's any one thing about England that Cayce finds fundamentally disturbing, it is how "class" works --- a word with a very different mirror-world meaning, somehow. She's long since given up trying to explain this to English friends.

The closest she can come is that it's somewhat akin, for her, if only in its enormity, to how the British seem to feel about certain American attitudes to firearms ownership --- which they generally find unthikable, and bafflingly, self-evidently wrong, and so often leading to a terrible and profligate waste of human life. And she knows what they mean, but also knows how deeply it runs, the gun thing, and how unlikely it is to change. Except, perhaps, gradually, and over a very long time. class in England is like that, for her.

Mostly she manages to ignore it, though there's a certain way they can have, on first meeting, of sniffing one another's caste out, that gives her the willies.

Katherine, her therapist, had suggested that it might in fact be because it was such a highly codified behavior, as were all of the areas of human activity around which Cayce suffered such remarkable sensitivity. And it is, highly codified; they loot at one another's shoes first, she's convinced, and Lucian Greenaway has just done that to Ngemi.

And doesn't like them.

Slightly dusty black DMs, their fat-proof (as advertised) air-cushioned soles now planted firmly before this counter in Greenaway's shop... Quite large, Ngemi's DMs, Cayce thinks, estimating a British size eleven. She can't see Greenaway's shoes, behind the counter, but if he were American, she guesses, they might be toe-cleavage loafers with tassels. Though they wouldn't be that here. Something by a Savile Row maker, but, she guesses, not bespoke.

She's met people here who can distinguish workable button holes on a suit cuff at twenty feet.

There could be lots more, but I'm cutting myself off. Also I'm a big dork for marking a few typos. Lunchtime now, I think.

Comments

[bagoffarts.livejournal.com]

I read it shortly after it hit the shelves. It was enjoyable enough, but far from groundbreaking or rereadimg material. I felt that it was a little hurried through the end of the story; one of those "I've hit my page count, how can I wrap it up quickly" feelings.