For two short weeks I was the proud owner of an 8 Gig iPod Nano third generation. I loaded music on it, and merrily listened to it through an FM tuner adapter in my old volvo. Dec 26th, while carrying my sleeping seven year old daughter into the house, I stupidly forgot to go back and lock my car. Some lucky fool trolling through my parents posh suburban Clarkston neighborhood spotted the gold bomber from the street went up, found the car unlocked and removed the ipod, part of my dashboard (wholly unneccessary), and the adapter. I guess this is why I shouldn’t have nice stuff…

There are flesh eating microbes awaiting someone’s testicles in hell.

Out of all of William Gibson’s Novels, Spook Country is the least evocative. A lot of Gibson’s now all too common critics read and loved Neuromancer for its impenetrable descriptions of the ephemeral and then unknowable internet, (or cyberspace), the vague chic of apathetic criminal characters, and the all too potent tincture of drugs, sex, and violence.

I was certainly among the throng of disaffected youth who read and loved the early books when I was fifteen, had a punk rock hair-do, wore a black trench coat and wanted to punch authority figures. Certainly because of William Gibson I became more literate. But I was not among the hordes of disappointed cyberpunks who’ve been gravely disappointed by Gibson’s move towards more mainstream fiction; I am merely disappointed in the lack of narrative cohesion, snappy dialog, and pointed cultural observations.

Pattern Recognition was a terrific novel. It was full of good characters, good dialog, and the Gibsonian specialty- the culture technology intersection. Gibson’s knack is recognizing where technology and culture have created something unique. Where as with his novels previous to Pattern Recognition he was writing in what he dubbed as speculative fiction, we would call it science-fiction. He moved into the present with Pattern Recognition and is firmly fixed there for Spook Country as well. The move to the present did not jar or upset me with Pattern Recognition.

Cayce Pollard and her allergic reactions to poor branding was in complete synch with where we were at as a culture. Globalization, marketing, brand recognition, and the interference or inevitability of anything and everything become merchandise or marketable spoke to me. I wish I’d thought of the character with the allergic reaction to Tommy Hilfiger first. But he also spookily worked in 9/11 in a way that did not seem hokey, or overworked. A character walked into the tower, and a ghost walked out to haunt Cayce. It was subtle and effective. Cayce’s zen statement to ward off bad mojo has stuck with me since reading the novel, “he took a duck in the face at 200 knots.” Also no one can ever forget, L-O-M-B-A-R-D. Loads of money but a real dickhead, which referred to Hubertus Bigend. Hubertus was a gift of a character, sinister in all the ways one might imagine a real person to be, but with a pearly white Tom Cruise smile.

I was pleasantly surprised by Bigend’s triumphant Belgian return. However the three intertwined narratives of Tito, Hollis Henry, and Milgrim don’t really compliment or contrast each other. The whole novel never really gels. We do have a few good moments where Gibson makes us chuckle at his cleverness. But his characters don’t pop, the narrative never reaches that point where the book created an inner moment for me the way his other books have. This failure is probably due to a few things. The first is not the lack of cyberpunkness, but the fact that the author’s knack of finding the precise moment to comment on a unique cultural technological nodal point (to use the Gibson term for a paradigm shift) was missing. The use of the i-pod as a storage device was unsurprising and commonplace. The idea that art could be locative and part of blended reality was also sort of commonplace and unsurprising. I never got that spooked feeling about seeing River Phoenix’s ghostly corpse outside the viper room. And for anyone who has used google maps street view, it just wouldn’t surprise the reader.

His commentary on the finances of the Iraq war and the intelligence community are also interesting, but hardly earth shattering.

Milgrim as a Junkie seemed to be purely a passenger for the novel and a vehicle for Brown, who was far more interesting as a character but lacked the definition the reader wished to see. His sermonizing was if anything was “under the top” and could have acted as more of a counter point to the “old man” to act as yin-and-yang, but alas this never developed.

Tito and Bobby Chombo were both alas pale comparisons to Bobby from Count Zero, or the Vat Grown Ninja Assassin from Neuromancer.

Hollis seems to be more of an archetype from Gibson now. He seems to be developing a pattern for his female characters now where they are delicate and sensitive, slightly daring, but rely on an older wiser male for their insight into the world’s inner mechanics. For Pattern Recognition Cayce relied on the not quite film maker boyfriend, and Hollis seems to rely on Inchmale.

The reveal at the end of the novel, just didn’t offer the payoff for the effort spent reading through the three disparate narratives. And Bigend as a result of his inclusion somehow seemed less sinister and more banal.

Hopefully Gibson finds his stride again, providing he feels he’s lost it. Certainly this book is not representative of his other works. Idoru and Pattern Recognition are still two of my favorites.

I think William Gibson beat me to the punch by posting this on his blog before me. I had to post this though, as I think my ideal writing machine cannot be celebrated enough. Steve Jobs eat your heart out, I want one of these beauties. It is an actual working laptop! This Japanese Steampunk Typerwriter kicks ass! The mouse is a telegraph button. (see below.

Top 5 reasons to paddle.
Ok these are my thoughts on the subject and are somewhat didactic and maybe even contradictory.

1. Paddling is linear and analog. Very few things are these days. It gives no regard to hurry, or any other timetable other than wind, sun, moon, and stars. Like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, your watch can be cast aside at the beginning of the journey. Granted you can get digital with GPS, digital watches, ala Doug Adams. But these things serve as needless fetishistic artifacts to an acitivity that defies the improvements of technology. In other words you can digitally track how slow you are moving, but it doesn’t change the fact that the average paddling speed is 3-4 knots unless you are Greg Barton. This brings me to number 2.
2. Speed. Speed is dictated by the first reason to paddle, which is that you go as exactly as fast as the effort put into paddling. Relatively speaking. No more no less. One could try to hurry, but really you can’t. It just can’t be rushed. You can go faster than 3-4 knots for fun, but is it really that much faster? How does 5-6 knots over the arc of a 10 day trip matter? It doesn’t. It typically means you aren’t seeing anything up close. Because Americans drive everywhere we hold no value to the energy spent to get there. Fiduciary effort burnt in fossil fuels just isn’t the same as calorie effort. Ask the nearest person with an SUV who is carrying 20 pounds or more of extra weight but would like to be thinner what that means. So I think overall there is something to be said for getting everywhere under your own power. While this sounds slightly pontificatory, I recognize that I drive to the beach to launch the kayak. And if could move Kalamazoo to the shore of a great lake, I would. But there’s only so much one man can do, or pontificate about.
3. Paddling is geographically specific. In a world where so much can be virtualized without context for location, paddling cannot be virtualized. One cannot Net meeting, phone conference in, or email a paddling experience. It is completely and inescapably linked to location. Also because paddling takes place in an area where people tend not to live (on the surface of the water) it is different than what I look at all day long. The Lake Michigan Shore line is not a great example though where houses along the dunes are the norm rather than the exception and the lake shore experience has been commodified to the extreme by some insipid breed of weasle/monkey hybrid from illinois that resists erradication. But maybe a new ice age might change this.
4. Learning all of the skills necessary to become truly effecient and seaworthy in a kayak is hard. Anything difficult requires effort and determination. Effort and determination take time, and time invested in something difficult reward the individual with a sense of accomplishment and confidence. This sense of accomplishment and confidence can also be thwarted by the sea, and the individual’s own stupidity, which is another post entirely. But for instance being able to stay upright and downwind on an icy 6 foot wave is not something everyone can do, or wants to do, much less repeatedly. Skills are really their own reward.
5. Backpacking is for suckers.