Dusted Off: He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots

Restarting William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Idoru was…okay. And All Tomorrow’s Parties didn’t quite click for me, so I didn’t do the standard bolt for amazon.com/Barnes & Noble when the hardcover came out.

I should have.

I bought the paper back sometime last year, and it sat patiently waiting for me until January. It took less than a page to know that this was his best in a long time–Gaiman says it’s his best since he rewrote all the rules in Neuromancer, he might be right. And it took two chapters to convince me that I wanted to live in this book for awhile. But responsibilities loomed larger, so I set it aside.

Felt the liberty to pick it back up this week, and crawled into bed with it twice, fully intent on not sleeping much. But I ended up closing my eyes before turning to page one. Didn’t have enough energy to step into the world inhabited by Cayce Pollard and her allergy to fashion.

On impulse, I sat down with it this afternoon, and slipped through three chapters. I should’ve taken the time to get up and change my playlist–Miranda Lambert, Brad Paisely, BNL and Matchbox 20 don’t work well with the intensity and pace of Gibson–but I was enjoying myself too much. Was tempted to send the kids to bed and lock the doors for another 324 pages. But they’d have complained and whined a lot and my wife has a key. So no point in that.

I’m hooked. Probably from this point

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.

Tho’ that just clinched the effect of this:

Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

Best first line since

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I’m a self-professed TV addict, but when you have someone who can use words and ideas like Gibson can, you know that flickering and flashing images (or even fixed images of a graphic novel, etc.) can’t compete. No picture is worth a thousand of Gibson’s words. The pleasure that you can experience–and re-experience and remember and long for from words tower above the high that can be gotten from anything else. I suspect that’s what prompted Nora when she told Harry to “talk hard.”

No real point to this…but if you’re wondering why I seem extra content over the next couple of days, well, now you know. This is where I am.