Where am I?

I've just finished William Gibson's latest. It's a good read, but it ranks well below Pattern Recognition or Idoru, or even All Tomorrow's Parties. Gibson still writes some of the most historically-aware prose that I've read. In previous novels, that historical grounding has allowed him to see well beyond current events. But the contemporaneity that started in Pattern Recognition has lowered his horizons still further, and Spook Country is the work of an author who wants to comment on last year, rather than shaping tomorrow.

I also found it hard to believe in Gibson's commercial independence, for the first half of the book. I've owned Macs continuously for the past 19 years, but I thought it was a little odd that the characters we're supposed to like best, Hollis and Tito, respectively tote a PowerBook and an iPod Nano through so many pages. Why are so many cars in the book made by Volkswagen? That seems especially strained considering that Blue Ant's choice of fleet vehicle is the Phaeton - already a dismal failure for VW a year before the book was published. Did Lester Young do radio spots for the Edsel?

But I digress. I always enjoy Gibson's reflections on the nature of celebrity, and it's easy to see his own bemusement in Holly's treatment of her ex-band's ubiquitous fans. I'm not quite sure who the Curfew is supposed to be, but it's probably an amalgam - Inchmale brings Nine Inch Nails to mind. The band's name could be a reference to a Woody Guthrie song.

Gibson's geography is usually more interesting than in this book. Manhattan seemed stale and tired. In Vancouver, Gibson might take a lesson from James Branch Cabell, who made a virtue out of vice by realizing that an author always sounds provincial when he writes about his own backyard. There's only so much anyone can do with Sunset in LA, but Mr Sippie was a high point of the Los Angeles chapters - does it exist?

The plot is gripping, in an offbeat way. In the opening chapters, it's easy to believe that the mystery container holds biological or nuclear weapons, if not something even more technically edgy - grey goo? Without revealing the climax, none of this is the case. Nor are the motives of Tito's family and their ex-NSC patron easily fathomable from the build-up.

The denouement is another matter. After the bullets have flown, Gibson spends entirely too much time wrapping up happy endings - at least, for every character that we're supposed to like. Contrast this with Idoru, or Mona Lisa Overdrive, in which surviving is enough, and the reader is left to transform ambiguous shreds of hope into whatever ending suits his or her needs.

At heart, the book is well-written but flawed by contemporary polemics. I'm not a fan of the GWB administration, nor of Homemade Security (one of Gibson's better coinings in this book, if his). I tend to agree with most, if not quite all, of the thinly-veiled anti-Republican politics in Spook Country. But I can get these politics from digg, reddit, or any random blog.

I expect more than that from William Gibson. In Spook Country, I never quite found it.

Angie went missing for the last four days, but she's back now. My neighbors were very helpful, and didn't once suggest that I should have worried sooner. We did find out that all orange cats look the same at night, though.

She came home hungry, but not starving. As far as I can tell, she was chased off or wandered off in pursuit of better hunting, and got lost. She then made her way back, stopping to rest on every oily patch of ground in San Mateo County. That must have been exhausting.

I don't know exactly when Angie was born, but she's probably 11-13 months old. With that in mind, I'm declaring 11 July to be her birthday. She wasn't lost - she was out celebrating. It must have been some party.

I'm now accepting re-nominations for a new cat. I won't have her until the end of next week, but she's already a movie-star on this interweb thingy. I didn't have anything to do with that video, or these pictures - they're both from the shelter. But I did spend some time with her in that same room.



She seems reasonably intelligent. I predict that she will be a mighty huntress.

However, her name is too short. I believe that cats should have names of around five syllables: this gives plenty of scope for short nicknames, while allowing for an easy change of nicknames as the cat's personality matures. For example, Kilimanjaro was known as Jar, Jaro, Killer, and Kilo (and probably less flattering things).

I'm toying with Carolynnetta. It has plenty of syllables, and also contains her shelter-name. Or I could name her after a song, but I'd need to stretch that out a bit.

Suggestions?

Kilimanjaro died this morning at about 10:30. When I woke up she was vomiting up water, and then fresh blood. She couldn't stand up. I took her to the emergency clinic, where they diagnosed an intestinal tumor. Her appetite had been poor, and she'd lost about 30-50% of her former weight. On Tuesday, another vet had noticed the lump in her abdomen, but didn't see anything on the x-ray.

She seemed to recover interest in food whenever I had tuna sashimi to offer. She was always strong, and I had hoped it was something minor.

But it was serious. This morning at home, and In the emergency room, she was clearly in pain. It was time to say goodbye.

I seem to be saying goodbye a lot, lately.



What would I have done if I'd known it was cancer, on Tuesday? Or a month ago? Cancer treatment for a 14-year-old cat? Would I have been strong enough to give her up while she still seemed to be healthy and happy? I wish I could have spared her the last hour or two. But I didn't know, and I couldn't.

ButI could edit this all night, without getting it right. So I'll stop.

The Prince of Wales will close on 2007-01-21. So long, Jack - and thanks for all the fish.



The last batch of chili (#971) was excellent, too.