"Pattern Recognition"

Huge props to Gibson on how he addressed 9/11.

• As the elevator doors close behind her, she closes her eyes and sees the dry petal, falling. The loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box.
• It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. <> An experience outside of culture.
• "It's okay. I live for fatigue poisons."
• The people who designed all the early Nintendo games drew them on long rolls of paper. There was no better way to do it, and you could unroll the whole thing and see exactly how it would move.
• lungfish-primitive
• Curta: (the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed):  “The camps. Herzstark in Buchenwald, surrounded by death, by methodical erasure, by an almost certain fate. He continued to work. In the end, the camp was liberated. He walked free, never having abandoned his vision of the calculator. Hobbs honors that triumph, that escape.” “He has something he needs to escape, himself?” “Himself exactly.” He nods. Then changes the subject.
• He’d told her that Poland, from the air, looked like Kansas as farmed by elves; the patchwork fields so much smaller, the land as flat and vast.
• Her first impression of Moscow itself is that everything is far larger than it could possibly have any need to be.
• "Germans doing communism? That even put the wind up the Russians. Like they saw the East Germans really believed in it, all of it."
• Peter the Great statue: unthinkable awfulness
• (footage creation): Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.
• How it was, here, for artists. Whole universes of blood and imagination, built over lifetimes in rooms like these, never to be seen.
• Subway: Gilt bronze, peach marble shot with aquamarine, engine-chased Cartier luster applied to the supporting columns of what seemed more like subterranean ballrooms than subway platforms, their chandeliers blazing, as if the wealth of what Win had called the final empire of the 19th century had come pouring in, all through the deepest, darkest thirties, to line these basilicas of public transport.
• An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.
• "The dead can’t help you, and the boy’s no good."
• Her hair, she has to admit, is really something, some paradoxical state between sleek and tousled. Anime hair, rendered hi-rez. {This part is cool but not really integral to plot isn't it?}
• “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,”
• As to how blankness can yield image, I do not pretend to know, though I suppose that is the question, ultimately, that underlies the entire history of art.