The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The uniting character in all three novels is Hubertus Bigend. He is not the main character. All of the books are about special projects contracted by Blue Ant, Bigend's company to find secrets. Secrets are the essence of cool to Hubertus Bigend.  His advertising company and viral marketing company Blue Ant, searches for cool things; thus he is often after secrets.  In the novels, the Blue Ant figurine even contains a listening device.  Bigend creates the backdrop for the stories.

Each book uses the concept of steganography, finding secret things in the larger pattern of things.  Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition must find a hidden producer of video clips.  What is ultimately interesting is that Bigend uses the secrets for marketing purposes.  In Zero History, we learn the video clips in Pattern Recognition are used to sell shoes.  Hollis Henry in Spook Country seeks to find a hidden shipping container.  This leads to cool technology also used for marketing called localive art.  In Zero History, Hollis Henry must track down a secret brand which is an article of military clothing.  This is of course is sold by Hubertus Bigend because military clothing sets the fashion of the street.  I rather like the idea that secrets sell.

The backdrop of the stories is a post 9/11/2001 world where change is accelerating.  Things happen so quickly it becomes hard to recognize the world of a week ago.   The cold war has ended and espionage has moved into the corporate boardroom with various loose factions vying for control.  We get to see this in the novels.  There is a kind of hidden war that is about directing peoples attention.  Reading the books together exposes a pattern in the writing.  In the first book, Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard steps into the shadowy post soviet world of the business oligarchs in Moscow.  Many of them are ex-kgb.  In the second book, Spook Country, Milgrim, interacts with two organizations, one a right wing christian conspiracy, and another a family of operatives that have left Cuba to go into business for themselves.  In the third book, Hollis Henry deals with both corporate espionage and a shadowy military contractor who is trying to go into business for himself after operating in various third world countries. This creates a very different kind of story about secrets.

The action takes place in hotels, factories, shipyards, art spaces, bars; places at the edges of every day life that are easy to miss.  The characters who thread themselves through the story would be easy to walk by and not notice in New York, Moscow, or Tokyo.  Voytek who sells antique calculators, and Inchmale who was part of the Curfew make for excellent background characters that help create the setting.  The descriptions of the backgrounds have a baroque quality to them that are often quite intricate.  It is a juxtaposition of fashion, technology, and every day objects; tweed jackets, tortoise shell glasses, zx81 calculators, GPS, cell phones, 501 Jeans, and other objects mix into a time frame that seems to head toward evening and night.

In each book, as the secrets are revealed, the characters emerge more as themselves.  This is best expressed in how Milgrim moves from being a drug addled captive to being sober and deeply indebted to Hubertus Bigend.  Also, the characters have their goals fulfilled.  Voytek starts seeking out zx81 calculators in Pattern Recognition for his art exhibit and is directly helped by Hollis Henry to build the final exhibit in Zero History.  All of the main characters hired by Hubertus are  indebted to him.  A lot of this debt is focused on medical help.  Milgrim is helped in a  Swiss drug clinic and Garreth has his leg reconstructed.

Some people view Hubertus Bigend as being immoral on many levels.  I find him quite moral, but often hiding it behind other ulterior motives like profit.  He actively moves against a right wing military organization in Zero History, and prevents a right wing organization from getting its money in Spook Country.  He also arranges two people to be cured of their medical problems.

This trilogy is well worth reading.  When I read Zero History, I realized I could not adequately write about it as a single book when I found there were two other books in the series.  Because the publication of the books was spaced so far apart, it was not obvious that they were a trilogy at first.  Pattern Recognition was written in 2003, Spook Country was written in 2007, and Zero History was written in 2010.  There is a very different feel to them when you read them one after another in a series.  You get to see how the characters change as secrets are revealed.

Daily Thoughts 9/21/2010 (Coraline, Pattern Recognition)

Why books are always better than movies? Paranormal levitation made with the free software Gimp, 27, September 27, 2009, Massimo Barbieri, Gnu Free Documentation License 1.2http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Why_books_are_always_better_than_movies.jpg


 
Daily Thoughts 9/21/2010 

I read some more of Pattern Recognition this morning.  I also put Spook Country on hold which I will reread once I am done reading Pattern Recognition. Pattern Recognition reminds us that the world changes so fast now, that it is hard to recognize things in a short time period.  I read a bit more Pattern Recognition on the train home.  Somehow, William Gibson manages to fuse fashion, thriller, and near future technology into a unique mish mash in all three books.

I also read some more of Self Esteem by Matthew McKay, Ph.D.  I read the book, but did not finish completing the exercises spread throughout the book.  I have already done severald exercises on shoulds, wants, self assessment, and cognitive distortions.  They are quite interesting.  I still have to do some visualization, meditation, and self-hypnosis exercises.  The book has a lot of material in it.

I got invited to a book signing on October 17, 2010 by a local poet for the book "Blood Beats In Four Square Miles" An Anthology of Poetry. Hopefully, it should create an opportunity to work on doing a poetry reading series at the library.

We did a display for the book, Play Me a Song by Barbara Jo-Lucchine Kruczek.  She sent us photographs of big band musicians and some articles from the local paper, The Daily Argus on her father, Philip Lucchine, who was a composer for big band music.  All of it will go to the local history room when the display is over.

The business resources list is up on the library website now.  I am waiting for them to put up the new library website soon.

I also confirmed that I am going to the Ebooks meetup this Friday.  I think it will be an interesting and useful experience.

Tonight, I finished watching Coraline. I like most all of Neil Gaiman's writing.  This is a short piece on him talking about Coraline.



Web Bits
An animated Neil Gaiman is going to star in the children's show Arthur doing a book signing. http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/09/an-animated-neil-gaiman-to-guest-star-on-arthur/

Daily Thoughts 9/20/2010 (Pattern Recogntion, Coraline)

Luca della Robbia, Priscian, or the Grammar (1437-1439). Marble panel from the North side, lower basement of the bell tower of Florence, Italy. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

Daily Thoughts 9/20/2010

Today has been a quiet day.  I picked up a copy of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson to read so I can finish reading the trilogy of books.  It will fill in so I can understand Zero History a little better.  



We just had pins assigned to our library cards to increase security.  This happened yesterday which makes things a bit interesting today.  There were a few questions about how it worked.



We also finished creating the business resources list for the library.  We are printing it as a flyer and posting it as a webpage.  It was originally created in publisher.  We create a lot of our documents and flyers in publisher.  A gentleman came by today to look at our community room.  It can seat 49 people. We are having some business programs tomorrow.

On the train home, I read some of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.  It helped me get a better grasp of the series featuring Hubertus Bigend.  Hubertus Bigend is not the main character in the book.  He kind is the theme behind the story.  All of the books, Spook Country (2003), Pattern Recognition (2007), and Zero History (2010) are very intricately detailed and can stand as separate works. In fact, there is an odd quality to them because unlike most series, they were published several years apart.  The complexity of the writing is very clear.  There is a lot of detail which can be very distracting but makes sense when you compare all of the three books together.  I am just beginning to get a sense of how this detail works.  On P.76 of Pattern Recognition, there is a quote from the writing which kind of explains how the books are very different when compared together, "Steganography is about concealing information by spreading it throughout other information. At present I know little else about it."

I also watched some more of Coraline.  I am almost finished watching the film.  I very much like the message of the animated film.  It is about being true to yourself even when giving up yourself is very enticing.  The animation is superb.  I especially liked the cat and the circus mice.  They are my favorite parts of the movie.

Information Overload (An Essay, A Rant, A Stream of Consciousness Post)

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern recognition. -Marshall McLuhan


Today, I am not going to do any reading of books. At points, I run into information overload where I simply have been reading too much. My brain gets full and sometimes it gives me insomnia. Then I have to take a day off from reading.

This does not happen too often. One way which I deal with information overload is to do mnemonic exercises. Things like taking a few minutes everyday to sit and memorize the contents of a single room in detail. Or memorizing childrens rhymes. I have a fondness for Mother Goose. It helps when you are constantly bombarded by an endless stream of unfiltered information.

Plus, none of my holds came in yesterday for me to read. I have no stacks of books waiting for me. I am not particularly fond of reading magazines. In a way, I think reading magazines and newspapers is not the same as reading books. The information comes in little bites.

I spend a lot of time going through masses of information on my job. Skimming through masses of reviews of books to see which one I can then focus on and read in detail. Most things really are not worth reading. A good example of this is the old clipping file for newspapers. You end up throwing away the majority of the newspaper and putting in a very few articles which may be of importance to the community. The rest is filler. I think this is true of most newspapers and magazines.

I think really good concentration is important in my job as well as the ability to speed read. It helps if you are really strong willed, or do activities which require a lot of detailed focus like knitting, crossword puzzles, sewing, or collect very detailed things like stamps, coins, or comic books. Good concentration also helps you filter out the constant bombardment of useless information on the internet as well. Speed reading teaches you how to scan for relevance and choose those things which are important.

If you sit at a screen all day, you also need a certain amount of emotional detachment to the things which they are trying to sell you. The internet is based on getting attention. It is filled with all kinds of nastiness designed to catch your attention, pornography, hate spewing politics, and thinly veiled scatalogical advertisements. If you give too much credence to these things it can create a state of information overload.

A problem which I run into is that many people don't consider reading work. The first thing which comes into their minds is that person is reading, they must not be doing anything. We read to select what you will read. A lot of it is not pleasurable. We have to select a lot of things which we do not like personally, because it is what our patrons want.

Also some people consider looking up things not to be work. They want hard physical evidence of work. Papers, statistics, cleaned floors, and other concrete things. They have a hard time picturing the idea that your helping someone find a book is a job, or your looking up a specific piece of information for them is significant. Service is a very abstract concept. There are not a whole lot of physical results for librarians.

Information overload is further compounded by what I now call "Media Soup." We no longer need to just know books, we need to know all kinds of media. The library is a media center not a book depository. Some of the audiovisual formats which we have to handle are audiobooks, cd audiobooks, playaway audiobooks, vhs videos, DVC-- Descriptive Video Casettes, DVDs, computer game cartridges, cd-roms, and music cds. This is further compounded by the need to purchase literacy and foreign language materials.

In print we have magazines, newspapapers, annual reports, newsletters, government documents, pamphlets, fliers, books of all sizes (mass market paperback, trade paperbacks, clothbound, folio, quarto), graphic novels, music scores, maps, and various ephemera.

Added to this is online information in the traditional formats, the internet, periodical databases, and pay databases like Westlaw (we have this). Now this has expanded explosively in the last year. Now librarians have blogs, myspace pages, vlogs, and are attempting to understand social networking.

This creates an upside down topsy turvy, information saturated environment. The variety is such that it becomes quite difficult to manage even a small portion of the variety of formats. Some of the formats even have special internal formats, books are available as large print books. Add in subject specialties and age groups like business, job information center, law, young adult, adult, childrens, and senior and you get a big boiling soup pot of information.

It becomes very easy to get confused in a public library. Libraries have not reorganized to meet the needs of the different formats that well. Librarianship is a very traditional profession. Right now, there has been quite a bit of foment in the profession.

Some claim that the librarians are broken, others claim that the libraries are broken. It is a kind of jumble where people are listening to the librarians who have the best jargon to explain what is happening, not necessarily the steady even handed people who can plan a straight course. Being patient in a sea of information is hard.