Self-portrait with frost and terrazzo.
Over at varnelis.net, Kazys posts about his William Gibson mini-obsession—in light of the recently released Spook County. The enthusiasm is infectious, and I’ve allowed it to lead me to Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition.
Forty pages in, the novel makes me jittery, filled as it is with jet lag and brand name anxieties. The details overwhelm: catalogs of cool desires and detachments. It stirs up memories of a year where, coolhunter adjacent, I worried if my jeans were a dark enough hue. Soon after I switched to corduroy.
Page 19 offers up an addition to my catalog of eyeglass-related quotes:
Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.
8-\. The international symbol for dork. Cool be damned.
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