I read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I liked the idea of the heroine's susceptibility to trademarks, but her insistence on wearing certain items herself, like her beloved flight jacket, was a kind of commodity fetishism of its own. Also, his evocation of foreign cities, particularly Tokyo, I found less than convincing, although it was interesting to discover that Tarkovsky used the Japanese highway for his futuristic Solyaris (1972; the original for Solaris 2002. I saw the Tarkovsky version shortly after it came out, and liked it quite a bit; I always liked Stanislaw Lem, but his stories are singularly unsuited to make into popular films). I am also happy to have learned from Gibson the word apophenia, "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena". What I couldn't get was the heroine's insistence on eating Western food there. I blame Gibson for not liking Japanese food, but maybe he was trying to tell us something about her. Anyway, I ended up liking Brad Smith's All Hat more, and found its evocation of rural Ontario more convincing (not that I've ever been there).


The thing I dislike about people is their fondness for brands that are far more expensive than they have to be, so I liked Gibson's idea about being practically allergic to them. Meanwhile, I've been reading some intellectual bs recently that complains about commodification, by which they apparently mean putting a price on practially everything, as capitalism does. I have little objection to that; it's paying more for a brand that's not measurably better that annoys me. So I was happy to see this subscriber-only article in the Economist about how many items of clothing are becoming commodities; deflation of clothing prices means that clothes are cheaper.