A waft of blue Gitane can drift out of my ass.

[tensegritydan]

I just read the first 20 pages of William Gibson's latest book Pattern Recognition and I am totally pissed off.

In the first two and a half chapters, he mentions:

Buzz Rickson
Ben Sherman
Paul Smith
Silk Cut
Mild Seven
Perrier
Harvey Nichols
Volvo
Tommy Hilfiger
Benetton
Ralph Lauren
Brooks Brothers
Laura Ashley
Dean & Deluca
Gitane

I have heard of only about a third of those names (and only from watching AbFab) and I only know what half of those even look like. Like his main character, I am allergic to brand name clothing and the fashion industry. I outright deny the spiritual validity of fashion. Beauty - yes. Aesthetics - yes. Adorment, accoutrement, fabric arts, costuming - yes yes yes yes. Fashion in the look-at-this-stuff-in-glossy-magazines-with-anorexic-models-and-then-mortage-your-soul-to-buy-it-or-you-are-fat-and-ugly sense of fashion? NO NO NO.

Is it some sort of attempt at post-modernist irony to write a book that his own main character would not be able to read?

Now I know that the book is about marketing and advertising, and maybe he is just setting the distasteful context for the main character's own name-brand allergy and he will drop the name-dropping and get onto actual writing in a few pages. If someone can tell me this is the case, I might keep reading it. Otherwise, this will remain the one Gibson book that I have never read.

Even if that is what he is trying to do, it still sucks my ass because it is the laziest sort of characterization and set-dressing. When Johnny jacks into a Maas-Neotek technomajiggy, that is some rad cyberpunk stylin. When Gitane smoke wafts by a character, Gibson can suck my ass.