SO I FINISHED UP A LAW REVIEW ARTICLE YESTERDAY, and rewarded myself by finishing William Gibson’s Spook Country. I enjoyed it, and it had more connection to his last book, Pattern Recognition, than I had expected. It had a bunch of quotable passages, too. Here are a few:

“The world we walk around in would be channels.”

She cocked her head at him. “Channels?”

“Yes. And given what broadcast television wound up being, that doesn’t sound so good. But think about blogs, how each one is trying to describe reality.”

“They are?” “In theory.” “Okay.”

“But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog.”

—–

The old man was as American as it got, but in what she thought of as some very recently archaic way. Someone who would have been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things.

—–

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Milgrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks.

_____

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”

Anyway, I enjoyed it; if you’re a Gibson fan you will too.