William T. Vollmann's YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

Man, I've known of the existence of this book for decades. I had a vague idea of what it's about and that it was probably going to be something I would love, but I never came across it in a bookstore, back when it was new and a physical store selling physical books, or a public library, was the only way to get them, so I never picked it up for my personal collection or checked it out. Later on, online booksellers became a thing and I went bananas, just like everybody else did, but by then a lot of newer books were on my radar, and then e-books happened and then...

But really? I couldn't tell you why it took me so long to get around to You Bright and Risen Angels, apart from its still never turning up in any bookstores I've managed to hit when I've a bit to spend. And there not being an ebook or audio edition. And there being millions and millions of other books vying for my attention. 

Sigh.

But so, better late than never. And also, thank goodness for my having a few dozen high brodernist friends, many of whom are obsessed with Billy TV and his oeuvre, who selected his Europe Central as a book club read (which I loved and consider one of the best books I read this year, but I'm not ready to write about it yet and think I'm gonna read it again before I do)* and I was jolted into remembering that back in the 90s when I was temping my way around the Greater Boston area (so many bookstores! But I never saw this in any of them. And anyway, Infinite Jest happened, etc.) I was kind of always on the lookout for this big chunk of literary speculative fiction about insects and revolution and hey, online booksellers still exist, and not all of them are avatars of pure evil...

So, anyway, You Bright and Risen Angels is finally in my life. And, as I often but don't always say, it feels like it was written just for me. Well, except for all the gun stuff. There's a fair amount of gun stuff. Which isn't really for me, but I'll put up with it if an author makes it worth my doing so. 

Billy TV sure did! Though he also kind of tricked me in some pretty inventive ways, like providing a rather untrustworthy, though vividly descriptive, table of contents. As such.

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

I'm coming to dislike the phrase "late-stage capitalism" almost as much as I do all the Underpants Gnome-ish fantasizing about the neo-Nuremberg Trials that are surely just around the corner for the current crop of bigoted,  authoritarian oppressors who have come to power in so much of the world. Both memes presuppose that these regimes so obviously carry the seeds of their own destruction that it's just a waiting game for the rest of us; we don't really have to do anything. We certainly don't have to get nasty or violent. We just have to keep the popcorn ready for when the imaginary good guys who are going to swoop in and save us show up and clean house, like they did in World War II. Except somehow, we all seem to think that we're gonna get to skip the war part this time? Or at least that somebody else is going to do the arduous stuff? But on what basis do we think that?

Anyway, YBARA is an elaborate, baroque and challenging allegory of what it's most likely really going to feel like when everybody's finally had enough of the manipulations and empty promises of our current socio-economic systems that keep everyone too scared or hopeless or indoctrinated to be be willing to even imagine a slightly better world anymore. Couched as a giant revenge plot of bugs against bug zappers. 

But that sounds a bit dry and no-fun, doesn't it? But see, those are two things this book ain't, especially if you like weird shit like giant, freakishly long-lived anthropomorphic insects who have teamed up with their more conventionally sized and life-spanned brethren to fight back against human domination and destruction; like sentient agglomerations of electricity that, for their part, seek to preserve the status quo except with themselves in charge instead of stupid humans; like a handful of sinister, immortal oligarchs who both embody the status quo and believe the aforementioned agglomerations of sentient electricity are actually their willing servants and weapons; like a tiny cadre of passionate revolutionaries who were already ready to take matters into their own hands and fight, despite their paltry numbers, and then accept surprise offers of tactical, strategic and actual support from the very gnats that ordinarily would be tormenting them in swarms in their secret lair above the Arctic Circle!

Oh and there's also another oligarch, shadowy, sinister and remote, manipulating affairs from his base of operations on Mars? And a secret race of plant-people who can dramatically alter their own biochemistry to incorporate some industrial products and by-products to give themselves really weird superpowers like remote viewing via developing photographic film at a touch? I mean, you can't say Billy TV is unimaginative. 

All of this is related to us, by the way, by an unreliable narrator who seems to at least *believe* he is the last human survivor of the resulting conflict, who in his loneliness has programmed an elaborate computer simulation** depicting "resurrected" versions of all of the important actors in the scenario (helpfully listed for us with notes on their interrelationships and alignments in a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book right before its wild and rather fanciful table of contents). As he boots up his system for the latest iteration of the game, he addresses the personality constructs inhabiting it as his "Bright and Risen Angels" with a melancholy air. But is he really a lone survivor wistfully reliving the actual past of the narrative, or just a frustrated Infocom employee? Heh.

And it is because of this that YBARA often gets categorized as proto-cyberpunk. As this is really barely just a frame narrative, though, I think so promoting it is a mistake. You're not going to see any console cowboys, expensive razorgirls, or Rastafarian satellite-dwellers here,  but nor are you going to get the funky, vaguely creepy pseudo-biopunk of, say, Bruce Sterling's more interesting offerings, or the intensely insect-focused action of "antasy" works like Clark Thomas Carlton's output to date,  which I must confess to having vaguely hoped for back in the early days of my knowing this book exists.

I am by no means disappointed by what I got, for all that it does not even contain what the second half of the table of contents suggests that it will. Because what it's actually in these pages is fascinating in its own right, with its alternate history of the industrialization of the United States, its vision of cryptoterrestrials (again, rather before even most fringe communities were even really talking about certain phenomena in those terms) and its depiction of how rebels are made, not born. This is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely unique book, and one I'm profoundly glad to have finally gotten to read.

Interestingly enough, I seem to have stumbled into what feels awfully like a spiritual sequel to YBARA. Stay tuned right here to find out what it is. 

By the way, I think there's going to be a lot more Billy TV content on this blog in the new year, but don't worry: I'm pretty sure this one is still going to prove to be unique, because this guy's restless intelligence and creativity have legendarily led him never to write the same, or even the similar, book twice. Dayum!

*Yes, I'm in a book club now, at long last, halfway through my sixth decade on this warming, dessicating planet. 

**Recall that this book was first published in 1987, when most high schools in the U.S. boasted, at most, a few Apple IIes awkwardly situated in the library for a handful of nerds to play typing games on. Oregon Trail was still in the unimaginable future for most of us who weren't in the industry or attending a handful of schools adjacent to it. But guess who was working in the industry as a programmer back then? Billy TV!

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès' ISLAND OF POINT NEMO (Tr Hannah Chute)

Was Hagbard Celine your bad literary boyfriend long before Hubertus Bigend burst on the spec fic scene? Is "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" your problematic fave? Was your favorite bit of Jodorovsky's The Holy Mountain the roll call of evil tycoons? Were Jules Verne's books not quite as Jules Verne as you were expecting? Do you care about mustaches? How about ebook readers?

Or, to be more succinct, do you like having fun when you read? And what is French for "fnord?"

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (who, are all Algerian-born authors simply amazing, or what? Admittedly, my sample size is a bit small, but still...) decided the answers to all of these questions was yes and decided to go them all one better and throw in a pigeon with a hilarious name here and there for good measure. 

Speaking of names, get a load of these: Martial Cantarel (dandified man of adventure), his pal Shylock Holmes (who solves crimes with the aid of a genius African butler with a big secret,  Grimod, in the mode of his famous grandfather, Sherlock), Inspector Scummington (of Scotland Yard, of course), French tobacco farmer Arnaud Méneste (whose personal bankruptcy -- after making cigars every bit as good as Cuban ones but since they're grown and rolled in France they have no exotic appeal to French smokers -- enables a Chinese syndicate to buy up his ancestral farm to set up an ebook reader factory), and Wang-li Wong, aka Monsieur Wang (the scopophiliac overseer of the ebook reader factory that arises from the unburnt ashes of the tobacco farm and the fancier of the pigeon with the hilarious name)... And there are more.

The action kicks off with an apparent murder mystery that may be connected to the theft from a Scottish castle of the world's largest diamond. While that thievery might be enough of a mystery to get things going, there is also the matter of three severed and saponified human feet,  each still encased in elaborate sneakers of a make and brand that do not exist, that have washed up on European beaches. No sooner are Cantarel, Holmes, Grimod engaged by the diamond's former owner (and Cantarel's baby mama) than one of the probable former owners of one of the severed feet turns up spectacularly and publicly dead and the gang is following an ingenious clue to Siberia! To which they travel in mind-bending luxury!

Meanwhile, a wife desperate to please and be pleased by her impotent husband resorts to desperate measures that result in improbable sentences like "His penis looks like a butcher's joke, a microphone made of bratwurst, ending in a big ball of calf liver." So, uh, content warning for bawdy humor though it's no worse than what you'd find in, say, The llluminatus! Trilogy.

I did not evoke Hagbard Celine in jest.

But this isn't much of a conspiratorial romp, nor is it merely a detective story, for all its trappings of both. Roblès has more on his mind than that, and he's been reading his Baudrillard, or at least his Umberto Eco, as we see when the action brings us to Tianducheng, China and an idealized,  hyperreal, scaled down version of Paris located there, with all of the City of Lights' famous sights and views perfectly reproduced but more conveniently situated, closer to one another "as if some genie had fulfilled a weary tourist's wish to shrink the city." It's carefully filled with all the expected cliches to populate the architecture, too:

Hundreds of white-skinned extras thus contributed to the authenticity of this immense garden of acclimatization, the designers having spared no expense. Among all these exhibitions of outdated and lost scenes, one display invariably provoked contemptuous chuckles -- that of a bookstore* reconstructed according to the best sources, in the image of those that existed before the digital divide that had finally stamped them out. Inside were fake readers around fake spindly booksellers who sorted piles of fake books.

If this doesn't make you think of Jim Munroe's bitterly awesome Ghosts With Shit Jobs, you really haven't been paying attention, have you? I, for one, can absolutely read the characters from this film as those less fortunate and left behind in North America while their more attractive or better connected relatives made for the bright lights and hyperreal sights of China.

Our trio of detectives and the diamond's owner, the lovely Clawdia MacRae, who happens to have had a daughter out of wedlock by Cantarel and has brought her along for the adventure despite said daughter being comatose (!), wind up traveling the world in grand Edwardian style, which is an odd thing to be doing in a novel that also explicitly contains things like ebooks and the internet and other modern technologies, encountering an array of perversions that would make Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson gush with glee as they follow the trail of the three right feet and the diamond. I had a theory about the anachronisms that kept characterizing their story -- the other plotlines in Island of Point Nemo are deeply concerned with storytelling, particularly with oral storytelling in the form, chiefly, of workers designated to read newspapers, essays and novels to their co-workers on the work floors of cigar factories and, later, the ebook factory, to keep them entertained through their drudgery and also to enlighten them (and thus make their overlords a bit less conscience-stricken at how their comfort and enrichment is paid for by that drudgery). I turned out to be right, at least in more ways than I did wrong, which was satisfying.

Where they end up is as incredible and unexpected as any reader could wish, among circus performers, zoo animals, and renegade scientists who have a firm belief that any small repair a person makes to the world is worth doing, even if it's just replacing a bulb in a street light.

A word, as always, about the translation: Hannah Chute had better have been well paid for the effort this must have taken; the English text is so rife with unusual locutions and near-neologisms that one would think Gene Wolfe had had a hand in it. I am a person of a certain age and fairly widely read, but some of the vocabulary (favorite example: "apocolocyntosis") appearing in Island of Point Nemo had me very glad to have an ebook version of the text and thus the ability to immediately look up the dizzying array of references and the unfamiliar words that kept cropping up. I felt like a naughty teenager again, leafing madly through the scandalous pages of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and other RAWiana with a real-life encounter with Robert Anton Wilson still in my future. I wonder if Roblès has a similar anecdote lurking in his back-story. Wouldn't that be delightful?

What is less delightful is pretty much the whole Monsieur Wang storyline. I labeled him a scopophiliac earlier, but he is also a gross sexual harasser of his employees, some somewhat consensually, some decidedly not. If you haven't been scared off by the wilder sex scenes in the other storylines you might take this in your stride, but as someone who rolls her eyes and taps her foot through this sort of thing, well, I guess we're supposed to hate Monsieur Wang anyway? Silly name notwithstanding?

Regardless, I am fairly certain this is going to end up being one of the weirdest, if not the weirdest, books I'll read this year, but then again, it's only February. From the French. What's yet in store? Stay tuned... I'm about to read some French young adult fantasy.

*This has to be a reproduction of Shakespeare & Company, right?

William Gibson's AGENCY

Please, tell me I'm not the only person who's already imagining a white-haired Tilda Swinton as Ainsley Lowbeer if The Peripheral and/or Agency ever gets adapted for the screen. Even if it's a century hence and it's a digitally recreated Swinton loping around with an omni-use "tipstaff" protecting continua from hobbyists.*

I didn't realize until my second reading of this book's predecessor, The Peripheral, that Lowbeer was going to be the Hubertus Bigend of this trilogy. Partly this was because so many of the other characters were so interesting that Lowbeer kind of faded into the background a lot (a "problem" Agency doesn't have, but we'll get to that) but mostly because she didn't feel that much like a character yet, more a figurant -- kind of like Hubertus Bigend!

I speculate that William Gibson maybe noticed this and, with this new book, chose to dial back the other characters to let the spotlight shine on Lowbeer, which is laudable, because Lowbeer is cool as shit, but, ah, I'm not quite sure it worked. Because Lowbeer is still mostly a peripheral (heh) character, acting as a sort of dispatcher if not a commander, while most of the action is performed by really boring people.

Ostensibly, the protagonist of Agency is Verity, a young woman in the middle of an exciting if precarious career as a sort of "app whisperer" in 2017.** She's just been hired to test an exciting new product that lives in a Google Glass-ish set-up but is startingly un-app-like to the point of pretty much laughing itself to death at the mere thought of being administered a Turing test. That's right, William Gibson has finally made an Artificial Intelligence into an actual character! But one so awesomely powerful and resourceful and such a quick study that our Verity basically becomes a Lemmiwinks.*** Which could still be cool, only pretty soon the cool AI (named Eunice because the actual name is an acronym I can't remember but corresponds to EUNISS) is absent, and Verity is just left to enact Eunice's plan to Save the World only no one ever, you know, tells Verity the plan (an, to be honest, I still don't understand how all this to-ing and fro-ing Saved the World), so she's just ferried around on motorcycles by surly coffee shop waiters or in funky helicopter-type things owned by her Tech Billionaire ex-boyfriend or, in one ridiculous scene, actually disguised as a dummy and hauled up many stories in a sling, and at this point I just decided Gibson was trolling us with this title. I mean, Lowbeer works for an Agency in the future and there are a few agents of an Agency or two sort of lurking around in Verity's present, but also there is a fully autonomous AI (the world's first!) exercising bucketloads of Agency but, like Lowbeer, only at a remove and meanwhile our heroine has so little Agency she has to hang there in the sling and not move while she is ratcheted up to the penthouse suite via the building's exterior.

Oh, and kind of the least interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and does some stuff, which, whatever, but also the most interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and let's talk about Coner for a moment. Spoilers for The Peripheral, obvs. but it says Ware Spoilers right in this blog description text.

Coner is from the "stub" explored in the first book, which is basically a near-future West Virginia in which 3D-printing has become commonplace but also so advanced that it can be used to manufacture drugs, so think of the Opioid Crisis dialed up to 11 and in this world, in addition to the rather delightful heroine of The Peripheral there is Coner. Coner is a veteran of an unspecified war but we can just assume, really, that it's still in the Persian Gulf area only now there are "haptic recon" units, i.e. soldiers with implanted technology that allows them to, e.g., operate drones a continent away in a very intimate fashion. Except, you know, it was still imperfect tech, so most veterans like Coner are a bio-mechanical mess even with the implants out, and also still have PTSD. But then there's Coner, who also managed to get himself actually blown up, and lost all but one of his limbs and a good bit of his torso and now depends on very advanced nearly-full-body prosthetics to live a very limited existence in his backwater timeline. He gets a taste of other possibilities in The Peripheral, in which the quantum computer that allows contact with The Past from Lowbeer's world doesn't just allow conversation but a limited degree of action via the control of, in Coner's world, dopey telepresence drones that are basically an iPad stuck to a Segway, and in Lowbeer's the full experience of running a vat-grown nearly-human body as though it were your own. In The Peripheral Coner gets to spend some time in a top-of-the-line martial arts training body, and since he was originally a military powerhouse even without his implants, well, just imagine. There's a great line in Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, in which a "console cowboy" who's been neurologically maimed and can no longer access cyberspace falls "into the prison of his own flesh." Now imagine if that flesh consists of, like, one messed up arm, your chest and your head. That's Coner, after.

But Lowbeer is a benevolent goddess, as well as one that needs mortals to do her bidding, so she has made sure that Coner still gets opportunities to be in better bodies via the mysterious quantum computer.**** As long as he does her bidding once in a while; here he is dispatched to Verity's world, but of course her world doesn't even really have very good iPads on Segways yet, so he's controlling, e.g. hobby drones and various smart devices, while still being very much the Coner that I grew to love in the first book. He gets some fantastic scenes and pulls off some exciting stunts and, really, his bits are the best in this book. I would absolutely read a book from his point of view, telling his actual story. Hint to the universe.

Having him as the POV character instead of Verity would instantly have made Agency a better read, at any rate. Not that, and I feel I must stress this because I feel like I'm bitching a lot, not that Agency isn't a pretty good read. It has lots of interesting ideas and poses lots of interesting questions and contains both Ainsley Lowbeer and Coner, plus a bit of Eunice, so, you know, it's fine. I was never in danger of DNF-ing it. BUT, I didn't risk sleep deprivation and un-done chores to devour it, either. It's not Gibson's best work, is all. But it's still more than worth the reading, and I'm still in for a sequel or two, but please, Mr. Gibson, some more Lowbeer? Please?

*If you're new to this series, and it seems many are opting to go ahead and plunge into Agency without having first read The Peripheral, in Ainsley Lowbeer's far-future post-apocalyptic time, someone has stumbled across a mysterious quantum computer that can connect to digital communications technology in the past, but every time contact is established it creates a new timeline, because Lowbeer's timeline is not one in which contact was ever made. Certain people in Lowbeer's world are so rich and bored that they connect to and interfere with the past for fun. These newly-created timelines are formally referred to as "continua", informally as "stubs" (as in Wikipedia perhaps?), and the people who fart around with them are the "hobbyists" I referred to above. Most just act like tourists but there are a special few who treat the past as their personal Let's Game It Out and deliberately try to ruin everything for everybody.

**Not our 2017, though. See, a continua hobbyist, one who makes Josh from Let's Game It Out look like a merciful angel/fairy godmother who can't coddle his NPCs enough, manipulated events so that in 2016 Secretary Clinton, and not Game Show Host Trump, won the presidential election, only, get this, it was part of a strategy to lead to armagedddon, meaning somehow the outcome I think the lion's share of Gibson's fan base and Gibson himself would have preferred is painted as the Darkest Timeline, an intriguing idea that did not get nearly enough exploration here.

***A South Park joke, referring to a character who has little or no, umm, agency, but is simply bossed around and sent on fetch quests by others. A fetch quest is... why am I explaining all this shit anyway? This is the internet. You can look it up. I've been spending entirely too much time with octogenarians who believe stuff on Facebook (and yes, 80+ year olds use Facebook. It's 2020. Hi, I'm Kate, and this is 2020, and honestly, this is the first time I've made that joke. I get a turn, too, right?).

****Which, I'm trusting there's a third volume of this Lowbeer series in the works, and I hope we get some answers about this tech. Nobody in Lowbeer's world knows where it is or who originally found it, let alone who developed it or how it works. An undercurrent I could have just imagined faintly suggests that maybe Lowbeer's native continuum isn't the "original" and is just as much of a stub as the ones its hobbyists play with, but I'm hoping it's not quantum McGuffin turtles all the way down, you guys.

Tim Maughan's PAINTWORK #OneBookAtATime

Set in a tantalizingly attainable urban world of the near-future, the three somewhat related stories in Tim Maughan's Paintwork shimmer with the retinally-rendered pixels of a less dystopian cyberpunk.

And yes, I did say "tantalizing" -- to read "Paintwork" and "Paparazzi" and "Havana Augmented" is to all but ache to play the games,* see the sights, watch the action (especially, if one has predilections like mine, that of the robotic beetles who generate and maintain billboard QR codes by secreting weirdly indelible nano-pigments "in both colors", ink-jet style. I mean, who wouldn't want to watch that?), hang out with the graffiti writers, pro gamer stalkers and digital-culture heroes of Maughan's world.

"Paintwork" is a sci-fi/mystery genre mash of a tale of an Augmented Reality graffiti writer of rising reputation who is fending off a weird series of attacks on his work, attacks that don't obliterate it (just hours after it goes up) so much as riff on it in a viciously warped way. As an introduction to a world of Google glass-esque experiences of "consensual hallucination" that turn ordinary urban landscapes into overwhelming three-dimensional marketing sense-bombs, it's first rate. 3Cube isn't just a guy with a spray can in the night; he's a guy with a spray can and a QR code stencil that hijacks dumb marketing art and turns it into stunningly detailed pop art with lessons about his city's past and its potential. However one may feel about graffiti and street culture, a reader is likely to share his puzzlement and outrage when he discovers someone else is hijacking his hijacking.

In "Paparazzi" a post-post-postmodern filmmaker who specializes in turning hours and hours of recordings of immersive in-game experience into memorable and usually critical documentaries is seduced into trying his hand at celebrity stalking. A world-famous professional gamer is beta testing new content for the world's most popular MMORPG; John Smith's vision is to infiltrate the playtest sessions and catch in-game footage of the master at "work." Maughan has here not only imagined a highly plausible new artform for a new fully-immersive digital age, but has already imagined a way its finest practitioners can be produced to whore out their talent.

And in "Havana Augmented" two young residents of the world's last Communist regime find themselves at the forefront of Cuba's half-assed attempts at developing its economy beyond that of a tourist haven, via exploiting the pair's intricate and exciting hack of yet another popular game. Our heroes, pretty much cut off from global gaming culture by their country's policies and firewalls, have nonetheless managed to take a run-of-the-mill giant robot battling game and scale it up and make it mobile, the better turn it loose on the streets of the capital city. When word leaks out on how these guys and their friends are duking it out, mecha-style, in the actual virtual streets of Havana, corporate/gaming culture comes calling, and Cuba welcomes its promise of economic development -- though the government is ignorant of what these powers will do to Havana's virtual landscape and thus to its newly "spex" toting citizenry. Hard to indoctrinate people to hate the free markets of global capitalism when they're busy admiring the latest city-dominating Coca Cola ad via their augmented reality glasses. The resulting conflict finally and more effectively than I've ever seen realizes the idea that video games can be more than just video games. Take that, Last Starfighter.

Author Tim Maughan is also a quality follow on Twitter, funny, urbane and an entertaining speculator on where our technology is taking us. He is thus definitely someone to watch, if this debut book is any indicator. And I think it is.

Just the right mix of thought-provoking and fun. Fans of Jeff Noon and William Gibson take note!

*And this coming from someone who sucks at video games and who avoids MMORPGs like the time-stealing plague.

Ants, Frogs, Slings and Arrows

The Canadian television drama Slings & Arrows is one of the best things I've seen on the small screen in years. I'm only halfway through the second of its three seasons but am pretty confident that this bold statement of mine will hold for the entire thing. It's a Robertson Davies novel come to life, a backstage and back office look at a fictional Shakespeare festival that makes the latter as exciting and dramatic as the former -- sometimes more so.

The first season sets the stage for the shenanigans in the second that are what has me writing about the show on this blog at five in the morning. The festival's hapless business manager Richard (Mark McKinney) got caught up in a wildly ill-advised affair with a liaison for the festival's major corporate sponsor, with predictably disastrous results; a huge chunk of funding lost, Richard must scramble in the second season to replace that resource and resorts to a loan/grant package that requires the moneys be spent on a "rebranding" effort. This leads him and his festival into the corybantic arms of a bleeding-edge marketing firm, Froghammer, whose operations and front man made me want to run and find William Gibson and whoever has the film rights to his latest trilogy and say "Lookie here! Lookie here! Colm Feore should totally play Hubertus Bigend!!!!!"

Hubertus Bigend, for those who are not fans of Gibson and his three most recent books, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History, is a post-post-modern, globe-trotting, talent-tapping, zeitgeist-twisting student of the edge, a man with apparently infinite resources and an insatiable hunger for a kind of cool that has yet to be invented. His marketing firm, Blue Ant, runs on pure potential and never-ending capital. Nobody likes him, but no one can avoid him: he is omnipresent in a world that doesn't yet exist, applies forces that don't yet have names; he is a human search engine on a web that no one else can yet perceive. He's the kind of guy who can commission a business suit dyed in International Klein Blue and actually wear it around and pull it off, not because it looks good on him (though he is handsome in his creepy way; as he is described in Pattern Recognition, he "looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates"), but because he's just that guy.

He's an arresting and slightly terrifying figure, and he's probably the most vivid and memorable and deeply idiosyncratic character in 21st Century literature so far.

So imagine my howls of recognition when Slings & Arrows took me to the offices of Froghammer, Blue Ant with a vigorous dance soundtrack in place of the dreamy electronic/ambient I imagine plays in the background at Blue Ant. Sanjay is Toronto's Bigend, thinking wildly outside the box, shuffling resources for the sake of shuffling them ("Let's go see if we can find where the conference room is today!" he shouts to Richard before bounding off on that quest) and creating a truly outrageous ad campaign for the festival: the first phase mocks its subscriber base as a bunch of old fogeys with one foot in the grave and a tagline that says "Don't bother" (see above); the second selects choice remarks from the worst reviews the festival's performances have ever gotten and plasters them on billboards. It's reverse psychology, meant to piss off the festival's traditional base, generate adverse publicity and create unbeatable mind share in its new target audience of younger people who don't make plans, who attend things on impulse and who don't want to be bored -- not quite a Blue Ant strategy, but rather a long way from Mad Men -- and I look forward to seeing if it pays off as I expect it to.

Midway through Season 2 as I am, I've just seen another way in which Sanjay differs from Bigend in that Sanjay is an actual charlatan, a professional imposter, while Bigend just feels simultaneously too good and too bad to be true, but even with that divergence I still say Feore's performance and the role he plays here constitutes one giant audition reel for the part of Hubertus Bigend if ever film adaptations of Gibson's books see a green light.

Why I didn't think of this before and on my own, I cannot say, but at this hour, coming up on 6 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, it's all I can think about -- which is also very Blue Ant, isn't it?

And now I'm off to watch some more episodes of Slings & Arrows. You should, too, if you haven't. It's the best argument I've found in a very long time for continuing to keep a glass teat in my home.