what are you reading now?

luka said:

are they? i cant remember. do you have the books to hand? i have valis here but not ubik.

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On the shelf at home but not handy. But yeah, they are quite different. He comes alive when he's talking about himself, and his characters seem much more real (for the obvious reason - they are).

the only one i read of his i didnt like is man in the high castle or whatever the alternative history one is called. that was appalling. otherwise i like them all and ive probly read them all.

w/r/t dream sequences - the best in literature has to be the one in Crime & Punishment - the one with the horse, you know the one.

Benny B said:

after 'scanner darkly' this is the best pkd I've read. I didn't really set out to pan him, I do like him despite the wretched prose. After reading a biography of and seeing a doc a while ago I came to the conclusion that his real life is actually more interesting than many of his books. Must get round to reading VALIS then i suppose.

Almost finished Crash right now, and 'enjoying' it a lot even if it is quite repetitive. I know virtually nothing about their relationship to each other, but I'm guessing Burroughs must have been a big influence on this book, right? Looking forward to watching the cronenburg film now, i thought he did a quite passable adapation of Naked Lunch as it happens.

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VALIS is PKD's most urgent, relevant book. Science Fiction on a knife's edge - what if it isn't fiction?!

I love both the novel and the film adaptation of "Crash". I am a hopeless Cronenberg fanboy and Rosanna Arquette worshipper - I don't know what could have happened in the making of that film that would make me critical of it. First I watched the film (way long time ago), then read the book after many years, then immediately re-watched the film. That's a good process, I think, but not expedient.

also, Murakami - i am doing that hand gesture that indicates ambivalence and/or dismissal. he's the gari (pickled ginger) of literature. a little different, cleanses the palate, ultimately unsatisfying.

empty mirror said:

w/r/t dream sequences - the best in literature has to be the one in Crime & Punishment - the one with the horse, you know the one.

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Yeah, so vivid - you really get the impression it's based on something FD personally witnessed. I also liked Svigrigailov's dream about the mouse and the lost little girl who morphs into this repellent child whore, as well as the young woman who's killed herself...very messed up stuff, hints darkly at monstrous crimes in the man's past without stating anything explicitly.

luka said:

the only one i read of his i didnt like is man in the high castle or whatever the alternative history one is called. that was appalling. otherwise i like them all and ive probly read them all.

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Confessions of a crap artist?

"w/r/t dream sequences - the best in literature has to be the one in Crime & Punishment - the one with the horse, you know the one."

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Yeah that's great. Surely that was before dream sequences became such a cliche though - I think that the problem with a really good idea done really well by someone talented is that it's ripped-off by less original artists for ages afterwards. Just the way that a good band always kinda ruins music because the airwaves are clogged up for ages afterwards by lesser rip-offs.

bandshell said:

prefer Blade Runner

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so do I (+ everyone) but it doesn't make sense to compare them. the movie isn't really an adaption, it's a separate thing. you have to read do androids... on its own terms. the director's cut where there's no voiceover + its more strongly implied deckard is a replicant is more in the spirit of the book, pkd's whole thing with identity, how you are never totally sure who you are or what reality you're in. also for the record all other hollywood pkd adaptions w/exception of total recall are effing terrible

also droid what you on about ubik is great. let me also recommend the stigmata of palmer eldritch.

I had no idea Total Recall was PKD!

Blade Runner is surely one of the most gorgeous films ever made. Apparently the title came from a totally unrelated (apart from being sci-fi-ish) story by William Burroughs, about people illegally smuggling medical supplies, literal 'blade-runners'. In the context of the film it doesn't make a great deal of sense, it's just a phrase that sounds vaguely futuristic and bad-ass.

The human virus!

The Scanner Darkly Film is pretty good. Even Minority Report is ok considering it's got Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton in it.

Mr. Tea said:

Yeah, so vivid - you really get the impression it's based on something FD personally witnessed. I also liked Svigrigailov's dream about the mouse and the lost little girl who morphs into this repellent child whore, as well as the young woman who's killed herself...very messed up stuff, hints darkly at monstrous crimes in the man's past without stating anything explicitly.

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Yes, both dream sequences in C&P are uncannily powerful.

This is a fragment that didn't make it into most editions of Kafka's The Trial. I think it's wonderful, possibly my favourite part:

“... he found consolation in the most trifling and, what is more, equivocal incidents of the day. Then he would generally lie on the divan in his office—he could no longer leave his office without an hour's rest on the divan—and mentally assemble his observations. He did not restrict himself narrowly to those people connected with the court, for here in half sleep they all mingled; he forgot then the magnitude of the court's tasks, it seemed to him as if he were the only defendant. And all the others were walking about as officials and lawyers in the halls of a courthouse, even the dullest of them with his chin resting on his chest, his lips pursed, and the fixed stare of someone meditating on the matters of great account. Then the tenants of Frau Graubach always stepped forward as a closed group, standing side by side, their mouths gaping like an accusing chorus. There were many strangers among them, for K. had long since ceased paying the least attention to the affairs of the boardinghouse. Because so many of them were strangers he felt uncomfortable regarding the group more closely, but he had to do so from time to time when he sought among them for Fraulein Burstner. For example, as he scanned the group quickly, two totally unknown eyes suddenly gleamed at him and brought him to a stop. Then he couldn't find Fraulein Burstner; but when, in order to avoid any mistake, he searched again, he found her right in the middle of the group, her arms around two men standing on either side of her. That made absolutely no impression on him, particularly because this sight was nothing new, but merely the indelible memory of a photograph on the beach he had once seen in Fraulein Burstner's room. All the same this sight drove K. away from the group, and even though he often returned there, now he hurried back and forth through the courthouse with long strides. He still knew his way around the rooms quite well, forlorn passages he could never have seen seemed familiar to him, as if he had been living there forever; details kept impressing themselves upon his brain with a painful clarity: for example, a foreigner strolling through a lobby, dressed like a bullfighter, his waist carved inward as if by knives, with a short stiff little jacket of coarse yellow lace, a man who allowed K. to gaze at him in unremitting astonishment, without ever pausing in his stroll for an instant. K. slipped around him, stooping low, and stared at him wide-eyed. He knew all the patterns of the lace, all the frayed fringes, every swing of the little jacket, and still he hadn't seen enough. Or rather he had long since seen more than enough, or even more accurately had never wanted to see it in the first place, but it held him fast. “What masquerades foreign countries offer!” he thought, and opened his eyes still wider. And he trailed after this man until he rolled over on the divan and pressed his face into the leather.”

Great stuff there, Corpsey. Only Kafka I've read is Metamorphosis, which I read years ago as a kid - though I remember thinking it was kinda cool, I probably wasn't mature enough to appreciate it properly. Definitely got to read The Trial at some point. Is there a particular translation you'd recommend?

Speaking of dreams, I had great fun writing the dream sequences in a story I wrote last year:

It was around late January that the dreams began. They were subtle at first, scarcely to be distinguished from the usual procession of surreal nocturnal images and sensations, but soon there was no denying a definite set of themes and feelings running through Ursula’s mind almost every night. Sometimes they were so vague as to be nothing more than a feeling of undefined dread, yet even on these occasions Ursula somehow knew, upon waking in a sweat, that they were intimately connected with her pregnancy. Perhaps all new mothers had dream-feelings like this, she told herself, unconvinced. On other occasions she dreamt she was playing with two young children of the same age. Initially these dreams tended to feel very normal – mundane, in fact, for a pregnant woman, she guessed – but as the dream progressed, doubt began to creep in. Both children appeared to have normal human bodies, but they were sat facing away from her, and she felt a sudden desire to see their faces. She’d reach forward and attempt to grasp their young bodies, but her hands would somehow fail to gain purchase – perhaps either the children or her hands were covered in some slick invisible lubricant, or maybe her hands were simply passing straight through their bodies, as if they were no more substantial than gas. Getting more and more panicked, Ursula would lunge at the children with all her might and cry out to them without knowing their names. Eventually one child would turn around, and with a great sigh of relief Ursula would realise the child’s face was as normal as its body; sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, sometimes with blonde hair like its father and sometimes with auburn locks like hers, but inevitably human – at least outwardly – and smiling sweetly at her with eyes like her own. Then with a sudden shock of cold horror Ursula would realise that the other child must be different. The other child would not have eyes like hers but would have eyes of ice-cold grey, like its father and grandfather. Why this should scare her so? What could be more natural than a child taking on the traits of either its father or its mother’s father? she’d ask herself in the dream. And then the other child would turn and as its face came into view Ursula would scream and scream until she woke up.

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The translation we had to have for my European Literature course was this one: The German Literature scholars would accept no substitute...

Of course, Kafka's stories/novels are so often dream-like to begin with. Ambiguous, sometimes seemingly nonsensical, comical/nightmarish expansions and contractions of time and scale. Crime & Punishment also has a dream-like intensity to it.

Well the main character in C&P spends much of the novel either in some sort of hallucinatory fever, or trying to convince the other characters that he is, or was...

And Dostoevsky himself was famously an epileptic who had frontal lobe seizures, which induce extraordinarily vivid hallucinatory states in sufferers. Flaubert was an epileptic too, though I'm not sure if he experienced hallucinations.

Supposedly Kafka experienced hypnagogic hallucinations while writing: http://www.peh-med.com/content/5/1/13

It's very interesting how Dostoevsky always seems most compelling and powerful when he's adopting the mindstate/voice of insane characters. When he attempts to write about sanity (which in his work equates with a sort of beatific religious ecstacy) it always seems comparatively lifeless... just as when he writes about happiness its often quite slushy, sentimental stuff.

Mr. Tea said:

Blade Runner is surely one of the most gorgeous films ever made

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so many things in the movie have nothing to do w/the book; cool title, amazing soundtrack, stunning cinematography/set design, not to mention the plot, which is why I think it unfair to judge them on the same terms.

I will give you all a scanner darkly (book still superior tho) but there is no way minority report is not shite.

I like burroughs but really he wrote one book over + over innit; beautiful boys having sex, heroin, galactic language viruses, ectoplasm, sinister men in gray flannel suits, freight-hopping yegg antiheroes, etc. he wrote it good, granted. that bit at the beginning of naked lunch where he talks about how they just have to drive + drive, to keep moving or be swallowed up, is one of my favorite pieces of writing ever.

wasn't it burroughs who said his entire body of work is really just one book with no beginning or end?

I think it was when i realised this, and took his advice to just pick up Naked Lunch or Soft Machine or whatever, and start reading random bits, I really started to appreciate his work. (insert another burroughs quote about about how this is how we experience life itself, so it makes sense to reflect that in the writing/reading...or something). The idea that this sort of approach to writing (and reading) is actually closer to and more representative of human experience than most 'realist' fiction is very interesting to me. But who else has took the the reins from Burroughs and Ballard (and maybe even Joyce or PKD for that matter)?

I started dipping into bits of Ballards Atrocity Exhibition today and will try to approach it in the same spirit i think. I like what I've read so far and having just read crash I think I'm in the right frame of mind for it. I may well get bored at some point and start reading the second Game of thrones book though...